Something very odd happened this morning while we were all waiting to board the Jetty Island Ferry.
We had been directed to go to the entrance one pier down, because the tide was out insanely far this morning and the pier they usually board at was too low for the boat to come to it. In both cases, the pier was at the bottom of a fairly steeply angled ramp. The young lady told us to go wait over by the potted plants, two rather large ones at the start of a level pathway toward the ramp on the alternate pier. Shobhit, Lynn, Zephyr and I had all been there a while already, and we easily walked over there to get first in line.
A young family was behind us. I could be wrong about this, of course, but what appeared to be a young mother suddenly began to panic because there were bees around those plants, and thus around her legs. "Bees, bees, bees bees!" she said at first, and then she paused or a short quiet moment and said: "I got stung."
And then. She cried. Not a quiet cry, but, like,
weeping. She cried, very near a wail, like you would normally expect a small child to react to getting stung. Never in my life have I seen a grown person respond to getting stung this way.
So here's where my ambivalence comes in. My initial instinct was to think:
Holy Christ, lady. Get a hold of yourself. To the credit of other people also waiting in line—including Lynn and Zephyr, and even Shobhit—anyone there who did not know this family either just looked on with a quiet compassion or basically ignored them. And to be sure, there could be all sorts of actually-logical reasons for the woman to respond this way. Maybe she's got a mental condition of some kind. She could even have been mentally disabled in some way. And of course then there is the most obvious, that perhaps she was allergic to bees. I am inclined to think that most obvious one is the least likely in this case, simply because she never once actually said anything about being allergic, and any person who had an allergy would have gone out of their way to let everyone within earshot know.
Instead, she stayed hunched over, cradling her shin, weeping, the way she might have had she just found out her mother had died. The young lady who had first guided us all over there had to launch into her every-boat-launch shpiel (and these boats cross to Jetty Island every fifteen minutes), very shortly after the stung woman began weeping, and there was a brief moment when we couldn't hear her over the wails.
So anyway. That was how we kicked off our visit to Jetty Island this morning.
I keep forgetting how far from the shore Jetty Island is, as it's so close that the foot ferry that only operates in the summer months takes all of five minutes to cross. Using Google Maps to measure distance, the eastern shore of the island is all of 1,210 feet from the dock where we boarded. That's roughly 0.2 miles. Now, if you move just slightly north to where the huge docks are no longer jutting out into the water, and you measure shore to actual shore, the width is actually closer to 3,000 feet, or 0.56 miles.
With Lynn and Zephyr having said they had never been out there, I could only guess as to how much time we would need. When I booked the ferry tickets for all four of us, we agreed to meet mid-morning because Shobhit worked tonight from 5 to 9 and thus needed to get back at least by 4:00. Knowing that Jetty Island is roughly half a mile wide at its widest point and fully two miles in length, we figured there would be a lot of walking. So, I suggested to Lynn over Facebook Messenger that we take the 10:00 a.m. ferry across, and the 2:00 ferry back.
Zephyr, who was part of the group chat I had opened a couple of weeks ago on Facebook Messenger, did not fully "enter the chat" until last night. He suggested we bring jackets and said it would be chilly; he also said it was unlikely we would need four hours on the island. When I told Shobhit that this morning, he was all for coming back earlier, maybe closer to noon. We learned once we got to the ferry that we could easily change our return time once we got to the other side, we just had to check in there. They had a decidedly low-budget system, in spite of my having bought tickets online that could be added to the "My Wallet" app with a scannable QR code: on the island side, they literally just had a spiral notebook with names handwritten and the time of their return. The girl handling the notebook just did some kind of update on her phone, and then wrote down our return as 12:15: the 12:00 boat was unavailable. This gave us a solid two hours on the island.
And then, as we walked along part of the island to the south of the dock after we explored a large portion of the island to the north, Lynn said, "I think we could have filled four hours pretty easily." I said, "I agree! But, I got outvoted." By then we had established alternate plans after 12:15 though, which I was totally good with, and I indicated as much.
Zephyr's insistence that it would be chilly wasn't quite true either. But, as Lynn said, it was much better to have jackets we did not need than to need jackets we did not have. And to be fair, there were some moments when I did put my hoodie on, although I spent most of our time walking around the island just carrying that in my hands, after I pulled it out of the backpack Shobhit wore because my arm is still sore with this stupid pinched nerve shit (it's much better, but when this happens the recovery is slow going).
