Burn After Reading

There is a constant drip in the gutter of the kitchen window overhang. At first, I thought it was because the gutters were clogged, so I cleaned them. It still dripped. So over the summer we caulked silicone along all of the seams of the gutters, and sealed them with gutter tape. It still dripped.  A few weeks ago I finally got on a ladder and realized that the problem was that the elbow where the drip was coming from was the lowest point.  The entire gutter needs to be detached and re-attached at an angle at which point gravity can finally do its job.  If anything about the construction of this house were “normal”, this would job I think I could do on my own. But with the number of elbows from end-to-end of the overhang (3?), and with the fact that the overhang itself isn’t level, I was going to need an extra set of hands.  I texted my friend David Neevel, who lives just across the Samish Bay in Edison, Washington.  Wanna come hang out and help me fix some gutters?

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David was the first of my people to see this property. Right after I moved my things here and the bottom fell out with my ex, he showed up on his motorcycle with his pup Ollie in the sidecar. In those early days, I was very fragile and uncertain about whether to dig in or turn tail. Though not unsupportive of me staying, David was extremely supportive of the idea of putting the property right back on the market. It was hard, but helpful, to have a witness at that very moment, and though I wanted him to be all: “Holy Shit, Robin / this place is amazing, look at all of this potential / You can do it!” he was instead: “...Or, you could just sell it?”

Not in a judgmental or paternalistic way, just gentle and pragmatic. 

I didn’t take his advice. When David and Ollie came over on the ferry the day after I texted him about the gutters, I made us a round of Olga Manhattans (my homemade prune-infused bourbon with sweet vermouth) and hot crab dip from Dungeness harvested last summer by neighbors Ward and Laura Berg.  Full of seafood, buzzed on whiskey, we both craved something terrible to watch, so I spent $4.99 to stream Lethal Weapon 4, which supposedly has a cameo of my friend Christina Orchid. 

Christina was one of the first people I met on Orcas. Right after moving here and finding out that this was going to be a wholly different adventure than the one I signed up for, I started frequenting the dog park, hoping to make friends or at least keep my conversational skills from atrophy.  One day I got to chatting with an older woman with a Boston Terrier named Buelah, who seemed to know everyone and everything about the island. In less than a half hour, I learned that we had both owned restaurants, that we both collected vintage Michelin-starred French restaurant menus, and we both had one from La Pyramide. (Mine was from my grandparents’ travels in the late 60’s, hers was from her own travels, in the early 80’s). When I gave Christina the broadest-but-starkest stroked version of my story (breakup, giant property, no water or septic) she simply said “Oh, everyone has a crazy ex around here, and I didn’t have running water OR electricity for my first 2 years. Welcome to Orcas!” 

Christina moved here around 1975 with her son and her crazy boyfriend who flamed out in a familiar way.   She opened Christina’s in 1980. Christina’s was a farm-to-table restaurant, before farm-to-table was a concept; think Chez Panisse for the Pacific Northwest. She found herself a mensch and then she and her husband Bruce (d. 2021) ran Christina’s until 2010. In its heyday, it was a dining destination for the rich and famous. Somewhere along the way, she befriended movie director Richard Donner, landing cameos in several of his movies, like Lethal Weapon 4. 

I usually visit Christina on Thursday afternoons.  I hang pictures, retrieve things from hard-to-reach places, and do a couple loads of laundry while we swap stories and talk endlessly about food. In some ways, it’s like a visit with my mom, who was only 2 years older. But Christina, who briefly held the record for most jumps by a female skydiver in the US in the late 1960’s, is not a version of my mother, Betsy.  It’s not a contest, or an audition. What Christina gives me, probably because we are not blood relatives, is the grace of understanding and unbridled encouragement. Everything I've been through, she's been through.  I don’t need to explain to her why I am here, trudging to the outhouse at first light, fighting a silent battle against the tansy ragwort, and holding on loosely to the idea that everything is going to work out.  Not only does she get it, she thinks it will. And she thinks I can do it.

David and I did not fix the gutters. Instead, we had a 36 hour burn. Burn season runs from October until May, and it's the ideal activity for cold weather. It's a tough act to follow Clayton, who wintered here and tackled so much brush back in the spring. Did you know that burning bamboo sounds like gunfire?

The pile David and I chose was close to the house, a felled holly bush enveloped by blackberry. I’d been wanting to work on this for months, but I needed to wait for a day that was both wet and without wind, and because of the proximity to the house, I wanted a bystander around in case things got out of control. Getting a fire started is a skill, and while I can now get the wood stove lit with one sheet of newsprint and a few shavings of wood, my outdoor fire-starting still need work. After stoking a small fire with lots of cardboard and twigs (this is where not having garbage service comes in handy), we finally had a fire hot enough to begin raking the mounds of debris towards the flames. By now it was maybe 5pm, and fully dark, and we kept this going for another 2 hours, until there seemed to be more smoke than flame, and the rain was keeping everything contained. Inside, we watched Road House over nachos.

The next morning, I was anxious to see how much progress we made on the pile. There was a 2-foot diameter of still-smoking ash, and a gentle prodding revealed still hot red coals. Raking on more blackberry canes, the fire was going again at 7:30am, and we carried it through the rest of the day. Borrowing a chainsaw from my neighbor, David tackled the branches of a horizontally-growing hawthorn tree cut down over the summer.  I spent a chunk of the day working on a paper for school while David sawed and burned, and the fire went on for another night, still smoldering the next morning. 

Halfway through his stay, I brought David to Christina's and checked out the 1974 Silver Streak trailer she’s offered to sell me (don’t worry, I’m broke). A few days later, she asked about the visit.  Did we get work done? Mostly we’d just burned, I told her. “Ah." She smiled. "There’s nothing quite like being outside on a cold day, the rain coming down, and staring into a huge fire, with a rake in your hand.”

I couldn't have said it better myself.

If you're enjoying Bucolia and would like to support my writing and the grand project of restoring this property, consider a paid subscription! As of now, none of my writing will be paywalled, but that may change in the future. And if you know anyone who would enjoy reading this, please spread the word.