WW: Café cats

(These are two employees of Neko, Bellingham's cat café. In this establishment, one may enjoy a variety of snacks while petting a truly bewildering array of resident cats. I captured this photo on their day off, which they take in the café's basement, where they enjoy access to sidewalk-level window lounges such as this one.

Some of these cats are professionals, but a significant number are there for the purpose of test-driving, after which the driver takes them home. A large display of photos on the wall documents dozens of former staff who thus found alternative employment as house cats. One wonders if it seems anticlimactic to be petted by just a few unchanging people every day, far from the glamour and adulation of show business.

One also wonders if their human coworkers get tired of cat house jokes.)


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WW: Sehome Hill observation tower

(Iconic Bellingham viewpoint, looking out over the northern Sound, San Juan Islands, Canada, and Olympic Mountains. Constructed while I was in college at the foot of the hill, sometime in the Pleistocene Era.)

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WW: Ancient oil can

(Found this all-steel imperial quart motor oil can on a recent walk along a former logging road – now in a protected natural area. Judging exact age is hard with no labelling left, but Internet-roshi says cans of this type were standard from the 20s through the 50s. All things considered, I'd guess 40s – early 50s for this one. Note the distinctive hole left by the old-school oil can spout. I threw at least one of those spouts away a few years ago, when I moved my mom out of the house she'd lived in for nearly 40 years.)

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WW: Old City Hall

(Brilliant summer day in Bellingham, Washington.)

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WW: Native rhodendron

(Rhododendron macrophyllum, the Pacific rhododendron, is the state flower of Washington. In late spring it bursts out in the grey-green twilight of the North Coast jungle, where its pale pink blossoms seem to glow above the undergrowth. When my mom was in high school, kids in her small Puget Sound town used to cut truckloads of these from the forests along the bay, to fill the gym for prom.

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WW: Whatcom Falls

(Bellingham, Washington.)

WW: Schooner Zodiac under weigh

(Local charter and school ship, 127-foot Zodiac, built in 1924 for a wealthy industrialist, outbound from her homeport of Bellingham, Washington.)

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WW: Swingin' on the hook

(I've never seen so many boats anchored off Fairhaven [Washington], where the marinas are all at capacity. Most of the newcomers appear to be transoceanic; a few look like homeless people. Both, I'm fairly certain, are down to COVID; the ocean-crossing crowd are beached by closed harbours overseas, and have nowhere else to go.)

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Good News on the Starfish Front

Not Pisaster brevispinus, unfortunately.

(Update, 15 September 2021: my report of a mature Pisaster brevispinus in this survey was sadly premature. See correction.)

So after a down year due to COVID lockdown, I got in not one but three Annual Puget Sound Asteroid surveys this year. And the news is brilliant!

The first took place at a bay on the Canada-US Border, where two old friends and I have searched for hardy echinoderms since the arrival of the climate disruption-related sea star wasting disease (SSWD) about ten years ago. There we'd previously noted a small but tenacious community of Pisaster ochraceus, the once-ubiquitous ochre star that had seemingly disappeared from all points south, both pelagic and thalassic.

But now they've gone bananas. As we probed crevices and rocky groins in the lower tidal zone, we found seam after seam stuffed with adult P. ochraceus, in numbers reminiscent of the pre-plague days.

Nor was that all. A subsequent hike along Bellingham Bay, a few miles south, fetched up many more, lying around in jaded profusion as if they owned the place.

With unrestrained delight we documented this turn of events in a wealth of celebratory photos.

Pisaster ochraceus.

And this is not, I soon learned, an isolated case. Another visit to the other beach I've been monitoring, near the southern extreme of the Sound 150 miles distant, produced not only several healthy adult Evasterias troscheli, where before I'd only found juveniles, but also an able-bodied adult P. ochraceus, luxuriating the warm plague-friendly austral shallows. And best of all, the first appearance of a robust Pisaster brevispinus!

That last was truly exciting, owing to the long relationship I've had with the North Pacific giant pink sea star. When I was three years old, my uncle and a neighbour girl – young adults both, and divers – disappeared below the inlet in front of my grandmother's house and resurfaced with a great glistening pale monstrosity. They propped it up, tall as I was, on the beach in front of me, and I watched its rows of tube feet wave in phlegmatic bewilderment at the sudden change of world.

This lasted all of five minutes, after which they returned the perplexed fellow to the saltchuck, but the moment remains sharp in memory, now six decades gone.

A few years later I rowed the same bay, hip pressed against the port gunwale, head craned over the rail to peruse the creatures on the bottom. The further out I rowed, the fewer I could discern, until at last only great green bands of sea lettuce were visible in the depths, alternating with bare grey sand.

And then nothing.

Except… here and there, the ghostly undulating skeletal hands of yard-wide P. brevispinus, glowing up through 100 feet of green water.

So the disappearance of my old friend truly hurt, and I fairly cried when I found this one.

Evasterias troschelii.

As it happens, I'm not the only observer of this uptick. As early as 2018, a grad student at UC Merced noted genetic variances in local P. ochraceus populations that allowed a durable nucleus to survive after the great majority had perished. At the time her department wondered aloud whether a similar evolutionary reserve might bail out other species as well.

