Picking Up Sticks

By Kimberly Mayer

Spring is upon us and I know I must go headlong into it. “That’s the thing about gardening,” notes Maggie O’Farrell, “there’s always something to do, you’re only ever just catching up with yourself.” First, I had everything to clean up from winter winds. In other places people worry about break-ins. On island it’s the outdoors that gets ravaged.

I call it picking up sticks, and it’s a chore I actually enjoy. You might say I have more in common with George W. Bush today than I ever did during his presidency. Surely you remember him going off to clear brush on his horseless ranch in Central Texas. It was how he unwound, they said. Well, the same might be true with me although I’m not the president of anything, nor am I starting any wars. 

I find it interesting how many U.S. presidents were brush clearers. According to presidential scholar Tim Blessing of Alvernia University in Reading, PA: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. But perhaps none as tenacious as George W. Bush in the canyons, rocky hillsides, and pastures of his ranch outside Crawford, Texas. “Local agronomists say brush control has been a part of rural Texas since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930’s.” (Down on the Ranch, President Wages War on the Underbrush, Lisa Rein 12/2005 Washington Post)

Unlike Bush, I am not whacking down stands of trees, making ear-splitting noise with chain saws, or burning piles. On my little wooded lot by the bay on San Juan Island, I simply put on gloves and boots and pick up Douglas Fir, Cedar and pine sticks, branches and boughs. “Calling cards” from the winds, I call them.

One thing leads to another, and I think about all the recently felled trees on Roche Harbor Road. Fallen branches, fallen trees, this is where the mind wanders when everything is falling down. While we understand OPALCO’s intent in trying to prevent a Maui-like wildfire along high-voltage power lines–those winter winds again–it is distressing to see so many trees downed. And aesthetically it’s unacceptable. On every trip to town and back I pondered, what can be done, what can we do?

And then I got it: bicycle paths! 

Bicycle paths running within the powerline easement, crossing creeks, pastures, and a vineyard. Hopping over ravines, and alongside lakes. Climbing hills, and sometimes disappearing into woods. The tricky part is how often the power lines leap across Roche Harbor Road from side to side. How will cyclists do it? But I’ll leave that to others, and just say I can see it in my mind’s eye.

Now on every trip to town and back on Roche Harbor Road I find myself mentally riding the bicycle path off the road. It’s attractive in that it follows the contours of the land—mountain bikes, anyone?– and far more fun. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, if you will.

Originally published 4/17/2024 in The Journal of the San Juan Islands

What Brings Me Back

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

What drove me away from the islands in December was the darkness. Now, three months later in San Diego, I am almost ruined. All that light! Even in the historic rainfall this winter, bomb cyclones or atmospheric rivers–call it what you will–there was light. And I got used to that.

Now we leave SoCal, the land of shiny white cars, and drive up the coast, traverse Oregon, the land of trucks, and all of Washington, the land of gray SUV’s. Enormous states all. Finally, ferrying out to what our five-year old grandson refers to as “going to that other country…” 

I think that’s what breaks my heart.

I had thought we’d be returning to the island with the rufous hummingbirds, coming up from southern US and Mexico at the same time as them. In my mind’s eye salmonberry and red flowering current would be abloom for our feisty little friends, and we would start being their handmaidens, crazily filling their feeders. Bags of sugar flying off the grocer’s shelf like it was days before Thanksgiving. Kayaks and paddle boards coming and going, revolving doors of houseguests, and every meal on the deck. I saw all this, with spring accelerating into summer.

But there’s more winter to get through apparently. Our route will be more coastal, but still, a Monster Blizzard in the Sierras. Snowfall on island. We’re packing snow chains for the road trip. But it was never about snow; it was the lack of light. Snow is beautiful. And it’s bright. 

If there’s one thing we can’t predict, it’s nature. Winter or spring, we’re coming home. To the woods by the sea where Douglas firs and cedars stand and greet us, and madrone trees bend and beckon with open arms. 

Originally published 3/21/2024 in The Journal of The San Juan Islands

Sundown

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

You could say we are coastal people. North or south, it’s the ocean that pulls us. Our northern home is on a bay where the trees meet the water, logs rest in mud, buoys bob, ducks float by, rafts of otter play along the shoreline, and solitary heron tiptoe knee deep in water tiptoe over rocks. Except for the call of gulls and eagles from their treetop lookouts, it’s quiet. Sometimes a voice will carry across the water, but not many people live in the San Juan Islands.  

