Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder...

On this glorious late February day here in the Valley, I rolled Gladys out of the garage where she's been hibernating most of the winter and took her for a spin. We cruised on past Ed and Ginnifer's new construction and remodel. The two story breezeway between house and garage is framed in, the windows installed, and the metal roofing in place. I noticed the entryway has been reconfigured and roofed as well, the west entrance canted now to the southwest. During the tear out and construction the Broers family has been living in Ed's shop, and I imagine their homecoming can't come any too soon for them.

As we approach the Werkhoven Dairy, I see a lone figure striding briskly in our direction and assume it's either Steve, Jim or Andy en route to the next farm chore. We meet at the intersection of Sargeant Road where the pedestrian takes a right hand turn onto Sargeant. To my surprise I recognize Sargeant Bob, once a familiar figure in the Valley. We'd pass each other so frequently in our Valley outings we formed a sort of bond and would sometimes walk together and share bits of information about our personal lives. A bizarre incident on July 4, 2010, and subsequent encounter brought our"friendship" to an abrupt end. Both incident and post encounter were the subject of a July 13, 2011 post ("Strange...Very Strange Indeed").

It's been nigh on six years since that fateful collision and today was only my third encounter with the Sarge--post incident. Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder, but when Bob and I passed, made eye contact, the spring-like warmth of this beautiful day dissolved in the vitriol of his glare, and Gladys and I were thrust back into mid-December, a day of chill and frost. And yet again Bob gave me the cold shoulder and so much time has passed I can't remember which injured shoulder it was.

Edible Litter from the Valley...

Afoot in the Valley over the years I've come across many a strange item lying alongside the Tualco Loop Road. Most castoffs have been tools. I've brought home screwdrivers, pliers, a wrench or two (mostly metric), one of which, a hefty box end, could well have been used in the assembly of a 747. Just lately a sturdy paint scraper,... nuts and bolts and other assorted hardware. Nails, tacks, and screws I toss far out into the field to spare a motorist the hassle of having to haul out a spare tire to fix a flat. Stolen mail, condoms still in sealed packages (and others that were not), coins in denominations from a fifty cent piece down to a penny, thirty-seven of which I found littering a yard-long stretch of shoulder several years ago. And believe it or not, some years back on the First of April I found $1,000 in a muddy zip-loc bag.

Day before yesterday what to my wandering eyes did appear but a Snickers candy bar lying in the grass just off the shoulder. At first I thought the wrapper was one more item of litter tossed there by a passing litterbug. On closer inspection I found a fully wrapped, intact Snickers bar, regular size, lying there in the weeds as if it had fallen off the candy shelf at the grocery. "Hmmm," I thought, "this wasn't here yesterday.

Snickers bars and I have a history. In my other life, when I did my best to teach sophomores English as a foreign language, I used Snickers bars as leverage: I dangled them over a struggling student, "If you pass this test, this Snickers is for you." I mostly used them to build rapport with my students in friendly wagers on sporting events, major league baseball match-ups, championship and World Series games in particular.Whenever a student in one of my classes had a birthday, I gifted him or her with a bite-sized Snickers bar in a pre-wrapped gift box ("I need the box back," I'd tell them). Although in all honesty I prefer a Payday candy bar over a Snickers, I picked up the lonely bar for nostalgia's sake, stuffed it in my pocket and carried the roadside gift home for further scrutiny.

Both ends of the wrapper were neatly sealed, as was the seam, and in spite of its lying in the wet grass (a day or two? Overnight? Since morning?), the paper wrap was barely moist. The contents were not squashed, nor was the bar broken in half. Regardless if the sweet hunk came from Wal-Mart or Willie Wonka's chocolate factory, its contents: 250 calories, 12 grams of total fat, 4.5 grams of sat. fat, 27 grams of sugars, and 120 milligrams of sodium, remained well-sealed.

