by Dylan Tomine
The moment I can touch the cooked crabs without getting third-degree burns, I start pulling carapaces off and scraping guts and gills into a bucket. My grandmother would have scrambled the intensely flavored, mustard-colored innards with eggs, soy sauce, and sugar, then served them over rice for a true Japanese delicacy. Chouinard would simply slurp the steaming guts directly from the shell. But not us. Even though the Sound is cleaner than it’s been in decades, its legacy as an industrial waterway keeps us from partaking. We’ll stick to the meat for now.
Stacy brings out a loaf of whole-wheat sourdough, a tasty, edible napkin for wiping crab juice from hands and faces. We sit at the picnic table and start cracking shells. Everyone has favorite parts: Stacy and Skyla prefer the satiny, snow-white body meat that falls from cartilage compartments at the base of each leg; Weston carefully pries small, tender morsels from the back legs; I go for the big, thumb-sized sections in the front legs and crumbly, robust chunks from the claws. Pieces of shell fly through the air, crab juice drips from our chins – please pass another chunk of bread – and the feeding frenzy is on.
There will be a time later, maybe tomorrow or the day after, for Stacy’s crisp, savory crab cakes, an omelet or two, crab and melted cheese on toast. For now, all I want is crab in its purest form. And lots of it. Knowing crab doesn’t keep well only fuels my hunger. I drop the last shells of my first crab in the bucket and, still chewing, reach for another. What was that about taking it easy? I can already see the wall coming, and yet I’m helpless to stop myself.
But wait. Bob and Joanne Dawson could probably use a few crabs, as could Marc Bale, and our next-door neighbors. I could give Steve Maris a call too. And our friends who let us use the boat ramp, they might like some. Why didn’t I think of it before? Of course, I will say, feel free.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIRDS II
Smart, gregarious, inquisitive, but above all else, survivors, crows adapt to any environment, from deep wilderness to inner city. They are the mischievous black streak that snatches a potato chip from the inattentive picnicker. The goofy clown unable to resist a shiny piece of broken reflector in the driveway. The fierce defender chasing an eagle many times its size away from a nest.
My mother says Grandma is a crow now. I’m not sure if I buy it, at least not in a literal sense. Yet I can’t help feeling a special affection for the big black birds. And if Mom’s right, Grandma is, at this moment, hovering above the mailbox, dropping clams on the pavement.
When we first moved here, we found all sorts of strange objects on the small patch of asphalt near the mailboxes: steamer clams, crab claws, walnut shells. It was a great mystery. Who was putting them there? Was it a neighborhood kid’s joke? Some kind of sign?
One morning, Skyla and I heard a great commotion and cawing…and the mystery was solved. Crows had discovered they could bring objects they couldn’t crack with their beaks to the road, and let gravity and pavement do the work for them.
Now, on our way to get the mail, Weston and I watch with pleasure as “Grandma” swoops and flutters, dropping her clam from increasing heights until, finally, it breaks open and she dives in for her well-earned snack.
I still can’t say whether I believe Grandma’s spirit actually lives on in these birds. But if seeing a crow reminds me of her, what difference does it make?
SUMMER, EVENTUALLY
The old-timers like to say that summer starts here on the fifth of July. They say it half in jest, with knowing smiles and shoulders shrugged toward a rainy June sky, but more often than not, they’re right. In western Washington, parkas and tarps are as important to Independence Day celebrations as fireworks and barbecues. The wisdom of our elders, though, is easily forgotten. After two summers of consistent warmth and sun, we assumed we’d be watching fireworks in our shirtsleeves forever. We were wrong.
Of course, it’s easy to dismiss old-timer weather lore. How many times can you hear “When I was your age, we had snow on the ground up to here” without rolling your eyes? Yeah, and let me guess, you walked to school barefoot, and it was uphill both ways, right? But, it turns out, Pacific Northwest weather really was colder and snowier “back in the day.” Over the past four decades, the annual snowfall here has averaged about six inches. But between 1949 and 1969, Seattle weather records show that almost three times as much snow – 17.4 inches – fell each year. In January 1950 alone, the Island got five feet of the stuff. Maybe it really was uphill all the way to school and back in those days, too.
