Walking in February: Of Woods and Water

February 2023 brought the opportunity for a weekend getaway to Lake Quinault Lodge in Olympic National Park to celebrate a friend's birthday. Some of the group drove to Montesano with their tandem and solo bicycles and rode the 50 miles from there to the lodge. Others, like those of us healing from a broken wrist who can't cover that much ground by bike right now, drove to the lodge.

As I drove out Friday afternoon, accompanied by the Eagles Live double album, the rain came and went and came again, reminding me with the watery blur and the slapping of my windshield wipers that I was heading into a temperate rain forest. (And, not incidentally, reminding me that I wasn't totally sorry I had to miss the bike ride in the cold grey wetness—cold makes my wrist ache even more.)

Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast meant pleasant socializing with some new acquaintances. We were going to gather again for Saturday dinner, and meanwhile the agenda was wide open for whatever activities appealed. For me, this meant a walk in the woods.

I headed first up the narrow, shoulderless road past the lodge to visit the World's Biggest Sitka Spruce. At 191 feet it's a neck-craning forest giant standing in a spot that felt sad, surrounded by the encroachment of spaces designed for tourists exactly like me. 

I tried to imagine it standing as one among many in a lush, unbroken tree canopy, birds and animals rustling in the brush that no longer grows around its feet, no signage prompting us to go visit other giant trees in the park, no people posing for a picture to put on Facebook.

From there, following the simple paper map available at the lodge, I headed back to the road and across, following the trail to Gatton Creek Falls.

I walked alone on the soft paths, surrounded by so much green! Mosses, mosses everywhere, reminding me of listening to the audiobook of Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer with its rich description of their complex lives, structures, and functions.

Every so often I passed a gigantic stump, quite possibly a mother tree cut down to build the lodge I had slept in the night before. I could not help but say softly, "I'm sorry, Mother." Saplings sprang from each stump to fill the space left behind, fed by their mother's body and watered by the rain falling all around.

I heard a creek chuckling off to one side. A small wooden footbridge provided a place to stop and listen to the water rushing downhill before continuing cautiously across on the slippery wet wood, then on up the hill.

This wasn't a hike to cover lots of ground quickly or get somewhere by a certain time. This was a walk simply to be in the woods. I gazed up, down, around and along the trail. Every minute gave me something to look at.

The very small: Delicate traceries of mosses and baby ferns. 

The very big: Those mother trees, downed logs, and tall trees soaring up, draped in long grey-green beards of Spanish moss. 

The pale: The underside of a patch of lichen, fallen from a trunk or limb above. Perhaps all that sogginess was too much to hold onto? It's so moist, like walking on thick sponges. Weblike masses of another moss shrouding a tree as if I were in Shelob's lair.

The bright: Rusty red maple leaves decaying into the soil, the contrast of a log's interior below the dark bark, pale orange dead ferns.

Life, life everywhere. The full circle, with green springing up from brown, climbing, growing, falling back to become soil again. Walking in woods and water reminding me that this world doesn't require me, or humans, to be whole and beautiful.

The Rocker

Easy answer: Grandma's rocking chair.

The question: "...as I arranged for a few beloved furniture items to be put into (climate controlled!) storage this week, it made me want to know about pieces of furniture that you’ve loved through the years. They don’t have to be fancy, or “beautiful,” or even, necessarily, useful. They just have to be beloved. Tell us about them, and why you cherished it or it looms large in your memory, with as much detail as you’re able to recall or reproduce."

This prompt in the subscribers-only space of Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study publication led me straight to the rocking chair that sits in our living room, covered with a deep crimson velour blanket to hide the worst of the peeling dark brown paint.

When I was born at St. Joseph Medical Center in Lewiston, Idaho, my Grandma Humphrey rocked me in this chair. She worked there many years as a licensed practical nurse and when she retired they gave her the rocker. Then it went to my parents' house, and at some point it became mine because of that story.

Grandma becoming a nurse is a big piece of what makes the rocker special. She married at 18 to a man 20 years her senior (which was so scandalous they each fudged their birth years a bit on the marriage certificate to shrink the gap). She was the youngest of 13 children and knew nothing about how to live in the world; he had to teach her to cook, clean, run the household. She had three children, my mom being the oldest and only girl. 

