Snow Nazis - the Documentary

These girls prove that laughing at something is the best way to destroy it: http://ping.fm/tptwT

Crazy Weather

On January 3, the junction of Highway 101 and 113, near Forks, looked like this:


















Our gold roses were still blooming when the storms hit. I headed the blossoms and left them on the snow:



















On January 18, there was barefootin' at the Clallam Bay beach (Clayton Bannon and Damen Ringgold). That's Canada there in the background, with snow.

Rescuing a Townsend's Warbler

Neighbors and I were trudging along the beach – they in high boots, so they could walk the wet edge, myself in low boots, so I was breaking trail – when we found this little girl huddled in the snow.

That's a female Townsend's Warbler (or so we think).

They thought she was pretty cute, being so friendly. I recognized a lowered core temperature and disorientation when I saw it. That poor little thing couldn't see any landmarks and was very probably waiting for the sun to provide her some way of orienting for direction. Her insides were heading for freezing and the tiny computer in her head couldn't get her back to the woods. If she'd lifted off in the wind in her weakened state, she would have probably just been puffed into the cold, slate-colored water of the Clallam bay. Loons, mergansers, grebes, buffleheads and goldeneyes were swimming nearby, feasting on fish, but their living room would have been the warbler's deathtrap.

The Townsend's Warbler isn't usual to this area in the winter, except for a small, local population in the lowlands, where we seldom have harsh weather. It's a bird of the upper stories of conifer woods, and to this little female this expanse of snow-covered beach might as well have been the Sahara desert. I knew it would be terrifying to her for me to approach her at predator speed, so I crept up on her. She must have read my dark legs as “tree,” for she flew up and gripped a fold in my pant-leg.

I reached slowly down, hoping not to spook her, but she flew desperately to the next thing she recognized as a tree – one of my fellow walker's wool hat. The woman laughed and backed away; you have to admit that having a wild animal landing on your head isn't an everyday experience, and most of us would shriek and try to duck away. The bird fluttered back to the snow.

At this point the warbler was so exhausted – and probably confused -- she couldn't prevent me from catching her. I managed to lower my wool-gloved hands to the snow and slowly enclosed her; she helped by crawling into my right hand. Not from recognition that I was kind or safe or perhaps even a living thing – I was larger than a dinosaur to her – but from the attraction of warmth.

I couldn't take any more photos; I had both hands carefully cupped around the motionless bird, and I had a long trudge back up to the roadside bushes. There were logs and ditches in the way, so I had to take it slow, so I wouldn't fall and crush her. I could see her little bright eye peeping out from under my left forefinger, watching where we were headed.

Up on the road, I looked around for a shelter. The best shelter – a short, fat Douglas Fir, little larger than a bush, was already the obvious property of a pair of fat Dark-Eyed Juncos. The frozen fuchsias in another front yard were full of snow and frankly uninviting. They were too low to protect the bird from dogs, including the large yellow lab – Willie – who was happily romping along, obviously hoping I'd throw whatever I had in my hands for her to fetch.

Then I saw the ragged bushes under a neighbor's house: part salal, part wind-wrenched scraggy hemlock, part ivy, forming a small cave in the mass of foliage. The bushes were further sheltered by a small grove of Douglas Fir. They looked as though they had old leaves, rotten buds and probably tasty bugs in them. Ivy has berries. The Townsend Warbler eats insects, but insects eat everything else.

As we all approached the bushes, the warbler had begun to respond to the warmth, and she began to wriggle and chirp. When I gently thrust my hands into the cavity among the branches, the bird hopped out of my hands and onto one of the internal twigs, and bounced out of sight in the foliage.

The neighbor asked me what I was doing, and when I told her, she said, “You're kind.”

I said, “No, the spirits are watching. If I walked by a fellow creature and let it suffer, they'd let the same thing happen to me.”

I've seen karma come around too many times not to help when I'm asked to. It's not kindness. It's self-preservation.

It be snowin' its ASS off

The Yukon gave us a Solstice present – its weather!