The question of the day: should I eat litter found lying alongside the road? But the the bar was still sealed in cellophane...not like it was opened, half eaten with a stranger's bite marks on the truncated remains. Not the same as fishing an uneaten slice of pizza out of a dumpster, was it? But still, the candy bar was lying in the wet grass just beyond the muddy shoulder of the road.... Do candy bars have expiration dates? That could be the all-consuming factor. Yes, they do. And yes it was....  Don't expiration dates principally apply to eggs, meat, and dairy though? And aren't candy bars sealed to keep freshness in? I rationalized the question to the point I could almost taste the caramel. However, I wondered, what if some sociopath injected the Snickers bar with some poisonous substance, a narcotic or worse yet, a laxative? A flimsy wrapper is hardly tamper-proof.

At this posting, the Snickers bar is cooling its heels in the freezer where it will remain until (it's my hope) I'll have forgotten all about it. And then, what a sweet discovery!

(If in the past three days you lost a Snickers bar in the Valley and would like to claim your property, stop by anytime. To prove ownership, though, you'll have to tell me the bar's expiration date. But for now, it's finders, keepers.)

Attic archives...

The holidays are behind us, thank goodness. Now we can look forward to the excitement of the New Year...if, that is, you're one who finds filing the past year's tax returns exciting. Here on site at The Ripple we have the halls undecked, the trappings packed away in bulging totes, and I've been creaking my way up the ladder to the attic one tote at a time.

The last of Christmas to be packed away is the exterior illumination, the strands of lights that while they herald holiday cheer, also illuminate gutters sorely in need of power washing.The three strings are nearly as old as the house. A few sockets are deadouts but those are hardly noticeable during the day. I can hang the seventy-five feet of lights in half an hour, remove them in fifteen minutes thanks to the hooks I strategically placed in the fascia boards when the gutters were new...and clean.

I coil the strands one at a time in a well-worn Sunbeam mixer box, the contents of which are now a ghost of Christmas past. Gently, I nest them between layers of newspaper yellowed with time, sepia toned--old news for sure. The years pile up one on another, and each season as I layer the strands one at a time, I pack the news of yesteryear around them.

One by one I layer the sheaves dated 1983 to 1991. Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, was wrapping up his administration then, about to turn over the reins of the U.S. government to George H. W. Bush (The Vacation President). The pages crossed the presses two and a half decades ago, ten years before the horrific event which bruised and scarred our nation. Two of the newspapers no longer exist in hard copy: The Seattle P-I and Times thump no more on your doorstep or daily fill your paper box but have hopped on the internet bandwagon.Two pages of  Monroe School District's newsletter The Pipeline (Vol. 8, #2, Dec. 1983), separate one of the strands. The Pipeline, too, I believe, is now defunct.
,

What I have in the tattered box is a time capsule of sorts. Ads show the inexorable march of inflation. Haggens (in Monroe: here today, gone tomorrow), for instance, had bacon on sale for ninety-nine cents a pound. At today's prices, a buck might buy you two thin slices. Priced appliances lately? In 1991 at  Everett's Judd and Black, you could buy a Whirlpool kitchen range for less than $500.

And back then imagine slipping a mobile phone in your back pocket. You might as well have sat on a brick.

Consider the financial markets in the days when the cardboard sides of that Sunbeam box had integrity. From the finance pages of The P-I, vintage 1991: DJIA 2934; S&P 500, 456; NASDAQ, 536. Spot gold a steal at $358 an oz. Oil, $18 a barrel.

And "current" events? The presidential election of 1992, for one (Trump? Who's Trump?). Andrew Cuomo trims his aspirations political to the mayoral environs of NYC; no master and commander of the Free World for Andy. On the home front some things never change. The Seattle School Board, always embroiled in one controversy or another, acting in the best interests of biology and adolescent hormones, decided to distribute "prophylatics"to its students.

And locally, the Monroe S.D. was hoping to refresh its coffers by mounting yet another school levy: public schools, underfunded then; underfunded now; the 3 R's don't come cheap. (At the launch of fiscal 2016, our State is sitting on a 1.3 billion dollar "rainy day" fund: the State gets richer; the schools--more children.)

One of the wrinkled pages of The Post-Intelligencer I smoothed and read proved to be a coincidence. Beneath a half page color photo was an article about Seattle fast food entrepreneur Dick Spady, founder of the iconic "Dick's Drive-in." Dick's had celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Just this past week the drive-in's founder and namesake passed away at the age of ninety-two.