This year, we seem to be returning to the chilly days of yore. We’ve had a few stretches of seasonable weather, but for the most part, spring has stretched into what the calendar calls summer, with gray skies and frequent rain. I try to take Annie Dillard’s wise words – “there’s always unseasonable weather” – to heart, but this is getting ridiculous. The heat-loving vegetables are growing to Seussian proportions, cartoonishly long and leggy, reaching upward for a sun that remains obscured by clouds. Global warming? Dr. Nathan Mantua, a prominent atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, says that one possible outcome of a warming planet would be cooler, cloudier summers in Puget Sound. So we have that going for us.
We celebrated Fourth of July bundled in fleece and blankets, crowding around a bonfire at a friend’s beach house. Melted butter we’d planned to serve with a big bucket of fresh crabs solidified before we could use it. The kids stayed inside the house to escape the cold and wind, building elaborate living-room forts until the fireworks were about to start. Stacy, Skyla, and I watched the showering sparks and starburst explosions hunkered in the lee of a giant drift log. Weston – despite urgent parental requests to stay dry – splashed into the cold, dark water, throwing rocks and whacking sticks. On the drive home, Stacy and I wondered what becomes of all those shell casings and burnt chemicals raining down on the harbor. The weather hasn’t helped our family mood.
There are some bright spots, though. A nesting pair of Pacific slope flycatchers has taken up residence in the awning above our back deck, entertaining us with their midair, insect-snatching maneuvers. I happily tolerate nesting materials raining down on the barbecue in exchange for the flycatchers’ pest extermination services. And boy, do we need them. The wet weather has produced a bumper crop of mosquitoes, the huge, clumsy ones that first appeared in February steadily giving way to ever smaller, faster, and more fearsome biters. “Musquetors very troublesom,” wrote William Clark in 1806, when he and his men discovered that bear grease and tallow – apparently the 19th-century version of DEET – did little to deter the hordes of biting insects they encountered. This spring, inspired by the exploding mosquito population, I quoted Clark at every opportunity, carefully enunciating his distinctive misspellings. For some reason, Stacy failed to find the humor in this.
Fortunately, our flycatchers work like living bug zappers, perching on one specific tomato cage from which they launch their aerobatic sorties. The tomato cage also functions as the flycatcher outhouse, and it’s no surprise their poop has killed the Stupice tomato that grew there. I’m okay with that. Not to count our tomatoes before they ripen, but that still leaves us with 72 plants, far more than we’ll need if they produce at even moderate levels.
We have owls too. A mated pair we welcome, like the flycatchers, for their predatory habits. Earlier this spring, we were overrun with mice. Crossing the yard, you could see them pushing wakes through the grass ahead like scattering fish in shallow water. I trapped an unending stream of rodents from the house, the shop, and, much to Stacy’s horror, her car. If there’d been any kind of market for mouse pelts, I could have opened a modern-day Hudson Bay Company and retired on the profits. But the last time I checked, mouseskin coats had yet to appear on the red carpet, so I was left with the disgusting chore of clearing traps and burying carcasses each morning.
Then the owls moved in. From the first night we heard the barred owl’s distinctive, four-note call – frequently described as “who cooks for you?” but to me sounding mor
e like “whoo, whoo, huh-whoo?” – echoing through our woods, my “trapline” production began to diminish. A month later, you couldn’t find a single mouse anywhere on our property. Soon a new sound joined the hooting: a blood-curdling, raspy shriek, like a cat hissing into a megaphone. The new baby owl was calling out to his parents, hungry for more mice.
One morning, I came face to face with the baby owl, perched at eye level on an alder branch. Huge, almost-human eyes stared directly into mine from a disheveled bundle of gray fluff. The hair on my neck stood up and I shivered, first from the shock of meeting this enormous bird, then from the thought of its mother, gliding on muffled wings with talons extended toward my scalp. It happens. Frequently enough that the city has put up warning signs in local parks where joggers have been attacked by barred owls. On this morning, there was no winged assault, but I walked the rest of the way home awfully fast.
