Biker Bob — (Tales from UpCreek)
Spring doesn’t come early to UpCreek. Too dark, too high in elevation, too impervious to Global Warming. Summer lasts about a month, less if you live on the north side of Daddle Mountain, not that many of us do ….
You won’t see gardens up here. Orchards either. Late frosts, early freezes. Folks who last more than a year or two usually come from the cold countries. Norway, Sweden, Minnesota and North Dakota. UpCreek seems positively tropical to them. They know what winter is like, although … they miss those hot summers, I don’t care if the mosquitoes ate them alive and the humidity was like a steam sauna. What we got is cold and clammy, perfect for moss and fungus and aggravated arthritis.
The UpCrickomish have 56 words for rain in their native language. They got everything from a dry mist to a gullywasher and 54 in between. The Eskimos got snow covered and the Hawaiians fine tune their lava, but the UpCrickomish have parsed their precipitation fairly fine. Us non-natives, we got one tenth that meteorological vocabulary, but we spice it up with four letter descriptors. Sometimes it seems like the boundary between rain and the rest of the world is too arbitrary, too ephemeral. We merge with the wet world the way dew is rain that quit falling.
Some of us old timers remember when the rain did quit falling, the drought of ’76. The rainforests on the Olympic Peninsula burned. In the winter! UpCreek burned too, over a thousand acres east of Otter Creek all the way to Pilchuck Pass. Biker Bob lost his cabin, so did a few others, fire burned right up the canyon before the Forest Service boyz got on top of it.
My cabin sits in a clearing so that year I was passed over. The meadow downstream the year after the burn was loaded with morel mushrooms, maybe not a great payback, but you learn up here to take what you can from hardship and disaster, it’s all this hardscrabble place is gonna give for recompense.
Biker Bob moved on. Last we heard he was holed up in Pahrump, Nevada. Got himself a little trailer and on the postcard he sent to the Otter Creek Trading Post for all of us to read, he said it doesn’t rain down there and there’s nothing to burn. He liked it just fine. A couple of the usual layabouts at the Trading Post said they might just have to go visit Bob some winter to escape for awhile, but we all know they won’t. If we wanted to live in the desert, we’d have gone long ago.
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