The Breakfast Ride

The Breakfast Ride

We bike to meet Sally and Ron for Sunday breakfast frequently. The ride is a ho-hum routine. It’s on a road I frequently took to work. They bicycle from their cabin at Cain Lake and we come from Mount Vernon. It is about fifteen miles each to the Hometown Café in Sedro Woolley. They have recently bought have motorcycles, his and hers. Their bicycling careers are in the twilight.
“You’re way short for your weight. You need to dump that motorcycle and keep pedaling” I say to Ron.
“And you need a job, Walker. You’ve got nothing to do but torment me with your retirement.” Ron responds. “You have lots of free time. Help me organize this year’s guys’ bike ride.”
“That’s your show Abbott. You’re Canadian. You should be planning the trip – in Canada.”
“We’ve got no country roads. Every road is packed with trucks and cars, no shoulders. You have a glorious gift in this country, and you don’t appreciate it. Just think about your ride to get here for breakfast, those beautiful those country roads with shoulders to ride on and things to see.”
“We’d swap some of our pavement for your trees. Still – you’re right.” We take our bucolic scenery and empty roads for granted. But there’s something else that we ignore: the advantages of a slow vehicle. We tend to ride our bikes like we drive our cars. The more serious the cyclist, the more interest there is in techniques to ride faster. Concentration is required for safety. Tourism suffers.
Consider drafting, a cornerstone technique for bicycling efficiency. A rider passing through the air leaves a wind shadow in his wake extending about 24 inches behind his bike. A second rider pedaling 12 to 18 inches behind the first saves about 30% in energy expended to follow at the same rate of speed as the leader. If the second rider is fatigued, he may be able to follow at 20 mph, yet be unable to sustain more that 12-13 mph without assistance. This second rider is “Drafting”. Drafting creates synergy, meaning the team’s effort is greater than the sum of its individual parts. It makes bicycling a team sport.
If the front tire of the following rider touches the rear tire of the leading rider, the rider behind will fall. Hence the safe and effective following distance is 8 to 24 inches. The safety secret is anticipation. Never overlap the wheel in front of you, especially when you are riding slightly to one side to gain the “sweet spot” in a cross wind. In the interest of anticipation, riders work together to make speed changes smooth and predictable. Sudden decelerations are dangerous. Steady Eddie wins the day. A rear view mirror helps to avoid changes in speed, that occur when a rider might otherwise stop pedaling to turn his head and look behind. Sit up straight before slowing; it telegraphs your speed change. Close gaps gradually. Keep track of that crucial wheel in front of you using peripheral vision, don’t fixate attention on it. Instead, keep your eyes moving; look through the knees and over the shoulders of the riders ahead to anticipate decelerations, stops, and hazards. Talk. Point. Identify the hazards to riders behind.
Abbott inspired me. He started me thinking about what we fail to appreciate on our rides. I’m moving to the slow lane. Interesting things and people abound on our bike routes. I have passed them by.
“Abbott, I’m taking tomorrow off,” I say grinning. He is generous. He treats me to the response I want.
He rolls his eyes. “Oh good, a day off from retirement.”
“I’m going to take my camera on our breakfast route – look around, ask some questions.”
“Walker, you’ve made the ride a thousand times. Do you need to see it again?”
“Like you said, we don’t appreciate what we have. I’ve got nothing better to do than fix that.”
He winces. “You need a job.”
I am excited to do 1001st trip with renewed interest in the countryside and the people I have long taken for granted, to continue my trip in the slow lane – pay attention to its cumulative nature.
Ron, gregarious elf that he is, gets me started on my exploration immediately. Cheryl is our waitress. She delivers him poached eggs and corned beef hash and he starts schmoozing her about motorcycles, moving on to the history of her restaurant.
The Hometown Restaurant, open 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Metcalf St., has been run for five years by Peggy Procter and Cheryl McLaughlin. Cheryl has lots of balls in the air. The mother of a six year old daughter, she also rides a Harley and sponsors a part of the Sedro Woolley Motorcycle Run benefiting Hospice and the Battered Women’s Shelter. Harleys run in this family. Her husband rides with his own organization, Combat Veterans International. The Harley rocking horse fits in, but café décor also includes a blanket made by Cheryl’s sister, paintings of mountain scenes, and the best of the crayon art by her youngest patrons. Portions are large. The Tuesday special is chicken fried steak. A chainsaw sculpted logger with his crosscut saw stands in the front window. The place is a cultural icon.
