Day 76, Tuesday, August 30

I spent today sight seeing around the roads to the west of the Puget sound. Beautiful day of sightseeing, but not much to take pictures of. I have always liked harbor towns and this area is full of them. There’s something about the sound halyards slapping rhythmically against the masts of a harbor full of sail boats makes my nerves tingle. It’s not like I actually grew up with that sound being a staple in my auditory diet, but I’ve always had a love of the water and that unmistakable sound always means you’re near not just water, but a fairly large body of water. While I was living in Chicago, that sound meant I was near one of the harbors on Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan was fun to live near, but it gave me mixed feelings. I could look out over it, and seen *relatively* big waves, hear the sounds of the harbor, and see the boats out on the lake, but there were several things missing. Anybody who’s grown up around salt water knows "that smell" that you always get when you’re around a large body of salt water. It’s a semi-sweet smell of seaweed drying in the sun mixed with the salt spray. If you know the smell and it’s in your veins, you can smell it when still miles away from the water. Lake Michigan simply doesn’t have that. It’s got the blue water but because it lacks "the smell" it never quite felt right to me. The other thing it misses are "correct" waves. Waves on the ocean roll into the shore in sets and always parallel with each other. You can sit on the beach and close your eyes and listen as the each successive waves starts to break to one side of you and continues across until the sound fades out, and about that time you can hear the next wave taking up where the previous left off. It’s rhythmic an soothing. On Lake Michigan, especially Southern Lake Michigan, the waves look more like the boxes on a checker board. The waves get reflected from the curved shore of the lake and hit the shore randomly with seemingly no direction. I’ve heard that this reflection phenomenon actually makes the great lakes exceptionally treacherous bodies of water in a storm. Coming full circle on this train of thought, the Puget Sound looks and smells right. I really miss that. The entire time I’ve lived in Chicago, I’ve always knows I wanted to wanted to get back to living near salt water eventually.
As I was wandering around today, killing time, one of the places I happened by was Gig Harbor. Here there were more of the big power yachts than there were sailboats but the town still holds a quaint sailing village feel.
This evening I headed over to Archie Beddingfield’s house in Maple Valley. Archie and his fiancé Bobbi live there with their combined familes (her daughter, his son). Archie let me stick my trailer in the garage for the week and offered me their couch to crash on for the night. Dad and Mom wanted to know if I could "tell Archie was a Beddingfield". Better put, how much did he remind me of Ray and Jessie Beddingfield. The answer is A LOT. Listening to Archie tell stories about hunting and general experiences I could definitely hear Ray telling the same story. The similarity was comforting.