IT’S A WORKING weekend here at the lake, though I’m mostly throwing the stick for Jimi the dog and snapping pics here and there. By sunset tomorrow there’s a metal roof that needs to go up on the newest building Jan and Connie added to the upper camp.
The materials lift sailed over on the barge. The lake is nestled up against the Olympic National Forest and there’s no road access to where we are. Everything gets here to the west side by water.
That big body of water is the Hood Canal. It’s a natural feature, not a canal in the same sense as the Panama Canal, Erie Canal… It’s salt water, part of Puget Sound.
This morning, Jim Hanna picked up the lift of roofing materials with his excavator and tracked it a quarter-mile over to the Nelsons’ camp.
Backing up the hill with the lift… Jim saved everyone an awful lot of walking, no need to lug one piece at a time.
The jet boat lives here, at Jan and Connie’s dock. The barge could tie up here, or at Jim’s cove nearby, but the grades are so steep it would be a semi-hazardous operation. Even with a clever operator like Jim there’s a chance the machine could end up in the lake.
My camp while I’m here. The party lights are still up from Maja and Ben’s wedding last summer. Maja is the youngest of three in the new generation of Nelsons.
I scored a free hat. The Nelsons picked it up for me in Mexico last month. I did a bit of Phantom scribbling for Jeff Weigel yesterday, the artist on the Sunday strip. Will do more tomorrow.
Come Monday, I’ll be back on the road. Maybe back up to Canada for a few days, or more likely on some remote roads that caught my eye in three of the national forests around here, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie, Okanagan-Wenatchee, and Gifford Pinchot.
CCjon and Nestor aim to make Haines, Alaska by Monday, put their motorcycles on a boat. If so, they’ll do the three-day sail down to Bellingham, WA on the Alaska Marine Highway. I’ll meet up with them somewhere within a 200-mile radius of Seattle, then we’ll ride east together for a few days, them bound for Texas, me for New England.
I think we’ll probably split off onto separate tracks home somewhere in New Mexico.
Tony DePaul, August 18, 2018, Lake Cushman, Washington, USA
