by Dylan Tomine
A little less obvious – and a whole lot less sexy – are the benefits we found in manufactured-wood floor joists. Instead of solid beams cut from large old fir trees, these are made from small pieces of wood, sawdust, and other waste (think of them as tree sausages) compressed under tons of weight to form incredibly strong, straight timbers. In fact, they’re so straight, installation is a snap, reducing labor costs to make up for the higher purchase price. Sure, there are questions about the energy, and in some cases the formaldehyde-based glue used in manufacturing, but too many details tend to get in the way of a good rationalization.
I spent countless hours pulling nails from old flooring and siding that was removed during the demolition process. Our contractor used this salvaged wood wherever possible to lower material costs and reduce the number of trees that went into the project. But the math here only worked because I employed free, unskilled labor (me) to sit on the porch with a hammer, pry bar, lantern, and plenty of late-night talk radio. The virgin lumber we did use came from a Canadian company known for sustainable forest management, and I will say we paid dearly for it. But I guess that’s a predictable result of trying to manage a construction project without professional help: After doing the research, I was so excited about this company’s timber practices, I placed the order without asking what the bill was going to be; when it came, I almost passed out. A friend called it “further evidence of another failed financial strategy.”
So, did we build a “green” house? Not even close. No hay-bale or recycled-concrete walls. No reclaimed oak floors. No salvaged slate roofing or refurbished doors. The fact is, most of the really cool stuff we simply couldn’t afford. But we did the best we could, given our available time and money. Or at least that’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.
As long as I’m going to be tossing and turning on this winter night, I might as well dive in all the way and take a look at the cost of our recreation. In what might be the outdoor enthusiast’s ultimate irony, the process of loving and experiencing nature is, to varying degrees, destroying it. More specifically, the act of getting to and from “nature” causes a lot of the harm. Trucks, motorboats, long drives, paved roads…they all damage the very thing we’re traveling to experience. The all-or-none runoff pattern from impermeable asphalt creates sudden flooding and longer periods of drought in our river systems. Beyond the obvious effects of exhaust on the atmosphere, our cars leak oil, transmission fluid, and poisonous metal brake dust that all eventually end up in the water. You could always move out to the country and live where you recreate (which is, to some extent, what we are trying to do on the Island), but then you’d probably have a long commute to wherever you worked. And living in the boonies means more everyday driving to schools, grocery stores, soccer practice, etc. All this, done by people who actually care very deeply about the outdoors.
What about the vast majority of people and corporations for whom the natural world is at best an insignificant diversion and at worst a detriment to their bottom lines?
When BP says there’s nothing to worry about, that they have triple redundancy on a mechanical “blowout protector” submerged beneath thousands of feet of corrosive saltwater, I worry. When Aquabounty tells us their new genetically engineered food product (a fast-growing Atlantic salmon with growth hormone genes from Chinook salmon and a genetic “on switch” from the ocean pout fish) is “identical in every measurable way to the traditional food Atlantic salmon,” I worry. When Northern Dynasty assures us that their enormous open-pit, cyanide-leach mine, planned for the headwaters of Bristol Bay, won’t damage the world’s last great wild salmon rivers, I worry.
Where does that leave those of us who depend on the outdoors for our day-to-day mental health? I can only hope that somehow, through participating in the natural world, our need to protect it becomes more urgent. Maybe understanding what we have, what we’ve lost, and what we stand to lose can spur us to action. Maybe it will force us to stand up and fight the BPs, Aquabounties and Northern Dynasties of the world. Whether or not that action can actually save what we love has yet to be seen, but I do know this: We have to try, if for no other reason than to get a good night’s sleep.
I want to do the right thing. I really do. I want Skyla and Weston to live in a world that’s at least as rich as the one we have now, if not better. But I’m full of hypocrisy, rationalization, and conflict. I admit it. It’s been pointed out that if I truly wanted to do what’s best for the environment, I would live in an energy-efficient high-rise condominium, in a densely populated urban area where I could walk everywhere I needed to go. I would not water a yard. I would not burn wood for heat. And I certainly would not drive anywhere to fish or forage. I would have very little impact on the natural world. Of course, I’d never experience it, either. But it would be out there, all the healthier for my absence.
