One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.

-- Herman Hesse

Our Green Family Summer has been an annual tradition since well before the kids were born.  We started traveling west to visit Sherri's family when we moved away from the Northwest.  Sherri wanted to see her family, of course, but she also needed that yearly dose of mountains, glacial streams, salmon dinners under the stars, and blackberry-stained fingers to sustain her.  This is her home, and nothing will ever quite feel the same.

Our permanent home is, of course, in Appalachia, but, when people ask about our summer trip I always say that we "live" in the Northwest in the summer months.  It's Sherri's home, but also my "home away from home."  "The Ranch," as we all call it, was Sherri's grandfather's and is now run by her folks.  It's a gathering place, to say the least, for a whole range of James family and friends and, since the weather can be so dreary during the rest of the year, a favorite place for many people to soak up some sun during the Pacific Northwest summer.

The Ranch sits on the Columbia River, where the fabled Columbia Gorge begins.  This is not the mouth of the Columbia, which lies some 100 miles west.  This is where blackberry covered bluffs and evergreen escarpments first rise from the water to form a deep valley stretching 80 miles east, reaching as high as 4000 feet above the water.  As a matter of fact, if you drive up route 14 in Washington out of Washougal, you'll pass a sign which reads, "Welcome to the Columbia River National Scenic Gorge."  Directly beyond the sign, some two miles off, you'll see the houses, barns, and outbuildings -- these are living quarters for the ranchers and the ranched -- of M Bar J Ranch.  The driveway snakes between the buildings and then lands atop the dike, which originates on The Ranch and protects the downstream towns of Camas and Washougal.  About 3/4 of a mile out on the dike road it veers west, parallel to the river, and we take a small side drive down to a narrow, mowed strip just up off the beach.  Among the cottonwoods, in a park-like setting that Sherri's Dad, Ron, keeps immaculately mowed and trimmed, is where we make our summer home -- this year with our Green Family Summer rig.

If you're familiar with the area, you'll know it is, among many other things, rich in natural beauty (now protected from development on both sides of the Columbia by the 20-year-old Gorge Act); an internationally recognized, up-and-coming wine region (Pinot Noir, anyone?); and a favorite with wind-surfers, due to the steady winds which seem to come in from all directions.  Although not wind-surfers ourselves, we're looking forward to relying on the wind generator to keep our batteries brimming with electrons to power our Aliner Ease, cameras, and laptop.  As soon as the wind generator is up the wind sets the blades to spinning.  It seems to work especially well in the evenings and at night, when I like to lay awake and listen to it whisper in the breeze -- an oddly comforting sound which seems to fit right in with the sloshing of the river on the bank and the night songs of bugs and coyote.

  

Once we're settled out here, we look forward to many of the same traditions every year.  Picking the wild Himalayan blackberries (an invasive, I'm told) to make jam, for one.  Lawton Creek, along the eastern border of the ranch, is a naturally cool place to pick the huge berries which cascade down over your head in large bunches.  You can wade up the creek in river shoes, plucking berries carefully from the brambles . . . one for the bucket, three for me.  As soon as they're cleaned and sorted, we turn them into pints of blackberry jam, or freeze them in gallon bags for use at home later.  Often in the winter time back home we'll break out a bag of berries and make up a cobbler to remind us of our summertime.  At the mouth of Lawton Creek there is a wide fan of sorted gravel which the family calls "the Agate Beach," where the well-trained eye can find opaque agates smaller than a pea and as large as your fist, the latter winning unofficial contests which spring up during each agate hunt.  Winter takes these home and polishes them in a small tumbler, and you'll see caches of these agates all over our house, evidence of summers past.  But blackberry and agate hunting are only the beginning here -- many evenings find us cooking salmon or trout on the grill, polishing off platters of fish and game that friends and neighbors will bring down to the beach, knowing us Easterners are hungry for Pacific Northwest delights.  Sherri's Dad is a fisherman and hunter, and is often the source of the trout and moose we enjoy while we're here.  We're usually packing away the last of the dishes and food from a feast about the time a lazy moon drifts up over Crown Point, just across the river in Oregon.  We often wonder, "What are the rich people doing?"  You can't buy evenings like this.

The kids play in the river with their cousins most days.  "Walking to the island" means waiting for the water level in the Columbia to drop (as less water is let through Bonneville Dam, just upstream), leaving sand-bars exposed enough so that swimming out to Reed Island in the middle of the river isn't necessary -- usually a short, waist-deep wade is all that is needed to make it across.  Once to the island, the kids will jump off the sand bars into deep pools which are left behind by the receding water.  Sherri talks about playing here when she was a kid -- how they would pass a nerf football to each other, leaping out over the pools, never knowing if they would come down into water up to their knees or way over their heads.  More than once we've pushed stranded boats off of those sand bars, which seem to have the effect of keeping most of the boat traffic away from the ranch and across the river, nearer the channel on the Oregon side.  Still, the James family wave-runners are popular with the kids, and each year they get a ride or two out with Grandma, usually to jump the wake of one or another barge.  I've pointed out to the kids that not many of their friends could claim to have taken a white-knuckle wave-runner ride to jump barge wakes with their 70-year-old grandmothers.  They think it's cool no matter what.