And so it seems. The single blue note here is the continued absence of great sunflower of death Pycnopodia helianthoides, the final Puget Sound regular still absent. (Though I didn't survey for Leptasterias hexactis, the tiny six-rayed star that lives under rocks, so can't comment on its status.) Marine biologists have suggested that Pycnopodia – soft, squishy, easily penetrated and dissolved by SSWD – may be extinct in our waters.

But I hold out hope that a breeding population, sheltered in colder, deeper fathoms, will one day repopulate its ancestors' old range.

SSWD-resistant Dermasterias imbricata, still very present in the South Sound, as it's been since the beginning.

Parted Stays

By the time I reached Alan's apartment -- six hours of rainy interstate blockaded by accidents -- I was exhausted, disgusted, and keen to leave freeways behind for a very long time. My glasses were embedded in the bridge of my nose, the bows biting into my ears.

But how good to find Al at the end! He smiled broadly as he opened the door, and I was heartened to see that the break-up hadn't taken the glint from his porcelain-blue eyes. He laughed his "H-e-e-ey, man!", clamped my hand, and suddenly we were college kids again, as if Al could make it so simply by combing his thick blond hair the same way.

There was nothing for it but to return to the scene of the crime, and so we drove across town to Fairhaven and our favourite restaurant. As I savoured a mushroom burger and frosty porter, Al regaled me with tales of his tour in the Air Force, his current job fixing helicopters, and a bar fight he'd recently witnessed, his large hands evoking the knife-whirling Canadians as he mugged and gesticulated, eyes wide with an enthusiasm that fell away from the rest of us with our hair.

We picked up frozen yogurt on the way home and spooned it out across Al's breakfast counter -- I in the living room, he in the kitchen. Missing furniture and blank spaces on the wall told a story that lost none of its poignancy for remaining unspoken. When at last Lake Whatcom blacked out of the sliding glass door, he said that Michelle had been with abusive men before they met, that she treated him like a child, and at last came to consider him the enemy. I understood, and said nothing. That Al's relationship had failed at the same time as mine only deepened the anguish: another stay parted on a sea grown surly. But there was exhilaration in facing the storm together, damming it up in silence, and so defeating it.

I slept fitfully on the sofa that night, and woke to muffled morning-jock banter from Al's clock radio. We gulped tea as he readied for work, the anticipated stress of our respective days twanging between us in monosyllables. At the door we hesitated, I in the hall, he on the mat, reluctant to desert the other in the presence of danger. But there were aircraft to repair, roads to run. We clasped hands again, muttered "See ya, man," and the door swung shut.

I showered and dressed, but the sadness didn't break till the Ram's engine roared to life.


(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Lost in the Palouse

"Where to now?"

I leaned on the truck's hood and stared at the back of the ram's head, but my chromed companion remained cast in silence.

A magpie burst out of the waving grass half a hundred yards away, caught a blast of air, and banked screeching over the rise.

We'd been down this road before. Three times, in fact. I smoothed the road atlas open, holding it down against the gusts, and frowned. Everything irritated me; the filth on the fender, the reek of hot engine, the sun's glare on the page beyond the shadow of my hat, and the persistent smell of rain.

And the wind. Especially the wind.

We wanted south; all the roads ran east and west, switching back through vales of hilled prairie. Even those tracks the map promised would eventually plumb out, bowed to peer pressure and veered east.

The first time I'd come to the golf course, away out in the wheat, I'd trundled slowly past, rubbernecking like a kid at a carnival. Then the dorms. Three times I retraced my route, tried another, and three times ended up back on campus.

Where the hell was this? Either I'd gone all the way around the world, and come back to Pullman, or this was Moscow. But the map didn't go to Moscow, so either theory was plausible.

I knew from my college days that the University of Idaho was just a projectile puke from WSU. And as neither is often mistaken for a Mormon school, to say no more, the highway between was reputed to host more drunken tragedy than any other seven miles in either state. So solemnly and reverently was this fact repeated in the residence halls of Bellingham that I've never insulted it with research.

I sighed west, over the giant surf of the land. Now I was navigating by lore and legend, like the Polynesians of old, checking my work by the smell of the sky and the taste of the sea. And in this I was at a decided disadvantage, for unlike those ancient Pacific voyagers, who plied their watery heritage with sublime confidence, my own ancestors had left me blind and deaf.

And so it is that to this day I judge I've been to Moscow, because that's where it was and that's where it had to be. But who knows? Maybe there's some anomalous college out there, some phase-shifting Hogwarts of the prairie, into which I thrice blundered, and lacking any real sense, called the University of Idaho. Like Columbus, perhaps I'd stumbled on something much grander than my mercantile imagination could grasp, out there off the charts, and will go to my grave as big a fool.

The wind whistled through the ram's helix, ruffled my shirt, batted my hat. I tugged the brim down and thumped the hood through the atlas.

"Anywhere you want," it replied.

I jumped, and the wind shuffled the pages back to one.

"That's where to," said the bighorn.

"Anywhere you want."

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Dodge Ram hood ornament by Christopher Ziemnowicz; magpie in flight by Ken Billington of Focusing On Wildlife; Palouse hills by Bala Sivakumar.)