Author: Kay

Okay. I’ll take breath mints.

I grew my first successful crop of garlic last year. It was modest, perhaps a dozen heads of Nash’s Delta Giant but I was hooked. The dried version you get at the supermarket is pretty generic, much of it imported from China. Fresh garlic is gentle, succulent, and nuanced. It grows well here. It gives bragging rights. So I set aside a whole bed for this year’s crop. Like any addict, I wanted more. Much more.

Garlic is planted in the fall and Nash’s seed crop failed last year. This led me to a local garlic maven, Blythe Barbolian, of Barbolian Fields Garlic. I landed in Garlic Heaven. Did I want softneck? Hardneck? Hot and spicy? Mild? Artichoke? Asian? Porcelain? Oh, dear!

Blythe is patient and good hearted. She knew the signs of a fresh convert and walked me through her tiny workshop of baskets loaded with heads of garlic – large, small, porcelain, purple. I estimated the number of plants I could grow and she helped me decide. I came home with a small bag of this year’s promise which I planted last November. The photo above is most of the bounty. There are also about a dozen heads already harvested.

German Extra Hardy (porcelain, shown above), Inchelium Red (artichoke), Brown Tempest and Persian Star (purple stripe). And she threw in some Juan de Fuca Wonder, their own rocambole. Plus the Siberian that I’d already harvested.

Some years ago I helped at a friend’s party with kitchen duties, peeling and chopping garlic. When another guest commented on my work, without thinking I said, “Garlic makes me happy.” I hadn’t realized it until that moment but it was one of those simple, unrealized truths. And now that I can grow it I’m very happy indeed.

Simple pleasures are like that. Life is good.

Disappointed

I nearly missed an exhibition in Port Townsend of Ansel Adams photos taken at the World War II internment camp, Manzanar. But because it had been so enthusiastically received, the exhibit was extended until Labor Day and I headed to the Jefferson County Musuem to check it out.

After we paid our entrance fee I was firmly told that photos were not allowed, with or without flash. This was a disappointment – and even moreso when I saw the exhibit. The work was not a display of Ansel Adams prints but reproductions on large sheets of texts that told of the experiences of the Japanese Americans who were interned. The prints themselves are downloadable free from the Library of Congress website (www.loc.gov) as is Adams’ book, “Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California.” The exhibit itself was in the former Jefferson County Jail, a dreary cement basement in the building shown above. I’m puzzled by the photography ban.

The exhibit is a touching and disquieting portrait of American history and has local relevance because Manzanar was the first camp where local Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island were sent. Residents from Bainbridge Island were also the first West Coast Japanese Americans to be relocated. Orders were posted on March 24, 1942 and by March 30 internees were sent to the Center. Six days to dispose of virtually all ones possessions. Internees could take only what they could carry.

Manzanar is a vividly stark and remote place. I have driven past it many times. No buildings remain. Until more recent years, when an effort has been made to remember this era of our history, very little marks its significance. While there, the internees turned the desert into cultivated fields, created a small hospital, and educated their children. Many of the young men volunteered for military service and served the U.S. with great distinction. In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology.

Some years ago in Death Valley, California, I was surprised to learn that there had been a World War II internment camp there as well. I took the photo above of a barracks there while on a ranger-led walk. Like Manzanar, it was a remote and unforgiving environment. Here too the internees made the best of the situation. In Death Valley they volunteered for work details that led to many of the improvements that exist in present day Death Valley National Park.

Bright skies for Labor Day

As summer winds down it’s been great fun having our skies brightened by hot air balloons from the Sequim Balloon Festival. Judging from the turnout by the sides of the roads as they launched early in the mornings, there’s been a lot of interest in this new event. I have loved this eye candy and am grateful to have this event in our collective backyard.

Here are random views from our skies this past weekend.



Here come the cuties

The Peninsula Daily News reported this week that the bee balloons would fly during the Sequim Balloon Festival this weekend. They sounded very cute – and they didn’t disappoint.

Up they came, then they hovered for a while down behind some trees. Then came the fleeting embrace.

Here’s a closer view. The three bees and three or four other balloons landed in a field next to where we’d stopped. Most were balloons we hadn’t see in flight earlier this week and the balloonist we asked mentioned they came down because the spot looked very convenient. The flights seemed short to us; the landing site was only about a mile from their launch site at Sequim Airport. And most of the balloons we saw landed without benefit of a chase crew.

Come back tomorrow if you’re not oversaturated with balloon photos. I’ll post photos of a few of the more conventional – but nonetheless striking – ones.