In Solana Beach, California, where we’re wintering, the surf pounds. Day and night the perpetual pounding and crashing becomes one with our breath, our pulse, our being. Surfers seize the surf all year long, but we give it a wide berth and walk the long sandy beaches in winter. Then at the end of every day, high on a bluff at Seascape Shores, a handful of people seat themselves upon a couple rows of benches, like pews, to witness the setting sun.

All ages, all neighbors, living aside, across from, and on top of each other in a cubist configuration of condos that forms a village, that’s Seascape Shores. Here the communal ritual of seeing the sundown has been going on since I-don’t-know-when. I just know that for the final leg of the sun’s long arc across the sky every day, we arrive in the golden light in which everyone looks good, and bid goodbye in darkness.

At the same time on the beach below, dozens or hundreds of birds line up near the water’s edge and face the sun every day at sunset too. Like us they are all in a line, very still, and facing forward. Thrilled to be sharing our sun worshipping moments with another species, I thought, I really must ask my friend, Tyler Davis, about it. Naturalist and bird guide on San Juan Island, he would know. 

Tyler guessed, rightly, they are Western Gulls who have “found a place to roost for the night, or perhaps stage before continuing on to a communal roost nearby.” 

“Is there anything particularly spellbinding about the setting sun to them?” I asked.

“Not that I can think of,” he replied. 

Tyler must have sensed my disappointment, for he then inquired whether the wind would be coming from that direction.

“Oh yes, the wind is coming off The Pacific Ocean alright,” I assured him.

“Roosting gulls often point themselves into the wind,” Tyler explained. Then added, “Doesn’t mean they can’t also be sun-worshippers!”

Originally published 2/10/24 in The Journal of the San Juan Islands

Blue Skies

By Kimberly Mayer

This piece was recently published in my monthly column, The Nature of Things, in The Journal of the San Juan Islands.

One month ago I began to plunge. The sun was at such a low arc in the San Juan Islands the days grew darker, and the darkness got me. It was at that time I made the acquaintance of a man who, having lived many years in Alaska, found winter on island to be darker. He explained that because Alaska is without all the cloud cover, moonlight is reflected in the snow and winters seem brighter. Night after night I was watching HGTV “Bahamas Life” in bed. No wonder.

Trading rain shadow for Ray Bans and missing our grandchildren, we packed up the car and headed to sunny Southern California. Tree branches waved like arms in the wind as we steamed off on the ferry. Goodbye beautiful snowy mountains and islands, there is no place like you anywhere in the world, I know. But sometimes there is just not enough light.  

Wet and cold, dark and muddy, it was all much the same through Washington and Oregon. Then something happens the moment one goes over the line into California, and it happens every time. Rolling down the Siskiyou Mountains and coming into all that light and dryness—the landscape looks like the location of Westerns in my childhood. Signs like Sunny Valley, Rogue River, Little Muddy Creek, Elk Creek, and Wolf Creek seem to bear witness. 

It turns out that “the real west,” as I call it, was always unreal. 

Everything is indeed looking better in the light and I can’t help but be happy. A four year old in San Diego charted our road trip on his placemat map at breakfast every morning and we made it. But here’s what I forgot: “The darkness is not an end point, nor is the daylight. They live in a continually unfolding, mutually dependent cycle,” explains Rick Rubin in The Creative Act: A Way of Being. The process is as old as time, and every six months it starts all over again. 

I never saw us as snowbirds. I had lost the continuity of seasons. Winter Solstice was but days away, and instead of waiting it out, we jumped the gun. The skies here may not be Bahama blue but they’re powder blue. Light is coming for us all, and with it, color. Hang in.

My New Monthly

By Kimberly Mayer

A writer’s life is like this. She grows a set of antennae as she goes into the world, looking for material. Lately I’m wearing two sets of antennas, one for this blog and one for a new column in the Journal of the San Juan Islands. I don’t know what the difference will be in terms of what I will see and what I will write for either outlet. I do know, however, that while blogging can be irregular, I will have to be regular with the monthly newspaper column. 

I’ve titled it “The Nature of Things,” to keep it broad. My new hero in life is Eleanor Roosevelt. A woman for all seasons, all reasons, and now this: her dedication as a columnist. For nearly thirty years, six days a week, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote “My Day,” a nationally syndicated column reaching millions. How did I not know this when I was young and reading only comics and “Dear Abby” in the newspaper? Why was I not guided to “My Day”? I feel I am having to make up for lost time as a child. 

More liberal than her husband, Eleanor considered herself a journalist first. She wrote past FDR’s presidency, through the Truman administration, the Eisenhower administration, and into the Kennedy administration. Indeed Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t put down her pen until two months before her own death in 1962. Her column covered everything, from everyday occurrences in the White House to nature and conservation, art, labor reform, civil rights, women’s rights, anti-Semitism, and the threat of fascism.