When Grandpa H. dropped dead of a heart attack in his 70s she was in her mid 50s. Grandma had never driven a car, held a job, or signed a check—he handled all of that for the household. She was all set to move straight into "old age" and rely on my mom for everything. Mom had four kids at the time (I'm one of the last two "late in life" babies she hadn't had yet) and really didn't have time to drive Grandma everywhere or have Grandma relying on her for all emotional support. 

So Mom gave her a fierce pep talk along the lines of "you can be an old woman now, or you can have a life and be an old woman many years from now. Which is it going to be?" 

Grandma went to school, became a licensed practical nurse, learned to drive, made friends, joined two bridge clubs and a bowling group. She became the woman who taught me to knit and tat and bowl, and always had the store-bought waffle cookies in vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry that we called "Grandma cookies".

Mom telling me this story was part of her raising me to be a feminist; she told me to be sure I could take care of myself and never to rely on a man for everything.

Fast forward to 2021. I was planning to sand the rocker down, paint it, and put it out on my deck so I posted a pic on Facebook to ask for advice. In the serendipitous world of social media I got all kinds of strongly worded good advice about how bad that would be for the rocker. It turned out a long-ago acquaintance has another friend who is a rocking chair FANATIC (has a collection of he's-not-sure-how-many). He told me it's an army knuckle arm Windsor rocking chair with saddle joints where the legs meet the rockers, and I had to look all that up to have any design context. He also offered to buy it from me. It is not for sale.

I now need to find a professional to do a really good job of the refinishing, hence the blanket hiding its shabbiness. (This is not shabby chic; it's just shabby.) 

It represents both my beloved grandma and how my also beloved stay-at-home mom raised me not to repeat the dependent parts of Grandma's life trajectory but to make my own way. Sitting in a refurbished rocker will represent my gratitude to both of them for the lessons. Rock on, ladies.

Walking in January: Of Gloves and Poetry

 "Honey, look! It's your glove!"

"What?!" I stared in delighted disbelief. The glove I'd lost on a walk weeks earlier hung from the branch of a tree along East Bay Road, clamped there with a wooden clothespin. I happily stuffed it into my backpack and we continued our walk, one of many we've taken along the water since moving to Olympia in fall of 2020.

The saga of the lost glove starts in Port Townsend, WA, over Veteran's Day Weekend. On a weekend getaway I found and purchased a delightful pair of soft gray gloves with swirls of colored yarn appliqued on the backs. Loved those gloves! So warm, so soft, and so fun to look at with their splashes of bright colors.

We came back home to Olympia from our mini-vacation. I wore my gloves everywhere—right up until I lost one of them on a walk. Most Saturdays we walk from our home into downtown, going by the farmers' market and then running small errands and getting coffee or lunch. Somewhere after a stop at Olympia Coffee on 4th, one of my gloves disappeared. I called around to the places we had been to no avail. The next time I was in downtown I walked the same route hoping for the glove to be lying there waiting for me to reclaim it. Still no avail, whatever that is. (Okay, yes, "avail" does have a definition.)

I mourned my return to my boring plain old gloves. But then—eureka!—Belleza Ropa in downtown Olympia carried the same style of gloves, although in black rather than grey. Turns out they're a sister store for the one in Port Townsend. Bought the black gloves and wore them happily—right up until I lost one on another Saturday downtown sojourn. 

As soon as I realized it was gone I jumped on my bike and retraced our path, searching in vain. Apparently losing a glove was becoming part of my routine too. I would have been willing to wear one black and one grey but had managed to lose the right-hand glove both times.

I went back to Belleza Ropa. They no longer had the exact colors I really wanted, although they did have another pair with a quieter color combo. I settled for Pair of Swirly Gloves #3. Just for fun on some occasions I wore Bright Swirly Lefthand Glove #2 with the new Tamer Swirly Righthand Glove #3.

Weeks passed until that January Saturday when Lost Righthand Glove #2 reappeared pinned to that branch.

That alone would have made the walk a bit magical. We laughed about the idea of a "glove miracle", neither of us being much given to belief in miracles when simple kindness or coincidence offer sufficient explanation. That, and paying attention to what's around us.

Whenever we walk we're scanning for birds on the water, in the skies, or in the trees and shrubs along the way. We always see mallards, crows, and seagulls, sometimes Canadian geese (which we refer to as "our Canadian visitors") or the comedic black and white Harlequin-painted buffleheads. On really awesome days we see a great blue heron or two, and once we spotted a kingfisher. We watch the waters of Budd Bay for the sleek head of a seal, sometimes to avail. We note the plants growing alongside the sidewalk and whether they're showing the damp brown dormancy of winter or starting to poke out a bit of spring hope. My sweetheart keeps tabs on the various sailboats in the marina that catch his eye. We're noticers, we are.

