Two and a Quarter Tons

Actually, it's not that much rock. Well, it is a lot if you have to carry it all at once, or if you had to move it some dozen miles from the landscape rock yard. But if the pile is on your driveway, you have a wheelbarrow and a half an acre of gully, and you want to build terraces, it's not that much rock.

After four days of a few hours each morning (it's really hot this time of year), I have only two small piles left, but the slope by the five steps has some nice rock groupings.

Plus, I burned off the weight I put on visiting Lower Alaska last month and sitting on my derriere for thirty-two hundred miles of driving over two weeks.

The gully with its rock groupings is looking more and more archaic, as if the remnants of some ancient civilization.

Next time, I think I will order four or maybe six tons. I wonder how many tons that truck can carry.

But for today, I think I will let this resting rattler be and work inside the house. Where, oh where are our king snakes?

Two Days, Twenty-Four Hours

The Great Basin, Nevada, south of Ely.

Geography and flora shock us as we sit at home in Tucson two days after we left Lower Alaska, after about twenty-four hours of driving time. We've seen so much change in a short time.

The Salish Sea is so lush with vegetation and water. Drive over Snoqualmie Pass and past Ellensburg, the rolling hills of the almost treeless Inland Empire spreads out. Then the Yakima River and its vineyards and orchards, then bare hills, then the Columbia River, "Welcome to Oregon" near Umatilla, and more bare hills until Pendleton and the Blue Mountains. On and on.

Most of the places we passed and their sequence are fresh in my mind, like a road map inside the head of a wagon train guide.

I was hoping to take a photo of this sign
marking the east end of the
Extraterrestrial Highway . . .

It rained as we left Seattle, it again rained in the Great Basin, our second morning after overnight in Ely, and it rained very heavily just as we pulled into out little dead-end street of San Simeon.

. . . but this was how it looked to us,
blurry. The other snap is off the web.

Indeed, on our drive north two weeks earlier, it had drizzled in Nevada's Great Basin, then just as we drove onto Whidbey Island from the ferry, it started to rain heavily.

Rain is a blessing.

It's impossible to describe what it's like being by the Salish Sea. It's gorgeous. It's impossible to describe countless places of dramatic and subtle beauty along our route — and that's only from the road as we whizzed by. (One of these days I will retire and actually pull off the road occasionally.) It's equally impossible to describe the harsh, stunning, and inspiring beauty of the Sonoran Desert.

I can write that it's good to be home and that I'm glad we have made our home on our little acre of the Sonoran Desert.

Snowbirds and Bedouins

If snowbirds are folks from cold areas wintering in warm areas, what do you call folks from hot areas summering in cool areas? 

Bedouins?

When Shari and I first moved to Tucson, it was mostly for winters. Summers we spent at our house on Whidbey Island. After three years of seasonal migrations, we settled on Baja Arizona and sold our house on Whidbey.

We'd visit Lower Alaska maybe for a couple of weeks in autumn. My last visit was October two years ago. We had fog so thick we didn't see the sun for several days.

This year we're visiting in high summer when afternoons are sunny and hot, locals party for Seafair and get sunburned, and mornings and evenings are moderate enough to wear short pants and sleeves — it's all just like Tucson most of the year.

It's a rural environment on Whidbey Island, isolated by a long wait to get on a ferry boat. Yesterday, the wait was four hours. That's eight ferry boats. There are plenty of weekenders, but the Island is still rustic.

I was walking Nazar this morning, savoring the cool, fresh air of rural Whidbey, enjoying the sunshine, green vegetation, and blue sky. I remembered why we tried the snowbird lifestyle in the first place, migrating like geese over Nevada.

We tried living in two homes in order to savor the best of two very different yet equally beautiful worlds. We boast about the Sonoran Desert, but we still love a rural Lower Alaska that's very familiar and nurturing.

And if staying at Dodi's house overlooking Holmes Harbor is the equivalent of a Bedouin tent, sign me up for Arabic classes.