Today we have all that plus a planet in peril. My column, “The Nature of Things” appeared for the first time in The Journal of the San Juan Islands this month, and what did I cover but runner beans, rolled hay, and Breton striped sweaters. It was a start.

See my article here.

My Father’s Last Garden

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

Nine years ago, when my father was ninety-one years old and recovering from quadruple bypass heart surgery, he spent some time in a rehabilitation center near the retirement village where he lived with my mother in Duxbury, Massachusetts. I remember being startled at first by how frequently the word “rehab” was bandied about by their crowd. It took me awhile to appreciate that these stays had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. My father’s stay, it turned out, had everything to do with gardens.

The month was September and the weather was mild. Mom and I visited dad in turns daily, and when it was my turn I knew I was giving her much needed time alone or with her friends. So I spent some time. Every day I wheeled dad out to a courtyard in the center of the complex, where I pulled up a chair and, with a navy blue lambswool throw over his lap and a gray herringbone wool cap on his head, we settled in for a good bit of the afternoon. We spent no time whatsoever in his room, and I can’t even tell you whether or not he had a roommate. But our time in the courtyard is as clear as can be. 

Memory, it turns out, has a far stronger relationship to place than it does to time. I know this to be true because in order to write this, I had to rely on my sisters to recall the month and year for this particular rehab stay. Toward the end there were so many.

Surrounded by a brick building on all four sides, the courtyard was concrete underfoot with a couple patches of soil. A rhododendron shrub grew in each patch. So Dad and I started with that. Our job, the one we gave ourselves each day, was to dream up a courtyard garden. Just the two of us. There were other patients scattered about but as we didn’t know them, we enjoyed an anonymity, and of course, reported to no one. In this way we took ownership of the lot.

“Look at how the rhodies thrive here, let’s do more of that,” I don’t know which one of us said it. We were thinking like one from the start.

And so we began in that concrete courtyard, designing a garden in our heads. Creative play, day after day. Neither touching a hoe nor getting dirt in our fingernails, just thinking like a gardener together. No boots, no gloves, no kneeling pad—or knee pads, as my father would have worn. No deer here, no rabbits to devour everything green. But the sun on our faces and fresh air in our hair, for gardening is also about being in a garden, albeit in our minds’ eye. 

Each day we took our place and picked up where we’d left off. Dreaming it, improving it, growing it, we made the courtyard garden ours. Did dad share this with mom in her visits? Probably not. I never heard a word about it from anyone. 

What dad and I felt in our hearts was that a garden at the rehabilitation center would do more than all the staff, more than all the meds, more than anything, for the patients. We just knew it at the time, and I have since learned this to be true. In 1984 the pioneering environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich conducted the first such study, View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery. In a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania two groups of patients recovering from the same surgery were studied. The windows in the rooms of one group looked to a brick wall, the other, to leafy trees. “The patients with a view of trees fared better; they had lower levels of stress, more positive mood, required fewer doses of pain medication, and were discharged on average a day sooner.” (The Well Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature, by Sue Stuart-Smith). And that was simply given a view. 

Consider the recovery with an outdoor space, such as a courtyard, to bring the outdoors in. Architecture could be doing this, but it isn’t, not enough. Gardening-wise, it can be as simple as planting trees, vines, or broadcasting seeds. In her book, Growing Myself, Judith Handelsman reminds us, “In the not too distant past, the healing power of gardens was a matter of course. European sanitoriums incorporated time in their gardens as an essential part of the cure. It is only with modern medicine’s dependence on taking a pill that we have lost the belief in healing through osmosis by basking in the presence of nature.”

If indeed dad and I had been “basking in the presence of nature,” all of this would be more understandable. But in our case the courtyard at the rehabilitation center was all but barren. Similarly, E.B. White described his wife Katharine S. White “laying out of the spring bulb garden” in the Introduction to her book, Onward and Upward in the Garden:

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair—a folding canvas thing—that has been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and weather, … sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

I don’t want to overstate it, but gardens have always been about both the real and the imagined. Ask any gardener. And an imagined garden, it turns out, can be healing too. 

My father was soon released from the rehabilitation center, moving back into the retirement village in Duxbury with my mother, and then to a more assisted care facility near Boston. There he contracted Covid 19 and died, nearly five years after our time together in the rehab courtyard. I consider that imagined garden dad’s last garden because his plot of land in life kept shrinking. In the end it was the 11 x 6 inch birdfeeder mounted on his bedroom window that came the closest to being a garden. Blue jays, sparrows, cardinals, and chickadees, his joy in them immeasurable. 

