What a sweet place

This is such a sweet community. I don’t mean “sweet” in the “rad”, southern CA kind of way. I mean sweet like a perfect piece of fruit. When you taste a perfectly ripe, flavorful piece of fruit, it feels like just what you’ve always wanted but didn’t know was possible. Every bite is divine.  I realize this metaphor is a little loose and drippy but it strikes me since our return from the great north that this Petrolia sweetness is rare. Such a high percentage of loving, salty, smart, fun, caring, and warm people here. I am grateful to be in the process of becoming a part of this community.

I went to the store today and knew everyone I passed on the road and everyone who was shopping while I was there. At first, the absence of anonymity felt overwhelming but now it feels comforting and fun.

It’s New Year’s Eve and I will try to stay up until 11.  I’ve made a heap of esspresso cookies to help us all reach toward midnight.   Our dear friends Drew, Amanda, and baby Ella are generously babysitting the sleeping Ossian so Blase and I can go to Dr. Dick’s party. Blase will play drums in the band tonight – he says it’s like playing Carnegie Hall and he can’t wait for the party to start.

The photo here is of Ossian holding Ella on her lap. She is into babies in a big way right now. Convenient, given that one will moving into our house in less than 3 months (yikes!). Whenever she sees a baby, she asks to “pet it” or “hold it lap”. Ella very kindly indulges Ossian on a regular basis. Ossian loves Ella and calls her “friend”.

we’re back from the great north

We just returned from Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula. It was so good to see friends and family. I had a couple of fleeting moments of pining for urban life. They were very brief. One occurred in the gorgeous bathroom of our friends’ Rosemary and Hal’s house. Not sure why I got so swept away in there but I just hung out in there loving the city. In general, though, I did miss the traffic-free natural beauty of our new home in Petrolia.

After a week of festive holiday parties in Petrolia, the celebrated arrival of fellow Seattle transplant friends Seth, Jen, and Nick, AND a delicious visit with  Tim and Dana on their way to Arizona, we made our own 11 hour pilgrimage to Seattle. It would have been 12 to drive… we took three flights and ate lots of snack mix. Ossian was really into the propellers and wheels on the planes.

Here are some pics from the trip.. ossian and her first pair of underpants on xmas day, ossian and manama in her xmas playhouse, ossian with poppy and her new train set, ossian in her xmas dress, ferry sunset headed back to seattle, ossian her friend baby xavi bear, blase on his favorite street in Sequim

Ossian speak

Ossian has a growing collection of phrases.. they are really cute and I only wish I could share her unique intonation and style to fully convey the cuteness.

Here are her current most favored phrases:

• what’s that?
• where is it?
• rock and roll, baby
• let’s do it!
• high-five cows, peace
• how about that
• look at it
• sit a minute
• how pretty
• wear it
• get up
• use it

These photos are of the view from our bathroom window this morning.. it’s a beautiful ridge on a clear day but, as you can see, today is a bit soupy. Ossian still thought it was beautiful and commanded us to come “look at it, morning pretty mountain”.

Earthquakes, smoothies, and baby goats

Sorry to disappoint you, but I have no story that ties these three items together. Instead, I have 3 unrelated comments to make:

1)Earthquakes… after a lovely break from detectable earthquakes for the last 3 plus weeks, we seem to be back on a run. We’ve had two this week. One was a real shaker but short. I keep trying to find out if Petrolia is the most seismically active place on earth and some say yes, some don’t seem interested in the question. At the very least, Petrolia’s location on the triple junction of three major faults is unique.

2) Smoothies… absolutely nothing interesting here. Just that Ossian still loves smoothies which explains the photo.

3) There is the cutest baby goat just up the road.. it is tiny and wobbly and usually nursing from its mom. A large white dog seems to be assigned just to this pair and protects them with impressive focus and fortitude. The baby is the blurry, small brown dot on the right.

Decoding city folk

I’m working on a list of things that identify one as a “newbie” around here. So far, this is what I’ve come up with:

• walking dog on a leash
• putting ID tags on your pets
• letting your pets sleep inside
• using your turn signal when driving
• only driving forward on the road
• asking for propane at the store before 11 am or after 4 pm
• ordering a sandwich from the store on the weekends
• noisily dragging your car’s heat shield through town after knocking it partially off on a bumpy dirt road
• complaining that you don’t have hot water at your house
• bringing a yoga mat to yoga class
• talking about what you “do” (or what you “did” in the career department)
• locking your doors, ever
• noticing all the earthquakes
• leaving the porch light on at night
• worrying about being on time
• wearing lipstick
• wearing a collared shirt if it’s not plaid

This is a work in progress.

