Ralph and Minnie and Mr. P

This story is a lie. It is a lie because I cannot remember the detailed true separate stories I am amalgamating here into one, untrue story. Got it? OK.
Once there was a couple, who, for the purposes of this untrue story, were named “Ralph” and “Minnie.” They had lived good hardworking lives, and retired comfortably on Ralph's pension and their savings.
Look, I told you this story wasn't true.
In retirement they settled in the pleasant land of northern California, on the outskirts of an old Spanish town. They found a house that suited them, with neighbors close enough that they did not feel isolated, and far enough away that they did not feel crowded.
A creek flowed along the rear of their property. Over the years animals would walk up from the creek into their yard, stray cats and raccoons, mostly.
One autumn a peacock came bobbing up out of the creek. It was a gorgeous creature, and Minnie loved it. She bought some corn to throw to it, and whether it was the food, or for some slightly more skewed reason, the peacock stayed.
Minnie called him Mr. P, and all that winter he graced their back yard. They asked around to see if anyone had lost a peacock, but no one claimed Mr. P.
Minnie was an artist, and Mr. P was a flamboyant model. She sketched him as she looked through the windows, and in the spring she set an easel up in the yard to do a painting of him.
Alas, in the spring a peacock's fancy turns to thoughts of love, and he fell for Minnie, hard. His tail would come up in a spectacular display of feathers when he saw her. This was fine until Mr. P tried to mount Minnie, which scared her.
Now Mr. P became her jailer. She couldn't go out into the backyard to tend plants, or hang clothes out to dry, or throw the compost away, or paint some other subject than the peacock for Mr. P would immediately force his attentions upon her. The situation was untenable.
Ralph and Minnie found no help for their problem. No one wanted Mr. P.
But he had to go. Finally they heard of a bird sanctuary a few hours' drive away. They figured they had their solution, but how to capture and transport the large amorous bird? I don't know who came up with a solution, but finally they had a plan, and they put it to work.
They soaked some feed corn in bourbon. It might have been vodka, but this is my lie, and I like bourbon, so hush.
The morning came when they were ready to move Mr. P out of their lives. They put the soaked corn out in a pie plate, and Mr. P obligingly came and gobbled it down. And seemed fine. Just their luck to get a peacock that could handle his liquor. They put out more corn, and the bird didn't mind if he did, and ate all that. At this point he began to stagger, and wobble, and passed out.
Ralph and Minnie sprang into action. They ran out to the unconscious bird and put a t-shirt on him in order to keep his wings subdued should he wake up. Minnie knotted the hem of the shirt to make sure he was tightly held, and they loaded him in the back of their station wagon and set off for the sanctuary.
All was well for the first hour or two of the trip, and then they heard Mr. P stirring in the back. As they drove on it became obvious that Mr. P was a surly drunk.
Finally they arrived at the sanctuary – only to find it was closed. Minnie nearly burst into tears. Now what?
Ralph told her he had a plan, and this was it: he would carry Mr. P to the high fence of the sanctuary and drop him over the top. Minnie's job would be to remove the t-shirt at the last second. Would the sanctuary people even notice one more peacock?
As Ralph hoisted Mr. P to the top of the fence the bird began to struggle violently. Minnie tried to get the t-shirt off in vain. Mr. P pulled free, tipped over the top of the fence, and fell with a thud to the ground. Ralph and Minnie were horrified. But Mr. P. began to struggle, trying to get up. Ralph and Minnie looked at each other and their two minds were of one accord. They dashed back to the station wagon and lit out of there.
That summer they would go out to their peacock-free patio in the cool of the evening, have glasses of wine, and speculate on what the sanctuary workers must have thought, encountering a hungover peacock in a t-shirt in their enclosure, but of course they would never know. They wished Mr. P all the best, and hoped he had met the peahen of his dreams, but they never went back to find out if he had. That would have been silly.

Island Legends: the Secret Ferry

Drawing by Rick Tuel
Smart Aleck note: this column dates from 2003. Like everyone else on Vashon Island, I am sick and did not feel up to writing a new column this week, so here is a rerun that is a particular favorite of mine. Hope you enjoy it.

