(click to enlarge each photo)

“No — look,” she said. Across the field was something much less common than a llama. It was a camel! We drove a little further, and suddenly there were baby camels almost close enough to touch. I rolled down my window to look, and Mike said, “Watch out that they don’t spit on you.” I quickly rolled it back up again.

Like the camels, I find many things curious and incongruous about the Amish lifestyle. For example, at night, the old-fashioned buggies are lit with newfangled LEDs. And when you pull up to a gas pump here, you often find a pile of steaming horse poop in front of it. What’s inside those mysterious horse-drawn contraptions that needs gasoline?

After our camel experience, we turned down a busy road and found ourselves behind a horse-drawn farm wagon that clop-clopped placidly at about five miles per hour. We had to wait our turn to pass him, and when we did, I noticed that his load consisted of eight little Amish children sitting on hay bales. The boys were all in the back of the wagon, and the girls were up front, as far away from the boys as they could get. All the children wore black anachronistic clothing, the boys’ outfits topped with charming straw hats.

A while later, we arrived at our destination, Donna’s mother’s home. While the others unloaded the groceries, I sat down in the living room to catch up with Odessa, who lets me call her “Mom.” We’d just started to chat when she looked over my shoulder and said, “What have we here?”

I turned around, expecting to see Donna, Mike, or Barry. To my surprise, it was a group of black-clad Amish children. “Would you like us to to sing to you?” the oldest boy said to Odessa. His English was clear but heavily accented. “That would be fine,” she said, sitting back in her chair.

As the eight children arranged themselves into three groups around their songbooks, I recognized the group from the farm wagon. The man driving, the father of several of them, had dropped them off and gone on an errand while they entertained Odessa with traditional Christmas songs.

“Seventy-nine,” said the tallest boy. They turned to that page and began to sing a Christmas hymn, a very unfamiliar tune. Their voices were high-pitched and their Pennsylvania Dutch accents gave a slightly nasal tone to the music. When they finished, one of the girls said, “Eighty-three,” and they launched into another one.

During the second song, I noticed something strange. The older children were gamely singing away, but their little brothers and sisters were having trouble focusing on the music. After a while, one of the little girls gave up singing completely and stared with her mouth hanging open. Her silence had its effect on her brother, who also lost his concentration and stared, openmouthed, at the corner of the room. The others faltered a little.

Odessa had muted her television, but she hadn’t turned it off!

As the Amish children labored through about seven different songs, it became evident that the television, though silent, had the power to mesmerize them completely. The older boys, who stood with their backs to it, couldn’t stop glancing over their shoulders to see what was happening on the tube. They got confused, repeating some verses and skipping others. The younger children, who unfortunately were facing it directly, leaned on the arm of a chair and stared, unabashed, at the lively, colorful pictures on the screen.

There were two earnest girls whose singing carried the concert, probably because they couldn’t see the TV from where they were standing!

At Odessa’s request, the children sang Silent Night, and then finished with “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” The oldest boy said, earnestly, “If you’d to hear more singing, you can come to our school on December 22nd.” I think he was embarrassed at their performance and wanted a chance to show that without the distraction of TV, they can sing much better.

As the little group left through Odessa’s kitchen, Donna gave them cookies. I was laughing silently — and sympathetically — at their predicament. I haven’t had a TV in 30 years, so I get mesmerized by the darned things, too. But that afternoon at Odessa’s house, the Amish children were so different from anything I’d experienced, watching them struggle with the pull of the television had me completely mesmerized.

There goes the neighborhood... Flutterby in front of Vero Beach's posh homes

From Flutterby’s mooring to shore is about 150 feet. It’s a lot farther, if you measure it in dollars.

Tonight, there’s a birthday party at one of the houses on shore. The lawn is full of dressed-up people, and they’ve got a live reggae band. What I can’t figure out are the two chickens in the yard. I’ve never noticed those before. Perhaps they were a birthday present. Perhaps they’re serving really, really fresh chicken for dinner. Or maybe that’s the backup singers.

OK, that’s enough about the chickens. I must be hungry. I wonder what kind of people can afford to hire such a professional-sounding band for a birthday party?

No boring ol’ farts, no boring ol’ farts
No boring ol’ farts will be there
Singin’ no boring ol’ farts, no boring ol’ farts
No boring ol’ farts will be there (another verse from the same song)

My curiosity sends me to Zillow.com, where I look for information about our shoreside neighbors. The house with the party is just over a million dollars, but it’s not for sale. The one that is, though, is even closer; it’s the one whose windows we look right into. It’s a 3-bedroom, 2-1/2 bath rambler with a swimming pool. You can buy it for just over a million dollars. Or rent it for $7500 a month.