Musings on Water

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” Rumi

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

We are thinking about selling the boat. The boat that brought us here, to the San Juan Islands. We lived in Seattle then and we were just starting to dream about living here. 

We found a waterfront house on San Juan Island and lived on the boat in the marina while our home was being remodeled. On our bay there are no ferries, no commercial boats of any kind. Only residents quietly coming and going in kayaks, canoes, and small fishing boats. We see our neighbors paddling by more often than we do on the shore. 

This is where I want to live, I said way back then. At the end of the world. The archipelago reminded me of Pat Conroy’s beloved low country in South Carolina. The turning back of the clock, stuck in time, almost off the grid. 

Life on an island will be made even smaller if we sell our boat.

Will we lose this connection to other islands?

When a woman I know from Houston came to Seattle on book tour she remarked, “When you’ve seen one pine tree you’ve seen them all.” I’m wondering, is it that way with islands? I think not. You can turn my husband around at sea and he can identify any island by its shape, by the contour of its hills. The islands are individuals much like trees are sentient beings.

We have talked to the kids about the boat and everyone understands. The boat is getting old, and we’re not getting younger. For one reason or another she is spending too much time in the slip. A couple of our friends recently sold their boat. Another couple were relieved when their sailboat sank. Lately a broken down expresso machine at home impacts us more than the loss of a trawler.

Haven’t I always said, the smaller the boat, the more the fun? Our time would be freed up to kayak more. Kayaks, paddleboards, a canoe, and a rowboat, such is the small fleet at home.

As my friend said on putting down her dear old ailing dog, “As much as I miss her every day, I’m thinking I may have kept her too long.”

We are living with the idea. I’ll write this up and see which way the wind blows. We’re heading out this week to the Gulf Islands, BC, and time will tell. Trawling will tell. It’s a fluid situation.

Birdsong

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

I am on a bird walk. Comfortable shoes and binoculars are all that’s required, and I carry in my pocket a small notebook and pen. As our guide, Tyler Davis, says, “there’s just so much happening up there.” There’s a lot happening down here too, as participants in his bird walk in the San Juan Islands Sculpture Park seem to double, triple, and quadruple each month this summer. 

We stand in a circle and it’s easy to feel dizzy as swallows perform in flight around us. 

We learn there are six species of swallows on San Juan Island, five in the Sculpture Park and one out by the ferry landing. Our guide knows all the birds, their appetites, and who’s returning every week. We learn that robins move around, that winter robins and summer robins may not be the same. There are 11 or 12 species of gull on island in the wintertime, and bluebirds are being reintroduced. That quail live in brambles to protect themselves from foxes. Ducks nest in trees. Cowbirds historically follow cows and the buffalo out west. That bird bones are honeycombed to keep them light in flight, and that birds migrate by using celestial cues and following the stars.

We walk on.

Like a conductor Tyler hears everything around him, sometimes cupping his ears to hear even better. “So much of birding is by ear,” he states.  

The busiest time of day for song is sunrise, but before sunrise there’s also what birders call a dawn chorus. Some birds sing when seated, some only in flight. The goldfinch cries, “potato chip.” The white crown sparrow, “me me pretty me.” Tyler’s favorite is the flute-like sound of a Swainson’s thrush, which he describes as “a summertime song, ethereal.” 

“Like a spiral staircase,” he adds, twirling an index finger in the air. 

Spotting and listening to birds not only enhances our time outdoors, but paying attention to birds may be beneficial to our well-being. “Everyday encounters with the bird kind are associated with better mental health,” writes Richard Sima in “Why Birds and their Songs are Good for our Mental Health” Washington Post, May 18. Known as attention restoration theory, “natural stimuli, such as birdsong,” he explains, “may allow us to engage in soft fascination which holds our attention but also allows it to replenish.”

“The special thing about birdsong,” writes Emil Stobbe, an environmental neuroscience grad student at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, “is that even if people live in very urban environments and do not have a lot of contact with nature, they link the songs of birds to vital and intact natural environments.”

We continue walking. I’m thinking we are learning to listen with our eyes as well as our ears.

Twenty acres of naturalized gardens, fields, meadows, a pond, woods, and shoreline. The San Juan Islands Sculpture Park is indeed a wildlife sanctuary. Numerous birds live and alight here, and according to park president David Jenkins, “Turns out birds love art.” 

We are all in a reciprocal relationship. Protecting and preserving natural environments has everything to do with sustaining bird life, and in turn, our own mental well-being. The more in tune with birds we are, the more in tune with ourselves. 