The story as I heard it went like this: a few years ago, one Sunday morning, a Big Important Business Man was having brunch at Sound Food. His cell phone rang. He answered it, and received a Very Important Business Call.
He needed to get to an Important Business Meeting off the island. He went up to the hostess and asked, “What's the quickest way to get off the island?” The hostess told him to head north on the road outside the restaurant until he came to the ferry dock, and then wait for the next ferry, and he should be able to get off the island in an hour or so.
The Big Important Business Man was distressed. An hour? That was much too long. He had Important Business and had to get to the mainland right away, and wasn't there a quicker way to get there than the ferry?
No, the hostess told him. The ferry was the only way off the island.
“OK,” he said. “I know how things work in places like this. Where is the secret ferry?”
“The what?” asked the hostess.
“The secret ferry,” he said, “the one only you islanders know about so you can get off the island any time you want to.”
The hostess was non-plussed. She explained that there is no secret ferry, only the public state ferries that come to the ferry docks.
The man refused to believe her. He insisted that there must be a secret ferry. She was concealing the information because we islanders were selfishly keeping it to ourselves and didn't want anyone else to know. He was too smart to be tricked, he said. He wasn't born yesterday, he said.
Finally, in exasperation, the hostess said, “OK, OK, you're right. I can't fool you. There is a secret ferry.”
He smiled in victory. “Where is it?”
So she told him how to drive down to Manzanita Beach.
He left, and did not return.
End of story.
A friend told me that story in the supermarket. She said she had heard it from the grand daughter of another friend. I called my friend, the grand mother, and asked her where she got the story. She said her son was working as a chef at Sound Food at the time of the incident, and he had told her the story.
Soon after that I ran into my friend's son and I asked him about the story. He confirmed that the story was true, although he wasn't sure if the hostess had sent the man to Manzanita or Point Robinson.
He said that for a while after that the staff at Sound Food joked about “bippies,” or “Big Important People.”
This island legend was fairly easy to track because I knew all the people in the chain of the story's telling. I wanted to track it down because when I heard it, it sounded like one of those urban legends, a fantastic story that is supposed to be true. These stories begin: “This is a true story! It happened to my cousin's step-brother's next door neighbor's dog trainer's niece...” and goes on from there.
Many of these stories circulate on the internet. I have learned to check with snopes.com before believing anything I read, because I hate to pass on rumors, libel, and outright lies.
Island legends are easier to trace than urban legends. For example, I believe it is true that the late Joe Chambers set a ferry dock to ferry dock land speed record of 9 minutes. His friends have confirmed this. He did it late at night and had his friends posted at intersections to make sure no one would turn onto the highway and get in the way. This was a few decades ago. It was a different time, the island was a different place, that place I moved to 40 years ago. It doesn't exist any more.

