August ‘25
Summer’s Unexpected Theme
We always had a freezer full of fish. For nine months of the year we savored our summer memories of fishing in the waters that surrounded our island town in Southeast Alaska. During the three months of summer we ate fresh salmon and halibut. I can picture my dad, sizing up a fish as we reeled it up to the side of the boat, pronouncing, “It’s a keeper!”
That lifestyle is long gone. But as August proceeds and Labor Day approaches, I still get triggered to replay the memories - even if there’s no boat to pull out of the water for winter. It coincides with an impulse to answer that back-to-school writing prompt: What did you do this summer? Well, I had some keepers to be sure.
For our first adventure, my husband and I drove up into the Cascade Mountains one Saturday morning and hiked the Iron Goat Trail. Butterflies were waking, fluttering slowly on their way to nectar and warm sun. The old railroad bed created a comfortable path. The monolithic snow sheds and tunnels offered cool shade. The history plaques read like a suspense novel about the building of the railroad. One viewpoint memorial jutted out so we could look down the mountain and imagine the horror of passengers who’d impatiently demanded to travel in the snowstorm - only to meet their fate. That was a downer. But our outing was a keeper.
Next, in the foothills of Mount St. Helen’s National Volcanic Monument we camped and played make-believe: we pitched a tent and pretended we still like the rugged experience of living out of Igloo coolers, eating outdoors with bugs, falling asleep to the sound of boisterous neighbors, and waking to crows and a deflated air mattress. The nature trail on the hummocks created by the 1980 blow up of Mt. St. Helen’s offered an over-hill-and-dale hike across mounds of geologic history - history made in my lifetime. The information centers retraced and replayed the complete destruction of miles of nature and lost lives. It was a sober trek in a land of trauma. A fragile keeper.
With two new summer adventures checked off, we relaxed into the familiar annual trip to our home-away-from home. Our favorite campground is on a bluff above the beach where the Puget Sound merges with the Strait of Juan de Fuca. This August, as always, we set up the campground before dark and headed to the beach. You can hear and smell the ocean before you see it. This year was pungent - as in cover-your-nose disgusting. We set our feet in the rocky sand, kneading the shore with our soles. Slowly our eyes focused on the distant shoreline and the cause of the stench was revealed: a dead whale! Sad and phenomenal. Again?!
I don’t know how we unintentionally strung together a morbid collection of keepers this summer. But we sure had a whale of a time!