I wonder how the lady with the Prius sleeps at night? Probably better than I do. At the organic food store checkout counter, a kid with blond dreadlocks bulging from a Bob Marley knit cap informs me (a little more emphatically than I think necessary) that they most certainly do not carry Lunesta. He suggests melatonin instead. Great. Give me the biggest jar you have. I think I’m going to need it.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIRDS IV
“Dad,” Skyla says in a dramatic whisper, “there’s an eagle right there!” Weston and I follow her pointing finger to an alder branch 15 feet directly above us. I catch my breath. Up close, an adult bald eagle is an immense bird. It cocks its head and stares down at us, but makes no move to fly away.
A few minutes later, Weston hooks a small trout and hauls it to the bank. I reach down to unhook it and glance back to make sure the eagle is still there. Then I toss the struggling trout out into the pond, and as it leaves my hand, the eagle lifts off, wheels around and drops with extended talons. We can hear air swishing through feathers and water shearing when it plucks the trout from the surface and returns to its perch. The kids and I look at each other with wide eyes.
There was an osprey out over the water, stark white against a pale winter sky, its slender wings barely moving as it hovered on the breeze. From time to time, it would make a halfhearted dive before aborting the mission and flapping back to altitude. I stared at the osprey, hoping with all the concentration a 10-year-old boy could muster that I might will it to succeed.
We were fishing. Or we were going fishing, although I can’t recall making a cast or catching any fish that day. What I remember is the osprey, and my dad saying that when we moved back to Oregon in the spring, he wouldn’t be going with us.
After that, neither of us spoke for a long time. My mind raced with questions, but I was too afraid of the answers to ask. Maybe we kept fishing. The osprey was still there, farther away now, a distant speck hunting back and forth across open water. Suddenly, it folded its wings and dropped from the sky, accelerating toward something I couldn’t see.
ON THE ROAD
Driving to our house, you leave the paved access road down by the mailboxes and turn onto a narrow gravel lane bordered by salmonberries on one side and an enormous, thorny wall of Himalaya blackberries on the other. A hundred yards deeper into the woods, an even narrower dirt two-track takes you down the hill to our house. When you start seeing blue tarps, buckets, and freight pallets, you’re getting close.
It’s that first section of gravel road we share with four neighbors that concerns me, especially during the rainy season. (Which, this year, feels about 11 months long.) When the first autumn storms come, the road’s solid, sunbaked surface holds up fine. For a while. Then, after months of steady winter precipitation, the ground saturates and standing water appears in even the shallowest depressions.
And that means potholes. If you don’t get on it, the holes grow at an exponential rate, going from a little bouncy to suspension-wrecking in a matter of days.
It’s a vicious cycle. Water collects in a shallow puddle, someone drives through it, and a few rocks splash out. More wat
er collects and the next car splashes more rocks out, allowing even more water to collect, etc, etc. Water is the enemy. And if it keeps raining, you end up with holes big enough to swallow a Volkswagen.
A couple of years ago, over on the Olympic Peninsula (where nearly 12 feet of rain falls each year), I drove down an old gravel road into a pothole so deep, the boat I was towing floated its trailer off the ground. Water came pouring into my car through the door seals, flooding the floorboard; if it had been any deeper, it would have killed the motor. My passenger, an Olympic Peninsula local, said, “Oh, good. I was worried the road might be in bad shape.” He wasn’t being sarcastic, either.
You just have to stay on top of things. If you patch the road at the first sign of standing water, it only takes a little gravel and hardly any effort at all. Wait too long, though, and fixing the road becomes a big, unpleasant job requiring heavy loads of rock and serious labor. The lesson is obvious: Procrastination hurts.
So, of course, I put off patching the road through two solid weeks of rain and watched with gnawing concern as the potholes grew larger each day. I knew I should fix them, but more urgent (or enjoyable) projects kept getting in the way. By the time the situation became dire enough to make it my top priority, the holes were so big that the job seemed too daunting. So I put it off for another few days. And now, as they say, it’s time to pay the piper.