Or sit out here on a mooring and look into the windows, for $400 a month.

Turn your lights down low
And pull your window curtains…
(from another Bob Marley song)

It’s a good thing I like reggae, and the birthday party band in particular. I’m sure everyone over there is shouting, unsuccessfully, to be heard over the music, like this:

John: “Blah-de-blah-de-blah chicken?”
Mary: “No, I don’t want to dance with your chicken.”
John: “I said, blah-de-blah-de-blah CHICKEN!”
Mary: “You want me to to remodel your kitchen?”

Out here, we can’t turn the music off, but we can easily talk over it. It’s like our own private dinner concert (no boring ol’ farts here!). Because this is Vero Beach — known as Zero Beach to the younger set — the music stops at precisely 9:30 pm. I’m disappointed.

I once had a business trip to Semiahmoo, a stunningly beautiful resort near the Canadian border in Washington, with two coworkers. When the desk clerk handed out room keys, two of them faced the water, and one faced the parking lot. The two other women looked at me in consternation. I had the most seniority, so they were certain I’d claim one of the waterfront rooms, leaving them to fight over the other one. Instead, I picked up the parking lot room key, saying, “Enjoy the view. I’m going sailing tomorrow, and if you count both sides and the transom, I’ll have over 75 feet of waterfront property all weekend.”

That comment comes back to me as I listen to the reggae-chicken birthday party. Tonight, they’re  enjoying their waterfront property and sharing it with their friends. But they are paying an awful lot just to be looking at us! And we are not paying very much to be looking in their windows, enjoying their music, and laughing about their chickens.

Let me tell you, it takes a joyful sound
To make the world go ’round
It takes a joyful sound
So come a come and rock your boat (one last verse from Bob Marley)

What's that white thing on the dock? A shoebox, a bookshelf, or a boat?

On the big day, when we launched Flutterby, I didn’t pour all the champagne over the bow. There was some left in the bottle, so a bunch of us went down the dock to where a little wooden shoebox, about six feet long, sat waiting. Kris and Barry picked it up and dangled it down to the water by its painter, letting it down with a  splash. Way, way down there in the water below the high dock, it looked for all the world like an abandoned piece of furniture. Somebody tossed a couple of wooden oars into the shoebox-bookshelf, and then they all turned to me, expectantly.

Uh-oh.

There it floated, nine years in the making, waiting for the builder to test it. I felt like the ancient Roman bridge designer who had to stand under his bridge when the first load went across. What if I was too heavy? What if it flipped, or worse yet, slowly sank? I could hear the blub-blub-blub in my imagination. But it’s amazing what adrenaline and an audience can do. White-knuckled, I climbed down the ladder into the tiny vessel that I had given birth to from a pile of plywood.

I was still hanging onto the ladder with a death grip when Barry handed me the bottle of champagne.

It felt like a toy boat, something that should be christened with Kool-Aid. But I wanted the gods of the sea to take this thing seriously, so I poured champagne over the “bow.” (Since the boat doesn’t have a pointy end, it’s a little hard to tell which is the front and which is the back. It would probably row just fine sideways, if I mounted the oars that way.)

“I christen thee Flutterwent!” The name was Kris’ idea. It rolls off the tongue better than Flagondry or Rockcoach, two bug-based Spoonerisms that sound a lot worse than Flutterby.

Before I knew it, Barry was climbing off the dock to join me in the boat, I think because I had the bottle of champagne. Or maybe because he wanted to swamp it and go swimming. Surely this thing was not rated for two adults, was it? Thank goodness the Coast Guard wasn’t around to see the open container in an overloaded vessel with no lifejackets.

But she didn’t ship any water when he climbed in. We sat there, facing each other, grinning, and passing the champagne bottle back and forth. Meanwhile, the current was carrying us away from the dock. Whoops! Time to do something about that!

Using ridiculous 7-foot oars as giant paddles, we paddled through the marina and over to the ways, where Flutterby awaited us. The scariest part was getting back out again! I didn’t know how stable it was, but I knew how stable I was — not very. I guess the adrenaline got me out of the boat as well as into it, although by now most of our audience had lost interest and wandered off for happy hour. I was already plenty happy.

You might be wondering, why would anyone use such a strange-looking, tiny dinghy? Normal cruisers go back and forth from their boats in stock gray inflatables with stock outboard motors. Why not the Flutterbies?

For years, Barry wanted to build a 34-foot sailboat with me. This terrified me, because I was afraid of power tools. I’d had an accident in college with a bandsaw and nearly ended up eight-fingered Meps.