It’s a guy thing

The phenomenon I am driven to write about tonight is certainly not unique to Petrolia, or even rural America. It has, however, happened with unprecedented frequency since I’ve arrived here. When asking about how to do something that falls into the category of home repair or is of a mechanical nature, I have gotten reponses like, “it’s kind of a guy thing” or ” do you have a husband or some other male who can do it?”. I asked our landlord for clarification before I set about lighting the pilot on our tempermental water heater… “it’s kind of a guy thing”, he replied. He went on to ask when Blase would be home and I explained that Blase would have the same question that I was asking. He reminded me that Blase had been a home owner and so he would certainly know how to do it. I struggled with the prideful impulse to set the story straight but balanced it against the goals of making nice, maintaining his comfort zone, and protecting Blase’s apparent prowess as a formerly home-owning male…
Today, I spoke with someone at the propane company. It was a woman. We are out of propane currently which means no heat, no cooking, no hot water for a week until the delivery truck makes its next round through Petrolia. That could be the focus of another blog session…. anyway, I was desperately exploring my options with her. The best we could figure is that I drive into Fortuna (an hour or so from here via the Wildcat) and pick up a 25 gallon cylinder from them to hook up to our empy tank until we can get a refill. I asked her if they could give me some intstruction on hooking it up if I were to pick it up, her response was “don’t you have a husband or some other male around? They’ll know how to do it”. I couldn’t resist stating the fact that Blase did not know how to do this. She seemed shocked and I explained that we hadn’t used propane before.. to save face a little, I guess.
These are the most poignant examples among other, more subtle exchanges along these lines that have caught me off guard since my transplantation here just over a month ago. I consider myself a pretty handy woman and know many, many other women who are skilled craftswomen, woodworkers, mechanically adept, etc… but Petrolia women are exceedingly skilled and resourceful. They are building their own houses, tending their livestock, creating water and energy systems, homesteading”, and killing chickens. So, it is particularly ironic to hear the kind of old school, rigidly gendered thinking I’ve mentioned above in a place like this where the women are wild workhorses.
I think the phenomenon speaks loudly of the cultural contrasts here … the crunchier, homesteading, back-to-the-lander types as one group and the more conservative and conventionally thinking “rancher” types. Of course there are many more groups, exceptions, complexities, and forces at work.. I don’t mean to rigidly categorize or simplify what is a very diverse population. There is, however, a more palpable culture difference between these groups than between many others in this area.
I’ll sign off for now and get back to being barefoot and pregnant, but not in the kitchen.

Hat tipping – the hip new thing

Ossian and I were on one of our regular cow, deer, turkey, and roti viewing walks today and a young man drove by in a pickup truck. I think I’ve mentioned previously that everyone waves to each other as they pass on the roads here. This young man did something I’ve never seen outside of old movies, he tipped his hat at me. I stopped for several moments just taking it in. I really didn’t know that still went on in this country. It was so old-fashioned and gracious. I’m sure it has some kind of sexist origin that should offend my feminist foundation but it was really nice. I liked it. Have any of you ever had someone seriously tip their hat at you as a greeting? I think we should bring it back into common use. Make it the hip new thing. Join with me, find, knit, or buy a hat and then just start tipping at people. Even total strangers. Let me know how it feels and report back on what kind of responses you get.

Time to snuff the rooster

The chickens we have been feeding are soon to become ours. Maybe not permanently ours, but ours in a long-term chicken-sitting way. Once they are our responsibility, we will have to purchase their food, collect all their eggs (we are looking forward to this since we go through at least 5 eggs a day here), and manage the group dynamic. The latter task includes snuffing a rooster or two. There are too many roosters and they just aren’t really necessary. The hens will lay with or without them. The roosters are attractive, flashy guys with outspoken personalities. They are also very rough on the hens. You feed them and they get all randy and just jump on the hens for a completely self-serving 2-3 second interlude. The hens sometimes try to run or peck them away but mostly they just take it. It makes me a little mad. So, I like the idea of having only hens. I also do eat chicken from time to time. This all adds up to slaughtering a couple of roosters. I asked a friend to show me how to do it when the time comes. It seems like the messiest part is actually cleaning them afterward. I don’t mind the mess. It is the chopping of the head and therefore killing a bird I like to talk to that gives me pause. Of course, I have thought about this over the years. If I am to be an omnivore, I need to be able to actually do the slaughtering myself. I have caught, killed, and cleaned hundreds of fish in my life. I don’t know if I just used to be more comfortable with the graphic realities of this carnivorous relationship or if killing fish feels like an act of lesser magnitude than killing a noisy rooster. Intellectually, there is no difference for me but, of course, we are not just our intellect.
Well, time will tell. I’ll keep you posted on my creds as a carnivore and let you know when it really is time to snuff the rooster. It might make me very popular with the hens… or it might make me a vegetarian. Stay tuned.