I'm Tired, I'm Tired, I'm Tired

Photo: Southern Pacific publicity photo of a Daylight locomotive

There was a program on channel 9 the other night about the Daylight, the Southern Pacific passenger train that ran between Los Angeles and San Francisco between 1937 and 1971, when Amtrak took over passenger service. Trains still run, but not the Daylight.
The trains were striking in appearance, red and orange along the sides and black on top and bottom, with matching specially built steam engines, so the train was one matching design from beginning to end.
I grew up in Watsonville, California, which was on the main line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Everywhere in the Pajaro Valley you could hear the train whistles blow as trains came into the station. My father's sister Thelma and her husband Ray had a farm over on the Monterey County side of the Pajaro River and the trains ran along the edge of their fields. I remember how thrilling it was to see those red and orange trains go by, the engines puffing clouds of smoke. It was the beginning of train love for me.
This documentary came on, and I was completely caught up in memories of passenger trains. The show featured many clips of the Daylight chugging through the California landscape. In the background were the hills and valleys and seashore of California. These sights were so familiar to me, and brought up so many memories of my misspent youth and the beautiful places where I misspent it. The low round hills of the Pajaro Valley were the background of my childhood, surrounding me every day like the arms of God. Seeing them once again in the background of the train movies connected me to something inside that is deeper than words.
I spoke about that connection to my husband, Rick, and by email to his friend, Hutch. Rick and Hutch were both Army brats who lived all over the world growing up. They met in Germany when they were in high school, and they played and sang folk music together with a third member, Terry MacNeil, as The Balladiers. Yes, spelled with an “i.” Talking to Rick and Hutch about trains set off their memories.
Hutch wrote: “Sometimes, as a family, we would have a compartment, and other times, berths. Either way as a kid I always managed to get the upper. Can you imagine the intimacy of changing into pajamas, passing others in the narrow passageway to and from the bathroom? At least once a trip the train would lurch and you'd fall through the little blue curtain onto who ever's bunk you'd be passing.”
Rick wrote: “We must be the last generation to carry such fondness of memory for the era of passenger trains. I'm glad you took the boys back* so they can carry some memory of that time. I developed my love of the 'I'm tireds'** not from watching them pass through but from riding them.
“I never saw a more beautifully evolved choo-choo than the European zigzag trains with their passenger cars all fitted out like lovely wooden jewelry boxes with thousands of different doors and drawers.
“The diesel electrics were a real innovation but nothing said 'train' like the big, noisy, hissing steam locomotives.”
*In 1993, I took our sons on a train trip. We went from Seattle to Chicago on the Empire Builder, then from Chicago to Akron on another train. We visited with Rick's relatives in Ohio, then caught the train back to Chicago and from there caught the train to Los Angeles, stopping to visit my brother and sister-in-law in Raton, New Mexico, along the way. From LA we took what is now called the Starlight up the coast to Seattle. It was a grand trip that took about three weeks and we still talk about it.
**When Rick was a little boy in Ohio, his grandfather would put him to bed at night and tell him about the steam engines chugging along saying, “I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired...” Rick said it didn't take long for him to drop off, and ever since he has thought of steam engines as the “I'm tireds.”

The End of Blackadder Goes Forth

Photo: the cast of Blackadder Goes Forth getting ready to go over the top
Today was a day for sorting through paper, throwing stuff away until my brain got too numb to go on, trying to get ready to do income taxes.
I had “Blackadder Goes Forth” running on Netflix on my computer, as company while I worked. This series is set in the trenches of World War I, and I've seen parts of it before. It first ran on the BBC in the United Kingdom in the autumn of 1989, and unlike the three previous Blackadder series it had an antiwar stance. In the last episode, all the fooling around and smart ass remarks are done and the characters go over the top into No Man's Land. And that's how the show and the series ended.
Blackadder's last line, after Baldrick says he has a cunning plan to escape, is: "Well, I am afraid it will have to wait. Whatever it was, I am sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here? Good luck, everyone."
World War I, or The Great War, as it was then, the "war to end all wars," truly was devastating to Britain, and the Blackadder series honored that at the end. I was seeing it twenty-one years after it first aired. This ending is famous, at least among some people, but I had never seen it before and it touched me deeply - and left me feeling deeply sad.
And I still feel that way.