In 2001, our housemate, Sharonne, signed up for a beginning woodworking class. For the first four weeks, the students built toolboxes using a table saw, joiner, planer, biscuit-cutter, and sander. For the remainder of the class, they worked on their own projects. At the end of ten weeks, Sharonne proudly brought home the toolbox and a tall bookshelf that she had built with her own hands.

I signed up for the next session and built the same toolbox. Then the teacher sat down with the class and told us we were free to start on our own projects. He went around the room and asked each person to say what they wanted to build. “A CD rack,” said one. “Toys for my grandchildren,” said another.

I never checked to see if the toolbox would float. It would make a great dinghy for the dinghy.

When he reached me, I said, “A boat.”

“A toy boat?” asked the teacher.

“No, a real one.”

The rest of the class stared at me.

“This is Woodworking One. You can’t build a boat on Woodworking One,” said the teacher, with a smirk.

“Don’t you remember Sharonne, from last term? She built a bookshelf. I promise my boat will be just like a bookshelf.” He rolled his eyes and made me stay after class to convince me that I couldn’t build a boat.

The following week, I showed him the plans. Phil Bolger’s Tortoise dinghy looks a lot like a floating bookshelf, so he reluctantly permitted me to start. A couple of months later, Barry and I loaded my plywood dinghy on top of Peepcar and brought it home. I’d done the final assembly in Woodworking Two, with a more encouraging instructor.

The good news was, I still had all my fingers. (So did the instructor from Woodworking One, who’d nearly run his hand through the table saw helping me cut the framing.) The bad news was, it wasn’t a boat yet.

It was a thing of beauty, constructed of luan plywood with pine framing and copper ring nails. For the first year, it sat on our back porch. For the next five, it hung in my in-laws’ garage.

I was proud of my accomplishment, so I told people that I’d built a boat. But whenever Barry heard me say that, he’d correct me. “No, you didn’t. It’s not finished.”

In 2008, I painted it with epoxy resin to protect the wood, and we tied it on top of the Squid Wagon. We drove from Seattle to Flutterby in Beaufort, North Carolina, via San Diego, with that tiny, funny-looking boat on top of the van.

The ant and the elephant along the California coast (April 2008)

It looked like an ant on top of an elephant. All the way across the USA, we got reactions like the guy with the toothpick in his mouth who sauntered over to Barry, not noticing me nearby. “What is that?” he asked. “Some kind of storage pod?” “No,” said Barry, “It’s a boat.” The guy looked more closely and said, “Oh.”

Then Barry added, “My wife built it.” The guy cracked up laughing. He thought it was the punchline to a really funny joke.

The epoxy wasn’t UV-resistant, and by the time we crossed the country, it already needed sanding and painting. We didn’t have anywhere to store it out of the weather, so we rented a 5×7 storage unit and stuffed it inside, using it to store other items — just like a bookshelf!

For another two and a half years, when I said, “I built a boat,” Barry said, “No, you haven’t.” I’d glare at him. Couldn’t he just shut up?

That was getting really irritating, so last summer, I took the poor neglected dinghy out and put it under Flutterby. It was time to finish it, a job only I could do. If I let Barry help me, then, when I said “I built a boat,” he’d still have an excuse to correct me. “No, you didn’t. We built a boat.”

My sawhorses sat on some turf with boatbuilding history. Between 1983 and 1995, Bock Marine built and launched over 30 boats in that spot, including the 122-foot White Dove Too. Like the WDT, my dinghy was brought from another location and completed on that hallowed ground. But there are some differences. Their ships were steel, launched using a dramatic side-launching technique (this is a hilarious photo of people running from the splash) instead of our painter-dangling end-launching technique. I calculated the ratio of length-to-time-under-construction: At 6.5 feet and 9 years, Flutterwent’s ratio was 505. Knocking out a couple of 85-footers a year, Bock’s was 2.1.

I finished the dinghy in the heat of the summer, using all the woodworking, epoxy, fiberglass, and painting skills I learned on Flutterby. While I was working, I wore headphones and hearing protection. Not because of the power tools, but because I was tired of all the men in the boatyard wandering over to stare. I was tired of explaining that I was not building a hard dodger to cover the companionway.

When I was done, I said to Barry, “I built a boat.” Then he hugged me instead of correcting me.

It still wasn’t completely done, having no means of propulsion. But it’s past midnight, and I am done for tonight! Tiny boat, big story. I’ll put the photo essay below and save the rest for another time.

Barry and Kris drop the dinghy into the water, stern-first. "Yikes! Who's got the painter?"

With nerves of steel, I step into the floating box. Ted, who has launched many dinghies, was there to help, and Barry had the painter and the champagne.

You can tell from my hand that I am afraid to move, for fear it will sink or tip over.