Ninety-year olds are often asked to share the secrets of their longevity. When I look at the cheerful Dick Spady, calorie-packed 'shake in one hand while holding 780 calories of tasty 'burger in the other, I'm fairly certain I've discovered one of his secrets for a long and happy life. On that ending note The Ripple wishes one and all a healthy, happy New Year.

A Dickens of a Tale...

A favorite question in trivia games this time of year is to challenge a contestant to name all the spirits who visit Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, a fairly easy question if one is familiar with the most seasonal of Christmas stories in the English Language, A Christmas Carol (the answer is "4"; can you name them?). A more challenging question, however, might be: "What Dickens' novel hints at or includes a story that is without a doubt the prototype for the most beloved Christmas story in the English Language?" This question is on a much higher plane of difficulty and unless you have read the entire collection of Dickens' novels, the answer is certain to elude you.

Though The Ripple is not one to boast, I'll share the fact I have read all eighteen Dickens' novels, plus A Christmas Carol and the shorter stories "The Cricket on the Hearth" and "The Chimes." Though I've always enjoyed Dickens' stories, I was a casual fan until years ago a colleague suffered a career-ending brain aneurysm. Out of respect for a friend and talented educator, I promised myself I'd pick up the torch and fulfill his goal to read the entire body of Dickens' works. So, concerning the question of which of Dickens' eighteen novels contains the fabric for A Christmas Carol, I've done all the legwork for you, and now for the answer which will have trivia players believing you're a scholar of Victorian lit.

The tale that morphed into the Christmas story as familiar and beloved as that favorite ornament you hang on the tree each year appears in Dickens' very first novel, the book that launched his literary career and secured his finances to the point he could devote the rest of his life to writing. If one were looking for the question and answer that are the subjects of this post and set out to read Dickens' entire body of literature, he need only to have read The Pickwick Papers halfway through to discover a narrative told by one Mr. Warble, "The Goblins that Stole a Sexton."

It is Christmas Eve and Gabriel Grub, confirmed misanthrope (Ebenezer Scrooge) and sexton for the village church, grumbles his way through festive streets, each house alight with Christmas cheer from which issue aromas of Christmas feasts in the making. Caroling children throng the doorsteps, their excited voices resounding the Christmas spirit. Gabriel, described as "a sullen, morose," fellow, has little time for such gaiety ("Christmas! Bah, Humbug!") and is en route to the churchyard to dig a grave to lift his spirits. As Grub trudges along, he sings a different carol:

                                Brave lodgings for one, brave lodgings for one,
                               A few feet of cold earth, when life is done;
                               A stone at the head, a stone at the feet,
                               A rich, juicy meal for the worms to eat.
                               Rank grass above,and damp clay around,
                               Brave lodgings for one, these, in holy ground.

His night's work finished, Gabriel seats himself on his favorite tombstone and takes a long pull on the bottle he has brought along. Just then the old curmudgeon hears a "Ho! Ho! Ho! and turns to see a goblin sitting on an adjacent grave marker. The goblin inquires after Gabriel's business in the churchyard and when he learns the sexton has been digging a grave, he wants to know what manner of man it is who visits graveyards and digs graves on the merriest night of the year. Before Grub can answer, a host of goblins choruses his name: "Gabriel Grub, Gabriel Grub!" The King of the Goblins chides Grub for being so mean-spirited: "You miserable man!" King Goblin and his unearthly host snatch Gabriel away to their underground lair where at the very end of a cavern the goblins conjure up a cloud upon which their captive is shown a number of visions.The first projects a poor family before a warm fire in their small, but clean, apartment. The children welcome their father home from work. Though he's tired, he attends to his children who flock to his knee. The scene is one of love, happiness, and comfort.