On this particular journey, another touch of magic awaited on our path to reward our noticing. The light rain overnight had revealed phrases of poetry stenciled onto the sidewalk, something I had read about in an article on Olympia's poet laureate program discussing the use of a paint that doesn't show up until it gets wet. We made our usual circuit around the edge of the bay and went to the market. 

As we left the market I spotted yet another line of poetry on the sidewalk. I read poetry every morning and finding it serendipitously along our route on the same day my glove reappeared felt like an un-birthday present. Later search turned up the name of the poet, Zyna Bakari.

We walk more now than we ever did before the pandemic. Starting to telework 100% of the time in early March almost three years ago created the need to go somewhere, anywhere we could go without breathing someone else's air. Back then we lived in an area of unincorporated King County that lacked sidewalks. We roamed the empty streets lined with parked cars going nowhere and I realized just how much I really wanted to live in a place with sidewalks or paths to walk on—a place that felt like it had a place for us to move safely and comfortably. When we moved to Olympia that was on my list of must-haves along with a bikeable location.

We ended up in a fabulous neighborhood where we have sidewalks on most streets we'd want to use to go anywhere, with bike lanes and trails connecting us to destinations too. The trip to downtown and back comes to 5 or 6 miles or thereabouts, depending on how many places we stop. Sometimes we decide we'll bail out on the return and let Intercity Transit give us a nice warm lift back uphill to our neighborhood. Sometimes we choose a slightly different route to mix it up coming or going. Each walk gives us time together, movement, fresh air, and the chance to see our town at a human pace and get to know it better than if we only saw it under glass.

When we got back from this particular day's outing, I wrote a thank-you note and biked down to clothespin it onto the tree where some kind person had hung my lost glove. So glad we went for a walk that day!

And yes, I now keep very close tabs on my gloves.

2022 in Review: Blogging and a Bit More

2022 was a pretty quiet year in my blogging life until the last few weeks. I lost my writing mojo in 2020 when the world went dark, other than the writing I needed to do for work, and only this fall and winter did I start making an effort to write again. 

We still have a global pandemic and people still die from COVID-19 and its Greek-numbered variants. I've been vaxxed, vaxxed again, boosted, boosted, variant-boosted, and I still mask in crowds, stores, and mass-transit settings. The number of people doing the same has dwindled; sometimes I'm the only person wearing a mask. 

I'm fortunate to have a job that lets me telework 100%. I do travel a bit, eat occasionally in restaurants, shop in stores (masked), and occasionally have a social life with people I know are vaccinated and maintaining precautions. We kept up the grocery online order/pick-up habit because dang, that's lower stress than going into a store full of lots of people coughing, especially this time of year with the "tripledemic" in the news (COVID-19, flu, respiratory syncytial virus, with that last one usually only producing mild cold-like symptoms but breaking out much more seriously this year, especially in children). 

I haven't had COVID-19 yet that I know of. (I do have my suspicions about a few days of feeling under the weather during which I kept testing negative after attending a big conference and receiving a lot of texts and emails from people I'd talked with saying they had tested positive.) Nor have I had the flu, a cold, or any other contagious respiratory illness. Masks are awesome.

You would think that with all this non-social time on my hands I would have done more writing. It's been more like "what do we binge next?" at our house, to be honest, plus a lot of books read. At any rate, here's 2022's short list:

In May I tried to plan ahead for a special round-number birthday celebration: Counting up the Years. This was a lot of fun, coming up with things I could do that don't all cost money; instead they cost the far more rare and precious elements of time and attention. 

As part of my job, I get to coordinate with the office of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on the proclamation for Bike Month. I wrote Bike Everywhere Month Rolls in May for the WSDOT Blog to share that—especially happy to do that in the year in which the Washington state legislature passed the historic Move Ahead Washington package with record-breaking levels of investment in active transportation and public transportation and dedicated future funding from a new carbon tax. That same package included a directive to WSDOT, where I work, to apply Complete Streets principles on all our projects, which is game-changing in a way that adds to the value of those new investments.

Both my long list of fun ideas and my bike riding took a turn for the worse September 1 when this happened: Broken Wrist, Dang It! No Riding for a While.