I haven't sunk yet. And I have the champagne. So I'm smiling.

Oh no! Here comes Barry to see if he can swamp my dinghy.

As the current carries us away from safety, I say, "You want some of this?"

Giggling, we pick up the oars and paddle into the sunset. She tracks like a shoebox instead of a soapdish.

Getting out is trickier than getting in. Barry made sure the champagne bottle was safe, but I think it was empty by now.

Whee! Barry has fun scooting under Flutterby's bow line. At 6-1/2 feet long, the Tortoise dinghy is just long enough for a nice nap.

Bill Brown's mischievious grin

When Barry and I learned last week that Bill Brown had died unexpectedly of a heart attack, it knocked the stuffing out of us. We hugged each other and cried for a while. And then I imagined Bill’s voice in my head, saying “Enough sillyness.” We got back to work on the boat.

There were a lot of people who disliked Bill Brown, but he didn’t seem to mind. His abrasiveness was a test. If someone concluded the worst, that he was obnoxious, pigheaded, or rude, then he’d plant his tongue firmly in his cheek and do his best to earn that reputation by “yanking their chain.”

Me, I liked Bill Brown a lot. Probably enough to make up for all the people in the world who didn’t like Bill Brown.

Bill was outspoken, honest, and one of the most supportive friends I’ve had in my entire life. We shared our sailboat cruising dreams with him, and he never spoke a disparaging word about how we pursued them. Bill never once teased us about the length of the FLUTTERBY refit. He was not only tolerant of our breaks from the boatyard, he reveled in our land-based travels and told me my writing was as good as William Least Heat-Moon.

Bill made me laugh when he wrote, “Tolerance is learned. Living aboard certainly teaches tolerance. Living aboard in a boatyard has gotta be the postgrad course in tolerance.” It was his way of saying that he understood what we were going through. Tongue-in-cheek, of course.

Right now, I know I should write something funny for Bill. He loved my writing and once said, “You guys have one of the widest ranges of humor of people I know.” I’m not finding the humor in his untimely kicking of the bucket, but because he was so irreverent, he would denounce anything serious as, well, sillyness.

I went through Bill’s most recent emails and decided to have the last laugh. I’m just going to publish Bill — in his own words. Now I’m off the hook, and I can go burble and cry all I want. He’s sure to make you chuckle…whether or not you’re an engineer.