Then the scene shifts to a small bedroom in which the family stands vigil over a dying child.The child dies before Gabriel's eyes and the family grieves (sounds familiar, doesn't it?). The cloud shifts to another scene which portrays the world of nature, its beauty and the wonderful creatures that live in it. Between scenes the goblin king calls Grub a "miserable man" and he and his followers kick Gabriel unmercifully. Another scene: poor folk going about their daily lives, cheerful and optimistic in spite of the hardships life throws their way. Vision after vision until the sexton has a change of heart and remarks at his revelation: "...that men like himself, who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth; and setting all the good of the world against the evil, he came to the conclusion it was a very decent and respectable sort of world after all." No sooner had Gabriel reached his conclusion than the goblins disappeared one by one and he slipped into a deep sleep. He awoke in the churchyard on the same slab of stone, an empty bottle at his feet, "but he was an altered man." ["I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The spirits of all Three shall live within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach." Ebenezer Scrooge]

The Pickwick Papers was written and serialized 1836-7, but A Christmas Carol did not appear until 1843, six years later. During those six years the tale of Gabriel Grub and the goblins gestated in the creative mind of Charles Dickens, shifted like the visions shown the sexton in Goblin Cave and six years later emerged as the wonderful Christmas story known the world over. And there's your trivia question ripe for the asking.

The Ripple wishes one and all the very merriest of Christmases.




                                                         

Black is the New Green: From the Editor's Desk...

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" 

Ebenezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

This is the time of the year I hire an extra security guard to stand watch over my wallet; it has come under siege from all quarters. The mailbox bulges with catalogs. Pages of glossy photographs push merchandise confirming white elephants are alive and well, no longer on the endangered species list. Sandwiched in between them are packets from one charity after another reminding me this is the season for giving--as if the needy were invisible the other ten months of the year--as if I could use all those address labels in two lifetimes....

At their posts, standing sentinel over the red tripods and kettles, Salvation Army surrogates halfheartedly shake loose a jingle or two out of their little bells, leveraging guilt to squeeze a few coins out of shoppers. Surrogates? Yes, General Booth's army has outsourced its bell ringers, gone secular in keeping with the spirit of getting and spending. No more that little dumpling of a Salvationist, ruddy cheeked, braving the cold, her uniform replete with bonnet, red shield and epaulletes. No longer does she swing her bell with cheerful resolve for hours on end, standing the while on those black regulation high heels fat as my wrist. Her replacement? Some fellow wearing an L.L. Bean jacket lounging in a folding chair, sipping a holiday cup of Starbucks which, by the way, he's holding in his bell ringing hand...a disingenuous "Merry Christmas" to you, too, sir. Enjoy your seasonal paycheck."

                       "The world is too much with us.
                        Getting and spending we lay waste our powers..."
                                              William Wordsworth

But there's nothing more insidious this time of year than the concept of "Black Friday," corporate retail's strong-arm campaign against the American consumer. Not only has Black Friday cast a pall over Thanksgiving, but it's nearly relegated the day of thanks (not unlike the marshmallow-topped yams) to the holiday back burner. Black Friday is an all out assault on our wallets, our bank accounts...our nest eggs. Now it's in your face Black Friday every calendar day post-Thanksgiving until after the Friday before Christmas. Car dealerships dangle "Black Friday" month in front of shoppers. Furniture stores, the big retailers, everyone with something to sell has hopped on the "Black Friday" bandwagon. Black Friday, I'm told, now begins on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It's "noir" Friday in your face (I have several containers of Black Friday honey if you're interested; it's Black Friday every day until the supply runs out).

The days of those two  magical wish books, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck's winter catalogs are gone forever, swallowed up by the black hole known as Black Friday. We Americans have so much to be thankful for, and it's my hope we honor Thanksgiving in the spirit for which it was intended. So, readers, regardless of  this plague of blackness, The Ripple wishes you all a "Happy Thanksgiving." And if you do happen to fall into the Black Friday abyss and have any money left over for Cyber Monday, give thanks for that, too.

Down on the Frohning Farm...

I had occasion this past week to check out the effects of the Skykomish River's unwelcome visit at the Frohning Family Farm. Prompted by a call out from social media, I was on a meals on wheels type of errand: to deliver some baked chicken and potato salad to the cleanup crew and other volunteers who had pitchforked and shoveled themselves up an appetite at the farm. Because the southbound route to Frohning Road was accessible only by watercraft, I had to circle the Loop to the low road and even then had to creep north through two pools of residual floodwater. First, I'll relate how things went down and then share Matt Frohning's story of how the floodwaters came up.

