At Aunty Florence's house right now. She and I will be flying to Hawai'i tomorrow. Kai dropped me off tonight, Karen will take us to the airport in the morning on her way to work. The main reason for our trip is Uncle Art's service next Saturday, a secondary reason is Mom's geriatric assessment later this week.
Mom already has a chore for me to do. When I called this morning to remind her to take her pills she said she was trying to get the vertical blinds to open; they were stuck. Then she said I would need to fix them when I arrived. This is a lot better than a couple years ago when she would insist that she could fix whatever it was or call someone to fix it. I would find on my next trip that it had not been done so I would do it. I think it was after my 3rd trip that she started to let me know what needed fixing. It had been her "job" to find the repair people, I think it was difficult for her to turn things over to me to do.
When I called this evening to remind her to take her pills she wanted to know when I was coming! I could hear Dad in the background telling her I would be there tomorrow. She was very surprised by that. I have found that she forgets more in the evening or when she is tired or stressed.
This is the last catch-up post. All future posts will be real-time posts! So they will also generally be shorter posts.
Happy Birthday to Lenny and Jon!
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02/19/2016 Day 1 It Was a Dark & Stormy Night
We’re down in Portland this weekend to visit friends and relatives before I make the final move back to Hawai’i. There are 5 friends/family here and 1 from Seattle who is here for a celebration of her uncle’s fight against discrimination experienced by Japanese-Americans during and after World War II.
We left about 7 pm after Kai’s medical appointment, so we arrived at friend Jane’s house about 11 pm. I could not believe the amount of traffic all the way down! We ran in to a traffic jam in Fife around 8:30 pm, the rest of the way was heavier than I’ve seen it except on the Wednesday just before Thanksgiving. It rained off and on all the way to Portland; in Lynnwood the wind was blowing so steady you could only tell it was windy by noticing that the tree tops were bent at an angle that they usually aren’t at.
It has been a long time since I have been farther south on I-5 than Sea-Tac Airport. I had not seen the Emerald Queen Casino or Great Wolf Lodge before. Or the giant Cabela’s outside of Olympia. I liked the additional lanes on I-5 but I guess they had to do that because of all the traffic, which is not so cool.
Passing by the signs to Mount St. Helens brought back memories of when I was stationed at the Toutle River Hatchery in May 1980. I think we will try to stop in at the visitor’s center on the way back so I can compare what it looked like on the day we were evacuating the hatchery to what it looks like now, 36 years later.
Jane knows how to treat her house guests, we had pie for an after-drive dessert! After a little catching up we headed off to bed. Photos will start tomorrow.
02/20/2016 Day 2 !Bienvenidos!
We had brunch with our friend Hazuki and her family in Beaverton. We met her in around 1997 in Mexico at her family’s Japanese restaurant; at the time it was the only Japanese restaurant in Chiapas, we were told the next closest one was in Mexico City! We were in Chiapas for 10 days to help our Sensei with an Aikido seminar. A couple years later her father asked us if her older sister Maki could live with us for a few months while she was studying English in Seattle. The next year Hazuki came and stayed with us. It was very enjoyable to spend a few hours with her and her family; we even got to Skype with her mother and father in Mexico. (Her father is Japanese, her mother is Mexican.) Hazuki served us pancakes, bacon, fresh fruit, and 2 types of chilaquilas. One of my fondest memories of when Hazuki lived with us was how she could open up our refrigerator and create something tasty from random things she found!
We gave them some Hawaiian chocolate as a gift. In return, they shared some chocolate from Hazuki’s native Chiapas region that her brother Takumi had sent her. It was from Cacao Nativa and has flavors such as tamarind, chile, pumpkin seed, tequila, and mezcal. The shop is located in San Cristobal de las Casas. Here are some reviews in English.
Later our friend Steven picked us up at Hazuki and Todd’s house. I met Steven in 1976 at the University of Washington; we were both in the Lander Hall dormitory. The coconut wireless spreads the word fast so that students from Hawai’i found each other quickly. Steven is from Kaua’i, the most northwesterly of the 8 main islands. We accompanied Steven on an errand to Asian Food Center (yes, that’s its name) to buy Longevity Peaches, special peach-shaped buns with red bean filling, for his mother-in-law’s 95th birthday celebration that was happening this evening. Unfortunately, they were all sold out. After he dropped us off at Jane’s house, he went in search of the elusive special birthday buns. (I aspire to be like his mother-in-law, until recently she was doing 30 minutes a day on her treadmill at 3.3 mph. Due to a minor medical issue she has had to cut back to 30 minutes/day at 2.8 mph. Right now I am doing 45 minutes at 2.0 mph - haven’t quite yet gotten coordinated enough to do it any faster, I think I am thinking about the belt rotating too much.)