***
“Life is much easier if one doesn’t have to make sense all the time.”
***
“When in a Wal-Mart out of dire necessity, I feel like the Starship Enterprise at the edge of known space in one of those scenes where Romulan and Klingon vessels are all loitering about waiting for the other guy to do something stupid first. I do not belong in a Wal-Mart. But I could enjoy being a tour guide in them. Just keep your phazer on stun. Or perhaps a can of whipped cream would be adequate protection but only if you were wearing your clown suit. ”
***
“There is no such thing as ‘too much sex’. Technically, it is considered self regulating.”
***
“Burning Man has franchises? Imagine that. How are you sure you are at a Georgia Burning Man and not at a KKK event?”
***
“…a cookbook is essentially a survival manual. Look in any Bible. Right after Revelations, the last book, you will find the Book of Betty Crocker stapled right in there.”
***
“Across most of America until, oh, roughly Ohio, a proper tavern is defined by a jukebox that has two songs: anything by Buddy Holly and ‘Party Doll’ by Buddy Parks. Surely somebody has sought to map this? Maybe it’s my calling.”
***
“These are people who believe ‘published’ means print on paper as in a page you can dogear. No way on this planet do I want my computer students dogearing a flat panel display. I am the one they will bring it to to fix. I don’t want to even think about dogearing a CRT monitor.”
***
“Aren’t you glad epoxy isn’t toothpaste!”
***
“My spell checker … does not yet recognize the term ‘Obama’. It does recognize ‘Barrack’… It recognizes ‘Lincoln’, ‘Eisenhower’, and ‘Johnson’. Interesting is that it will recognize ‘Abraham’ and ‘Dwight’, but not ‘Lyndon’… It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum you stand. You can neither praise nor condemn without having to deal with this in your spell checker.”
***
“The crap we fill our brains with amazes me.”
***
“Only an engineer type can spell ‘equilibrium’ without rum as a spellchecker.”
***
“I had cause to see if our tax dollars were being well spent so I called 911 as little else civic was going on on a Sunday. Sure enough, they hurried right out and hauled me to the ER where I got to see all of the neat new toys we just bought for our hospital expansion demonstrated to (on actually) me. No problem says they … The toys were actually fun as well as good to have handy…”
***
Regarding a Mac G3 laptop: “There is a story here. How did you come into this toilet seat?”
***
“You are looking way too serious. Rum will fix that. Always has. Always will.”
***
“Mainliners, heroine users, know that cutting pure heroine with talc and all those other contaminants is bad form. Same with rum. You cut it with Coke and other contaminants and, well, you have a contaminated experience. Proper rum has no commas or conjunctions following it with a list of contaminants like soda pop. At least not unless you want the headaches and barfing that come with contaminants. This is not to be confused with solid nutrition being used to supplement rum such as oatmeal, chocolate, coffee, or stimulants such as other medicinal alcohols or sex.”
***
“I am well aware that hitting the forward button is the only social skill, the only social life some people have.”
***
“I’ve always said I go to my high school reunions to see what I’ve overcome.”
***
“Puny Anacortes? We are talking the gateway to the San Juans here, western portal to the fabled Northwest Passage, western terminus of all the great roads west, and all you have to do to get here is hitch-hike the last sixteen miles. We don’t want a great thing to be too accessible.”
***
“From memory of my travels in that area (southeastern Ohio), if you had just gone down the road a coupla more blocks and turned left, you’d have found the Bates Motel – quite quaint and quiet for a forties era clapboard motel as i recall. You’d have wanted to avoid the shower though.”
***
“The title of this book, or chapter, will be ‘How I spent my winter in the Great Pacific Northwest living in a storage locker sorting crap I really didn’t need but couldn’t let go’”
***
“Killer Oatmeal washed down by a Coffee Herbie. Food of the GAWDS!”
***
“‘…squidwaggin’ ” as a verb sort of sounds naughty as if it has something to do with fallopian tubes. But we know it is just exquisite transportation.”
***
“Becoming single, Christmas became fun. BIGTIME! Single people have get togethers. Lots of get togethers. Go to interesting if cheap places. Gather our kids together in a big bunch. Do all sorts of things that we learn about might in some way be a Christmas sort of thing for someone. Theater, movies, tavern hopping, sailing someplace, sing our heads off, helping others as a group, the list goes on and on … I wondered why it wasn’t this way before. I guess it is because suburbia frowns on this sort of thing … Married again for some years now, this is still what we do… sort of.”
***
“Why can’t I make even a passable meatloaf? One of life’s great mysteries.”
***
“What (your boat’s name) looks like is not half so important as what it sounds like when hollering it on channel 16 as part of a mayday call.”
***
In response to my quip, “I should have just gotten into my birthday suit and stood on the foredeck with a bottle of shampoo,” Bill said, “Done this a few times in marinas. Only once, at Westview (Powell River) did anyone care. I had announced my intentions prior to doing so. When nearing the end of my disrobe, the genteel couple simply picked up their afternoon tea, stood, turned, and quietly walked to the the other end of their yacht. It was a very hot day, Sunday, which is the one day of the week in Westview that everything must be closed by local ordinance. That included the marina services including showers. Why else do cockpits have scuppers?”
***
Bill’s response to a limerick about toe amputation: “Hang 9?”
***
“To shinny is the only way to get a tetherball attached to the top of the tetherball pole. Free-climb does not even approximate the task. Free-climb is what you do on a walk to the top of Mt. Everest. You shinny a mast.”
***
“I really don’t have many good feelings about Wyoming. Being Dick Cheney hails from Wyoming, I’m not expecting any.”
***
Regarding a recent colonoscopy: “Frankly, I’ve had … many a drinking bout that ended far more dramatically. These passings, gas and otherwise, didn’t even earn bragging rights among those of a scatological bent … I’d had the fear that I was going to swamp the fifth wheel’s holding tank … Once again, we learn the awful truth. That the legend of The Great Hunt is really nothing more than a long walk on an empty stomach. So much for legends.”
***
“It’s not my place to whine and I’m not very good at it anyway.”
***
“My greatest reward is learning I caused an engineer to chuckle.”
***
“I’m not twisted. But I do think in ironious ways. The world about me, not being flat, is what is twisted.”

(After reading what Bill wrote to us all these years, I might add: And funny as hell.)

I came up with a little list last night, during a particularly stubborn case of insomnia. It’s my list of the five things a woman may find useful when traveling cross-country alone:

1. A credit card. This is useful for food, lodging, and fuel, which are the only things you really need to make it across this vast country. There’s a big drawback to using it for fuel, though. You swipe the card, fill the tank, and don’t actually interact with anyone. That makes me feel lonely.

2. A roll of paper towels. Since there is no gas station attendant, you need the paper towels for wiping the dipstick when you check your own oil. Better lonely than dead, I think scrubbing the sad remains of a giant bug off the windshield with my paper towel.

3. An iPod. I use this for mood modification — I put polkas on it to cheer myself up, so that when I pull out of the gas station, I won’t feel lonely on the highway.