Drying the Dog

Photo by Laurie Shepherd Heath, photographer extraordinaire

Every time Jive the dog comes in these days he's sopping wet. He smells great, too. Well, he puts off a great smell.
There is a pile of old towels by the door, and a folding chair for me to sit in, and we have a few minutes of communion. I throw a towel over him from head to tail, and then commence rubbing him down and drying him off, and telling him what a good boy he is. This praise is most important when I get to his feet.
There may be dogs who like to have their feet messed with, but Jive is not one of those dogs. It is the foot drying that makes him start to walk away. He especially dislikes it when I run the towel between his toes, and try to get the mud loose from his claws. So I've learned to say, "Good boy, good boy," to him while I perform this delicate maneuver. That seems to calm him and get us through the tedious business.
Then when I'm done and he's only slightly damp and his paws don't leave little mud prints on the floor I sit back, and he stands there looking at me expectantly. Usually I'll throw another towel over his head and rub down his head and back again. We both enjoy that part.
Finally I say, "That's it," and we are done. He looks at me to make sure I really mean it, and walks off to whatever corner of the couch he has in mind.
When my husband dries Jive, he usually reminisces fondly about Sadie, our Doberman mix, who passed on a few years ago. When he was drying Sadie off, he would say, "Footy," and she would obligingly raise a paw for him to dry. She didn't like it, but she understood the necessity. Dobermans have reasoning powers.
Jive is a Lab mix, and is not burdened with reasoning powers.
While animals have always been a part of our family, we are not of the persuasion that animals are our babies or children. We had babies and children; animals are animals, with definite animal personalities and natures, and we love and respect them as such. Rick says now that after Jive goes, he would like to have no more dogs, or cats, or rabbits, or rats, or mice, or guinea pigs, or gold fish, all of which have lived with us over the years.
I understand his reasoning: you get so attached to them (except for some of those awful killer rabbits), and then they die. That's the main reason. Rick is tired of having his heart broken. Also there is maintenance and money. We're at an age and stage of life when we need to take care of ourselves, and animal companions take time and care. You have to train a dog, you have to clean the cat's litter box, and you have to pay for food and vet bills. Dogs chew things up, and dig up the yard, and run off and roll in disgusting rotten things and come home grinning. Cats leave disgusting things in the middle of your bed. Worst of all, you will probably have to make the decision to have an animal put down at the end of its life.
Sometimes as I'm toweling Jive down I'm thinking, he may be the last dog. It makes me a little sad, and it even makes getting the mud off his feet a sweet chore. It's a sad part of growing older, realizing that you are doing things for the last time, and that parts of your life are gone forever.
Then I think, I'll bet if I brought home a cat or a dog, Rick would fall in love with it and they'd hang out together. Maybe if as I presented it I said, "Good husband, good husband?" That might calm him down.
Don't tell him I'm thinking this, though. I want it to be a surprise.

How Did You Come to Vashon Island?

I had dreams about the island and Mt. Rainier all that summer.

I love to hear people tell how they stumbled on this island, and ended up living here. Here, I'll get the conversational ball rolling:
When I was going to school at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, back in the 60s, I was in a country-folk-rock band. The band consisted of Van, my sweetheart, on lead guitar, me as chick singer, Randy on rhythm guitar and dobro, Bruce as bass player, and a long line of drummers who came and went. That was when I learned that drummers as a rule are goofy, to put it mildly. I don't mean to impugn the whole class of percussionists, I'm just saying that rock drummers are predictably unpredictable.
Anyway – Randy met a married couple named Marc and Chrissie who were also old-timey musicians. Marc played wicked fiddle, Chrissie played banjo and guitar and autoharp and they both sang. We became friends and played music together, until Van and I moved to Los Angeles in 1969 to become rock stars.
Seriously. That was the plan.
After that Randy played gigs in San Luis Obispo with Marc and Chrissie. In 1971, just before I moved out of LA, I got a letter from Bruce the bass player. He said, "Bummer in the summer. Marc and Chrissie have moved to Seattle." Marc had apparently graduated from Cal Poly – who saw that coming? - and acquired a job up in Seattle.
Sometime around Christmas 1971 I received a letter from Marc. He and Chrissie had moved to an island, the letter said, and had met a couple of musicians who lived there. They were planning to build a concrete sailboat and sail around the world playing music, but they needed a singer. Marc invited me to visit. No one had ever literally invited me to sail off into the sunset before, so I quit my job, packed my '58 Chevy with a few necessary belongings, and drove up for a visit.
I arrived at the Fauntleroy ferry dock on April 16, 1972. Once on Vashon I followed the traffic up the highway, and it was right around the nursing home and the Episcopal Church that I knew: this is home.
I drove up to the main intersection, and using the pay phone there called my friends to let them know I had arrived. About 12 minutes later, up drove a VW beetle with a police car paint job - white doors, blue fenders, and eagle decals on the doors - with Chrissie waving at me over the shoulder of the young hippie driving. She jumped out of the car and introduced me to Rick Tuel. Yes, he was the very first person I met on the island, but we didn't get married until seven years later. Slow learners.
Now, there is quite a convoluted tale of that trip, but we'll skip that for now. I returned to California after a couple of weeks, but the island had taken hold in me. I had dreams about the island and Mt. Rainier all that summer.
In November of that year, I came back and decided I would move here. On January 4, 1973, I started driving north and arrived here on January 5 after driving all night through a snow storm. I had about $37 to my name. I moved into a house full of hippies, and stayed.
Interesting (to me) fact: my first son was born exactly nine years later on January 5, 1982, during a snow storm. Second interesting (to me) fact: my first boy friend on Vashon Island moved off the island after we broke up and went on to be Microsoft employee number 9.
A question I've never been able to answer is how Marc and Chrissie got here, because they soon got S-A-V-E-D and moved off the island to join a large evangelical church which later dissolved in lawsuits and acrimony. They got me here, though, and I never left.
So what's your island story?

