Posts Tagged ‘lake washington’
ICE STORM
Snow Tree Carillon Point, Kirkland, Washington
SeaTac International Airport has closed all three of their runways due to the ice thus stranding more than a thousand travelers. This just after an inordinate amount of snowfall for the region. There are power outages reported throughout the area.
I powered down my drivers’ side window to leave a layer of ice – it looked as if the window was still in the up position. Fun to show the neighbors how I can punch my “window” out!
Credit for Snow Tree Carillon Point to J. R. Hudson, Scenic Edge Photography
Peace Lights Carillon Point
Peace Lights - Carillon Point
Official First Day of Summer Kirkland
First 'official' day of summer at Carillon Point, Kirkland, Washington
Honoring a Pacific Northwest Photographer: Josef Scaylea
 Those of us who have lived in the Pacific Northwest, even if we have not known him by name, have undoubtedly seen the work of Josef Scaylea (1913-2004), perhaps the best known photographer of the region. Mr. Scalea served as chief photographer of the Seattle Times for 35 years. |
Here are the links to explore:
“Classic Northwest Photography” by Josef Scaylea at SeattleGallery.com
When Did This Happen? 1 – The Setting
1 THE SETTING
As the dim steely-blue-gray light penetrated the window above the head of my bed, I crack one, then a second eyelid. I see the soft silhouettes of objects in my room with no comprehension. I struggle to awaken and my first thought was in the form of a question, “Why I was not running anymore like I did a few years earlier? It shouldn’t be too difficult to jump up, dress, get out and get running.” I also wish it is a few years earlier . . . I wish I could be a few years younger. Contemplating issues like running or simply just jumping out of bed is something I dwell upon lately. “Why don’t I do something about it?” That question prompts me to think about different places along my life’s path, and to contemplate those bumps on the road.
Thinking backwards, “Why didn’t I do sports in school? Was it because I wanted to spend more time pursuing girls?” Not really. I worked after school to pay for clothes, a car, and then dates with what little money was left over. I was young for the class and smaller than average. It did not appear I had any natural physical or mental inclination to be an athlete. Socially, I was a little awkward, later to be coined a “geek”, though I achieved modest successes at periodic relationships with girls back then.
I snap out of my backward thoughts, amble to the kitchen to grind coffee and feed it to our elaborate coffeemaker with many buttons and light-emitting diodes. The resultant product, my fresh ground coffee brew, will give me a boost of alertness for the Pacific Northwest freeway in the Pacific Northwest rain into which I was most immediately destined.
These days of the year are ubiquitously gray. So much so, we cannot really tell what month it is without recalling the actual month; “It’s November now?” Or reciting; “It is now February?” For there is no apparent difference between the two. One such year it started raining in October and it didn’t stop until mid-March. What a gloomy period, not only for the weather, but for a conglobulation of reasons. “Stop dwelling on it,” I command myself, aloud.
On a floating bridge of concrete that floats on a gray lake, beneath a gray sky, I try to keep an amount of safe space between the vehicle in front and my own. I do this in case I need to do a panic stop, but I try not to allow so much space that someone could take it away from me. But someone snuck in anyway. As my heart pounds an extra two beats, I project my complaint beyond the windshield, “We’re all trying to get to work at a reasonable time, buddy!” Soon following my moment of agitation, my thoughts go back to a time when this sky was blue and I was sailing on this lake. Sometimes after work, with friends, we would sail all night and watch the sun come up. When we would get back to work the next day, we would be wearing big smiles even though we bore no sleep.
When Did This Happen? 2 – As a Kid
2 AS A KID
We’ll experience some sunny hot days here. I worked with a Hawaiian near Seattle. During one of our summers he complained that it was too hot. I also remember that, as a kid, I could look down the long rectangular blocks of my town with the sharpness of a kid’s eye to see heat waves distorting the town’s brick drugstore at the intersection a half a mile away. That year could have easily been the year when I was in elementary school, when ‘The Witchdoctor’ was popular. The lyrics, “ooh, ee, ooh, ah, ah . . . ting, tang, a walla-walla bing-bang,” advises that you can win over your lover with a contemporary interpretation of a voodoo chant. What did I know about such things at the age I was?
In those summers, the other kids and I packed around like dogs around the neighborhood. We were comprised of varying ages, from four to eleven years old. We really were too young to be left unattended and to our own discretion. We fairly freely roamed from yard to yard, boundaries meant nothing. We knew all the secret passageways; fences with holes, garages with flat roofs to climb across, and trees to leverage travel without touching turf. Barefoot all summer, we could walk over gravel without pain, unlike I could now with tender business-shoe feet. By the end of each summer, our little feet were though as leather.
