Category: Banalities & Journaling

The neighbor’s house burned down last night. It’s still smoldering, at 6 AM.
It was scary. A bit after midnight, Dean (the neighbor, not the same Dean as recently mentioned who is Arthur’s friend) knocks on our door and says, “Call 911, my house is on fire.” The next 5 hours are a blur. Here is a picture of the house, at about 1 AM:

This house was here before Arthur moved here – it’s one of the oldest houses on all of the Port Saint Nicholas Road.
We put our hoses on and tried to prevent the fire from burning into the trees west of the house – because our house (where Arthur and I are) is only 50 feet away, through some trees, to the west. And the trees closest to Dean’s house were burning. Here’s a picture from Arthur’s dock, at around 3 AM, looking back toward shore. You can see how close Dean’s house is to ours. That speck of light in the dark on the right side of the photo is someone with a flashlight at the eastern wall of Arthur’s house.

The power was out for a while, because Dean’s house’s electrical connection shorted out the system, as it burned. APT (the power company) actually got here before the fire department, and were working on fixing the situation. A fire truck came from the Craig Volunteer Fire Department, but they only had 800 gallons in their tank – they sprayed down at the trees and when the power came back on we resumed spraying with our garden hoses. I estimate we used about 2500 gallons from Arthur’s 3000 gallon cistern. Fortunately, we have a well, now, and the cistern is now re-filling.
As of dawn, we seemed to have suppressed the spread of the fire. It’s just there smoldering now. Here it is at 6 AM.

What a very intense night. My friends Mark and Amy, still here, were helpful throughout the night. I think they will now have a very amazing memory of their visit here.
We had some panic when it was spreading into the trees, because it seemed like nothing could stop it from catching our house, as the power was out. At around 2 AM, we evacuated our house, got out our computers and important documents, drove vehicles over to the western lot. That was pretty scary.

Most of my anxiety is pointless. I realize this.
I got my test scores today, for the Praxis Core I took on the 10th. Although it’s been a few decades since I took a standardized test, I exceeded even my previous performance. I’ve always had a knack for test-taking, but I think teaching Korean kids how to do a-b-c-d exams for 10 years probably just made me even more aware of how to do well. Admittedly, the Praxis Core is an “entrance exam” – it’s not particularly stringent.
My scores.

Later, I went on a walk in the rain. I saw Mike and Penny’s boat at their dock.

There is a lot of rain right now. I saw mud from the creek staining the inlet.

All hopes and dreams floating around.
Today is Hiroshima Day. On this day 74 years ago, a lot of stuff was destroyed, in a new and exciting way. Lives were lost, too.
Mostly unrelatedly, I had a kind of epiphany today, about Arthur and I having diametrically opposite connections to “stuff.”
Arthur sees himself as parsimonious with respect to possessions (this is debatable, but not relevant to following point). In contrast, I see myself as profligate with possessions – I have a lot of “stuff,” much of which isn’t really so necessary to my sense of well-being. Arthur’s feeling, on the other hand, is that he has few possessions, so each item counts for a great deal. This leads to our very different emotional responses to losing things. When I lose something, I may have a moment of annoyance, more at my own absent-mindedness than anything else, but I’ll pretty quickly move on, I think. I tend to think in terms of replaceability, and focusing on the simple fact that I have so much stuff, I grant that individual things are not actually that important. For Arthur, however, a lost item is a crisis. And it’s nearly impossible for him to let something go, once lost. He has dedicated entire cummulative DAYS to worrying about and looking for a lost hammer that was mislaid in February, and which is replaceable for $8.99 at the hardware store. But once a week, he’ll bitch to me about his missing hammer.
There is an end irony, though – setting aside the above, and as I hinted at starting out: in strictly quantitative terms, Arthur has much more “stuff” than I have ever had. Consider that his house is full of his stuff, while he’s alotted to me the north half of his attic along with 200 square feet of his front yard. I fill these spaces to clutter but they are fairly contained. And he complains that I have too much stuff.
Here is a picture of the neighbor’s rooster, in the yard between Arthur’s kerosene tank and my “studio” (a big plastic tent for storing stuff).

