Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Cross Spider




I’ve moved to a new city three times in my life, and each time I might have made a better first impression if I'd arrived in town wearing a T-shirt that said “I KNOW--I should have seen this place five years ago.”  Or ten years ago, or fifteen, depending on the age of the person telling me what I’d missed.  Everywhere always used to be better, according to the people who were cool enough to have been there.  Did you know that Austin, Texas was the greatest city on planet Earth until exactly the moment the Liberty Lunch closed for the last time?  What was the Liberty Lunch you ask?  Oh, nothing, I guess you just had to be there.  Seattle was pretty cool too, until they closed a bowling alley and a Denny’s in Ballard, and all these condos were built on top of the artists who used to live in the trees and drank independent coffee before that was even a thing and we wore flannel because it was the thing to wear, not because it was the thing to wear, you know man?


That’s the right of people who stay in their hometown though.  If you stick with a place long enough, you do earn ownership of it.  You can complain about the way it is now, and cherish the way it was, if you want to.  When I go back to my hometown I might as well be a tourist.  All the stores are different, I know about three people I could call.  Here I've met people who have been working the same plots in my community garden for thirty years.  They really do remember Seattle when it was a lot different.  Their regional complaints actually contain bits of history.  If Seattle seemed better to them back then, maybe they seemed better to themselves then too. 


I’m not a native northwesterner, and I'm not trying to pass myself off as one, but if I should need some kind of credential to prove I'm rooted here, I could point out that my son is a native, and that’s a serious thing to me.  He might become a rolling stone when he’s older and leave this mossy place, but it’s important to me and to Jordan that he have a hometown.  We love our hometowns.  Even if you can’t go back, it’s good to have a place you can’t go back to.  Some people can’t not go back anywhere, so how do they even know which way is up?      


So I’m trying to learn about this place, taking Henry out to explore it and reading about the history of the land and the people, and I’m finding that I love it here.  I hope that if I love it, Henry will find it easy to love too.  Yesterday morning I was at work, and when the sun came up I went outside and it was raining.  It was maybe the first good rain after the summer drought season.  I wanted to jump out of my skin, I was so excited.  It was like dreading the first day of school, but then when you get there you find out your best friend from two years ago moved back to town and he’s in your class.  Henry is going to know how lucky he is to live in beautiful Washington State, with these hundred year red cedars and these salmon who (hopefully continue to) return every year.  We’ll always have to grow more peas and cabbages in our garden than tomatoes and peppers, but they’ll taste better to us because they’ll be our kind of food, from our kind of place.


Also, I'm going to try to teach him that it's bad manners to welcome people to your town by explaining to them the sad fact that they aren't cool enough to have seen the place in its most recent heyday.  But shoot, some people can't help themselves.






Cross Spider
Araneus diadematus
Family Araneidae

Here's a common lady to see during autumn in Seattle.  Henry and I found here in the blackberry bramble behind our apartment.  They're harmless to humans, but they sometimes devour the male after mating.  Another fun fact: they digest their food before eating, by throwing up on it.  Neato!

--Tim 9/27/11

Monday, September 26, 2011

Black Huckleberry





















I would like Henry even if he wasn’t my boy.  Everybody’s into slow things now, like slow food, slow money; Henry is a slow baby.  Which is perfect for me, because I’m a slow man.  Henry took an extra ten days to gestate.  It’s going to take me an hour just to write this blog.  No reason to hurry.

We just got back from camping.  Henry’s favorite camping game is to go up to a tree and touch it, then go over to another tree and touch that one.  He laughs if your run with him from one tree to another, but if you start at a run and then slow way down to a slug’s pace he goes bananas.  He keeps looking at that tree and cackling his head off until you finally touch it, and then he’s looking to the next one.  He takes life one tree at a time.

He’s not sure enough on his feet yet to walk from one tree to the next on his own.  Walking is another hurry he wasn’t in.  It’s like that Cat Stevens song, where he says if he didn’t have hands he wouldn’t have to work.  To Henry, walking is just more work.  I move really fast when I’m at work, to get everything done on time; it’s how you can tell I don’t care that much about it.  When I’m doing something important, like helping Henry pet the dog more gently, I takes my time.




Black Huckleberry
Vaccinium membranaceum
Family Ericaceae (Heather)


In some places in Washington State, black huckleberry (or thin-leaved huckleberry) can be the most common under story bush of the middle elevation.  That was definitely the case where we were this weekend, Tahklakh Lake in the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest, below Mt. Adams.  Every trail in the campground was cut through huckleberry bushes.  One reason could be fire ecology: black huckleberry regenerates fiercely after fires, and native people in a lot of areas burned the under story to encourage huckleberry growth and eliminate other plant competitors.  


Even at the start of autumn Henry and I were able to find our fill of the fat black berries to eat, and the leaves were just beginning to darken to a gorgeous plum color that will paint the entire forest like it’s covered in jam until the snows come.  




















--Tim 9/26/11

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Nootka Rose

If you ask Henry what sound a sheep makes, he says "Ba, bababa, BAH BAH BAH!"  If you ask him what sound a cow makes he says "mew."  If he sees a raspberry bush, even without any berries on it, he points to it and shouts "Dada!"  We took him to the state fair and he loved the pigs, the pygmy goats and the John Deer tractors best.  When he wants to throw a ball or a clementine he winds up like Felix Hernandez and whips it.  He had his first haircut and he didn't cry.  He's been camping three times, nine total nights.  He barks at dogs.  He's in the ninety-fifth percentile for head-size.  He will not wear socks.  He figured out how to spill a sippy cup, and he does it on purpose and laughs.  He feeds his dog Cheerios.  He eats with his own fork and spoon and he can open the freezer door.  He prefers playing in the sprinkler to going in the pool, prefers splashing in the lake to the sprinkler, but likes to be in the river best of all.  He gives us kisses when we tell him goodnight, and he warns us when something is "hot".

So what if he doesn't walk yet?  Everybody walks.

The other night we went foraging for wild rose hips.


Henry helped pick the fruits.  I've read that the rose hips are best after the first frost, but the not-quite ripe ones were the easiest to work with, and the least likely to be full of larva.


He can also say "flower".



Each one contains at least one-hundred million seeds.  We scraped those out with a small knife.  The raw fruits are chewy and tangy.  They're not too good.


I made four jars of jam from the hips, two with blackberries we picked (4 cups rose hips, 1 cup blackberries, 2 cups sugar) and two with rhubarb from the garden (4 cups rhubarb, 1 cup rose hips, 2 cups suger).  The one we've tried so far is delicious.  How many one-year olds eat rose hips?  I bet he walks before most babies try their first rose hip, that's for sure.

Nootka Rose
Rosa nutkana
Family rosaceae 

This wild rose grows up and down the West coast, and is one of two native roses to the Puget Sound.  (The other one's the bald-hip rose.) It's long been in use as a medicinal tea by native people, but the hips were only eaten as an emergency food.  Some babies were bathed in water boiled with nootka leaves to promote strength.  During World War II, when the Nazis successfully prevented most tropical fruit from importation into Britain, The Times encouraged people to gather wild rose hips and printed instructions for creating a vitamin C supplement.


--Tim 9/7/11