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A Waltz through the Gulf Islands
Regardless of the calendar, today is an autumn day. With a slow rain falling and a mist moving gently over the lake, I’m not quite ready for this. So a reflection on an earlier August trip to the Gulf Islands is a great way to hold onto summer for a few more days.
As an annual rite of summer passage John and I always visit our neighboring islands. We enjoy a combination of favorite harbors and marinas, as well as other coves and bays recommended by friends.
Loaded and ready to go we motor out of Snug Harbor early morning on a promising August day.
Sailboats and trawlers ply the waters of Haro Strait. We make a run to Bedwell Harbour for our customs clearance. The wind is calm and there are no boats ahead of us at the dock. John is back in less than ten minutes. Welcome to Canada.
We arrive at Ganges, our first destination, at that sweet spot moment when the marina over-nighters have left their slips and the afternoon boaters have yet to arrive. At the dock there is no breeze. This is a hot day of summer and exactly what we’ve been waiting for.
I’m impatient to prowl around Centennial Park, for Saturday at the Ganges Market is worth the trip alone. Each time we come we visit with David, a ruddy Scotsman whose cobalt blue bowls adorned with dragon flies are staples in my kitchen. It’s a bit difficult to navigate today. The park is teeming with folks of all ages.
We stop at every booth to see what the local artists have been up to. I am intrigued by the ‘Chow Boats’ by clay artist Melissa Searcy. The vibrant boats, chop stick oars and marine theme are what the market is about"a unique creation from a gifted artist’s eye.
At the Black Sheep Bookstore, purveyors of the ‘Antiquarian and Nearly New’, I gravitate to the local authors and browse through the shelves of titles on life in B.C. I’ll come back tomorrow when there is room in my bag and buy a book, or maybe two. I’m always intrigued by how others live in these islands.
Finished with our shopping, John and I walk along the water’s edge and listen to the engine roar on a float plane gathering speed to lift off. Further along we see that the marina and harbor are now full of boats.
“Look.” John peers down at the Rotary Dinghy Dock where a double layer of dinghies have become white petals surrounding the dock’s wooden center.
“That’s a good indicator of how busy this place is.” I’m happy to see business is thriving here.
Later, our dishes and flatware join the muted sounds of dinners on the water. There is a tinkle here, laughter over there, followed by the scent and sizzle of salmon on a grill. Good things are happening in Ganges, B.C.
A slight breeze picks up as the sun goes down and carries on it the sound of a band at the Oyster Catcher Restaurant, playing not too loud, and never too late.
“Want to read?” John is ready to enjoy the evening. He arranges the chairs in the cockpit.
“That’d be great.” I wash the few dishes. This will be a tranquil way to end a summer day.
A mega yacht arrives and pivots for a starboard side docking. Crew members work in concert to tie the lines. A young man in an oxford shirt and tie guy leans over the railing to watch the process. A lithesome blonde moves about the upper deck.
John looks up from his book at the white behemoth. “Think they’re having more fun than we are?”
I re-arrange my feet on the cooler- turned-ottoman and sink deeply into my garish orange collapsible chair, a season end bargain sale item from a West Marine store on some former trip. I re-live this perfect day.
“Nope, not possible.”
(Mary Kalbert is a native of Waynesboro, Mississippi. She is a graduate of Oklahoma City University with a Bachelor of Science in Management. Mary is a long time community volunteer.)
Unforgettable Moments
I have often said the windows in our home offer a moving panorama of all that lives outdoors. The back side of the house provides a sweeping view of the lake, dock, woods and all the things that graze, fly, nest or float therein and thereon.
From the windows on the front side of the house there are views of the green oval of grass surrounded by the gravel drive, a large sloping rock on which our deer sleep and rest, an un-mowed meadow where they graze, a trail for a black tailed fox that trots back and forth to other neighbor houses, and a river birch tree that welcomes a variety of birds that perch and twitter among the branches.
This morning as I sit to write there are three bucks lying on a grassy rise out by the shed. Two of them are the largest I’ve ever seen on our acreage. They rest with their hind ends nearly touching. A juvenile completes the third spoke in the buck wheel. Between the three of them a 360 degree sightline is covered. The youngster drops his head onto the haunch of one of the alpha bucks and closes his eyes for a quick nap.
I stop writing to witness a moment I’ve never seen before. A doe steps out of the salal and slowly munches her way toward the bucks. She reaches the young one and bends over to nuzzle him. She steps over the alpha male on whom he rests and bends her head down as the big buck lifts and turns his head toward her in greeting. They touch noses for a moment and she wanders off into the woods.
Miss Spooky has ventured to the edge of the lawn for a better view. Perhaps she too is a little in awe of this scene of group domesticity.
