Sunday September 1 2013

Sunday September 1 2013

Decided to get away from Midden until the crowds all go home tomorrow.  Woke as the sky was lightening, had my morning dip and pee and was cast off before anyone else in the marina stirred.   Sailed out into the Salish Sea while it was still a sheet of glass, and headed north.  

The beauty of being a boater in this part of the world is that you have access to thousands of miles of protected water and coastline, most of it pristine.  Used to be a time when sailors like me would face limits on where we could go based on what charts we had in the drawer.  All that changed with satellites and GPS.  Now, whenever I see an interesting stretch of water, I can call up the charts and any information relevant to taking a boat into those waters, and I’m good to go.

Today I managed to find a narrow cut in the coast that I hadn’t noticed in my 20 years of sailing these waters.  Online charts told me the water was deep enough to clear my keel, and that beyond the channel I could see, lay a small inlet maybe a mile long and half a mile wide.

Had breakfast at anchor while I waited for the slack tide necessary to make it safely through the gap.  Butkus spent his time barking at a bear that had wandered down to a pebbly beach nearby.  Didn’t seem to bother the bear, and truth be told the barking was kind of half hearted, but it annoyed the shit out of me.  So, I yelled, and the barking stopped and the bear ran away.  Could have been the other was around though—bear ran away and the barking stopped.  

The inlet was a beautiful bit of sloshing water and upthrust earth’s crust topped with cedar and fir.  Lowered the inflatable dingy and lifted Butkus over the gunwale into it… well…I actually dropped him into it, but he’s used to that by now.  Rowed to shore and went for a hike.  Blackberry  patch gave up a feast without having to shoo off any bears; always a bonus.  On our way back to the inflatable when something caught my eye. 

For all its wonders, one of the things nature does not possess is a straight line.  The horizon looks straight but it’s not.  It’s curved and fuzzy.  What caught my eye was a straight line, a line so straight that it had to be man made.  It was.  I walked towards the line until it emerged from between the tree and over the undergrowth as the corner of a cabin.  Or what was a cabin at one time. 

 

I stood and watched it for quite a while without moving.  I say “watched” instead of “stared at” because I have a thing about these abandoned homesteads, hundreds of which can be found, or more commonly not found, along this coast.  For me, it’s like looking at a corpse.  This cabin was the corpse of someone’s dream, and I was loathe to disturb it.  So I didn’t.

Paddled back to the boat and spent the rest of my day sleeping in the shade and writing a short story about a cabin.  I’ll share it with you sometime.