This is our front yard, with snow drifted up so high we go out the back door. We're using the snow from the front porch to melt until we can get a look at the pipes. Pretty nice, the wind bringing us our water. We of course filter and boil anything that's going to get near our mouths. We normally flush the toilets with bath water, so we have lots of buckets.

The snow falling now is soft and fluffy. The first storm is what I'm calling igloo snow. Franz Boas said the four Inuit words for snow were kind of like other languages: falling snow, snow on the ground, snowdrift, stuff like that. Igloo snow was the kind you could cut with a mattock to make snow blocks for an igloo; dense, icy crystals that packed together to form a firm substance. The new stuff is snowball snow!

Confusion: as I was typing, at the back of my mind I was wondering how Dan could have fallen asleep so quickly, because I heard a man deeply – and loudly -- snoring on the floor beside the couch. Then Dan walked in and my mind focused. It wasn't Dan on the floor.

We used to have an old native guy in a plaid shirt show up at the first lighting of the wood stove in the autumn. He was there for a second, nodded once and disappeared. We haven't seen him in a while, so maybe he feels at home enough now to sleep in front of the stove.

Dan says, “He's welcome! Enjoy!”

(We've had a lot of experience with ghosts and tape recordings over the years. Lots of cats, some old ladies, some old guys, one crying girl -- and a fucking dead pedophile. I'm about to concentrate on a life's worth of comic's collections -- start the prose novels so many people have been asking for. Lord knows I have the weird life -- and dialog).

This is the stove, melting, heating and boiling water and food. Bread rising, more snow melting, beans simmering. We loves us our Quadrafire, Becky. We have about three years' worth of collected wood sitting in the yard and shed. I knew this economic mess was coming, and we weren't going to be caught short. We have lots of food, cat food, solar lights and wood. And wireless. We be happy Technohicks.

The only car to move came down to slip and slide to the house that – ahem – runs a business. Let's say that somebody needed her medicine; the kind that gives the really bad teeth. What can I say? I'm hooked on caffeine and the occasional hit of tobacco, and I love my booze. My drugs are legal, so I can't point fingers at anybody else. Especially in THIS weather.

Dogs love this. Here's Willy, the neighbor's lab, so happy somebody will walk through the snow with her, plowing through the snow on the Old Lighthouse Bridge to Slip Point. In Willy's case, it's a whole lot of running around and running back to tell you “Isn't this great???” Willy doesn't give a damn. She'll fetch sticks in deep water and heavy waves – riding the surf back to shore – until your arm gives out.

I rescued a bird. Next blog.

It be snowin'

Well, it's kinda snowing. It's not a huge blizzard like the '78 snowbowl in Ohio, but it's making the kids happy.

Bryce Hat, with Colby and Samisue Underwood, braved the first winter weather of the year to walk their spaniel Freckles at the Clallam Bay Park. Colby expressed every kid's and dog's love of snow when he said, “We need more!” Temperatures at freezing brought dry snow and blasts of wind with a storm that originally went around the west end.

I grew up near Mukilteo, Washington, and severe weather was something my mom would wake us up for: "Look! Lightning!!"

Bryce is one of the Hat Boys: a group of red-headed boys that originally included their red-headed sister and a Makah boy and a little girl who wore sweaters 'way too big for her. They would play tag and hide-and-go-seek in the rain, because you either play in the rain out here, or you don't play outside, period. Our cat, Simba, was originally their cat, and used to follow them to the beach and downtown, and get under their feet during the street football. He's unafraid of people, which speaks well for the kids.

The first year up here we had no wood and had to get in a quick load of the green stuff. It's made me a bit nuts about making sure we have plenty. This is a shot of just PART of the suppply:



The sticks are part of small aspens the Utility District let us haul off after Mike had cut 'em down to clear out the power and telephone line paths.

He didn't have to chip them and we got a lot of wood. And the song sparrow who owns our yard gets to shelter in the twigs and eat the bugs and the buds that came out even after the twigs were cut.

It's all good.