Orcas Chronology Pt. 1
Just brought fresh madrona logs in for the woodstove, the rain quieting a bit in the loaming dark, the horizon cloud-bright in the figured distance that articulates in silhouetted relief the swaying tops of the Douglas firs down by the landing. Here, here, finally, here, a home. We have traveled 5000 miles, for a month & a half, sleeping on something like fifteen different beds, in four different states. Since we exited the ferry landing a week ago, we have slept in five homes, met countless people, winnowed our way into a community as fulgent & full of promise & enacted ideals as I could hope to find. & here, here, a home. The barn is modest & beautiful & rustic & easy all at once. Great vigas cross its low roof under white plaster & windows spread across the entirety of three of its sides, opening unto panoramic views of the farm & the forest & the sound off in the distance. Thick wooden posts line the room, rising of the red-brown floor. Mason jars of fresh-pressed cider, casserole dishes full of frozen berries, homemade sauces, jams & canned veggies of every variety fill the fridge & freezer. Two boxes of tomatoes sit by the door. The woodstove sits in the back half of the room, a thing of great beauty in its own right, an argent tree blazoning over its face, its black barrel worn & true, its pipe lending this yawning space its warmth. Up the thin stairs, the loft promises an everything not yet imaginable. Flowers & herbs dry everywhere, hung upside down from nails plunged into the wood that lines or comprises the bulk of the place. In the loft there is a kind of stage over which garlic bulbs hang & upon which old furniture is covered by a tarp to prevent it from the rain dripping through holes in the roof. It is a space full of promise, full of rich acoustics & a warmth al its own that knows nothing of temperature. You see your every breath. You hear the thump thump of the main barn door against a two by four in the wind. The cedar shingles overhead break to peeping patches of grey sky. It is rich, in every way. We will sleep in the loft, once we pull all the elements of that space together & make it into the simple room we require. Outside, past the hot-tub to the left, there is an outdoor shower nestled in an open wooden fence. Past it, the woodpile. To the right of the tub is a wooden staircase that opens unto a grass path that leads a hundred yards up to the outhouse. I’ve yet to make it that far. There is a porch all along the southern side of the barn looking over the fields, fallow in November but for the squash & late heirlooms & cover crop. & up on the hill, the lights from the main house shine warm & comforting & full of life. I look about me, at my love, at our dog, at our few belongings, & at how our lives are unfurling day by day, & I cannot help but feel a rich gratitude coarse in my veins, I cannot help but think home & home & home.
***
A Saturday now, our second night here. Late & through the night, a storm blew on & on & the planks of the wooden barn door banged against the building like dying soldiers firing errant rounds into some distant dark. The weather vain—a pig hoisted on high over the compass—blurted high shrieks & low grumbles periodically that sounded like some odd concerto of instruments new to the ear of man. Our first night in the loft, too, with the wind whipping through the cracks in the walls & roiling past our heads, made for a tough night’s sleep. At three a.m. I crept out to secure the loose doors with a white plank I found laid against the side of the barn. & then suddenly this morning came, & the rain dissipated & slowly died down until by eleven we were running in the first hints of a sunlight that endured well into dusk. Running, we garnered a sense of the lay of the land. The main house here sits atop a hilltop that is the bifurcate eastern twin of another a stone’s throw away. Both houses look over the same undulating valley, where a scattering of red edifices dots the aureate grass by the pond. On the western edge of this little, self-contained pastoral dream sits an ancient, modest chapel of white. & all of this—our barn & outlying buildings, the two main houses, the gravel lanes, the hills—all of this is contained by rich forests of doug firs & lodgepoles & evergreens, all themselves slick with lichen & moss, dotted with wild mushrooms & a world of flora I cannot fathom. It is a bit of a dream, really.