Maybe you’re wondering why one of the other four families doesn’t fix the road. Good question. And there’s a simple answer: Five years ago, the neighbors decided they’d had it with muddy cars, abused suspensions, and the dangers of careening around the road trying to avoid holes. They voted to pave the road with smooth, permanent, maintenance-free asphalt. But one of the neighbors – clearly in the minority – talked them out of it, citing runoff issues and other environmental concerns, finishing up with a vigorous pooh-poohing of the work needed to maintain a gravel road. That genius was me. And now I feel responsible for the whole thing.
At least today I have my right-hand man on the job. Weston recently celebrated his fourth birthday and, as an official “big boy,” has proclaimed himself ready to help with the roadwork. We take two shovels (a grown-up model and a small plastic beach toy designed for sand castle construction) and a five-gallon bucket up the road to the pile of crushed rock sitting in our neighbor’s front yard. Compared to my early days on the one-man road crew, the simple existence of this reserve gravel makes the job drastically easier.
When I first took over responsibility for the road, patching it required a trip (or several, depending on how long I’d procrastinated) to the lumberyard to load up on 80-pound bags of gravel. I’d pile them into the back of my car until the springs bottomed out, then drive down our road throwing bags out next to potholes. It was expensive, time consuming, and let me just say not exactly a picnic moving the bags of rock around.
Every time I had to wrestle one of those miserable hernia-traps into position, I thought of John Huelsdonk, the legendary Olympic Peninsula pioneer known as the Iron Man of the Hoh. As the first, and hardiest, of the settlers who tried to scratch out a living on the Hoh River in the 1890s, he was renowned for his great strength (hence the nickname) and determination. As the story goes, a ranger came across Huelsdonk climbing a steep grade with a cast-iron woodstove strapped to his back, and was moved to comment on the difficult task. In response, Huelsdonk reportedly said that the stove wasn’t a problem, it was the 50-pound sack of flour flopping around inside that made it tough.
Now we have it easy. Every few years, when the road reaches the point where maintenance becomes a full-time job, we call in the professionals. They bring heavy equipment to regrade the roadbed, making sure there’s enough camber (side-to-side tilt) to keep water from pooling. Truckloads of new gravel are brought in and rolled and tamped into place. I finally got smart enough to have the road crew deliver a few extra yards of gravel and leave it in a heap for easy access. The last time they came, we went with recycled, crushed concrete instead of our usual quarried black basalt, relying on reports that it holds up better and keeps old sidewalks and foundations out of landfills. It also has the right ratio of “fines” (small particles of rock and sand) to rocks for a smooth, durable surface. But it’s hardly maintenance-free.
Weston scrambles to the top of the crushed concrete heap and tries to push his shovel into it. After a year of exposure to weather, the fines have done their job well, solidifying enough to repel the flimsy beach toy. He watches me driving the metal shovel in and filling the bucket. “Dad,” he says, “I…need the real shovel.” Without thinking, I hand it to him, and before I can issue my standard “Be careful,” he swings it wildly toward the gravel mound. The blade misses my nose by an inch, clangs off the rocks and bounces out of his hands.
“Weston!”
“What?”
“Give me the goddam – I mean, hey…why don’t we do the shoveling together?”
I grip the shovel handle in front of his hands and Weston “helps” me scoop gravel into the bucket. When it’s full, I lift the bucket and start staggering up the road toward the potholes. Weston runs to help and grabs the side of the bucket, forcing us both into an awkward sideways crabwalk. Right as I’m about to bark at him to let go, I look down and see him smiling at me. “Fixing the road with you is fun,” he says. We haul it the rest of the way together. For the record, 100 yards is a long way to walk sideways carrying a 40-pound bucket of rocks with a four-year-old hanging off the handle.
