WW: Abandoned barn

(No stronger proof of disuse in an old barn than a rotten hay hoist. Because this tackle can easily kill people if it fails, farmers tend to obsess over its health.

This classic old red barn is part of the miraculously preserved dairy farm in my old neighbourhood. It still housed the herd, hay, milking machines, and cold storage for the milk when I was a kid. Whole district, including the pastures that used to be attached to this operation, has long since gone suburban.)

WW: Sunset on the Columbia Plateau

(Another shot from my trek through Eastern Washington last summer.)

WW: King boletes

(Boletus edulis. Part of a generous outbreak that burst up not far from my house during the record rains of last month. Some of them were the size of dinner plates. Unfortunately I neglected to get a photo of one of those, but had quite a feast on the lot notwithstanding.)

WW: Neighbourhood pond

WW: Ancient testimony

(Another electrical artefact from an old shed that's figured in these pages before. This time it's a full grown tree used as a power pole at some time in the shed's early life. Note that the wire now erupts directly from the centre of the tree's rather large trunk.)

WW: Rain owl

(Stryx varia.)

WW: Power outage season

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Autumn leaves

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Comrade spirit

(A point I've made before.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.])


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Warm autumn day

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Prairie farm

(Appearing also on My Corner of the World.)

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.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)