We cleaned in the morning before the run & afterwards met a delivery at the ferry of four boxes of fresh meat from Mt. Vernon for our hosts the Diepenbrocks. A stop at the store for a few groceries & a bottle of wine & we returned home to scour the place further. Took my first shower outside, the sun setting beyond the sound, the wind cold against my skin. & Stef & I slow-cooked pasta sauce with tomatoes from the farm, snipped basil, meatballs. Tomorrow we will gather apples driven from the trees by the fierce winds of the last few days, & make apple sauce & apple butter. We are hunkering down with our late autumn foods, watching winter come. letting our lives retrieve themselves with each gathered breath. What lives we lead. What extraordinary lives.
We think of time so differently, or I do. I feel myself already irrevocably changed. I could, I think, content myself with this version of living; one imbued with & reliant upon patience & kindness & generosity & openness, one wherein present is always preface to past. This is a living in which wonder acts as the kindling of your every action. A bald eagle dove twenty feet over our heads while we ran. A blue heron glided into our small pond, scattering the geese. Black-tailed deer look at us from feet away, their eyes empty of fear. & quiet, such quiet. It is a marvel to merely be here. I feel the thrum of a present in which ontology crumbles & dissolves. Instead, I watch the slow circle of the egret lazy over the water, or the quiet lap of the water against the driftwood. I breathe & know my being secure.
***
We’ve been splitting wood the last few days. We took yesterday off because the sun was shining for the first sustained period of time since we got here ten days ago. Through the afternoon we opened the barn doors & beat rugs hung over the swing-set & clipped chard & picked apples for dinner & desert. Willa lazed about, now in the open mouth of the barn soaking in the warm light, now under the bench on the porch seeking reprieve from it. The clouds rolled in at dusk, after we had walked to the market at the ferry landing for fresh crab meat. & then the wind came in, roiling & rushing through the cracks in the loft wall. We slept downstairs, the crackling woodstove warm beside us.
***
Another idyllic morning before we confronted the real world again for the first time in days. A run through Victorian Valley, where deer start around the corners & rush into the thickets & dark firs loom overhead. Breakfasted on granola made on the island, with blackberries I plucked from the briar minutes before. Our day in town was focused entirely on generating income, & though cannot ultimately prove fruitless, at least gave us cause to embrace a renewed ethic & resolve. It will be work finding work, but it will turn. A substitute teacher, A gutter repairman. A farmer. Anything, really.
Back at the barn, started a new fire & warmed soup I made last night from spaghetti squash, apples, potatoes, onion & blackberries all harvested from within twenty yards of our doors. We also cut bitter greens & spring mix from the beds & tossed them with tomatoes from the upper field for a side. There is such richness in this kind of repast; a sense of unpeopled connectivity that lends you a presence & a calm. We sing songs about our farm dog into flashlights held like microphones, songs about our strange new lives. We used to brace ourselves before leaving our front door in Denver, as if gearing up for some horrendous storm. Home, such as it existed, ended upon our doorstep. Here I can’t help but think how fitting that each of our doors is paned with glass, as the transition from within to without is effected with such seamless grace. To awaken & step from these doors is an indescribably natural pleasure, an ancient feeling, I think. There’s an O’Hara line, “grace to be born & live as variously as possible,” which, if you apply it to your every day, accounts for how I feel each morning.
***
A Saturday now, our second night here. Late & through the night, a storm blew on & on & the planks of the wooden barn door banged against the building like dying soldiers firing errant rounds into some distant dark. The weather vain—a pig hoisted on high over the compass—blurted high shrieks & low grumbles periodically that sounded like some odd concerto of instruments new to the ear of man. Our first night in the loft, too, with the wind whipping through the cracks in the walls & roiling past our heads, made for a tough night’s sleep. At three a.m. I crept out to secure the loose doors with a white plank I found laid against the side of the barn. & then suddenly this morning came, & the rain dissipated & slowly died down until by eleven we were running in the first hints of a sunlight that endured well into dusk. Running, we garnered a sense of the lay of the land. The main house here sits atop a hilltop that is the bifurcate eastern twin of another a stone’s throw away. Both houses look over the same undulating valley, where a scattering of red edifices dots the aureate grass by the pond. On the western edge of this little, self-contained pastoral dream sits an ancient, modest chapel of white. & all of this—our barn & outlying buildings, the two main houses, the gravel lanes, the hills—all of this is contained by rich forests of doug firs & lodgepoles & evergreens, all themselves slick with lichen & moss, dotted with wild mushrooms & a world of flora I cannot fathom. It is a bit of a dream, really.