4. A black lace bra. Unseen by others, this is a secret confidence-building item. Once I have cheered myself up, I wear it into a rowdy midwest bar under a flannel shirt with jeans and sneakers.

5. An orange satin backless evening gown. This is the ultimate way to combat loneliness. Once you are brave enough to interact with the people in the rowdy midwest bar, you accept a dare that you won’t wear an evening gown into the bar. Everyone in the bar knows how tiny your car is, and assumes that you are joking about carrying an evening gown. One quick circuit of the room in that dress and you can pretty much get what you want. Specifically, I have always wanted to drive a tractor, so that is my goal for the exercise.

If all goes well, there may be a photo of #5 tonight. That’s more likely, and more interesting, than any photos of #1 thru 4.

During a period of a couple months, I discovered that roosters don’t necessarily crow only in the morning, they crow all day. I thought it was charming. Other neighbors — the upscale ones — didn’t find it charming. They complained, and the flock was made compliant with Seattle law: Three hens, max, and zero roosters.

After that, the chickens were very quiet in their little coop, tucked behind some bushes and against the house in the front yard.

Given this experience, when we were invited to chicken-sit four chickens at a different friend’s house in Seattle, I was puzzled. “How can you have four?” “It’s OK. One of them is not a chicken,” was my friend’s response. This friend will remain nameless, because I’m afraid that the one that is not a chicken acts so much like a chicken, there might be a slight compliance issue. At the risk of being an accessory to the crime, I will not publish any names.

Except for the chickens’ names. First names only.

We arrived at the house for our chicken-sit instructions, and indeed, there were four creatures that looked like chickens. Two brown, two black-and-white. Mango, Frango, and Lucky are chickens. But Clam is simply the most chicken-like clam you’ll ever meet. There is no compliance issue. “This house has three chickens and a clam, Officer.”

Which one of these is not a chicken?

Like the other girls, Clam bursts out of the coop with a rush of flapping, flying energy when you open the door. Then she runs around the yard, clucking and looking for bugs. She digs up the dirt in the side yard, which may explain why the cucumbers are stunted. She hates being cooped up and wants to be top in the pecking order. She runs over and attempts to eat anything you toss on the ground, whether it’s a cucumber peel or a frisbee. She has been seen drinking from the infamous avian-nipple watering system. She produces award-winning volumes of chicken shit.

But lately I’ve noticed that Clam’s behavior is a little different from the others. Yesterday, she came over to me as I was standing on the patio. I thought she might be suffering from insecurity, being the outsider, so she was going to be more affectionate. “OW!” That was not affection, it was aggression! After she pecked me on the big toe, I punished the whole lot of them by vanquishing them from the backyard. And decided it was no longer a good idea to stand barefoot on the patio.

Ow! (Chicken pecking the photographer's foot)

Today, I went out in the yard wearing clogs. Picking green beans, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my heel. Clam had found the only exposed flesh on my foot and pecked it. Back she went, along with the others, into the Chicken Prison Exercise Yard. Barry seemed relieved.

Barry contemplates the risk of squatting near a clam with a beak

Right now, the chicken-sit is pretty easy; the chickens are too young to lay eggs. But what will happen when they start laying? Will Clam lay eggs, too? Or will she lay clams? She just might be the juvenile delinquent of the chicken yard, in which case, I hope she’ll straighten up and fly right. Otherwise, she’ll be out of here, and her owners — no, I still won’t tell you their names — probably won’t give a cluck.

Clam emphatically proclaims, "I am not a chicken!"

Until one day, sitting at the computer in North Carolina, dripping sweat on the keyboard, I saw a new one.

icon on fire

“Oh my God! The thermometer is on fire!”

Down at the bottom of the screen, there was indeed an icon showing a red thermometer with flames coming out of it. It very nicely illustrated what I was feeling — a day when I thought I might come around a boat and find Lucifer fanning himself, his pitchfork leaning up against a jackstand.

The thermometer-on-fire icon appeared a number of times in North Carolina, although I never saw the Devil. Too humid for him, I guess. But when we got to Seattle, the icons changed. Now they were back to clouds and sun, no lightning bolts or flaming thermometers. Until one day (you can guess where I’m going here), we looked at Forecastfox, which Barry had set to display Seattle weather, and…

“Oh my God! The thermometer is on fire!”

So what do you do in the Northwest when the thermometer is on fire?

We drove down to Yelm, where Tom took us to a special swimming hole. The only slight problem was the fact that we hadn’t brought bathing suits. Tom assured us that they wouldn’t be necessary; it was a private spot, and after all, it was Tuesday.