Earlier in the week I had spoken with a neighbor about some of the animal behavior playing out in our yard this summer. She told me she had seen a mature bald eagle bathing in the lake, and I could see in her eyes that it had been a breathtaking moment. Many people wouldn’t believe the things we get to see, she had said.
She is so right. I will never know why the buck herd has decided to make a rest stop of my little rise of earth near the shed. But I know that John and I, like many other islanders, are often privy to a plethora of unforgettable moments.
Audience of One
For a couple of seasons I have tossed the occasional apple to a small runt doe who survived our harsh winter year before last. I named her Brownie, an apt but unimaginative name. She comes alone in early morning or late evening and rests in the grassy oval of our drive or in the spongy moss on our big rock that overlooks the yard.
Today I see her on the rock, and leave my desk at the window to go out and have a chat. When I step outside the gate she ambles down to me and stands patiently waiting. She does a little dance, a few prancing steps and looks over her shoulder. It is then I see a spotted fawn in the hollow of moss on the rock.
I toss two apples near her feet and stand still. “Congratulations,” I tell her. “And thanks for showing off your baby.”
Brownie looks back and forth from the fawn to me and back again as if to say it is okay for the tiny thing to join her. She bends her head to feed and the fawn springs its way down to join its mother. It looks at me with great curiosity and cautiously sidles up to its mother to suckle.
I move slowly to the Adirondack chair beneath our Poplar trees and sit down. Brownie finishes her apples and grazes nearby. I accept the compliment of her trust when she turns her back to me and noses in the grass. The fawn strays farther afield, alert to the slightest sound or movement, and leaps and bounds around the lawn and me in a bit of wild abandonment.
It’s unfortunate that John and the kids have just left to go to town and aren’t here to see this. But perhaps that’s okay. Maybe this moment was meant for Brownie and me.
It’s been a busy week with children and grandchildren and all that is the annual celebration of the Fourth of July. We were in the throngs of people gathered for the parade. It is a chaos I love and enjoy. But in its wake are these quiet moments in the heart of summer, of celebrations that take place on the lawn with an audience of one.
Window Boxes
The birds at my house begin their chorus today at 3:38 a.m. First a single tentative tweet and in quick succession many more until the morning air is filled with competing but complimentary song. I try to stay in bed but the faint beginnings of light and the music outside my window are enough to coax me from the warmth of the covers to the early morning chill.
I follow a purring cat to the kitchen and trip around and over her to get my coffee going. I could make it easy on myself and take care of her needs first, but jeez, occasionally I want to be the first priority.
A few minutes later, I step out onto the patio with a mug in hand and a fully sated Miss Spooky in tow. She springs to the top of the railing and we both look toward the lake.
From the salal below a startled black tailed buck lifts his head toward me. His entourage of four smaller bucks follow suit. In unison they leap forward, crashing through the leaves, headed for the neighbor’s meadow. This is my version of a little wildebeest migration, and I listen until I can’t hear them anymore.
Spooky eyes the paths and the nearer trees carefully. This is the time of morning when raccoons traipse across the yard but today they are somewhere else and we are happier for it.
There is enough light for me to see my newly filled window boxes in the guesthouse. Yesterday I performed a seasonal rite of passage when I toted a basket filled with salmon colored geraniums upstairs to add a splash of summer color to frame the windows and the sights below.
Spooky sniffed them all and tried to sit on the unscreened window sill as I worked with dirt and trowel. I shooed her away twice. She sighed, curled up into a black coil on a cream colored chair and wrapped her tail over her eyes.
I worked quietly around her. Out on the landing I left one small planter box sans flowers. This is the spot from which Spooky observes her kingdom below. She is the master of the one eyed snooze when I am working upstairs, ready to accompany me when I leave, but content to guard the door or saunter in and out while I sweep, clean and fold my way into our coming summer.
From the bedroom overlooking the lawn the first fawn I have seen this spring tottered out of the woods, close to the hip of its mother. It stopped to suckle, and mother doe licked it gently. She nosed about in the grass while the fawn pirouetted about. The mother grazed slowly across the grassy patch and disappeared into the woods, baby at her side.
But that was yesterday. I call the cat. “Hey Spooky, let’s go up and see what we see.”
Each window in the guest house offers a moving picture of the life on our lake and acreage that goes trotting, swimming or flying by. Each geranium filled window box signals that summer, regardless of the weather, is on its way.
A Memorial Day Remembrance
In the autumn of 2006, on a visit to Oklahoma to see our children I received a call from a friend of mine. Grover Phillips and I had been friends for more than twenty years.
