These things come in threes, right?

ACT ONE

Last week, I was corresponding with the estimable Chris Dent, who

• lives in the childhood home of my oldest friend, Eric Sinclair
• developed the verry interesting wiki variant warp
• is a good egg.

Eric’s family home is one of the houses I have very strong childhood sense memories of, including detailed smells, rocking out to music I’d flee from today (well, most of it), cold pepperoni pizza breakfasts with flat, watery coke after all-night D&D marathons, and the assorted associations of the initial glimmerings of adolescence. I have a very clear memory of devouring “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” overnight, and a repeated one of listening to all the seventies Firesign Theatre records on vinyl – did you know one of those standard, single-LP releases had three sides? Verry trippy! Flip it over and which side plays? You never knew!

Chris lets me know that he’ll be visiting the glorious Pacific Northwest for about ten days in mid-to-late August. He’ll be traveling in company with his romantic interest, one Sabrina, who, he tells me, once lived here in Seattle.

Well, one thing leads to another, and I’m looking at Sabrina’s blog. While the look
of it is unfamiliar, there’s something about it that makes me think I’ve read it before.

I start scanning backwards, and bingo! I find some posts from early in 2002, when she was getting ready to move to Bloomington for grad school. I recall looking at them at the time she was writing them and being jealous that she’d essentially gotten an invitation to apply for grad school from a prof she had as an undergrad. Come to think of it, I’m still jealous. 😉

So, interestingly, Sabrina moves from author of random blog I once glimpsed for a moment to person who intersects directly with my life and childhood in countless ways, in one easy step.

ACT TWO

This weekend Vivian and I decamped for camping in the San Juans. It was a lovely jaunt, which is detailed in another entry or two.

On the way back, we knew that there’d be a considerable wait for the return ferry. We ended up sitting behind a group of slightly-younger-than-us-folks that looked vaguely familiar, for no readily apparent reason. Right next to us was a friendly lady with a black lab puppy who was talking to everyone around her. The mood of the waiting crowd was festive – it was a gorgeous hot summer day and we were all about to take a free boat ride through some of the most beautiful scenery in the Northwest.

Once we disembarked from the ferry and headed back to Seattle, the only down note was the customary summer Sunday-afternoon return commute traffic on I-5.

Then, on Tuesday, I was idly clicking through the links to the right of this entry, mostly blogs, to catch up. This activity reminds me of flipping through bins of records or comics, in search of the new or interesting.

Then I clicked on the link titled “Statanic Action“. In the entry I clicked into, the author, Stacey Lester, describes attending a wedding in the San Juans, on Orcas Island, where Viv and I had been camping. He spent the night, and then, anticipating a 3-hour wait for the ferry (accurately), hung out with his pals on a hill overlooking the ferry dock.

Which is exactly when and where Viv and I were doing the same thing.

Stacey even promptly (more promptly than me, I tells ya) posted his pictures of the weekend which, you guessed it, includes this shot of the dog lady… with me in the upper right corner.

The last time I was involved in anything comparable to this fascinating chain of coincidence and probability was in the middle of Seattle’s world-famous WTO festival of early winter, 1999. The day after shooting it, someone posted video footage of the Wednesday evening (December 1, 1999?) tear-gas and stinger-grenade clearage of the street near the reservoir in my neighborhood. You (by which I mean I) can make out my blurry figure and hear my voice just as a stinger grenade slams into the cameraman’s hand, busting a finger (and, though not on the video, chapping my ass quite nicely).

The current synchronies are much preferable, and have not involved bleeding.

So the query is, is that three? Or need I look anew to the future, yet unwrit?

I’ve completed processing my pix from our camping trip to the San Juans, and posted the results here. While I have broken the pictures down into sections, a highlight reel may be called for. In this entry, the small pix are linked into the pix.whybark.com album they come from, so click the thumb once to get to the album, find the thumb on the page, and click again to enlarge. (hm, I gotta come up with a better context and focus strategy than that, huh?)

Our campsite was located at the south end of idyllic Lake Cascade, in Moran State Park on Orcas Island. Moran State Park was created in the 20’s when Robert Moran, a wealthy shipbuilder and former mayor of Seattle, gave the property to the just-formed state park system. The park lacks a single element of astonishing presence such as Mt. Rainier or the Olympic Range, but it’s still a truly astonishing site.

Our campsite afforded us this lovely mirrored sunset. Later that night I was able to observe the stars of the Big Dipper reflected in the lake. In fact, each night I saw numerous satellites, and each night, I saw one meteor.

A short hike from camp up a very steep trail brought us to this viewpiont above the lake, known as Sunrise Rock. In this view, our tent is not visible; it’s hidden by the greenery just above and to the right of the small blue and white tent seen in the photo (in the thumb, that tent is a tiny light colored dot in the shade, to the lower right).

Within the park, there’s a moderately tall (2409 ft) peak named Mount Constitution, the highest peak in the San Juan Islands. On a perfectly clear summer day (such as the day of our visit) you can see as far as Vancouver BC to the north and to Rainier to the south. Mount Baker, however, is the closest of Washington’s grand and towering volcanos, and as such dominates the view. One may drive up the twisty road as we did, or opt for the four and a half mile hike up the mountain. At the summit is a cool-looking replica of a 12th century Balkan watchtower that is open to the public and from which most of the images of views on my pix.whybark.com album were shot.

Also an easy hike directly from our campsite is the picturesque, modestly-scaled Cascade Falls, which felt pretty damn good by this time in the heat of the day. On our return, we took a service road which immediately felt as though we’d taken a wrong turn and ended up backstage at Disneyland. We kept joking that the security guards would jump out and haul us away, or that we’d see animatronic wildlife piled up, rusting by the side of the road.

Instead of animatronic graves (NEWS FLASH: The Country Bears opens Friday!!!) we came across piles of discarded picnic benches, charcoal grills, and firepits; it was literally refreshing to see something that was not a perfect postcard for nature, warm and fuzzy in beauty and balance.

Not to worry, however, nature let us know that she’s the boss when at 4 am on the first night, a huge windstorm kicked up. I woke up and scurried about in the gale moving light stuff, soaking our firepit, and generally feeling helpless before nature’s fury. I then lay in bed sleeplessly as the tent tugged and pitched in the breeze. The wind died by midday, but then began anew at promptly midnight and was still in action when we left at about noon on Sunday.

I’m reasonably confident that when I say “huge windstorm” I mean larger than me. If I had been in a house and not a tent I doubt I would have been much concerned by the gusts.

On our last day, we packed up the camp and took a nice, five or six mile walk around the rim of the lake via the Lake Cascade Loop trail, and then hit the road and summer Sunday afternoon traffic back to Seattle on I-5. It was, all in all, a deeply pleasant camping experience.