We drove through cow pastures, parked, and waded, clothed, into the Nisqually River. The banks were lined with evergreen trees, and the water rushed over rocks and little rapids and our ankles. It was totally cool and refreshing — but what was this? Around the corner came an overloaded rubber raft, packed with Mom, Dad, and the kids. It was followed by additional family members in inner tubes. Then a couple of guys popped out of the woods across the river with fishing poles. And another raft went by with two guys, whooping and hollering, and a cooler.

I had resigned myself to wading, when from behind us, yet another person appeared. This place was like Grand Central Station! This time, it was a woman in a sarong who said her name was Boopsie. I’m not sure if that’s her real name, or if that was a skinny-dipping alias. If so, I need a skinny-dipping alias.

Boopsie charged into the river and nearly lost her sarong in the current. Tom chivalrously helped her hang onto it. At least, I think that’s what he was doing. She made her way to a big rock, perched on it like a mermaid, and entertained us with stories of bathing-suit-free adventures in this spot. “I was here one time,” she said, “and I couldn’t hear anything but the rushing of the water on this rock. Well, along came a helicopter from Fort Lewis, super-low over the water, and before I realized what was happening, there I was, eye-to-eye with the pilot. He just hovered there, staring at my you-know-whats and giving me a big grin.” We also grinned and decided to join Boopsie in the river.

Of course, more rafts came by, but when they did, I submerged myself so they wouldn’t see any you-know-whats. Then a helicopter flew by from Fort Lewis, as low as he possibly could. Boopsie waved at the pilot. I sank down so only my nose was above water. Eventually, we got out, refreshed and covered in goosebumps.

My 2003 polar bear swim

The following day, when we got up, guess what we found? The thermometer was on fire AGAIN. Luckily, we’d made plans to meet Brett and Ann and sail on their Thunderbird, Naumachia. This time, I took my bathing suit. Hard to believe this toasty giant bathtub was the same Lake Washington where I did my first polar bear swim on New Year’s Day 2003. The water temperature was in the 40′s that day, as you can see from the old photo.

And as a result of the trip on Naumachia, I have a bit of useful information for the next record-breaking hot day. On the west shore of Lake Washington, there is still a nude beach. At least, when we motored by, half the people there were wearing flesh-colored bathing suits. And there were no gawking helicopter pilots or people in rafts, only gawking people on sailboats. Now I’m set — if I can just come up with a skinny-dipping alias as good as “Boopsie.”

They rolled their eyes, but they came anyway.

That morning, we had begun installing the first three portlights. “Which side do we do first?” Barry asked. “The port side, of course!” My reasoning? The picnic table and barbecue grill were on the port side, so our guests would be able to admire our shiny bronze ports.

As usual, the work took longer than expected. We were still cleaning up messy black butyl and white polysulfide caulk as the guests began to arrive. We never made it to the showers, and the interior never got cleaned up. We hoped our friends wouldn’t come up on the boat and notice.

But as we fired up the grill and set out the appetizers, the first raindrops began to fall, and there was no place to go but up the ladder into the boat. The scene inside Flutterby was a disaster — there were tools and parts and clothes everywhere, and dishes were piled up from several meals. We quickly passed out drinks, hoping to distract our guests from the boat’s condition. We kept them busy, too: All hands were needed to man buckets and towels under the starboard portlights, which at that point were gaping 5- by 12-inch holes in the side of the cabin.

The storm passed fairly quickly and the party moved back outside, and nobody gave us a hard time about the condition of our interior. Our friends have very low standards, or else they’re very kindhearted. Given the  gifts I received at the party (my birthday had been the day before), I think it’s the latter.

Over the next few days, I took stock of our one-year situation. I have learned and accomplished a lot, including the following things that I didn’t know I needed to experience:

1. I got stuck in the lazarette (despite #3.2), had a panic attack, and had to be extricated by Barry. Have you ever noticed that the word “extricate” never has a happy connotation?
2. I sprained my ankle three times, once while stuck in the lazarette having a panic attack.
3. I broke one toe, lost 13 pounds, and cut off a foot (of hair).
4. I took one belly dance lesson. I would have taken more, except for #2 and #3.1, above.
5. I have handled carpenter bees in the ladder, a mud-dauber wasp trying to build a nest under the chart table, and a black widow spider in my water pitcher. These are all potentially harmful insects, and they did not make me scream. On the other hand, every 3-inch palmetto bug that ran across my galley counter made me shriek loudly, to Barry’s discomfort (if he sat further away, I wouldn’t be shrieking in his ear…see #7).
6. I became on intimate terms with Mr. Dremel, Mr. Orbital Sander, Mr. Makita Drill, and Mr. Jigsaw. I am now on speaking terms with Mr. Angle Grinder, and I’m getting to know Mr. Fein.
7. I found myself occasionally not on speaking terms with my husband, who is rarely more than 6 feet away from me. He can operate any power tool one-handed while lying on his back with his eyes closed in the coffin-shaped pilot berth, which I find maddening.
   