Dylan

Self Portrait (1970) Bob Dylan

By Kimberly Mayer

They sat next to each other, essentially, in first class. Aisle seats across from each other on a United Airline flight out of Tulsa to Denver. My friend, Karen, and the older man who was the last passenger to board the plane. Wearing shades and a leather jacket. Bob Dylan.

What I love is that for the one and a half hours of the flight she gave him his space and anonymity. Dylan, with a newspaper upon his tray, tearing articles into strips and rearranging them on the page of a notebook where he began writing. Having just toured the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa and seen his many notebooks of songs, rewrites and revisions, she was not surprised by the way he cramped his hand to write so small. His handwriting is miniscule.

And just when you think you are traveling with the gods, Dylan begins dropping things. First his newspaper, later his drink with ice cubes. 

Dylan sold his archive to the George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa in 2016 and there lie unreleased recordings, poems, notebooks, handwritten manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, leather jackets, and the like. Dylan was born in Minnesota, but folk singer Woody Guthrie was an Oklahoman—and a huge influence on the early Dylan. Oil billionaire George Kaiser also founded the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa. “Tulsa is the beginning of the west, but it is also on the edge of north, south, and east,” notes historian Douglas Brinkley. “There is no better crossroads city in America.” 

And didn’t Dylan always like the heartland?

But back to what he was doing on that plane, tearing the articles into strips. What Karen witnessed was a creative process, of course, as well as Dylan’s extraordinary skill at detachment. A master at it, finding a personal domain in which to write. 

I found a YouTube “Don’t Look Back” out take (1965) of Dylan demonstrating a similar process. “I wrote out the song, you know? Then I cut it up on the paper, like into four. I cut it in the middle, then I cut it across. And then I rearranged the paper so it comes out like this.” And then he continues in a song-like manner, “It’s just a technique, which some people say some people invented and other people say other people invented. And some people say it’s a very old technique. 

And I realize it’s similar to how I learned to write papers—on index cards, all over the floor of my room. It’s the only way I’ve ever known. I’ve graduated since to tables, but my notes remain on index cards. I wrote two manuscripts this way. I write my blog posts this way. 

And now I’m going to sound like Dylan and say: some people say they taught me, some people say I made it up. And some people say it doesn’t matter anyway.

Stuff

Dining Room in the Country, by Pierre Bonnard (Minneapolis Institute of Art Collection)

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

Nearly every object in my home has had a perilous existence of late. For a month I’ve been clearing out excess stuff. It began when I came home from the experience of designing a minimalist condo in Southern California and enjoying that aesthetic. Returning to a packed house up north drove me to purge my belongings. And unseasonably cold, stormy weather held me to it.

Apparently I had seen myself as a Pottery Barn branch on island, ready at a moment’s notice for a change of set. Table linens, pillows, candles, and home décor, I thought I had cleared it all out before. Candleholders and glass vases clattered in open boxes in the back of a car traversing a gravel road to the thrift shops. 

Off the wall came an antique pine cabinet, one that I had found to hold spices in a farmhouse kitchen in Pennsylvania how-many-homes-ago? In the years since I’d been coming up with various things to display in it in various rooms, none of them as successful, or necessary, as the cabinet was originally. Goodbye to the collections, and goodbye cabinet.

Still getting rid of all the black & white from our terrace in Seattle. How pretty black & white looked against the red brick of a home in the city, but not here. 

In some instances my “finds” have been returned to thrift shops so they can sell them again. All for a good cause, twice. Proceeds from Friday Harbor Fire Department Thrift benefit the fire department on island. Treasure Hound, our local animal shelter, and Community Treasures, the grand dame of them all, a wide variety of local programs. There is socially conscious shopping and socially conscious unloading, and I like to think they got me both ways. 

What breaks my heart are the tea sets, a porcelain coffee pot, and linens I purchased thinking: my mother would love this. As it turned out, she never had an opportunity to visit our island home. So all those teas we might have taken were in my head. It’s not about these objects. They’re in my mind’s eye now; that’s where they exist.

In these ways I am not so much chipping away at the life we are living as the lives we once lived, or intended to live. A little more on my mother. Age never really caught up with her. Thus I had a whole scenario, should dad go first. Mom might come live with us and feel remarkably at home on island, just as she had on Cape Cod for many years. Here mom would buzz around in a golf cart on country roads with little to no traffic. I often see it when I’m out walking, her long wave to me as she rounds the bend—off to the market at Roche Harbor, the boutiques, cafe, and the post office out on the wharf.

These are the moments too, the things that never happened. I can let the props go because they are seared into the environment, but the imagined moments I will keep.  Mom running her errands happily, on an island of gray haired ladies as prevalent as the Great Blue Heron on our shores.