I met our friend Jane, whom we are staying with, around 1995 when I went to work for the Community Development division as a grading inspector; they wanted someone with a stream and wetland background to investigate violations in those areas. Jane was working in another part of the department but later came to work with the grading section doing environmental reviews. Jane retired about 10 years ago and moved to Portland along with her mother to be closer to her 2 sons. Here’s an edgeworthia growing along her front walk. It is very fragrant and is used in paper making in Japan and China.
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| Edgeworthia chrysantha |
In the evening Kai met his friend Matt at Sushi Ichiban. They worked together at Freelock in 2011.
02/21/2016 Day 3 Never Give Up!
We went to the Portland JACL Day of Remembrance event this afternoon. This year’s event honored my friend Barb’s Uncle Min, her father Homer was one of the speakers. There is a film being made about Min’s work fighting against the forced removal of Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We were joined there by calabash cousin Alton and our friend Jody. It turns out Alton, who is a professional storyteller, had actually interviewed Homer a few years ago and was involved in telling stories about the internment experience as part of Oregon’s 150th anniversary commemoration. The reading of the book “Stubborn Twig”, about the Yasui family’s history and wartime experience, was encouraged throughout the state. To find out more about how Japanese Americans were treated in Washington check out the book “Strawberry Days” which documents what happened to Americans of Japanese ancestry in the Bellevue area.
This morning I saw a hummingbird at Jane’s feeder that hangs off the back porch. Since it was backlit I could only see its silhouette so I don’t know what kind it was. It actually sat down for a while.
Found out more about Kai’s visit to Sushi Ichiban He says the sushi was good and also very reasonably priced. For the 2 of them, eating 20 plates of sushi (that were delivered by a little train) it was just over $19. The neighborhood it is located in was extremely varied, with upscale shops next to soup kitchens.
02/22/2016 Day 4 Mount St. Helens
The original plan was to leave Jane’s around mid-morning so that we would arrive back in Everett by mid-afternoon, thus missing all the rush hours along the way. Since the weather was nice we decided to take a little side trip to Mount St. Helens, which meant on our way back we had to deal with the rush hour in Toledo, population 725. I wasn’t able to get very good photos because there was so much glare on my phone screen so I have provided screen shots from Bing instead. The blue dot is the salmon hatchery I was stationed at on May 18, 1980, it is about 15 miles from the summit of Mount St. Helens. Due to the topography it did not get hit by any of the mudflows, however when the debris dam at Spirit Lake broke, water, mud, trucks, logs, and whatever else was in it went cascading downstream. Everything hit the bridge crossing the Toutle River and flowed back up the Green River to the hatchery. The bridge eventually gave way and the only way to get in and out of the hatchery was through the logging roads.
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| Hatchery at blue dot (Bing maps) |
I was not at the hatchery when St. Helens erupted. Since the previous week was my duty week I had worked 10 days and was on my 4 days off. At the time I was still working on my masters thesis and since this was pre-personal-computers I was in Seattle to use the University of Washington main frame computer to do the number crunching. As soon as we heard the news, I called in and we headed back down to the hatchery to help move the fish out. We got to the checkpoint and were allowed through since we worked and lived in the restricted area. We never made it to the hatchery, another flood of muddy water covered more of the road, swamping 3 cars that were ahead of us on the road. We couldn’t reach anyone at the hatchery so I called in to the main office and let them know where we were and spent the night at our friend Mark’s house in Olympia. I called Mom to let her know we were all right (she had been out shopping so had not been near a TV). On the late night news we were finally able to confirm that our house (and our cat V-8) was safe when they showed footage taken from a helicopter that flew over the hatchery. Mom also saw some TV footage and called to make sure we were all right! Two days later the department arranged for a convoy of trucks to take us back in to retrieve personal belongings. Here’s a closer view of the hatchery in relation to the Toutle River. You can see how there is still a lot of sediment in the Toutle but the Green is fairly clear.
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| Toutle Hatchery as seen on a Bing map |
Being from Hawai’i, I made an offering to Madame Pele when St. Helens started becoming active. I had ti leaves (from a ti log from Hawai’i that I had growing in a pot) and alae salt from Hawai’i, but no red fish; so I used a salmon fillet. On each side of the walkway to the house I placed a piece of salmon on the ti leaf and sprinkled it with alae salt and asked Madame Pele to keep us safe. When the flood water backed up the Green River it came right to the edge of the ti leaf offerings but no further, stopping about 50 feet from our door. The hatchery buildings and ponds and the manager's house were full of mud, the mud had come to the back door of the 3 other houses. I don’t care what anyone says, Madame Pele kept us safe! (We were expecting some slides in the mail that Saturday. When we checked the mailbox, which was next to the hatchery building, the slides were there, nice and dry!)
I couldn’t find the access road to the hatchery while we were driving around today. I knew about where it should have been but could’t find it. After looking it up on Bing and Google maps I realized I could not find it because they changed the location of Hwy 504, they put it all on the south side of the river and there is no longer any access to the hatchery from that side. I was close though. After more research I found that the North Toutle Hatchery was reopened in 1985 on a limited basis.
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