WW: Autumn leaves

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WW: Comrade spirit

(A point I've made before.)

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WW: Old farmhouse

(This old house, near my childhood home, was once the residence of a family who owned and operated a dairy farm on the premises. The farm has long since become a housing estate, and the house effectively abandoned, for about 50 years now.

It's painful to see it slowly crumble, though slightly miraculous that it's still here at all, and entirely unchanged. It's like historical preservation, except the preservation has largely been inadvertant.

Any road, this is pretty much exactly the sort of house I've always wanted. [A more elaborate meditation on old farmhouses can be found here.])


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WW: Warm autumn day

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WW: Holding up the sky

(Altocumulus undulatus clouds.

The tree in the foreground is a sequoia [Sequoiadendron giganteum]. It's not native here, but introduced specimens are spotted fairly often in older Olympia neighbourhoods. This is because in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area absorbed a wave of incomers who arrived via Northern California, where the species is iconic.

This one occurs in the backyard of a house I lived in when I was 7. As I never noticed it then, it must have been much smaller.

Happens a lot these days. May I age as gracefully as my sister has.)

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WW: Apple hook season

(Feral apples are almost always the best-tasting, and you can't beat the price. With all the former farmland around here, the scrumping this time of year is great.)

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WW: Poke berries

(Another rivetting instalment in the saga of the wayfaring poke [Phytolacca americana] that's mysteriously turned up in the neighbourhood, thousands of miles from its native range. Here you see its ripe, deep-purple berries, whose poisonous juice was once used as ink in settler communities far from mine.

Invasive, but fascinating.)


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WW: Pacific crabapple

(Malus fusca. Native to the North Coast, in my home county it's a common understory tree, flourishing on the margins and in clearings of mature forests.

Though M. fusca's apples are only bean-sized, given the number available, they're a staple of local indigenous cuisines. Like all crabapples they're barely palatable raw, but a brilliant upgrade to other fruits, contributing depth, tartness, pectin, and rosy perfume to evergreen huckleberries, apple pie and cider, rose hips, blackberries and a great many others.

The wood is dense and hard, verging on flinty, and so good for such things as tool handles, stakes, digging sticks, and hard-duty walking sticks.)


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WW: Prairie farm

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WW: Giant yellow bamboo

(Suspect Phyllostachys vivax. This is very big stuff - diameters up to 4 inches and heights to maybe 60 feet. This grove occurs in the neighbourhood where I grew up, on a tract of land that was once a farmer's backyard, but has been untended for 50 years now.

Always surreal to see such an iconic plant of the tropics growing so happily here on the North Pacific Coast.)


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WW: Crane

(On my recent visit to Spokane I was struck by the sci-fi aesthetics of this building going up on the far side of the river. The crane dramatically frames and accents the distopian structure below, its bold red steel startling against a classic vibrant blue Gold Side sky.

Tourists often complain about cranes ruining their photos, but I find them uplifting.)

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WW: Century-old wiring

(This ancient outbuilding, one of a few derelict structures still surviving from what was a working dairy farm near my home when I was a child, has knob-and-tube wiring. As you can see, it was a two-element system consisting of cloth-covered wires strung on insulators. In living areas they were usually hidden inside walls, but in basements, attics, service buildings, and outdoor applications, they were hung along rafters, down siding, and under eaves, as here. [Note the old-school porcelain insulators – no longer wired – on the rafters.]

Though alarmingly primitive to modern eyes, knob and tube wasn't much more dangerous than recent methods. The main reason it disappeared was that it required twice as much labour as the single integrated cable introduced in the 50s, and was therefore twice as expensive to instal.

I believe that old farm dated to the 20s [the other 20s, I mean], when knob and tube was industry standard. But this shed was apparently still rocking it in the 70s, while in active commercial service.)

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WW: Battered but not beaten

(I made this fudo [look left; hanging from the bell] in 2009, for friends in Spokane County. When I took care of their farm for a few weeks 6 years later, I posted a photo of it here. It was still looking pretty smart then, all things considered.

On a visit last month I noted that 16 years' continuous duty in the desert hadn't done it any favours. But given the conditions, the old warrior still serves our patron well.)

WW: Novel architecture

(The Spokane Regional Health District is an arresting sight, inspired as it apparently was by the architecture of West and Central Africa. I can't remember seeing such a structure anywhere before. And I certainly wouldn't have expected to find one serving as a government building on the Gold Side of Washington – arid though it is. Hats off to an inspired county facilities committee.)

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WW: Collapsed apple tree

(This 20-odd year apple met its end last week, a victim of its own success. In the late 20th century, varieties such as these, bearing heavily but not growing very tall, became all the rage; they really pump out crop and it’s all in reach, at least of picking ladders and apple hooks. Since that time, little else has been planted.

Trouble is, this blueprint results in a top-heavy tree, balanced on a root ball smaller than evolutionary spec. So one good breeze on dry soil, and that’s that.

Sometimes traction and tree surgery can save such casualties. In fact, in the ancient abandoned orchards where I grew up, many of those old heirlooms actually bore from a reclining position, having fallen in some winter storm and retained enough root contact to keep producing.

But those were hardy, full-sized, union-built trees, falling where no-one cared what they looked like, of a wet, dormant season.

And so this beautiful new-guard girl is done for. How sad to lose a thing that gave so generously for so long.)


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WW: Raising bread

(As I recently pointed out, at high summer you can often raise bread dough outdoors in the shade. An 80 to 95-degree day ought to do it.)

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WW: Highest dome on the continent

WW: Pokeweed

(This is Phytolacca americana, called poke in the American South and Midwest, where it's a rampant weed. [And also a wild edible, though just how edible is a plant that must be boiled in four changes of water to stop it killing you is worth discussion.]

I've never seen pokeweed on the North Pacific Coast till this summer, when I spied it growing on two neglected bits of land in my neighbourhood. The iconic, high-growing, and monopolising Southern brakeweed first evaded recognition, so far from its natural home, till I'd confirmed it online, where I also found that poke is now listed as an incipient invader here.

I'm about certain this is yet another misfortune of climate disruption. Protected before now by our wet, grey, cold weather, the new drier, hotter North Coast is proving quite hospitable to this latest headache, as well as many others.)

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WW: Deer through the back window

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WW: Oriental poppies

(Papaver orientale. Came in time for Remembrance Day.)

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