In a cruel irony, owls around the world are disappearing at alarming rates, victims of powerful anticoagulants used to control rodent populations. These “second generation” mouse and rat poisons were introduced in the 1970s to kill the pests with a single dose. There’s a good chance you have a box or two sitting on a shelf out in the garage. The problem is that a single dose can take up to five days to work; in their weakened state, the poison-filled mice become easy prey for owls. These poisons were found in nearly 75 percent of dead owls examined in one Canadian study, and are, according to Scientific American, “imposing a toxic load on the environment that no one bargained for.” In our attempts to control pests, we’re poisoning the predators that would naturally control them, which requires us to use more poison, which…well, you get the picture. I’ll take the owls.
My only complaint is their voices, booming around the yard starting at dusk and continuing off and on through the night. I love to hear their wild, spooky calls, but in the distance. It’s a little different when they’re perched on a branch 10 feet from your bedroom window. However, given the alternatives – a swarming, unchecked mass of rodentia or the lethal brew of chemicals it would take to kill them – I’ll take the hooting.
You can only eat so many strawberries. It’s not that we tire of them; we just can’t keep up with the sudden abundance produced by even a modest patch of June-bearing strawberries. Assuming, of course, the modest patch in question hasn’t been butchered by inept gardening. As previously reported, my late, radical thinning effort – exacerbated by the lousy weather – resulted in a weak early crop. Now, after months of just barely hanging on, my little plants have finally matured into complete failure.
Luckily for us, we are not relying on my gardening skills to put food on the table. Because the trees surrounding our little clearing in the woods keep growing upward, our home garden gets less sun each year. It’s like living in a slow-motion sinkhole. To boost production, Stacy does a lot of her gardening at a small farm plot just up the road. It’s an open, sunny hillside tilted to the west for maximum warmth, with rich, well-drained soil. The owner has generously opened up the land, free of charge, to a community of like-minded organic gardeners, and crops grow there with miraculous intensity.
Stacy’s plot came with a small patch of feral strawberries left behind by the previous gardener. Unaided by helpful hands like mine, the berries are thriving. In early June, Weston came home from the farm with a single, slightly smashed strawberry he’d saved for me. “One strawberry?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “there were three, but I already ate two.” It was delicious, sweet, and dripping with deep red juice. Two weeks later, he was bringing home baskets full.
Now it’s time for our first real food processing of the year: strawberry ice cream. We start with our standard recipe, whisking plain low-fat yogurt, half-and-half, a little sugar and a dash of vanilla in a bowl, which I put in the fridge to cool and blend. Skyla slices strawberries into another bowl, while Weston uses a potato masher to “smoosh” an equal amount into pulp. We sprinkle a little sugar on the combined berries and chill them in the freezer. After dinner, we turn on the electric ice cream machine and add the cold yogurt mixture, and when it starts to thicken, the kids take turns spooning almost-frozen strawberries into the mix. We eat two heaping bowls each and read bedtime stories with full stomachs, still thinking about the ice cream. Then I head back out to my office. I have a story deadline hanging over my head and I need to make some headway. But three hours later, I’m back in the kitchen for another spoonful. If there’s a more heavenly dessert, I can’t imagine what it might be.
Later in the season, we’ll get more creative. We always try to beat the birds to a few handfuls of early blueberries and raspberries, which we mix with more strawberries and buttermilk for an intense, dark purple, three-berry ice cream. It’s so fresh and light, we eat most of it straight from the machine, and freeze what’s left in popsicle molds.
Finally, at the peak of the strawberry harvest, with bins piling up in the fridge and more coming home each day, Stacy makes freezer jam. It’s a serious project, with huge pots of boiling berries, sugar, and pectin steaming away on the stove. She ladles the hot, translucent red liquid into the peanut butter, pickle, and mason jars we’ve saved all year, then leaves them on the counter to cool. Overnight, the pectin works its magic, setting the liquid into perfect, spreadable jam that somehow tastes more like fresh strawberries than fresh strawberries themselves.