We cleaned in the morning before the run & afterwards met a delivery at the ferry of four boxes of fresh meat from Mt. Vernon for our hosts the Diepenbrocks. A stop at the store for a few groceries & a bottle of wine & we returned home to scour the place further. Took my first shower outside, the sun setting beyond the sound, the wind cold against my skin. & Stef & I slow-cooked pasta sauce with tomatoes from the farm, snipped basil, meatballs. Tomorrow we will gather apples driven from the trees by the fierce winds of the last few days, & make apple sauce & apple butter. We are hunkering down with our late autumn foods, watching winter come. letting our lives retrieve themselves with each gathered breath. What lives we lead. What extraordinary lives.
We think of time so differently, or I do. I feel myself already irrevocably changed. I could, I think, content myself with this version of living; one imbued with & reliant upon patience & kindness & generosity & openness, one wherein present is always preface to past. This is a living in which wonder acts as the kindling of your every action. A bald eagle dove twenty feet over our heads while we ran. A blue heron glided into our small pond, scattering the geese. Black-tailed deer look at us from feet away, their eyes empty of fear. & quiet, such quiet. It is a marvel to merely be here. I feel the thrum of a present in which ontology crumbles & dissolves. Instead, I watch the slow circle of the egret lazy over the water, or the quiet lap of the water against the driftwood. I breathe & know my being secure.
***
We’ve been splitting wood the last few days. We took yesterday off because the sun was shining for the first sustained period of time since we got here ten days ago. Through the afternoon we opened the barn doors & beat rugs hung over the swing-set & clipped chard & picked apples for dinner & desert. Willa lazed about, now in the open mouth of the barn soaking in the warm light, now under the bench on the porch seeking reprieve from it. The clouds rolled in at dusk, after we had walked to the market at the ferry landing for fresh crab meat. & then the wind came in, roiling & rushing through the cracks in the loft wall. We slept downstairs, the crackling woodstove warm beside us.
***
Another idyllic morning before we confronted the real world again for the first time in days. A run through Victorian Valley, where deer start around the corners & rush into the thickets & dark firs loom overhead. Breakfasted on granola made on the island, with blackberries I plucked from the briar minutes before. Our day in town was focused entirely on generating income, & though cannot ultimately prove fruitless, at least gave us cause to embrace a renewed ethic & resolve. It will be work finding work, but it will turn. A substitute teacher, A gutter repairman. A farmer. Anything, really.
Back at the barn, started a new fire & warmed soup I made last night from spaghetti squash, apples, potatoes, onion & blackberries all harvested from within twenty yards of our doors. We also cut bitter greens & spring mix from the beds & tossed them with tomatoes from the upper field for a side. There is such richness in this kind of repast; a sense of unpeopled connectivity that lends you a presence & a calm. We sing songs about our farm dog into flashlights held like microphones, songs about our strange new lives. We used to brace ourselves before leaving our front door in Denver, as if gearing up for some horrendous storm. Home, such as it existed, ended upon our doorstep. Here I can’t help but think how fitting that each of our doors is paned with glass, as the transition from within to without is effected with such seamless grace. To awaken & step from these doors is an indescribably natural pleasure, an ancient feeling, I think. There’s an O’Hara line, “grace to be born & live as variously as possible,” which, if you apply it to your every day, accounts for how I feel each morning.
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