First a bit of news. My sailing article Gems of the Caribbean is now up on my website to read. Click here to read it now or follow the Articles link from www.jamesewing.com. Next, I’ve figured out how to leave my busker’s cup on my blog page just over there to the right. Your support is truly appreciated. Now, on with the blog…

Summer is here. And it’s about freaking time. Daytime high temperatures have finally made it reliably into the sixties and it feels like a blanket of gloom has been lifted from the Pacific Northwest. This spring was the coldest on record. April had temperatures that are typically reserved for the northern hemisphere’s most dismal of months: February. There was also talk of above-average rainfall but I don’t recall more than four or five days of the stuff. This is not surprising as now I sleep wearing a helmet made of aluminum to screen out the brain-rays. And, if that last sentence seems borderline psychotic, I urge you to go read Hey Man, Do You Have a Match for the whole story.

In any event the temperatures rocketed up to over seventy degrees this weekend which is the first time ever that Seattle experienced nice weather coinciding with a Saturday-Sunday combination. Or so I was told. The moss-crusted inhabitants of the Emerald City emerged from their ice-caves blinking at the sun much as our troglodytic ancestors did when the alien spaceships first landed and started mixing their DNA, with ours. The warm weather was greeted with a meteorological incredulity unseen in these parts for nearly a year. Forget May 21. In Seattle the Rapture occurred on June 4.

Off came the REI/Patagonia Nano Puff jackets. Gone, OK almost gone, were the grunge stained hoodies and Dr. Martens. Metal studded black leather jackets seemed a distant memory. All of this was instantly replaced by flowered sundresses, plaid Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, and, unbelievably, bathing suits. Notwithstanding water temperatures hovering in the low fifties, people were actually wading around at the beaches of Puget Sound. Oh, Waiter. I’ll have what they’re drinking. One thing I can guarantee is that you have never really had a “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” experience until you have seen somebody wearing baby-blue over white Buffalo Check plaid Bermuda shorts with a pale yellow polo shirt, Doc Martens, and a day-glo-rainbow dyed, six-inch tall Mohawk haircut with “Free Hugs” tattooed on the shaved part of her head.

Summer has arrived.

The call seemed innocent enough at the time. “A group of us are going to Alki Beach on Saturday. The weather’s supposed to be nice for a change. Wanna come?” Gasp! Another straw to grasp in an attempt to weave an actual social life. “Sure. What’s happening?” I tried so hard to sound noncommittal. “Dancing.” Fuck. “It’s salsa and they’re having a free lesson first.” That “free lesson” thing was what tricked me into trying tango, too.

I actually had high hopes because the dance session had exactly nothing to do with tango. One of the local salsa instructors set up a cardboard dance floor around the micro-sized Statue of Liberty at Alki Beach in West Seattle. They taped the cracks to avoid lawsuits and fired up iTunes. The lesson started with all the men on one side of the dance floor and all the women on the other. Just like Eighth Grade. The instructor called time and demonstrated some extraordinarily simple footwork. He pointed his fingers in the direction everybody was to move. Then the music started and he kept directing. Hey, this is pretty easy. Until he stopped directing. Suddenly, my salsa turned into something resembling my tango, only with more enjoyable music. We were instructed to find a partner for the final dances of the lesson. The music started and, fraught with performance anxiety, I began to dance. There were a couple of songs, the music ended, and the instructor thanked us all for coming. I thought it went quite well. My partner, as typically happens, vanished into the crowd.

The lesson now over, the real dance started. Latin music with an infectious beat started pumping out of the speakers. Timbales rattled like Tommy-guns and the sinuate susurrations of maracas heralded the arrival of real dancers who swept the neophytes clear of the floor.

My friend who had invited me out dancing, and is, in fact, a professional-grade salsa dancer, invited me to cut a rug and was very kind as I attempted to revisit the moves that were covered in the lesson. I must admit that without the instructor calling out the steps and pointing the direction to take them, I was what is commonly known as “lost”. Nevertheless, my friend persevered with me and we made it through several songs.