Eventually This Gets to John Browne

There was a column on my computer, almost ready to go. All I had to do was the final tweaking. I got up this morning, came in to finish the column, turned on the computer, and was greeted by a big red window telling me that my computer files were infected with a Trojan horse.
And that, my friends, was that. My computer was frozen solid. It would not work in my house, it would not work for the mouse. I did not like it.
I shut it down manually and unplugged all the peripherals. It's out in my car now, waiting to be transported to the computer hospital.
One of my first thoughts was, I haven't had this much trouble since I used Macs. I started out on Apple computers because I'd heard they were superior, more user-friendly, didn't get viruses, and didn't crash as often as PCs. Anti-virus sales people always tried to convince me to buy anti-virus programs for my Macs. I did that once. Put an anti-virus program on my Mac. The computer immediately crashed and had to be taken to the Apple computer hospital.
While Macs may be more immune to virus infections, what I found was that they “corrupted.” One little piece of data would mutate, and pretty soon the whole hard drive had a cascade of mutations and the computer would crash and have to be taken...well, you get the picture.
I know that Mac users are devoted to their computers and I'm not trying to argue with anyone. I'm only saying that my Macs crashed a lot more than my PCs. In eight years of using a PC, this is the first time one has contracted a virus. Apparently anti-virus software actually functions on PCs. Except this time. Oh well. Off to the computer hospital.
What am I writing this on? My Netbook, which runs on Linux, which is looking pretty good to me right now. Except all the games seem to involve penguins, for some reason.
Now, an explanatory note for those of you who do not live on the island and don't know what happened to John Browne: on November 22, there was a snow and wind storm that hit the island. A tree fell down across 111th Ave SW, down the hill from the home of John and Vicki Browne. John decided to go down the hill and clear the tree off of the road. He took his chainsaw and went to work. While he was working a driver came along, lost control, and hit the tree. The tree pushed the chainsaw handle into John's mid-section, damaging his small intestine, and bruising his liver, lungs and heart (so I heard - not too sure about injuries to those organs) and shattering his left elbow. He was taken to Tacoma General Hospital because the bridges from West Seattle to Seattle were closed that night with ice, and Coast Guard helicopters could not fly in the storm.
He had surgery to remove some of his small intestine and stitch it back together, and another surgery to put his elbow back together. He was in the ICU about a week then moved to another room, and I last heard that he was going to a recovery facility, or perhaps to one of his children's homes, or even home with Vicki. I don't know the whole straight story but the fact is that he's improving. Now he and Vicki need a little help.
There's a benefit for John Browne at the Red Bicycle on Saturday, December 18. Drop by and support John & Vicki. They have given the island the benefit of their good selves for many years; let's benefit them. Whether you come or not, you can send money to the fund for John Browne at US Bank, P O Box 428, Vashon WA 98070.
Factoid: the first time I met John Browne was when I picked him and another guy up hitch hiking at the intersection of Haight Street and Fillmore in 1966.
Final words for 2010: Merry Christmas, or Solstice, or Kwanzaa (Hannukah's already gone by), and stay warm with your loved ones, Islanders.