MacDonald - Onions in the Stew

F or Joan and Jerry and Anne and Bobour best friends

CONTENTS

Where hearts were high and fortunes low, and onions in the stew.

C HARLES D IVINE

F OR twelve years we MacDonalds have been living on an island in Puget Sound. There is no getting away from it, life on an island is different from life in the St. Francis Hotel but you can get used to it, can even grow to like it. Cest la guerre, we used to say looking wistfully toward the lights of the big comfortable warm city just across the way. Now, as November (or July) settles around the house like a wet sponge, we say placidly to each other, I love it here. I wouldnt live anywhere else.

I cannot say that everyone should live as we do, but you might be happy on an island if you can face up to the following:

1. Dinner guests are often still with you seven days, weeks, months later and sleeping in the lawn swing is fun (I keep telling Don) if you take two sleeping pills and remember that the raccoons are just trying to be friends.

2. Any definite appointment, such as childbirth or jury duty, acts as an automatic signal for the ferryboats to stop running.

3. Finding island property is easy, especially up here in the Northwest where most of the time even the people are completely surrounded by water. Financing is something else again. Bankers are urban and everything not visible from a bank is too far out.

4. A telephone call from a relative beginning Hello, dear, weve been thinking of you... means you are going to get somebodys children.

5. Any dinner can be stretched by the addition of noodles to something.

6. If you miss the last ferrythe 1:05 A . M .you have to sit on the dock all night, but the time will come when you will be grateful for that large body of water between you and those thirteen parking tickets.

7. Anyone contemplating island dwelling must be physically strong and it is an added advantage if you arent too bright.

Our island, discovered in 1792 by Captain Vancouver and named Vashon after his friend Admiral James Vashon, is medium sized as islands go, being approximately fifteen miles from shoulder to calf and five miles around the hips. It is green, the intense green of chopped parsley, plump and curvy, reposes in the icy waters of Puget Sound, runs north and south between the cities of Seattle and Tacoma and is more or less accessible to each by ferryboat.

On the map Vashon Island looks somewhat like a peacock and somewhat like a buzzard. Which depends on the end you choose for the head and how long you have been trapped here. The climate, about ten degrees warmer and wetter than Seattle and vicinity is ideal for primroses, currants, rhododendrons, strawberries, mildew and people with dry skin who like to read. The population is around five thousand people and an uncounted number of sniveling cowards who move back to the city for the winter.

Because of its location and the fact that it rises steeply from the water into high plateaus, Vashon Island is plethoric with views. Across the west are the fierce snowy craggy Olympic Mountains and the magnificent untamed Olympic Peninsula, black with timber, alive with game and fish, soggy with lakes and streams, quivering with wildness. Separating Vashon from the Olympic Mountains and Peninsula is the narrow, winding, lovely West Channel of Puget Sound. To the east are the smoky purple Cascade Mountains and Seattle. North are other islands, Bainbridge, Blake, Whidbey and the Olympic Mountains. South of us is Mount Rainier, that magnificent, unbelievably shy mountain who parts her clouds and shows her exquisite face only after she has made sure Uncle Jim and Aunt Helen are really on their way back to Minneapolis. Mount Rainier is 14,408 feet high which is higher than Fujiyama but only half as high as Mount Everest. It has twenty-six glaciers, listed in the encyclopedia as quite an accomplishment, and was also discovered by Captain Vancouver who seems to have spent a great deal of time cruising around this part of the world discovering things. Except in the very early morning or rare summer evenings when the foothills show, Mount Rainier appears to be a mirage floating in clouds, appearing and disappearing (mostly disappearing) just above the horizon.

It is described locally as looking just like a dish of ice creamstrawberry or vanilla depending on the time of day. To make the description perfect, the ice cream should have pale blue sauce drooled over it.

Everything on Vashon Island grows with insane vigor and you have the distinct feeling, as you leave the dock and start up the main highway, that you should have hired a native guide or at least brought along a machete. Alder, syringa, maple, elderberry, madroa, pine, salmonberry, willow, wild cucumber, blackberry, fir, laurel and dogwood crowd the edges of the roads turning them into green tunnels and only the assiduous chopping and slashing by the county and the telephone and power companies keeps this jungle from closing up the highways altogether.

From the water Vashon looks like a stout gentleman taking a Sunday nap under a wooly dark green afghan. The afghan, obviously homemade, is fringed on the edges, occasionally lumpy, eked out with odds and ends of paler and darker wools, but very ample so that it falls in thick folds to the water. Against this vast greenness, houses scattered along the shore appear small and forlorn, like discarded paper boxes floated in on the tide. The few hillside houses look half smothered and defeated, like frail invalids in the clutches of a huge feather bed.

The farm land of VashonVashon is famous for its red currants, pie cherries, peaches, strawberries, gooseberries, boysenberries, loganberries, raspberries, chickens, eggs, goats milk, Croft lilies and orchidsis gently sloping and covered with plump green and brown patchwork fields tucked in around the edges with blanket-stitching fences. Scattered here and there over the landscape are rather dilapidated outbuildings, placid cows and goats stomach-deep in lush pasture, and churches. Churches are everywhere. Vashon was once, perhaps still is, a mecca for the more vigorously religiousFree Methodists, Baptists, and so on. The other milder religions have their small strongholds too. As Vashon still retains a pungent frontier atmosphere the over-all effect is faintly ridiculouslike a man sitting in the parlor in his undershirt, drinking beer and reading the Bible. A tiny white church up to its knees in non-ecclesiastical currant bushes holds a bony arm bearing a small cross high up toward the pale sky. A large hipped white church glares disapprovingly at the movie theatre across the way. A small brown church has its frail back braced against a horde of immense invading alders, its front porch sags wearily under a load of wild cucumber vines. A very old trembly gray church keeps its yard tidy and tries not to notice how its friends have fallen off. In among the churches are houses, mostly old, mostly shapeless and paintless, set in neat green yards, rearing up wild eyed and rickety out of tangles, peering out of thickets, hiding behind orchards or teetering nervously on the edge of bluffs above the water. The newly built, freshly painted houses are either along the main highway or on the beaches. Vashon is not a geranium-planted-in-the-wheelbarrow, wagon-wheel-against-the-fence, Ye Olde Tea Shoppe community. Our ugliness is rawboned, useful, natural and honest. Our beauty is accidental, untampered with, often breathtaking.

Oval ponds with flat silver surfaces lying in green fields like forgotten handmirrors. White pullets flapping across a green broadloom meadow like scraps of torn paper. A solitary maple tree sitting stolidly in the middle of an empty pasture, its full dark green skirt spread carefully over its thick ankles, a stout lady looking at the mountain. A red water tank spraddle-legged above rows of greenhouses, pale blue and cool like ice cubes. Green dance-hall streamers of boysenberry vines looped from post to post. Scotch broom pouring in over the hills like a flood of melted butter. Currant bushes bleeding red currants down their brown stems. Peach trees with freshly whitewashed trunks and crowded bright pink branches marching through newly plowed orchards like stiff bouquets. Strawberry patches rolling right up to the edge of the sky, the troughs between the plants scalloping the horizon.