Damn City Folk

“City folk” is a heavy title to bear… lots of assumptions roll into that label and most are not flattering in the eyes of Petrolians. Though no one has explicitly called us “city folk”, the label has been implicit in many interactions.

For example, we feel that since we are paying rent for a 3 bedroom home, all 3 of the bedrooms should be heated to some degree. The one heating source for the house is a propane stove in the living room. It cranks out the heat in that room and the two rooms next to it but does little to heat the kitchen and nothing for the utility room and bedrooms upstairs. After sleeping in wool socks and turtleneck sweaters, we started using a space heater in Ossian’s room. She was waking up cold multiple times each night and the space heater has improved her sleep. It is however, pretty unsafe to have a hot space heater in a child’s room. It also creates such dry heat that she gets very congested. It also means that we are paying twice for heat… once for the propane to fuel the main heater downstairs and again for the high electric we pay for running space heaters upstairs. We asked the landlord, who is a very nice guy, if we could work on heating the upstairs in a different way. He was not interested in this and explained that it really doesn’t get that cold in Petrolia and when it does, it isn’t for long. Temperatures have been 25-35 degrees at night for the last 2-3 weeks and it’s not even winter yet. But that isn’t as relavent as our misplaced expectations. He mentioned his own use of long johns and that was the end of the conversation. It was clear that he thinks our expectations are city-based and therefore not transferable to a place like Petrolia. We aren’t asking for a sauna, just some vents to allow the heat to rise upstairs once and a while. It seems that he believes our definition of what is “cold” needs to change, not the lack of heat in the house. His apparent assumption about our sensibilities allows him to not even consider the possibility that it actually is really cold upstairs at night. Some of our friends also are dismissive of our desire for heat and explained that the landlord surely thinks we are “city folk” and that our petty whining is just a byproduct of cushy urban lives of yesteryear. In explaining the landlord’s likely stance, our friends seemed to reveal that they share his view. Others say things like, “but, it’s a great house, right?”. This means, the house has indoor plumbing, on demand electricity, a functional road, sheet rock, and some heat.. so what are you complaining about?? Many folks here live without some and even all of those things.

It also took us nearly 3 weeks to convince our landlord that the water heater wasn’t heating the water and that it was leaking propane. Again, he said things like, “you must have an oversensitive nose because I don’t smell anything and I checked it all out before you moved in”. Our description of the cold water coming out of the faucet brought responses like “no, that water is really hot”. Just a complete rejection of our perceptions. Again, he’s a great guy and good landlord. If we were locals, undoubtedly these conversations would have had very different outcomes. If we were locals, our measure of what is hot and what is cold and what is the smell of leaking propane as opposed to burning propane would have been valid. Anyway, we did eventually get a local to corroborate our testimony which earned us a new water heater. The old water heater still lays wounded on the porch, waiting for someone to take it away some day.

It’s funny, the facts that Blase has lived through Petrolia winters before, I’ve lived on sailboats through snowy winter storms, and that we’ve both spent extensive time sleeping outdoors are not considered in these assumptions about us. You enter a place like this with the label “city folk” and it is an archetype that fully defines you. Just like any other stereotype, I suppose. I wonder how long it takes before you are no longer viewed this way by the locals in a place like this. Maybe when the next new people move to town who are more citified than us, we will lose the title? Maybe it is a certain number of continuous years of living here? Maybe there are concrete actions that de-activate the “city folk” label such as buying land and living in a tent for a couple of years while you work on developing a water source? Maybe it’s having a bucket as your temporary toilet for more than 6 months? Maybe there is a discernable attitude change perceptible only to true locals? Maybe the answer lies in this question. Perhaps we can’t shed the “city folk” label until we know the answer to the question of how one becomes a local.

Until then, the space heaters will apparently keep on chugging and our “city folk” complaints will offer comic relief to the true country folk.

I am not mad or disgruntled about the phenomenon of the labeling of “city folk”. I respect it in a certain way and am interested in how the labelling system works. I also just want some damn heat upstairs.

Lighthouse Road goes from the bridge in Petrolia out to the beach. It is a narrow road that, in certain places, only allows two cars to pass if one pulls mostly off the road. There is at least one completely blind spot and you have to go slow, creep through it, and yield to downhill “traffic” (I’m not sure if “traffic” is a word that ever really applies to Petrolia). Most people who live here drive slowly. Not only for safety, but also because there’s no rush really, ever. Everyone waves as they pass on the road. Two days ago, when Ossian and I were returning from the sea lion party at the beach, I was literally run off Lighthouse Road by two shiny SUV’s going way too fast and not making space for other cars. The occupants had slick sunglasses on and what I thought were high-tech outdoor shirts. They did not wave. As I swerved into the ditch, I cursed them..”Damn City Folk!”. It’s a slippery ideological slope out here.