“I want you to come by my house,” he told me, “I want to talk to you.”
I did as he requested. On that sunny Sunday afternoon Grover asked me to write a short memoir/essay for him about the two years he spent in the U.S. Navy, (1943-1945) aboard the escort naval carrier, Gambier Bay, built in a Kaiser shipyard near Vancouver, Washington.
Grover was an aviation radioman (ARM3c) and machine gunner in VTB (Torpedo Bomber) aircraft. He was part of a three man crew that flew anti-submarine patrol with various pilots from the complement of Avenger torpedo bombers assigned to the carrier. He was aboard the Gambier Bay when she sank in the South Pacific in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
“I spent my 19th birthday floating in a raft,” he told me. “My friend Hank saved my life. He wouldn’t let me drink sea water and tried to keep me going. I was one of the lucky ones.”
For years I had known that Grover had received a Purple Heart in WWII, and when asked to speak at Veteran’s Day events, he would talk of crash landing behind the fantail of his carrier, or being on deck when a bomb shell “the size of a small couch” exploded in the water just off the bow. He never talked about how he, along with hundreds of other wounded sailors, spent two days in the shark infested waters off the island of Samar, in what has been described by military historians as the largest naval battle ever waged.
Over the course of several months of conversation Grover would eventually tell me, “I remember being pulled aboard an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry), and a guy, a pharmacist mate, taking care of me.”
Grover was sent to New Guinea to an Army field hospital, and finally made it back to San Diego to nurse a wound that wouldn’t heal. Nine months after his return, a doctor cut a considerable slit into his back in order to dislocate his right shoulder and remove deeply embedded shrapnel. He was discharged from the Navy on November 8th, 1945.
Like many veterans, Grover took advantage of the GI Bill, married, had a family and worked hard throughout his life.
Shortly before one of my visits, Grover had been diagnosed with lung cancer. At the local treatment center one day in late 2006, Grover was wearing his Gambier Bay cap. A man approached him and asked him if he had served on the Gambier Bay. Yes, he told the man, he had. The man extended his hand, introduced himself as Leonard George, and said that he had been the pharmacist mate on an LCI that had picked up 175 wounded sailors.
Leonard remembered that one of the rafts included the ship’s captain and navigator. Grover was with that group, and after comparing notes the two men concluded their conversation with the likelihood that the pharmacist mate that had cared for Grover was at that moment shaking his hand.
In 2007 Grover attended his last reunion with his fellow survivors of the Gambier Bay. He took the memoir with him and called me from the car on his way to the event in San Antonio to thank me for “doing him the favor of putting it all down for him and his family.”
I told him it had been an honor. And I thanked him for the privilege.
Grover Cleveland Phillips Jr. died on September 26th, 2008. I am profoundly indebted to him for his trust in me to commit to paper that part of his life that affects us all.
Post script: In a column of this length it isn’t possible to do justice to his story. If there is an interest in this short memoir, please contact me at mary@marykalbert.com I promised Grover and his family I would share it with anyone interested in one man’s service to our country during WWII.
The photo included with this column is one I took of the gift of a book and picture that Grover gave to me in 2006. I arranged them on my table, placed on an American flag presented to me by an Italian Colonel assigned to NATO flying national security missions over Washington D.C.shortly after 9/11. Grover thought it was highly appropriate. It had been cloudy all day, but the sun broke through the clouds for the ten minutes I snapped photographs.
Two Mothers
I am drawn to the calendar in late April and May. It begins with the new life I see in the garden around me, but it is something deeper, for these are the months of the birthdays of my mothers.
My mother’s name was Mary. By the age of 24 she had outlived her parents and her twin brother James. She had married my father and by the time I came along, number 7 of 8, Mother had buried her first born daughter, my sister June.
I believe the losses she endured so early gave her a heightened sense of the need to love us as we were, which she did. Mother possessed a quiet grace and graciousness I don’t have. She was an encourager of people and a believer in their inherent goodness. She looked for hope where others dared not, and found it.
When I was still a child, she, along with my older sister Ann, were killed by a drunk driver. Three of my five remaining siblings and I were injured as well -coma, multiple fractures; glass embedded in arms so deeply it took three years to work to the surface. There were no minor injuries sustained by my family that night.
My father was a superintendent on a construction job hours away. He was put in the untenable position of having to manage, long distance, a family without a mother. It didn’t work. With the threat of foster care hovering over us he loaded us up and returned us to our roots and family in Greene County, Mississippi.
My father became a man on a mission -to find a woman willing to take on a battered, splintered family and make them whole again. Enter Nola Meadows, a 42 year old, never-been-married-working woman who was somehow drawn to our scarred and pain filled family. I called her Mama.
