Dr. Kim Patten

As I sat in the old classroom at the Oysterville School yesterday and listened to Dr. Kim Patten, I was a-swirl with mental images and emotional reactions.  Kim is the Washington State University Professor of Horticulture and Extension Agent whose areas of expertise are cranberries and aquatic nuisance species.  He is also long-time chairman of our local school board, husband to primo bread-baker Andrea, and father to three adult children, one of whom is also a Dr. now and who long ago was my student at Ocean Park School.

As always when I see a friend “doing what they do,” I was filled with completely inexplicable pride – like by knowing Kim I could take a little credit for his expertise or feel somehow more fully informed than those who had not been introduced to him before.  How ridiculous is that!  But, nevertheless, I did feel that special something that you swells your heart when someone you know is in the limelight.

“C is for Cranberries”

Kim’s talk was the third in the Town Hall Meeting and Lecture Series happening here in Oysterville.  The first was a month ago – Clay Nichols talking about climate change.  Two weeks ago Kathleen Sayce spoke to us about the many names we call rain.  Kim talked about the Cranberry and Shellfish industries here at the beach, the perils each faces, and what each might look like a decade or two from now.

I was glad that I had attended the first two lectures because there were bits and pieces of Kim’s information that I understood better because of them.  He alluded to our recent years of long, gray spring seasons, for instance, and their adverse effect on cranberry production.  And, of course, he talked about the changes in shellfish operations due to acidification of the oceans.  I wondered if Diane Buttrell considered the sequence of the speakers when she set up the schedule for the series – or was it happenstance?  Or is it just that all things are inter-related anyway?

“O is for Oysters”

Much of the information Kim shared was of the cutting edge variety – right down to the fact that ‘as he spoke’ an experimental mechanical clam harvester was being used on the bay a few miles south of Oysterville.  Many of the challenges to the shellfish and cranberry industries that Kim described have been given a good deal of press lately and I was glad that I was somewhat informed about these very complicated issues.  Even so, Kim’s peek at future possibilities, as in how our bay will look a generation from now, were a bit mind-boggling.

During the question/answer period, though, I had a brief desire to stand up and advertise a couple of my books:  “You need to read C is for Cranberries, the ABCs of Cranberries on the Long Beach Peninsula and O is for Oysters, the ABCs of Oystering on Willapa Bay.  Both are available at local bookstores, both answer basic questions like some of those you are asking, and both should be ‘must reads’ for those of you who live here on the beach.”

            But, I maintained my own counsel, as they say.  My middle initial “M” stands for Medora, not Marketing.