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May. 2nd, 2009 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonionayYou know what I realized I don't do much of? Sit by rivers. Creeks, yes. Oceans, bays, lakes-- check. A river's got a totally different dynamic. They smell different, stuff floats by--including ducks. Stuff that for some reason, fascinates me.
This is all building up to say, I went to Ferndale today, and am writing this from a log on the side of the Nooksack River*. There's a lot of nostalgia, because as a child in Magical Montanaland, I'd go swimming in the Bitteroot River during hot summers spent with my grandparents. Wide, rocky point bars always make me think of Tortuga Beach (so-called because my grandma's Spanish friend, Isabel, pretended to be a turtle there. And thus, I learned my first Spanish word.)
Why Ferndale? Why the hell not? I've never been there, and I needed to get out of town.
I read that there's a trail along the river in Hovander park. I found it easily enough, but discovered two things: 1) you can't see the river from the river trail, and 2) it had a couple hundred cars driving down it. So I walked alongside it, knee deep in dandelions, grass and clover--a special joy in itself. Fortunately, I found a side trail that took me to this empty beach. I ate my lunch, wrote [Hey, crows! Harrassing a hawk! Thirty feet above my head!] a paragraph of short story in my notebook, then became so entranced with a duck floating effortlessly down the river that I wrote this, and totally made my hand cramp.
Stop 2
A bench (Eagle Scout Project. Materials donated by...) peched on a high cut bank. It would have a spectacular view if not for the alders rapidly growing in front of me. I'm eating double-dipped chocolate peanuts, the kind where you can eat the first layer of chocolate off, and the peanut's just a tiny, tiny core inside.
Stop 3
Fragrance garden. Rain and drizzle. Watching a woodpecker in a lilac tree from a chair on the sheltered porch of the interpretive center. A bunch of boisterous girls are excited about the couger inside. One of them knocked on the window behind me. Don't know if she was trying to scare me. Somwhere in the marsh is the liquid call of the red-winged blackbird--a sound I associate with the Bitteroot Valley. **
Stop 4
Not much of a stop really. I wandered into downtown Ferndale to catch the bus. It's a lot like downtown Poulsbo, only without the interesting shops and stuff that attracted tourists. The bus stop was blocked by parked cars. That and the fact that an ever-growing convoy of emergency vehicles was on the corner led me to cross the river back into suburban strip mall land and catch the bus there.
Overall, it was the perfect day for this. The sky was the perfect translucent gray that keeps things from being too bright, but doesn't drop a lot of rain either. It discourages picnics, and the park was wonderfully empty, aside from the mob of cars that was the local plant sale. But they were in their own corner of the park, away from me.
*Granted, I'm typing it up and posting it from my desk, with the kitten under my feet.
** Ha ha. I looked up the blackbird song to make sure I had the ID right, and now the kitten's all, "yo? where's the bird?" He really wants to jump on my desk.
This is all building up to say, I went to Ferndale today, and am writing this from a log on the side of the Nooksack River*. There's a lot of nostalgia, because as a child in Magical Montanaland, I'd go swimming in the Bitteroot River during hot summers spent with my grandparents. Wide, rocky point bars always make me think of Tortuga Beach (so-called because my grandma's Spanish friend, Isabel, pretended to be a turtle there. And thus, I learned my first Spanish word.)
Why Ferndale? Why the hell not? I've never been there, and I needed to get out of town.
I read that there's a trail along the river in Hovander park. I found it easily enough, but discovered two things: 1) you can't see the river from the river trail, and 2) it had a couple hundred cars driving down it. So I walked alongside it, knee deep in dandelions, grass and clover--a special joy in itself. Fortunately, I found a side trail that took me to this empty beach. I ate my lunch, wrote [Hey, crows! Harrassing a hawk! Thirty feet above my head!] a paragraph of short story in my notebook, then became so entranced with a duck floating effortlessly down the river that I wrote this, and totally made my hand cramp.
Stop 2
A bench (Eagle Scout Project. Materials donated by...) peched on a high cut bank. It would have a spectacular view if not for the alders rapidly growing in front of me. I'm eating double-dipped chocolate peanuts, the kind where you can eat the first layer of chocolate off, and the peanut's just a tiny, tiny core inside.
Stop 3
Fragrance garden. Rain and drizzle. Watching a woodpecker in a lilac tree from a chair on the sheltered porch of the interpretive center. A bunch of boisterous girls are excited about the couger inside. One of them knocked on the window behind me. Don't know if she was trying to scare me. Somwhere in the marsh is the liquid call of the red-winged blackbird--a sound I associate with the Bitteroot Valley. **
Stop 4
Not much of a stop really. I wandered into downtown Ferndale to catch the bus. It's a lot like downtown Poulsbo, only without the interesting shops and stuff that attracted tourists. The bus stop was blocked by parked cars. That and the fact that an ever-growing convoy of emergency vehicles was on the corner led me to cross the river back into suburban strip mall land and catch the bus there.
Overall, it was the perfect day for this. The sky was the perfect translucent gray that keeps things from being too bright, but doesn't drop a lot of rain either. It discourages picnics, and the park was wonderfully empty, aside from the mob of cars that was the local plant sale. But they were in their own corner of the park, away from me.
*Granted, I'm typing it up and posting it from my desk, with the kitten under my feet.
** Ha ha. I looked up the blackbird song to make sure I had the ID right, and now the kitten's all, "yo? where's the bird?" He really wants to jump on my desk.
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no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 01:18 am (UTC)http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=48.825542,-122.582059&spn=0.021388,0.055618&t=h&z=15&msid=101265065555224110944.000468f7bb8943f2ccf63
I hope this works... shit, i should move back someday...
no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 02:33 am (UTC)