I left the food with Sandy and Terri who directed me to the dairy barn where Matt was hard at work cleaning up the mess left behind by the bullying Sky. I'm no stranger to the Valley's dairy barns and knew enough to wear my barn boots for the on-site visit. So glad I did: the road to the barn was a quagmire, as you might suppose...and of not just mud, either. After all, the farm's a dairy, right? I headed to the barn, threading my way through the Frohnings' flock of free range chickens. A couple of roosters eyed The Ripple's credentials and cleared me to pass.

In the barn I found Cameron hard at work switching out the flood-soaked bedding one stall at a time."The cows were standing in two feet of water here in the barn," he told me. All waterlogged bedding had to be shoveled from each stall and replaced by fresh, dry wood shavings. Cameron was working on the second bay when I arrived. We had a brief conversation before Matt tractored in a hopper full of fresh shavings which he funneled into each one stall at a time. He emptied the hopper, throttled back the tractor, stopped to  tattle-tale on the Sky, and relate the rest of the story. The gist of our exchange follows:

"I went to bed at 8:30, hoping to get a good night's sleep, awoke at 11:30 and found the Sky knocking on our barn door. I called Jim Werkhoven to warn him the river was on the rampage, but no answer [Jim and Delores were at an industry meeting, high and dry in Minneapolis]. By 12:30 the water was up to the floorboards on the tractors and I moved them to higher ground. Fortunately the river crested, so I didn't have to move the herd to higher ground. I don't think I've ever seen the river come so fast," Farmer Frohning told me, "and from that direction." Not surprising because after each flood event, the river's hydraulics change. One has only to peer over the railings of the Lewis Street Bridge to see the mounding gravel bars that displace water and push floods to new levels in the Valley with each subsequent inundation.

At this point our conversation takes a strange twist, turns to last summer's drought, irrigation, water rights and such. Matt tells me the farm has water rights he never knew existed. This past week, however, it appears the Skykomish River owned the water rights and at Mother Nature's mandate, darn well exercised them. But I know and respect Matt Frohning and have this message for the Sky, other rivers and their floodwaters. Ebb and flow as you will. In Matt Frohning you've met your match. Rogue river, you'll learn not to trifle with the likes of dairyman Frohning. He's beaten you time and again. In the end he'll prevail.

Post Diluvium...

When I crossed the Lewis Street Bridge today, it was hard to imagine that just three short months ago bathers were wading the Sky from bank to bank. Looking down at the roiling, brown water of a river that day before yesterday scoffed at containment and even at this posting is yet lapping hungrily at its banks, made me wonder if I was the same person who shared his fear about the well running dry.

The sun came out today, a welcome change from overflowing gutters and ponding on the property where ponds have never been before. A good day to be afoot in the Valley and so out I went to see what had washed away or, as I discovered, was still awash. Floodwaters shimmered in the November sun. I noted the silt-laden vegetation marking high water marks...the familiar signs of Valley hydraulics in flood season.

The grass shouldering the road west of Swiss Hall was flattened, roots showing white in some places, victims of the flood currents rushing over the asphalt. What I first thought was roofing material from Swiss Hall turned out to be debris washed up on the roadway by the rampaging river. Further down the road receding flood waters had piled and dropped more detritus.

Sargeant Road is my routine turnaround spot, but I noticed the flashing lights of a Werkhoven bucket loader tiptoeing its way through a lake of floodwater pooled in the road in front of the silage bunkers. Parked up to its hubs was a tractor, hose trailing from a pump powered by the PTO. I thought I'd continue my exercise and inspect up close and personal the Sky's impact on the Valley's milk supply. I first noted the dairy's sand auger grounded and out of commission. Then the familiar figure of Andy Werkhoven skirted the dairy's new--and unwelcome--water feature. Most of my encounters with Andy find him up to the top of his barn boots in some sort of liquid...effluence from the dairy barns, for instance. Today it was the Sky's floodwater. Andy saw me working my camera, recording the waterlogged scene and yelled: "You can title that picture 'A Pain in the Ass.'"

Those are Andy's words, not mine. I'm just reporting the news....