We moved often in my childhood, our lives a constant state of grim flux. When I became an adult, I asked Mama why she had stayed with us. It wasn’t an easy job on the best of days. I stayed because I loved you, she told me with her trademark frankness.
Mama filled the role of mother without once trying to take our Mother’s place. When she died, she was surrounded by the children she had helped to rear. The records of time may reflect she died without having borne a child, but she surely didn’t die without loving and being loved by many.
I think of Mother in the spring, the raven haired, high cheek boned woman whose blood courses through my veins. I think of Mama, too, the mother whose stoic character and simple rules of life helped guide me to adulthood.
I am the product of the love of two extraordinary women. Each spring on their birthdays, when new life abounds everywhere, I go down to the azalea bush in my garden, sit for the longest time on the rock step and thank them both.
The Sense of Census
In 1790 the founding fathers commissioned the first census to be taken of our new country. Men took to the rivers, rode into the wilderness, and walked farm to farm to collect this important data.
The accuracy of the names was in large part determined by the person collecting the census information. Many were barely literate themselves and spelled the surnames as they sounded to them. Evans became Evins, Yerby morphed into Irby, Walley into Whaley and so on.
Some of those interviewed felt the questions were intrusive. An ancestor of mine, when asked his name replied to the census taker that his name was Mr. Wally. I am sure he never thought that 220 years later someone -me- would dearly liked to have known his first name as well.
In the 1800 census the great migratory patterns began to emerge. It is intriguing to trace the movement of many families down the Old Wilderness Road to the new lands of Ohio, Tennessee and southern part of the country.
A large part of this movement was due to the number of the families who had fought on the losing side of the Revolutionary War. They were forced to leave their homes. Their properties were confiscated. Many returned to England, many fled to Canada, and those in the south headed out through the Indian Nations and Georgia to get to the Mississippi Territory.
Poring through the lists of families who applied for and received passports to travel through the Indian country of Georgia was revealing, yet predictable. In the 1810 census the same families who had lived six or eight farms away from each other in Edgefield County, South Carolina now lived near each other in the piney woods of the area near the Mississippi River.
The data in these early records was vital for the representation of citizens in the early congress and to record our population growth. It also provided a plethora of other data we can use two centuries later to establish our personal histories and provide true, inspiring and occasionally funny stories.
In the 1830 census in Greene County, Mississippi an ancestor of mine stated his occupation was a “loafer”. This one word description of a less-than-stellar-work ethic may have been in response to a question he didn’t wish to answer. Perhaps it was the truth. It certainly deserves a line in our family genealogy.
I have not yet made my way through the 1840 census and all the history therein, but I looked at my census form this year with a different eye. Two hundred years from now someone might look for me to provide a link in the continuing thread of our family’s lineal history.
The truth is I want to be accounted for -now and later, too.
Spring Break
Rachel, our favorite oldest granddaughter, is coming to see us for spring break. Soon John and I will head to Seattle to pick her up and only the seat belt I fasten about me will keep me from walking on air.
Rachel is a senior at University of Missouri School of Journalism. With all the opportunities to fly away and flock like birds on a white sandy beach she has chosen to come to the wet and wild spring going on here.
Rach and I have a history of senior year spring breaks spent together. Four years ago we romped and roamed our way through London and Paris. In ten days of museums, baguettes, old bookstores, cathedrals, plays in the West End and tiny coffee shops she told me of her plans for the future. “I’ve got it all planned out, Grandma. I know what I want to do.”
“It doesn’t happen the way you plan it all the time,” I told her. “But you’ll figure it out.”
She hadn’t planned on a semester working for Microsoft Network, (MSNUK) in London or studies in Doha, Qatar and Cairo, Egypt. She hadn’t mentioned that she would want a visit from me in the midst of her chaotic time there but that happened, too. Sometimes the best things are the ones we don’t plan.
When Rachel arrives I hope what she wants is to sit in my lap in the rocking chair in the kitchen. She can dangle her coltish legs over the arm rail and touch the floor with her toes. She can cackle in my ear about the funniest thing she remembers, or cry over a love found and lost. What I want most is a spring break gabfest, a graduating senior and grandma marathon of word mania.
Grandpa John will enjoy her in a totally different way. They’ll hang out in the garage and talk about building airplanes and boat rides and the economics of that first job out of the college chute. That will be followed by the simple advice he will offer on the need to be ever cautious in a dangerous world. His counsel will be wise and thoughtful.
For Rachel, this trip is once again the beginning of a new segment in her life. I hope her future will include a spring break with us old folks every once in a while. And if it’s true that history repeats itself there isn’t any need for me to worry.
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