We threw hard green plumbs in the spring and squishy ripe plums in the summer at garage doors, over roofs, down streets, over houses. We developed great throwing arms which later were applied to little league baseball or rocks. One otherwise non-descriptive day while hanging around with neighborhood kids, I looked up and saw a plumb-sized rock on a perfect trajectory speeding right towards my head. I instinctively ducked thus averting a certain trip to the local emergency room. I didn’t see him throw it, I just saw this eight-year-old boy standing there at the apparent source of the trajectory, his arms down while while beaming a contented expression as if he had done something completely normal.
I never ended up in an emergency ward as a kid, an amazing fact considering all the haphazard, mischievous events in which I was part. I was attempting, though I was not fully aware, to let myself be killed growing up. In one of my more extreme phases, I routinely jumped from a second story door onto a lawn below. A door opened to open air. It was a former entry to a bachelor’s flat atop our old garage which boasted a dormer, and was hot in the summertime. The stairs had rotted away so my parents, considering the creaking rotting boards to be too dangerous to walk on, tore it down. Doing my free-form jumps, I didn’t break any bones perhaps because of God’s grace, or because I was made of sinew like hard rubber, or maybe just dumb lucky. Today if I were to fall just eight feet I would break bones. I did just that.
Forward to the freeway merge, I became engaged in a reckless ribbon of variable-sized hunks, of what may be described to someone prehistoric, attractively-formed boulders rolling on tires vying for position in a concrete clover leaf, either going south to downtown, or to north to the gateway of the city. A president of a local insurance company suggested to me that his odds of dying are greater driving around here than while sailing the treacherous Puget Sound, Strait of Juan de Fuca, or Georgia’s Strait. I ponder that he said this because I’ve been to those places.
I’ve sailed all these places he mentioned, and have come close to dying in a couple of those places. I sailed at night with just a flashlight when the craft’s running lights refused to work. I rigged a red stocking cap on the port side, and a green sock for the starboard side in a feeble attempt to keep with maritime law. I raced in fifty mile-an-hour wind in a twenty-four-foot sloop all the black night, surfing with whitewater wake as I plowed headlong down the faces of thrusting waves, and several boats lost one-ton masts that same night. I have ridden down a vertical wall of water at day in a twenty-one-foot sailboat, the grandest surfing I have ever done. I’ve sailed a three-ton sloop from behind it in a dinghy, no one on-board the mother ship.
Now, I pull into the parking lot. My office is a haven for me and I feel it protects is protected from my haphazard past, although the office has its own level of recklessness. I deal in millions of dollars for some thirty companies with hundreds of employees at the small accounting firm I head. The recklessness here is controlled, monetary, not physical. We balance the books for which we are responsible; recklessness is derived from people’s nature. Business owners are passionate about their numbers. Employees are passionate about their paychecks. Files get awry and then fixed. People’s feathers get ruffled and then smoothed. It’s “just business,” and it is my workday life.
When Did This Happen? 3 – Little Fish
3 LITTLE FISH
Dad loves to fish. He had been with friends from the plant where he was a manager and often times alone. As far as I could determine, Dad performed payroll functions, and he walked around the plant talking with the workers quite a bit. He made friends easily, and though he was technically a manager at the plant, he seemed to identify with the line workers.
Eventually he concluded on and acted upon the fact that I should experience trout fishing with him. I was at that time six years old. Dad had an eight-foot “pram” which is a small rowboat with a flat bow. It had three flat bench seats. Typically, the middle seat was for the oarsman, the back one for a passenger, and the forward one he reserved for a platform for his tackle box. He had two of these little prams, naming them “Pogo I” and “Pogo II”. The hulls of both Pogo’s were painted with several coasts of “marine” blue paint. Pogo I’s interior was a dark maroon color and Pogo II’s interior was grey.
My Dad was, and remains, a purest about certain things. While some of his acquaintances went for powerboats, Dad felt rowing was the more gentlemanly way of propelling along the surface of a body of water. While some fishermen used bait, he would not. He, instead, opted for artificial hand-tied flies or little spinners. He was a purist about artificial lures. Regarding the use power tools, he would lament that the way to produce quality woodwork was with hand tools. Anyway, he was this way about such things.