There’s still some standing water at the bottom of the bigger holes. You don’t want to dump gravel into water, as it separates the rocks from the fines and won’t hold. The pros use a leaf blower to spray the water out, but I don’t have one. I do, however, have Weston. Using a combination of hands, plastic shovel and lots of jumping and splashing, he manages to do the leaf blower’s work in short order. He’s covered in mud and soaking wet, but I don’t expect anything less from him.
When he finishes clearing the first hole, I use the “real” shovel to break up the hard edges so the new rock can mesh better with the old. Our hard-won bucket of rock fills about a third of the hole, making this at minimum a 15-gallon pothole. To increase efficiency, I tell Weston to start dewatering the next hole while I go back for another bucket. I make the solo round trip in half the time as before, but find it’s less than one tenth the fun.
We fill the hole to just above the surrounding road surface, and Weston brings another specialized skill to the operation. “Jump up and down real hard right here,” I say, and he’s more than happy to comply. It’s surprising how much force a 35-pound bundle of energy can exert. Within minutes, the slight mound is packed down to level. I feather out the edges to make sure our patch won’t trap more water, and our pothole is gone. One down, eight to go.
The rest of our afternoon proceeds accordingly although, with individual tasks now defined, we work a little faster and with better results. Despite my stiffening back and sore hands, I have to admit that I’m having fun. All the times I’ve done this job by myself over the years, the work has been easier and more efficient. But I don’t recall it ever being fun.
Finally, we look up at what was, just a few hours (and blisters) ago, a cratered surface, and feel the satisfaction of seeing only level road. It won’t last. Just until the next rain. Right now, though, it’s as smooth as the interstate and, in a funny way, beautiful. Weston tears off toward the house, skids to a stop, and looks up into the sky. “Dad,” he shouts back to me, “I just felt a drop. It’s raining… Yaaaaaay!”
DEEP FREEZE
A week after Thanksgiving, winter locks us in a vise-grip of arctic cold. Brittle, frozen air normally kept at bay by our seasonal monsoon pushes south out of British Columbia and settles in for the foreseeable future. The spongy, muddy ground crunches underfoot at first, then solidifies, bringing an abrupt end to chanterelle season. The alders and maples around the house stand motionless, bare and skeletal against metallic blue skies.
I know this is standard fare for a lot of the country, but for us maritime Northwesterners, it’s a brutal shock to the system. Our houses don’t handle it much better. There’s a run on pipe fittings and shop vacs at the hardware store, and plumbing trucks fly around the Island from one ice-geyser emergency to another. Give us 45 degrees with endless rain and we can manage. Put us in the freezer, and suddenly our clothes, homes, cars, and bodies prove hopelessly inadequate. We are not good at cold.
The view from inside the house is deceiving: The frigid air holds little moisture and leaves no frost; the low-angled sun and cloudless sky give the appearance of an early summer morning. There is no indication that it’s anything but a beautiful day – until you go outside. Or, worse yet, out to my unheated office. Even when I’m dressed in state-of-the-art puff gear, work becomes almost impossible. Fingerless gloves allow me to hit the keyboard in 15-minute spurts before my hands seize up. I drag in the old space heater, run it on high for three hours, and find the thermometer on my desk reading a tropical 34 degrees.
To summarize: Can’t work, can’t pick mushrooms, can’t believe the alarming rate at which the woodpile is disappearing…might as well go fishing.
In the winter months, immature resident Chinook salmon, or blackmouth, feed heavily on herring and candlefish throughout our inland sea. At times, they even chase the baitfish into protected bays where I can fish from our small, open skiff in relative comfort and safety. On especially calm, windless days, I sometimes even venture out onto the open waters of the Sound, although such expeditions are not without anxiety. The object of this pursuit, though, is worth more than any discomfort, physical or mental. Smaller than the migrating adult kings of summer, blackmouth average four to eight pounds, with a good one (at least around the Island) going 12 or 14. They are delicious, and the opportunity to eat fresh, fat-laden salmon in the dead of winter feels like a great luxury. This winter has been a bust so far. Perhaps the cold weather will trigger something, maybe move the bait in toward shore and the blackmouth along with it. Tomorrow could be the day.