By this time the rest of our group had arrived, none of whom needed to be within five miles of a dance lesson and all of whose names ended in “n”. The pros went dancing and I went in search of somebody else’s toes to step on. I managed to convince several other potential partners that serious injury was unlikely if they danced with me and spent some more time trying to remember exactly what the instructor had said.

Then summer suddenly ended; the temperature dropped like a bobsled racing down the track. I went home and spent the rest of the night searching the internet for “salsa lessons Seattle”. In all things, hope, it seems, springs eternal.

The next morning I was scheduled to go hiking with another friend somewhere in the wilds of Washington State. She had worked as a tour guide for a number of years so I figured that wherever I picked to go I’d get the complete lowdown. I was up at six and summer had returned. I packed up a gourmet picnic lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, an already-open bag of potato chips, and saltines. The boysenberry jelly allowed me to qualify it as “gourmet”. I put together a bag of clothes in case the weather was rainy – as if – and waited patiently for my friend’s arrival.

Because today we were going to the Mountain. In this land of numberless mountains there is only one Mountain and that, of course, is Mount Rainier. It dominates the landscape for a hundred miles in all directions. It’s prominence, the elevation change from base to summit, is 13,211 feet making it the third tallest mountain in North America. Only McKinley in Alaska and Logan in Canada are more prominent. But to really get a feel for the size of the thing the best place to see it is from my neighborhood.

There is a park near my house that looks out over Seattle and Elliot Bay. In the foreground is the Space Needle, about one-third mile away. This is followed by downtown Seattle at about one mile distance. Then some sixty miles away, sits Mount Rainier. And it is this view that gives you the best idea of just how freaking big the thing is. The Space Needle is 570 feet tall, Columbia Center, the tallest building in Seattle, measures up at just under one-thousand feet. They are both built on hills. Despite their hilly advantage and being sixty times closer – just checking – Mount Rainier still appears to be over half as tall as the Space Needle and over three-quarters as tall as the Columbia Center. It’s big.

Off we went to the Mountain. The weather was predicted to be rainy and gray but by the time we arrived at the Paradise Visitor Center it was clear and sunny. Typical. Under a cloudless blue dome we started hiking up along a path that was just hard-pack snow. Even out on the snowfield it was warm enough to go shirtless and I sucked up enough carcinogenic insolation to turn not-quite-lobster red. It was glorious. Up close, the Mountain is still enormous but with nothing for scale other than distant climbers dotting the slopes, it is not quite so overwhelming. Close up, what it seems to lack in size it more than makes up for in detail. The visitor center is only about five miles horizontally away from the summit, but it is nine thousand feet lower. The pinnacle is invisible behind its guard of turquoise blue glaciers and rocky crags. In the distance the rocks continued as far as you could see. And all of the rocks, at whatever closeness you examined them from, looked like they had been hacked at with a cleaver. There were distant ridges on which you could line up fault lines that extended out for miles. There were cracks in cliffs with waterfalls pouring forth. There were gorges you could peer into that were – maybe – ten feet wide at a bottom that was two-hundred feet lower than your feet. Get down on your hands and knees and you’d find cracks cutting boulders into toaster size rocks.

It looked, what we geologists like to call, unstable.

A while back I posted a piece about how we, as groups, choose to live in some pretty unsafe places. I picked Mount Rainier as an example of that. At that time the Mountain was, for me, only an awe-inspiring monolith in the distance. During my research for that post I looked at data about the major mudflows which have issued from Mount Rainier and covered the area from the mountain to Tacoma on several occasions. At the time I was unable to visualize the combination of factors that would make a disaster of that scale possible. But now, with first hand observation of the fractures and faults, of the lubricating contribution of ice and water, and the gravitational assist of insanely steep slopes and a long drop, it all became perfectly clear: the only reason the Mountain is still there, is that it just hasn’t fallen down yet.

So that was my first summer-like weekend. An evening at the beach with music and dancing, a day-trip into the woods to commune with nature and a chance to get to see myself as the nano-dot I am with the great outdoors for scale. I’m just really glad I got to visit Rainier while it’s still there. The trip in the woods also offered a chance to see a late-blooming spring filled with the new growth, chances, and hope that come with the season. Speaking of chances and hope, I better go see about signing up for salsa lessons.