Homeward Bound

The more I walk, the more my body thanks me for doing what it is designed to do. Little by little I'm breaking the trance that says we have to travel to distant parklands and wilderness areas if we want to walk, and that where we live is the exclusive domain of cars. Thoreau wrote, "Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you." 

From the vantage of our physical bodies, and what we need to maintain a healthy balance between body and mind, Thoreau's observations are as relevant now as in his own day.

This week I walked the final 50 mile leg of my Snohomish / Skagit Valley / Whidbey Island walking pilgrimage, this time from Oak Harbor home along the length of Whidbey Island. The above photo shows me heading south from Oak Harbor, with Mt. Baker in the background. Baker is the most prominent sign post on my 100 km boundary circle, and I never grow tired of seeing it from all the varied angles. My wife Sally again joined me for the first part of the walk. We took a beautiful nine mile hike down the bluffs from Oak Harbor, with the Skagit delta and North Cascade range spread east across Skagit Bay, then traced the north shore of Penn Cove around to the Captain Whidbey Inn near Coupeville. 

Along the way we passed the site of the largest native village of the Cokwlo'a Skagit, the tribe now based on the Swinomish Reservation that once occupied the Lower Skagit delta and the area of Whidbey Island from Dugualla Bay and Oak Harbor to Penn Cove. This is the historic terrain of my friend Ray Williams, who I visited during the Skagit portion of my walk. The site is now a private vacation beach on North Penn Cove, with a plaque that tells the thread of this now invisible story. It is amazing how quickly history buries the memory of those who come before when a new culture gains ascendancy. The highway up Whidbey whizzes past not far from this spot, yet this is the first I've heard of this village that dominated central Whidbey for centuries before contact with the new Euro-American settlers. Will history deal as kindly with us as we have dealt with them? 

 

After spending the night at Capt. Whidbey, Sally caught the bus home in the morning and I continued on my way. I headed across to the west side of the island on a trail over Ebby's Prairie to Ebby's Bluff, a National Historic Preserve that is still dominated by working farmsteads. I visited the grave of Isaac Ebby, the namesake of this Preserve, who was murdered by a group of Haida Indians who paddled four hundred miles from the Queen Charlotte Islands in the mid-nineteenth century to exact revenge for the death of one of their chiefs who was murdered by a resident of Whidbey Island. In the strict traditional code of Northwest Coast native justice, a person of equal rank from the offending tribe was the one who had to pay the price, rather than the person who actually committed the crime. Isaac Ebby had the unlucky distinction of being the Territorial Representative of the young Whidbey community, so he was identified as the "chief" whose death would even the scales. The raiding party cut off Ebby's head and returned with it the four hundred miles by canoe back to the Queen Charlottes. He paid a big price for lending his name to this place. 

 

Once at Ebby's Bluff, with its expansive views over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic mountains and Vancouver Island, I turned south and walked all the way to Greenbank along the deserted beaches beneath a long series of bluffs. I had covered nearly twenty miles by the time I finally made it to Lagoon Point, where I stopped for the night with friends David and Cynthia Trowbridge. This was the longest single days' walk of the trip, and probably of my entire life. I have seldom been more ready to take off my boots. I was welcomed with warm hospitality and a fresh blackcod dinner. It was fun over dinner to tell them stories of my days fishing commercially for blackcod in the Gulf of Alaska. 

David is a fellow student of Harada Roshi, and both Cynthia and David are founding members of the Enso House Zen Hospice that adjoins the Tahoma Zen Monastery. David is also a PhD physicist with a passion for astronomy who has built a remarkable observatory on his property from which he participates in astromonical research with professional and amateur astronomers all over the world. Being a clear night, he fired up the observatory for me, with a retractable roof and telescope that pivots on request from a laptop to point exactly at the star or galaxy he happens to be studying. That night he was measuring the variations of light from a double star that spins in a strange orbital dance. The duration of the orbit can be determined exactly by the variable intensity of light that the star gives off over time. He also gave me my first-ever direct look at the planet Saturn with its rings. Not only did I get to see parts of Whidbey that are new to me, I got to see parts of the heavens that are only beginning to be understood by modern astronomy. To think that this could happen from a back yard observatory was quite a revelation.

  

I broke the final twenty miles of my journey home into two easy ten mile days. Back in my home terrain, I took my time, stopping for tea at friends homes that happened to be along my route past Bush Point, Mutiny Bay and Double Bluff, then stopped for the night to participate in the evening and morning meditation schedules at Tahoma Zen Monastery. 

My last morning brought me across the dike over Deer Lagoon to Sunlight Beach, then on to my home in the Maxwelton Valley. I got home just in time to join my friends Dan Kowalski, Rick Jackson, Doug Kelly and Steve Boyd for a waffle breakfast at Doug's house, a short walk through the woods from my place. I ate three waffles before I lost count. It was a great welcome home.