8. I fell in love with my full-face organic vapor respirator but found that it’s impossible to kiss someone or scratch your nose while wearing one.
9. I figured out that if you don’t protect the zipper of your Tyvek suit with tape, sometimes you drip epoxy on it and can’t get your clothes off.
10. I have learned to tolerate, but not enjoy, galley faucet roulette. I never know if the water is going to come out in an orderly fashion, as gravity and the universe intended, or if it’s going to explode violently into the cup I am holding, causing lemonade to erupt like Mount Vesuvius all over the front of my shirt. This is why I no longer buy pink lemonade.
11. I no longer think it’s unusual to wear hearing protection earmuffs while cooking dinner because Barry is operating loud power tools (see #6)  three feet away. It’s easy to burn things when you can’t hear them sizzling in the skillet, which makes the smoke alarm go off, which is OK, because I’m wearing my earmuffs. Barry always wishes he was wearing earmuffs when a palmetto bug runs across the counter (see #5).
12. I learned that when the  Sriracha chili sauce gets clogged, one should not simply squeeze the bottle harder. When I did, the lid exploded off, and I let out a loud, four-letter expletive. At this point, Barry looked up from his computer and said, alarmed, “Please tell me that’s not your blood!” To him, it looked like an unplanned amputation.
    

Most importantly, I discovered that some of the nicest people in the world are found in boatyards, hardware stores, lumberyards, and vegetable stands. This, coupled with the miraculous fact that we have not had to buy anything at West Marine, explains why I still have a sense of humor after a whole year.

***
North Carolina has many institutions of higher learning, like Duke, and UNC, and Back Swamp Community College. If I was trying to get into graduate school, I’d hate to have that last one on my resume.
***
We recently drove past an antique store in Woodbine, Georgia, where they call a spade a spade. Their sign simply said, “Dead people’s things for sale.”
***
Speaking of signs, our nearby farmer’s market has a huge banner that says, “Collards,” in 2-foot tall letters. At Thanksgiving, I watched a man come in and buy so many that they filled the cab of his truck. He drove away, his head barely peeking above the sea of green.
***
Near Christmas, I saw another huge banner, along a back road in North Carolina. This one said, “Collard Kraut.” I bet that gets a lot of takers.
***
Somewhere along I-95 in Florida, we saw an actual restaurant called “Ying’s Chinee Takee Outee.” That’s either an anachronism or a sadistic signmaker.
***
Speaking of Florida, I’ve got a new slogan for the state, based on recent observations: “Florida, the dead armadillo state.” Then again, there are a lot of states vying for that title.
***
Georgia might consider a new slogan, too. “Interstates under construction…since Eisenhower.”
***
And South Carolina might use this: “Y’all be nice, or we’ll secede again.”
***
OK, what’s with the Christmas inflatable yard decorations? Only about one in ten is inflated. The rest are not festive holiday cheer, they’re what Barry refers to as “technicolor flaccid lumps.”
***
Real streets I would not like to live on: Tattletale Lane. Embarrass Avenue. Dead Cow Lane.
***
Real streets I would like to live on: Ju Ju Lane. Daisy Street.
***
Can you imagine having a friend in Friend, Nebraska? It’s easier than imagining an enemy there.
***
Laramie, Wyoming: Where the truck stop ladies’ room has a vase full of plastic flowers…and the vase has water in it.
***
What would you find across from the Sleep 4 Le$$? The competition — a white sign, black letters: “Generic Motel.”
***
In Elko, Nevada, we drove past an establishment called “Inez’s Dancing and Diddling.” Wow. Are there really still women named Inez?
***
We stopped at a rest area next to Stinking Water Pass. When I took my water bottle to the fountain to fill it, I was stopped by a large sign that said, “Non-potable water.” No kidding.
***
On I-95, we were passed by a car with a personalized license plate that said “Ms Epoxy.” She was driving fast, probably trying to get away from a bunch of single guys with boats.
***
Weirdest boat name this year: A fishing boat called Dang Brothers. I guess, to be grammatically correct, that should be Danged Brothers.
***
I wish the folks at Gaskills Hardware had some punctuation for their changeable sign. The last time I saw it, the sign said, “Crab Pot Trees.”
***
Speaking of things that don’t go together, here’s my favorite pair of highway signs from Route 24: On the top, “Welcome to Turkey, North Carolina.” On the bottom, “Bird Sanctuary.”