Revisiting my bike blog revealed I had a problem numbering in the tens of thousands that required drastic action in subscriber management: So long, spammers (with apologies to real people). [Honestly, this one isn't worth reading; noting it only in the spirit of full disclosure of lessons learned.]

I was delighted to write State Active Transportation Plan receives multiple awards for the WSDOT Blog. The plan my team worked on starting in late 2018 got slowed by the pandemic, and became final toward the end of December 2021. Over the course of 2022 the plan won state, regional, and national awards. And for an extra dose of woohoo, the new Move Ahead Washington transportation investment package wrote the plan into state law as a resource for identifying gaps in walk/bike/roll networks to prioritize for investment.

In November when things got weird with Twitter, its potential demise looming, I grabbed the archive of the many faces of Tiggs in The Kitten Chronicles, Year One, The Kitten Chronicles, Year Two, and The Kitten Chronicles, Year Three. I share a picture or funny story every so often, adding to a thread I started the day we brought him home. He can be a real poophead sometimes—ask me about the holes he's eaten into a lot of good merino wool clothing—but he's also brought joy.

Kitten Chronicles Day 1: Attempts to take pictures are almost all either kitty butt or blurry as he runs around checking out the place. Haven't named him yet; awaiting insights into personality or some cute story we can tell about how he got his name. pic.twitter.com/4qEqCDhLE4

— Barb Chamberlain (@BarbChamberlain) July 14, 2020

Now I was on a roll and Twitter was still there to inspire a bike blog post: What’s in a Name? Acoustic or Analog, Regular or Traditional Bicycle*. (But just in case, I started up a Mastodon account, @BarbChamberlain@toot.community.)

I rolled right into wanting to do something to reflect on the National Day of Mourning (labeled Thanksgiving on the federal holiday calendar) and Native American Heritage Day and compiled a post I've had in the back of my mind for a couple of years now: “We Are Still Here”: Indigenous-focused Bicycle Programs.

I treat that long four-day weekend (since I get those days off) as a chance to do cooking that takes time, although I don't try to get an entire fancy meal on the table in one fell swoop. Thus I dove into Vegan Cranberry Caramelized Red Onion Orange Chutney Recipe Experimentation.

My morning routine includes reading poetry. Along the way I've encountered more than one poem that somehow involves bicycles. Hence, “I think/therefore/I ride.” A Bike Rack of Bicycle Poems. Like the Kitten Chronicles, that started as a Twitter thread. I invited suggestions, which yielded some of the poems in my post, and I'm continuing the thread so I expect another post in the future. I started a second thread of transportation poems and that's likely to result in a post as well.

Starting a thread of poems with transportation references. As with my thread of bicycle poems these aren't necessarily "about" transportation; transportation appears.
The bike poem thread: https://t.co/x8x6GXCo6j

— Barb Chamberlain (@BarbChamberlain) October 22, 2022

Watching TV with my sweetie, a reference to the Internet of Things sparked some wordplay. We agreed that An Alphabet of Things seemed possible, and a while later I put it together with some of our thoughts and only one bit of research (to find the X word).

As the year drew to a close, I marked the winter solstice during my morning poetry-reading time, which led to Winter Solstice Readings.

My relationship with resolutions has varied over the years. This year I'm making it both fun and easy by thinking in terms of "joy snacks" in Commitment, Bite-Sized and Tasty. To help people get rolling by bike (or some other climate-friendly mode) whether or not they're "resolution types", I rounded up my blog posts over the years that discuss forming new habits, tracking/not tracking your riding, and the nature of commitment in New Year, New Mode(s).

The last day of the year held so many simple pleasures—joy snacks:

• went for a long walk with my sweetheart on what proved to be a sunny, beautiful day after a week of rain, to downtown Olympia for a coffee date and a stop at Peacock Vintage; 
• rode Zelda the e-bike on my first bike ride since breaking my wrist, woohoo!; 
• baked a delicious vegan dish, a tofu/caramelized onion/mushroom filling in a pie dish lined with thin slices of yam; 
• sewed trim onto the hem of a coat that Tiggs had chewed a hole in, hiding the mended spot and making the coat wearable;
• did yoga, making today one of my "triathlons" (walk 5,000 steps or more, ride my bike, and do yoga all in a day); 
• finished this blog post; and
• enjoyed red wine and delicious chocolate at the end of the day while relaxing on the sofa.

A very satisfying way to close out 2022 indeed.