What I am thinking.
what am i thinking?
When I was about half my current height, I would raid the community garden by the Johnson’s house. Barely peeking over 2 ½’ raised bed plots, I groped about for the fruits of other peoples’ labor. Watermelons and various summer squashes sat enticingly on the unnaturally rich soil. Of course I liked eating the produce I picked, but a large part of my satisfaction from garden raiding in those days was derived directly from the act of picking the fruits. For this reason, I harvested produce that I didn’t even intend to consume, leaving them as undesired presents on the kitchen counters of my family and friends. ~ It is true that I regularly committed condemnable produce thievery. I regret this past habit and have been reformed by years and greater understanding. ~ The greatest prize of all in the Johnson’s community garden smorgasbord was the strawberry.
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Not all rock climbers can live in Southern California, one of the few places in the US where seasons (or lack thereof) allow for year-round climbing at temperatures above numbing. Only some can live among Santa Barbara’s perpetually calling sandstone or Malibu Creek’s ever-comfortable volcanic conglomerate. For those of us who live year-round at the base of the Wasatch in Utah, the Cascades in Washington, or the Tetons in Wyoming, how do we survive the Off-Season? We pretend.
I'm living in Gig Harbor, WA and will be living here for the foreseeable future. I've left home, graduated college, gotten engaged, and moved to a place where it seems all my previous knowledge is nearly obsolete. It's not that my understanding of business or economics is useless, it's merely under-utilized and unnecessary most of the time in the life that I currently lead. And it's not that my knowledge of the geography and natural life of the Santa Barbara area is without worth, it's just not directly applicable to life in the Pacific Northwest. There isn't manzanita on every hill here, and the odds of seeing a horned lizard outside of a pet store are non-existent. I am slowly becoming more aware of the place around me and all of its foreign intricacies. I can drive throughout the town without getting lost, I know of a few local hiking areas, and I've met and spent time with almost all of the people in my neighborhood. I am learning this place.
The other day, I walked down to the beach from my home. It was a grey and dismal day despite being mid-summer. Mt. Rainier was nowhere to be seen through the heavy, low-lying cloud layer, and Vashon Island had eery mist surrounding its shores. I sat on a bench and thought about the town in which I now lived until my attention was caught by one particularly interesting tree. It was a pine with vertical fissures in its reddish brown bark. The branches of the tree extended outwards with almost randomly placed needles of about 1-2 inches and occasional 3 inch cones. Sap oozed down the side in a large stripe. I sat looking at this tree until I realized that I had no idea what it was called. I had never identified a tree in the Puget Sound area before in my life. All my knowledge of wild sage, yucca, and jimson weed was irrelevant, so I searched for the identity of the tree, eventually using the site below to help me in the process. After a good 20 minutes of reading descriptions of various coniferous trees, I discovered that I had been looking at a Douglas Fir, one of the easiest trees in the area to identify. Trees of Washington: http://cru.cahe.wsu.edu/CEPublications/eb0440/eb0440.pdf I continued on to the shore with a new resource for learning my environment. The high tide lapped weakly at the small stones of the beach, and I sat down on a large stone block to write. |
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January 2023
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