   

Me?  I'm happy with a good cup of coffee in the morning after a run on the dike road, watching the osprey fish.  Or a cold beer in the evening, watching the osprey fish.  Or a warm beer in the afternoon, watching the osprey fish.  That's the vacation part of this travel stuff.

One of the time-honored traditions while we're here is to spend a day at the Clark County fair.  There the kids stuff themselves with all manner of delectable fried food (although we have drawn the line when it comes to deep fried snickers bars . . . I'm not kidding) and then try to make themselves as sick as possible by riding those rides that go around and around and around.  This year they grudgingly left the midway to star in a kids/audience participation show about singing farm animals.  My kids, of course, were far and away the best animal-singers of the bunch, and I wondered if there might be any agents in the crowd just looking for a couple of animal-singers for some new musical production of, say, Animal Farm.  Or maybe an adaptation of Macbeth set in a barnyard?  Alas, the fleeting performance of my two singing-animal prodigies went unappreciated by the crowd in attendance (the great unwashed!).  But I digress.  There's still nothing cuter than a bunch of little kids dressed up in animal costumes.

After the fair, we headed north toward Seattle.  We still had one Nature Conservancy preserve to visit -- Yellow Island in the San Juans.  As it happens, my great Uncle Murray lives in Anacortes, WA, where we were to catch the ferry to Friday Harbor on Tuesday, August 5th, to meet our TNC contacts, so we paid him a visit.  Actually, he was a really good sport about the whole thing -- since his daughter (my cousin, Laura) and her friend, Karen, were already staying in the house, we parked our Aliner in his driveway where we spent the night.  I'm not sure the neighbors would have approved, but the Aliner is so small and unassuming that no one was likely the wiser.



We took the 8:45am ferry out to Friday Harbor.  Back when we met, Sherri and I would take ferries to Kingston from Edmonds in order to spend the weekend hiking the Olympic Mountains, so we were glad to be able to show the kids how the ferry system works.  We drove on, locked up, and headed up to the passenger decks.  With a little "cel-phone-triangulation," we found Robin Stanton, Media Relations Manager in Washington for the Nature Conservancy on board.  Robin was visiting the little Yellow Island Preserve for the first time, too, and she seemed eager to see it. 

   

Phil Green, TNC's Yellow Island caretaker, met us at the docks in Friday Harbor to take us the rest of the way.  Phil and Robin seemed to fit the Nature Conservancy the way our other guides had -- people with a genuine concern for the areas they're trying to protect, coupled with an openness and general sense of curiosity about the natural world. 



The day was brilliantly sunny -- one of those perfect Pacific Northwest summer days your mind likes to recall in mid-winter.  Phil navigated the 20 minute boat-ride from Friday Harbor out to Yellow Island Preserve, and gave us the run of the place.  He showed us every corner of the 11 acre site, with seals tending to pups on the gravel spits at each end of the island.  We hiked all of the trails (under a mile of them), toured the memorial site of the family who had owned the island before selling to TNC, and got a tour of the 70-year-old driftwood cabin where Phil lives.  We shot lots of HD video of the island (look for an edited video on our site soon!).  At the end of the day, it was hard for us to tear ourselves away and head back to catch the ferry to the mainland.

Back in Friday Harbor, Robin elected to take the 5pm ferry back to Anacortes, while we set off to Lime Kiln State Park, on the west side of San Juan Island, to look for Orca Whales.  While we had a nice hike around the state park, we were informed by a ranger there that Orcas had been spotted off the southern end of the island. 





We climbed a lighthouse and looked into Puget Sound, but didn't see any Orcas out in the early evening sun.  After awhile we realized that we'd need to head back to Friday Harbor to catch the 7pm ferry, or we'd be stuck until 10pm with some pretty tired kids.  We filled our wait time for the ferry with a sampling of the local brew at the pub, and snacked on some excellent calamari.  We rode the ferry back to Anacortes in the golden light of a Puget Sound sunset.  A few days later Robin sent me an e-mail to tell me that she had seen Orcas in the sound right from the deck of the 5pm ferry that evening . . . had we just headed back home with Robin we'd have seen Orcas after all.  That's okay, we figured, because we will definitely be coming back to the San Juan Islands on future Green Family Summer trips.  Next time we'll kayak around the islands, which seems to be one of the best ways to explore the area.

  

We stopped in Seattle to do an interview with Penny LeGate of KIRO-TV, and then headed down to Toledo, WA, (Sherri's hometown) to spend the night with Sherri's Great Aunt Jo and Great Uncle Matt.  After a great visit, we made our way back to the Columbia River and the Ranch, happy to be "home" after our brief adventure.

Stay tuned . . . our Green Family Summer may be fading fast, but it's not over yet.