We followed a trail across the island from the dock, to the west side, where the water was
incredibly far out due to the low tide. There's a narrow arm of a peninsula to the island on the west side, which we did not quite realize we were walking along. But, once we reached the end of it, we found we could still walk over to the main part of the island just because of the end of peninsula curving back toward it, and the tide being so low. There was a couple of places with water like a narrow creek, which we could barely jump over. I got one of my shoes a bit wet doing this once, and Lynn, the shortest of all of us, got both her shoes wet crossing once. But, we did make it back to the main part of the island.
And we continued to walk north, for a little while. We did not cover a whole lot of the north end of Jetty Island where it has by far its widest part, though, because we started running short on time and needed the time to walk back to the middle of the island where the dock was. We did have a bit of time, once there, to walk a bit to the south. But, on this island with a length of two miles, I would bet we never covered more than a mile or so of its length. I'd love to go back sometime, perhaps next summer.
That is, even though it has no natural fresh water, and only one bathroom, at the dock, which also has no running water. The island is a wildlife sanctuary, and though they allow people recreation out there, they're pretty strict about it—not even overnight camping is allowed. Now, it's probably pretty easy to cheat that; the Jetty Island Ferry is not the only way to get there, even though the island is accessible only by boat. But if you have your own boat, of any kind, you can go there any time you want. The water between the City of Everett and Jetty Island is so narrow, they rent out kayaks and you can quite easily just cross over that way. Hmm, maybe next summer I'll do that! I've actually never been in a kayak before. Those kind of scare me, actually.
Anyway, once we got back to the mainland, we all commented on how nice a day it had been for it, and we were all glad to have been able to go out there. Well, Lynn and Zephyr and I did, anyway. Shobhit had his typical take-it-or-leave-it attitude he has to a lot of stuff like this I like to do, even though it was pretty obvious he also had a good time. He was a bit more openly ambivalent about the discussion about where to go for lunch, but in the end we all went to Scuttlebutt Brewing Col, which Lynn and Zephyr and I had eaten at during my Birth Week visit. Shobhit and I shared a veggie burger, which was fine; with beer breaded french fries, which was excellent; and I had one of their home-brewed root beers (which, honestly, was also fine). This still totaled $33 with tip, but, I have to keep in mind the way prices these days keep up with Washington State law raising minimum wage every year in proportion to inflation—something, I might add, I fully support.
After that, we all drove the few miles down to downtown Everett, where an art festival was happening called
Fresh Paint, where Zephyr's aunt, who had officiated their wedding last year, had a booth. She had a canvas going where she asked passers by to draw something "with your non-dominant hand," and after enough people scribbled all over it she would eventually turn it into an abstract piece. She had several finished pieces for sale and one in particular really spoke to me, but it cost $650. The woman's daughter was also there, a cousin Zephyr had apparently not seen in about fifteen years. So, Zephyr had been pretty intent on getting down there to see them at some point during the day. And both
Shobhit and I made contributions to Zephyr's aunt's canvas.
Shobhit and Lynn and I all walked the length of the fair, and it was actually filled with a lot of very cool stuff. There was also a turnoff street with food trucks, and Shobhit bought us a couple half-dozen bags of fresh mini donuts. Lynn bought herself a giant bag of kettle corn.
Soon enough 3:00 rolled around, and we said our goodbyes. With a bit heavier traffic in the afternoon on the way back home, the drive back took about an hour. Shobhit was off to work within another half hour after we got home, and I made our dinner, and worked on laundry, and chopped some vegetables for what we're taking with us tomorrow. Now I need to work on packing, as tomorrow we are on to the next thing: finally, the Second Biannual Family Vacation, this time in Tokeland Washington! We have a Costco cake to pick up at 9:45, and then we're headed out there, by all accounts earlier than anyone else. But we want to maximize the day, so we're leaving as early as we can. We just can't pick up the cake until 9:45.
Oh! One last thing: the
photo album. I did an unusual thing and just combined the 44 photos from today with the 31 photos I already had from May 5, when all Lynn and Zephyr and I could do was view Jetty Island from across the water. This makes today's event part of my
Birth Week 2024 collection, even though it's three months later; and makes the photo album a total of 76 shots. That's still not the largest of the albums from this year's Birth Week, so I figure it's fine.
[posted 8:06 pm]
