Jan 07 2009
What happens when all that snow melts and then it rains hard for a few days?
Flooding, that’s what. This is the state highway between my house and town, about an hour after high tide. Yes, I did drive through it, and yes, it was a little bit sketchy.
Maybe a plague of locusts will be next….
Jan 02 2009
None of these have been blogged before. No words today, just pictures. Enjoy!
Jul 06 2008
I just spent an hour writing, reading and then rewriting this post. It seems so inadequate, and so flat when compared to the task I am trying to undertake. But I don’t think I can do much better right now.
This afternoon I was hit with some shocking and sad news. I turned on the radio as I was driving down to work and heard the end of a story about a helicopter crash near Flagstaff, AZ, last Sunday, June 29. Two air ambulances collided in midair, killing six of the seven people aboard. When I got to the office I looked up the news on Google, fearing the worst, and my heart sank when I saw my friend and mentor, Tom Clausing, listed among the dead in an article on the KNXV-TV Phoenix news site.
I went back and re read the article twice, hoping I had somehow misconstrued what I read, but it was plain and clear.
Way back in March, I wrote a blog post about the Wilderness First Responder class that we host here every year. For the past two years, Tom Clausing has been our lead instructor, and I consider myself privileged to have had someone so talented and easy to work with as an instructor. I have taken the WFR class four times, and a full EMT course, and I have to say that Tom was the person I got the most from, hands down. I consider the instruction I got from Tom to be of far more use to me than most of the lectures I received from doctors in my EMT classes. I had been planning for a year or so to take the Wilderness upgrade to my EMT license from Tom’s company in Leavenworth.
He literally “wrote the book”, or at least one of them, for wilderness EMS instruction; our workbook that was filled with scenarios for us to analyze and write reports on was written by Tom, and included many real-life wilderness emergencies that he and other wilderness medics had responded to. Many of the photographs that were incorporated into our classes were taken by Tom while on the job in one location or another.
One of Tom’s jobs was as a wilderness paramedic in the Grand Canyon National Park, and he flew on helicopters as a flight paramedic routinely as part of this job. He had a lot to say about helicopters, and we tried two years in a row to arrange a Coast Guard helicopter to show up for one the WFR sims. I had finally worked the bugs out of communicating with the right person in the CG chain of command and Tom and I were certain that next year we would be able to put it all together for a helicopter to show up.
One of the things that he said about helicopters, which I will remember forever, doubly so now, was that they are basically big balls of tinfoil, full of fuel, just waiting for an opportunity to fall out of the sky and burst into flames.
The details of the accident are of course still under investigation, and probably will be for a long time, but from reading the articles that I have found on the internet, it appears that the helicopter that Tom was riding on was carrying a fire fighter who had experienced anaphylaxis to the hospital in Flagstaff, when it collided with another helicopter, transporting a patient from another hospital to the same one in Flagstaff that Tom’s chopper was headed for. For some unknown reason, they collided in midair near the hospital. Six of the seven people aboard both helicopters were killed and the seventh, a flight nurse on Tom’s helicopter, was listed in critical condition as of July 2nd. Basically, both choppers found the opportunity to fall out of the sky and burst into flames.
The last time I saw him, he had just finished loading up his old red Suburban with all the gear from the class, and was heading back to his home in Leavenworth, WA. He handed me a helicopter magazine as he was headed out to his rig. We parted ways laughing and thanking each other for a great week, and looking forward to next year.
I took so many pictures during that WFR class, but none of Tom specifically. I found this one of him watching the “litter packaging race”. I’m so frustrated and annoyed with myself that I don’t have any proper pictures of Tom, out of all those frames I took.
I had assumed that I would be working with, and learning from Tom Clausing for years to come. It is so shocking to realize that I will not see him again. I will miss him a lot, especially so every February, during WFR class.
Here is an online guest book that you can leave your condolences in, and another article about the accident is here. An article that talks more about Tom than the crash can be found here, at the Wenatchee World.
Post Script:
After doing some more online research, I found that the flight nurse who had initially survived in critical condition, died on Friday after being removed from life support. He was 36, with a wife and three children.
Jan 27 2008
If I had written a blog five years ago, it would have been all about logging, sawmilling and livestock. That’s what was mostly going on in my life back then. I was running a portable sawmill full time, and had about two dozen Black Welsh Mountain Sheep and a whole lot of chickens. We even had a cow for a short time, and a few pigs one year. I spent a lot of my time driving up and down the Pacific Northwest coast with the sawmill, while my wife Shannon was holding down the fort here on our land in Skamokawa, WA and raising our daughters, Alice and Opal.
A lot has changed in those intervening years. I do still have the sawmill and continue to do small jobs with it from time to time, but it is no longer a full time job. I got back into boating and fishing, both childhood loves that had been left on the back burner for many years, and I got into kayaking in a big way, eventually making it into a full time job for part of the year. The coyotes discovered my livestock a few years back, and cleaned out the chickens right away. And between the neighbor’s dogs and the coyotes, my sheep flock was whittled down to just a few animals a couple of years ago.
More big change came last year, when we decided it was time for our oldest daughter Alice to get some more formal education than the casual style of un-schooling we had been doing with her. The local high school didn’t have much to offer a book-crazy, English major type, but the high school in nearby Astoria did. So Shannon got a job in the new Fort George Brewpub over in town, and rented a house over there for her and the girls to live in. Not only does Alice get to deal with the shock of having homework and early bedtimes, but she and Opal are finally getting some experience living in town, something neither of them had ever done. More can be read about their adventures in town, including a disastrous house fire in October, on Shannon’s blog.
Along with all the other upheaval created by the move to two households, I lost my expert shepherdess Alice, who had succeeded in the last couple of years in keeping the coyotes away from the sheep. After teetering on the edge for several years, I finally made the decision to sell the sheep, as it isn’t safe to let them out on pasture and it isn’t economical to feed them hay. They should be moving to a new home in early February. For now, my livestock days are coming to an end.
I learned computer programming back in 1978, when I was in eighth grade. The school had a Digital PDP 11, which was about the size of a small filing cabinet. It used great big 8″ floppy discs and had a big red knob on the front for parking the drive head. There was a separate room with about a dozen terminals and a massive, sturdy line printer that would just about deafen you when it went off. We were programming in Basic, with line numbers and everything. Later on my family had a VIC-20, with a cassette tape storage setup. When I was in my early twenties I bought a computer for myself, a PC clone with a 4.77 mhz Intel 8088 processor that had a “turbo” switch that would boost the speed to 10 mhz. I could not afford the extra cost of a 20 MB hard drive, so I got two floppy drives instead. That computer cost me almost $900. I remember when Windows first came out, but it was hopeless to run it without a hard drive. Windows was up to version 3, I think, before I had a computer with a hard drive.
Today I live in a world of science fiction. I can sit here at my kitchen table in the country and access a world wide network of information at speeds that would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago, on a fast Mac computer the size of a spiral notebook that is so far past the PDP 11 or even the 8088 that you could hardly compare them in the same sentence. So, with that level of powerful technology at my fingertips, I decided to give blogging a try, and yesterday, I spent the whole day at the computer, learning just enough about MySQL and PHP to make myself dangerous, and I installed Wordpress on my website.
On this blog, you are likely to find stories and pictures about kayaking, boating and fishing, kayak building, machinery repair and lore, rural life and maybe the occasional rant about something in the news that caught my eye. I still have a few farm-like things going on here on the land too: fruit trees and berries, shiitake mushrooms and maybe some hop vines this year. Hopefully it will be interesting enough to keep you coming back for more!