Like many houses on the Island, ours was built on land once covered in strawberries. Marshall strawberries, to be exact. Now listed as one of the 10 most endangered food plants in the United States, the famously sweet, juicy Marshalls drove the Island’s economy for years. At the peak of production, just prior to World War II, local farmers – with names like Suyematsu, Oyama, Nakao, Katayama, Koura, and Terashita – shipped nearly two million pounds of berries off the Island during the brief harvest season. In 1939, these berries became a lasting source of civic pride when they were served to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England as part of a feast representing the best foods of North America.
Mike Terashita, whose parents farmed the land we now live on, tells stories of the incredible industry that came to life around the Island during the harvest. His father would drive up to Vancouver and bring truckloads of First Nations tribal workers down to help with the picking. The seasonal workers lived in the many outbuildings still standing near the Terashita house, and Mike’s mother cooked for the crew around the clock. There was a bustling cannery in the harbor to process the bountiful crop, and a steady stream of shipping traffic hauling canned and fresh berries to the mainland.
But the Island’s strawberry industry didn’t last. When the federal government forced Japanese-American farmers into relocation camps during the war, the farms suffered and the cannery was abandoned. Around the same time, the fragile Marshall plants were besieged by new diseases inadvertently brought onto the Island. Moreover, times were changing. A growing consumer preference for fresh berries doomed the Marshalls, which had a short two- to four-week harvest season and even shorter two-day shelf life. Today, all that remains of a once booming industry are the weather-beaten shacks still scattered around the Island, an annual Strawberry Festival, and the memories of those old enough to remind us that “Marshalls were the finest-tasting strawberries in the world.”
Summer struggles to emerge, and our tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers struggle to survive the low temperatures. The cool-weather crops thrive. Stacy’s strategic planting of broccoli, spinach, and lettuce in two-week intervals brings a constant stream of maturing produce. Zucchini and pumpkin vines sprawl along the ground, and their huge yellow flowers, although late, show promise. Inside our little greenhouse – actually more of a green lean-to made of corrugated fiberglass siding attached to the garage – three types of cucumbers snake upward on bamboo lattices. A small side bed, basking in reflected heat from the house, pumps out baskets of bush beans and arugula. It doesn’t feel like farming weather, but we’re eating well.
A joke Skyla made up and told to
the produce manager at our local grocery store: What’s a coyote’s favorite vegetable? Ar-ar-ar-AROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGULA!
King salmon season won’t open for a couple of weeks yet, but I want to be prepared. Actually, I’ve been getting ready, at least mentally, since the last season ended, almost a year ago. Now, with the first migrating summer kings on their way in from the ocean, it’s time to get serious. We’ve been out crabbing, but those are casual, easy trips compared to what’s coming.
The boat’s running lights need to be fixed for predawn and postdusk fishing, and the trailer’s brake lights are shot. Just part of my ongoing battle with the corrosive effect of salt water. To get the upper hand, I’ll replace all of the lights with sealed, waterproof LED units, and commit to more meticulous freshwater wash-downs. I also need to check our safety gear – flares, horn, fire extinguisher – and reorganize the boat, exchanging the crab-pot pulley and measuring gauges for rod holders, fish box, and the big salmon net.
And then comes the fun part: tackle. As with every new season, there are fresh strategies to try and theories to test. This year, I’m planning to fish faster and cover more water, which means I’ll need heavier weights. I also want to catch more live herring for bait, so I have to tie up some herring jigs and double-hook mooching leaders. There’s a whole drawer full of the latest, greatest fish-catching lures that I couldn’t resist as I wandered through various sporting goods stores over the winter. I’m a sucker for the shiny new spoons, rubber squids, and a plug shaped just like a herring. Most will probably be duds, but you never know.