The package left on our porch late yesterday afternoon had a note attached:

Nyel and Sydney,
Soup is quite tasty but does have a bit of a zing on the end.  Had a cooking accident!  Like the lid came off the pepper jar and about ¾ cup went into soup.  I tried several remedies which mostly worked.
Had unexpected company last night and made the cornbread.  So, you have day old but it will soak up the soup quite satisfactorily I think.
Hopefully, you will get home and get this before any critters do.
S.

Actually, we had just returned home from an overnight doctoring trip to Portland, but the soup fairy arrived and was gone before we could get to the door.  The note made us laugh out loud and the chicken-with-wild-rice soup and cornbread were just what the doctor ordered!

It was an absolutely delicious dinner – a little peppery to be sure, but the perfect warm-up for a cold winter evening.  Most importantly, it warmed the cockles of our hearts.  And there’s enough left over for lunch today!  We are truly blessed.

This is a test blog, suggested by my webmaster to see if my blog is going simultaneously to my website and to Facebook.  I am not holding my breath.

There are some days in winter, even now in the year of our Lord 2013, that we don’t see more than a handful of cars in Oysterville.  Even more unusual, there are times that we can drive the seventeen miles to Ilwaco and see nary a vehicle on the road.  Usually that happens in winter, though not on clam tide weekends.

I’ve been told that as many as 10,000 vehicles crowd the beach during a clam tide which is not hard to believe.  Seeing the cars and pickups parked head-in, side-by-side along most of our twenty-eight-mile stretch of ocean beach always makes me wonder if the entire Peninsula might tip to the west.  Seeing all the out-of-state license plates on those vehicles makes me think of how the bridge has changed things for us.

Most of us who remember the days of the ferry are getting a little long in the tooth now.  Remembering the days before the bridge – pre 1966 –has become a mark of how far back your Peninsula connections go.  My shirttail relative, Virginia Williams Jones, (who is now in her ninety-eighth year) can even remember the very first car ferries and their Captain, Fritz Elfving.

It was in the summer 1921 that the first regularly scheduled auto-ferry service began between the slip at the foot of 14^th Street in Astoria to the dock on our side of the river at McGowan.  At that time, the dock at Megler was still the terminus for the train and the boats that regularly met it from Portland and other points along the river.  It wouldn’t be until the trains quit running in 1930 that Megler would become the ferry landing on the Washington side and “going to Megler” became synonymous with “catching the ferry.”

That first car ferry, the Tourist, could hold up to fifteen vehicles.  The statistics for 1922 show that it carried 6500 vehicles and 25,000 people across the river that summer.  That prompted Captain Elfving to build a second ferry and in 1924 the Tourist II began service.  She had a wood hull, was 98 feet long, 36 feet wide, 8 feet in depth, and could carry 22 cars.  Her 200-horsepower diesel engine could propel her along at about twelve miles per hour.

Although other ferries were added to the ‘fleet,’ the Tourist II continued to serve the Astoria-Megler crossing until the beginning of WWII when Elfving sold her to the Army for $35,000.  She was given a coat of gray paint, became the military ferry and mine planter Octopus and received the “E” pennant for her outstanding service.  At the end of the war, Elfving bought her back for $36,000.

It’s more likely, of course, that most of us with memories of the ferry are remembering the M.R. Chessman which went into service in 1947 or the Kitsap which began the run in 1962.  Both of those ferries belonged to the State of Oregon to whom Elfving sold the ferry business in 1946.  And, for those of us who do remember the ferry days, there are dozens of stories…

Well, the thunder and lightning that someone predicted for yesterday didn’t arrive, but neither did the sun or wind.  In fact, Oysterville seemed to be in a quiet gray envelope all day long: the high temperature was 66º, the low was 60º, and someone said the wind was only one-knot-per or. at best, two.  Certainly not an ideal day for the Annual Oyster Cup Regatta.

In fact, there were some glitches from the get-go.  Of the twelve sailors who signed up, three had to drop out before the day dawned – one whose back had given out, one who hadn’t been able to leave work for practice time beforehand (it probably wouldn’t have mattered), and one because his car broke down.  So the race began with nine.

Usually there are three heats or races but yesterday there were only two.  From the spectators’ viewpoint anyway, the first race was like watching a watercolor or, at best, a slow-motion silent movie.  From the point of view of at least some of the participants, “it just wasn’t any fun.”  Two dropped out before the first race was over.

The wind picked up a bit – perhaps a zephyr – during the second race and the seven who stuck with it made it around the course a little faster.  Even so, it was a long afternoon by Regatta standards and the third race was called off because they were running out of water, as in “time and tide wait for no man.”

We had our usual front row seats and had a grand time enjoying it all from a fairly dry vantage point.  It was misty-moisty but didn’t actually rain, and lots of people came to watch and visit with one another.  Now and then little kids and big dogs headed for the nearby marshy places keeping their respective adults busy and the rest of us amused.  We reconnected with folks we only see annually – “regatta friends” – and thoroughly enjoyed our day.

As usual, it was all topped off with the Banquet and Awards Ceremony at Tucker and Carol’s.  More visiting and more laughter and new tee-shirts.  As we walked around the corner and home, we were already thinking about next year and wondering if there will be better sailing weather…

Willard, Edwin, Dale in 1916

     I woke up to the sound of a pack of seals barking in our bedroom.  It was loud!  How many were there, anyway?  And where did they come from?
     My mother used to tell about the baby seal that she and her brothers had found down at the bay.  They brought it home and put it in the bathtub upstairs.  For days they spent their time catching fish for it, but it barked piteously for its mother so they took it back to the bay.
     No, what I was hearing was not one seal.  It was a gaggle or a bevy or whatever you call a congregation of the beasts.  (Actually, I think it’s a harem, but I’m having none of that in my bedroom!)  And they weren’t in the bathtub.  They were right there in the room with us.  Practically in bed with us!
     Predictably, that long-ago baby seal followed Edwin, Willard, and Mom back up the lane to the house.  No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get it to disengage.  It had bonded.  Nowadays, of course, we are told to leave those baby seals alone.  Their mama has only parked them, not abandoned them.  But the Espy kids hadn’t read that rule…  Maybe it hadn’t been formulated for public consumption and headlined in the paper as early as 1916 or 1917.
     As I was struggling with the rest of that story, I came to full consciousness.  There were only two seals in our room, after all, but they were loud.  Very loud.  And right there in bed with us!  The bark, bark, bark became cough, cough, cough and we became they!
     Feeling puny though I was, when I put on my kiss-and-lie-down-dress in the middle of the afternoon eight full days ago, I didn’t expect to be down for the count for more than twenty-four hours.  I certainly had no expectation of turning into a seal or any other sort of marine mammal.  And I didn’t expect to draw a blank when it came to writing my morning blog.  Not so close to Christmas with all its attendant excitement.
     “What in the world shall I blog about this morning?” I asked my whiskery companion.
     “Maybe it’s time to hang up your pen,” was the most unhelpful response.
      Perhaps he’s on the right track.