Here are the neighbor’s geese on the east side of the house.

Here is an island with fog behind it and an island behind that.

We went fishing.
I took a painterly photo of a passing, old, wooden fishing boat.

Arthur butchers the salmon.

I had a fairly productive day today. Firstly, I replaced the pipe that connects the well-head with the “doghouse” (where the pump controller and accumulator tank are), per Richard’s advice. I had some trouble with one of the couplings (brass to PVC), but I finally got it to not leak.
Secondly, I began laying out a “first draft” of the paving stones for the passageway/patio alongside the south side of the kitchen shed. This was a project Arthur had been working on before his accident last year, and I’ve been aware that it’s been bothering him that it wasn’t progressing, so I re-initiated it. Here is the concept, beginning to take shape:

Arthur and I were walking around town – because we’d left the Blueberry (the car) at the mechanic’s for diagnosis of a problem.
He was grumbling incoherently, as sometimes happens.
Jared: “How are you doing?”
Arthur: “Everything is fucked.”
Jared: “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
Arthur: “I don’t feel the need to be more specific.”
He’s been struggling with his vertigo problem, of course. And a general frustration with his ageing. But the way he phrased his response made me laugh.

In other news, Richard got the new septic tank for Lot 73 stuck down in its pit, finally, and mostly buried. Progress is being made, one rock at a time, and by the bucketfulls.

Wayne departed back for his home on Vancouver Island, today, leaving Arthur without an enthusiastic fishing companion. I have a hard time being enthusiastic about fishing. I am happy to go with Arthur out in the boat – and I even enjoy the time out on the water when I’m not feeling criticized, but I don’t have the passion for fishing that Arthur or Wayne do.
Here is Wayne, about to board the plane.

Here is Arthur, Wayneless, forlorn.

We went out fishing again today – Wayne, Arthur and I. It was Wayne’s last day here.
Actually it was a bit windy at the south end of San Ignacio – but the fish from yesterday had disappeared. There were quite a few boats around, but no one was catching.
We went over to Caldera Bay to try for halibut, instead. But as I’ve remarked before, Arthur seems to have little patience for halibut fishing. Halibut fishing is unlike fishing for salmon, where you troll with boat at a slow speed and maneuver the downriggers to depths in an effort to convince the fish to try for your hook. In halibut fishing, you just drop your hook and weight and bait to the bottom and wait. And wait.
And wait.
Arthur gets restless with this, after maybe 15 minutes. It can be heartbreakingly amusing in the way that so many ageing-related issues are tragicomic.
Here is a baited halibut hook, with its formerly frozen herring hoping to be a meal.

Here are the fishermen, driving the boat along.

Arthur and I went out fishing today. Wayne didn’t come along – he’s actually more of a river fisherman and I think maybe Wayne was burned out on dealing with Arthur and me and the tension on the boat that arises due to Arthur getting upset that I can’t read his mind but I’m nevertheless supposed to be effective as second-in-command.
But we have our rhythms, I guess. And we finally caught some fish. Maybe because finally it has been raining a bit, and finally the fish decided to taste the shores.
Here is a view of where the fish were, south side of San Ignacio – to the left, from here, is the open sea, but it’s a ways down. There were broad swells but it wasn’t too windy.

Here is a view of Sunnahae – the mountain that towers over Craig – on the way back.

Arthur and Wayne failed to catch fish up at the north end of the island, where they’d gone off to yesterday. So they came back early. I guess the fishing season just isn’t going well, this year. Wayne said some people were catching fish, but using a brute force “snagging” method that is illegal in most parts of North America, but which is allowed in libertarian Alaska. It made him uncomfortable. He remarked that fishing like that in British Columbia – his home – that method would land you in jail.
So they came back. We were sitting in the upstairs living room area after dinner, and I looked up out the front door window and saw a bear in the driveway. I went out and managed a low-quality photo of it as it ambled toward the water cistern.