My Dad normally rose between four and five each morning, so, when we went fishing, he would get me up at the time I was in my deepest sleep – three AM. We would have a light breakfast, he would have his coffee, and I, hot chocolate. We would then travel out, being in the only car on the road for miles, driving to some obscure lake in west-central Washington State.
My first boat experience was in a mahogany sport skiff on the Columbia River. I barely remember it, but I believe I was crying. There are pictures reinforcing the experience. But the first time I rode Pogo out onto a lake with my Dad, he quietly rowed in the dawning hour and there were no loud noises, nor people taking pictures. The water made a swishing sound as the oars gently broke the glassy surface on the lake. A power line crossed the lake above and I recall the silence as we glided under it. I marveled at the progress we made on our little journey along the imaginary center line of the lake. We paid out our lines terminated with our artificial lures while he rowed, a well documented style of fishing called trolling.
I caught my first fish that day. It was a small rainbow trout about nine inches long. Dad gave me instructions, “keep his head up,” “easy now,” “now bring it towards me,” and chuckled as he dipped a green-meshed net framed in aluminum to encompass the fish. He then lifted the dripping animal out of the water and dropped it into the boat. The little trout flipped and flopped wildly, then it’s movements diminished until it just lied there with a big eye looking blankly at nothing. I was more thrilled about the camaraderie I felt with my Dad than at the actual act of catching a fish, but it made him happy, it made me happy.
A fellow joined my Dad with a similar passion for fishing. He was very enthusiastic and fairly boisterous. The two of them made a really excitable pair. They both loved being out in these little boats fishing. I was brought along with them one day and all that day, the fishing was slow. It took us all afternoon to catch a couple of fish. Long after I felt it was time to be packing up, knowing Mom would be concerned for us, but we continued fishing well into the evening.
After a long lull, my fishing pole suddenly jolted, jolted some more, and the tip bent downward towards the water. I started cranking on the reel handle while one of the men commented, “Son, you really had your line out a long way.” I reeled for a long time and then, with some assistance with the net, brought up a sizable trout. “Just when we were about to give up!” “Wow, what a fish!” “Ooh, baby!” “Yeah!” “Yeah baby!”.
I wasn’t prepared for their response. They were whooping, hollering, and laughing so loud that echoes came back to us from both shores. They laughed, and they yelled. They were very animated and loud. Having never seen grown men act like this before except perhaps when there was some kind of problem, I thought there was, but they were jubilant this time. I just stared at them. Though it was sixteen inches long, and weighing more than a pound, it still was a small fish. Later at a gathering where fish stories were exchanged, they told me, “At least you could have shown some excitement having caught the biggest fish we’d ever seen from that lake!”
When Did This Happen? 4 – Bigger Fish
4 BIGGER FISH
Fishing did become a part of my life. I fished in Tanawax Lake, Clear Lake near Tanawax Lake, Clear Lake in the Bald Hills, Lawrence Lake, Mineral Lake, Black Lake, Lake Rapjohn, Langlois Lake, Hearts Lake, Conconully Reservoir, Waptus Lake, Packwood Lake, The Potholes, Williams Lake, Snake Lake, Medical Lake and others.
I had seen pictures of big fish, mostly from the Inside Passage to Alaska. I wanted desperately to catch a big fish because the little trout didn’t excite me much. Fortunately, my Dad was interested in offshore salmon fishing and took me on a commercial charter trip on a forty-foot boat out of Westport, Washington on the Pacific coast.
We tried our luck for about six hours and we caught a couple of salmon. The most exciting part about this trip was being out on the big Pacific Ocean. Coming back, we went over an underwater bar, a shallow area where the waves pile high as they make their way towards land, and we rode them back into port. Sitting above the bow with my feet dangling out was the biggest thrill for me that day. While running with the waves, one moment we are high on the crest of a wave, then as the wave overtakes us, the bow would crash down into the trough with my feet planing on top of the water. The ride was fantastic! If I wasn’t before, I was hooked on boating for life on this trip.
I went charter fishing a couple times while a teenager. The second time I caught a silver salmon, about eight pounds and felt that I finally caught a real fish. A fish this size could feed a family of six a couple of times. Barbequed salmon is now one of my most favorite foods.
There used to be plenty of salmon in Puget Sound. Seattle is nestled on the sound, picturesque as it is, but the sound had been all but fished out by the late 1960’s. My friends and I would go down to the boathouse at Point Defiance, Tacoma, about thirty miles south of Seattle, and rent a twelve-foot skiff with an outboard motor for a day all for only eight bucks. We would get a couple of dozen herring for bait. These little silver fish are a salmon’s natural prey. We would proceed to each catch at perhaps ten sand sharks, which we call “dogfish,” though nary a salmon. The timing was wrong for us at the age we were and the year it was.
