Scouting the Nooksack
Cow dung and horse dung, as muck goes, are relatively agreeable. You can even become nostalgic about them. They smell of fermented grain, and on the far side of their smell there is hay and grass.
-- John Berger
Saturday, July 8, 2000
One year ago: Tarzan
Three years ago: Camping Day 2
A year ago, Jon Singer was telling me about an exciting flower that smells really bad. Three years ago, I was swimming in the Atlantic Ocean.
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Nooksack -- sounds slightly dirty, doesn't it? Actually, it's a Native American name for one of the rivers here, that starts on the slopes of Mount Baker and runs to the ocean. There are two forks of the river. Today Jack wanted to explore the South Fork for future rafting trips.
We drove out to the country after a breakfast at a family style restaurant. Jack had borrowed a water recreation guidebook for Washington state, so I looked at the sections he had marked while we were eating.
We headed out the Mount Baker Highway, then turned north to Everson. We were looking for likely put-in spots and take-out spots for the raft.
We'd seen a notice that the town of Everson was having some sort of summer festival. But the only special event we could find was the used book sale that the community library was putting on. We wandered around some empty retail space where the Friends of the Library had set up tables with donated books on them. Two bucks for a bag, by the time we got there. I got two Clare Darcy books. (I must remember -- no more! Even at a dime, those were not worth it. Such a cut and paste of Georgette Heyer -- very pale.)
We crossed the river and started up in the direction we'd gone on our trip to Silver Lake last year. We were really in the country -- flat cropland running right up to the foothills. There was a roadside stand selling raspberries and filberts, so we stopped and bought some. Every time Jack's daughter H---- smelled the cows, she exclaimed about it. "Ewwh!"
At the Van Zandt crossroads, on the South Fork past Deming, we stopped at the old country store called Everybody's Store. This place cleverly has a good gourmet selection, since so much of the business is for tourists, or for urban folks with weekend homes in the country. I especially liked the hunter's sausage.
Jack found the good places for us to use on a raft trip. The South Fork is calm and slow, so it's not for a whitewater trip, but we can have a nice relaxing float.
We got back to the Sunset movie theater just in time for the five o'clock matinee of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkly. Too bad it was on the lame side. I think Natasha especially got short shrift.
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