The salmon’s decline is the result of several major factors, most having to do with man’s development of the shoreline, demolishment of watersheds, commercial and tribal fishing, using technical means that were never used in past centuries. But, better fish management, improved stewardship of watersheds, controlled catches, and aggressive seeding have brought the salmon back in numbers not seen in a very long time. It took, and continues to take, painful sacrifices to nurture back this salmon fishery. It is an understatement that a lot of emotion has been stirred up in the process.
In recent years, I have been out on the ocean salmon fishing several times with my father-in-law who pilots a forty-foot vessel out from the mouth of the Columbia River each season. Each time I have come back with a couple of ten-pound Coho (Silver) Salmon, feeding my desire to catch a sizeable fish. I harbor thoughts of fishing in Alaska, though if I never make it to Alaska fishing, I will still rest satisfied. I really would like to pilot a boat from Seattle up through the Inside Passage.
When Did This Happen? 5 – There’s Something Happening Here
5 THERE’S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE
“Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down, should’a been done long ago.” There was something significant happening here I felt. It was in my first year of college when these lyrics of Buffalo Springfield echoed across the beautiful campus of evergreen trees which was only a few miles from my hometown.
My dad said I need to take on a trade or something. “You gotta do something,” echoed my dad’s voice, “you gotta start somewhere,” he continued. So I studied forestry, music, aviation, and political science, and photography. A foreign exchange girl from Czechoslovakia got a B in my english-literature class, and she had only been speaking English one year. I got a C, though I made up it later.
I had become caught up in the happenings and the changes that were taking place; the music of the time, the Viet Nam war which appeared to be hobby, and that blue smoke that wafted around nearly every corner of campus buildings. Good, bad, or indifferent, it cannot be denied the 1960’s and 1970’s were really the way they were. It was a very heady period of time.
In the Pacific Northwest the mentality of the late sixties extended well into the seventies. In Washington State, California’s sub-culture, known throughout the country, was delayed and synthesized by a couple of years; the surfing, the clothing, free love, drugs, music, and so on.
This area saw a strange blend of hippies, hunters, four-wheelers, and backpackers. Among these were mountain men who toted guns, carried their lunches in ammo boxes found in the Fort Lewis woods, and smoked pot.
West, about one hundred miles, lies are long sandy beaches making nearly half the Washington coastline. These beaches are a popular destination for graduating seniors from high school. They arrive in droves, driving their second-hand cars up and down the beach having parties in the dunes. I did this too.
In my third day into my time on the beach the afternoon had become dull. Remembering that some kids north of us had a nice camp, I fantasized that their camp would be a great party spot that night. I filled my car up with kids and we started a caravan up to see what was happening. Looking in my rear-view mirror, to my amazement, there were about a hundred cars following me. When we arrived only two kids were sitting there prodding a meager campfire. Mumbling “waste of time,” and other words, all my followers turned around and headed back south.
I worked at a camera store during this time. There I became exposed to the marvelous hobby of photography. It was technical, it was a form of art, it allowed creativity, and in the capacity that I was involved, it was related to business. All these things I enjoyed. I progressed to store manager while immersing myself in the hobby.
Specializing in scenic shots, prompted by my photography hobby, I went more and more into the surrounding wilderness areas. I thought nothing of driving a hundred miles to get an image, climb into a sleeping bag for a night on some un-patrolled land, and then getting back the next morning to work in the shop.
Photography impelled me in a way that I was beginning to see the world differently, through the eye of the lens. I took great pains to eliminate all man-influenced realities from my images; the exception were boats, most which I consider as beautiful; sail, steam, gas, diesel, or man-powered; and surfboards too.
Without the resources to travel to more exotic places, I was limited to roaming the local geographical area in search of shots. Not to complain much, the Pacific Northwest is resplendent in majestic mountains and rugged coastline. But access to excellent shots hard to find. The area is heavily treed and thick with underbrush.
Much of the northern coastline is wilderness. There are few roads that penetrate the rainforest’s thick trees and underbrush. When finally there, it is gray, wet, and the atmosphere is drizzly even in summer. If luck has it, getting to the coast when the sun is out is like seeing a great gem buffed off and realizing its’ grand beauty.
Pacific Northwest | J R Hudson 