“I need a walk after that breakfast,” Sally says.
“ Downtown Sedro Woolley has some great stuff,” Pinky says eagerly. “It’s actually a pretty artsy little logging town.”
“There must be twenty five statues. There’s a carving on every corner. The town is a chainsaw art museum,” Ron says.
We count thirty five sculptures before it’s over. Many are winning entries from past competitions at the Sedro Woolley’s yearly July 4th Logger Rodeo. There are: diving dolphins, loggers with axes, loggers with saws, multiple bears, a cougar, a cowboy on a bucking bull, an owl, a salmon, an eagle, and a bank robber. They are artfully rendered and with shiny finish protecting them from the weather. Woods Logging Supply is still marked by its dealer sign for Stihl chain saws. Hard work and risk no longer guarantee a job in the woods. Times they are a’changin. Loggers are turning to art, and commerce is more apparent at the espresso stand in the parking lot than in the Woods Logging Supply store.
The Chamber of Commerce is open. When I ask for a brochure on the town’s history, the lady looks over her reading glasses slipped slightly down from the bridge of her nose. She does not approve of my bright colored biking shirt and lycra biking shorts. “We used to have one”, she says, relishing her denial of my request. “But there is a website run by a guy, a different guy. But he might be your cup of tea. He rides an old bike with a basket, rides it everywhere.” She is smiling, looking at our shirts with the pockets in back and at our fruity shoes. “You’ll be a match for Noel. He does the website.”
“Does he have an office?”
“No. But he’ll meet with you. We have a flyer for him here somewhere. Here. He’s into history and that kind of stuff.” An eccentric self-appointed Skagit Valley historian on a bike just might take an interest in my cumulative bike tour. The flyer says log on at www.stumpranchonline.com.
His website would give me the following background: In 1878 the log jam on the Skagit River was partly cleared at Mount Vernon, and David Bately and Joseph Hart from England via San Francisco made their way to settle on the north bank just west of the current Sedro Woolley. In 1885 Mortimer Cook built a shake mill, the first with a drying kiln; and a small community resulted. He called it “Bug” because of the mosquitoes. Wives of employees lobbied for a real name and he chose “Sedro” from sedra – Spanish for cedar. A few years later, there was a boom for the coal seam that surfaced 6 miles from Mortimer’s general store. In 1889, Nelson Bennett had finished the Fairhaven and Southern Railroad, the first standard gauge Railroad north of Seattle. It first rumbled down the F&S Grade to Sedro on Christmas Eve. The cargoes were logs and coal. The hope was for riches from the anticipated establishment of Fairhaven as a major railroad terminus. With trains and roads the river was becoming less necessary for transportation and floods were a risk. New Sedro was built about a mile north of the original away from the river. In 1890, P.A. Woolley bought land a mile northwest of the Sedros and built a mill and its community that began 8 years of competition and neighborly enmity that subsided with the joining of Sedro and Woolley in December, 1898.
We head back a block and a half to the Hometown.
“Bikes are still here,” says Abbott.
“‘Carbon Fibre No Match for Chainsaw’ would be a more likely article in their Courier-Times than ‘Bicycles Stolen from Downtown’ ” I suggest. Loggers have no use for bicycles. We mount up and head down Metcalf Street, cross the tracks, turn on highway 20 and veer off onto F&S Grade Road. This road leaves Sedro Woolley climbing gently northwest toward the hills above the Samish River. There is a vista on the left of the broad Skagit Valley with its verdant farmland, pastures, and wetlands, punctuated by several prominent free standing hills that seem slightly out of place on the flats. Inches off the pavement, tiny flowers are blooming. The foxglove flowers cover a hillside. As the road ascends into the forest, moss hanging from the tree branches speaks to our rainy winters. For a half of a mile the road bores into the forest, a tunnel pruned out through interwoven branches of trees lining each side of the road. We stop our bikes at a road killed opossum mother. Killed for moving too slowly, she gives us slow lane cyclists pause for somber empathy.
This slow moving, nocturnal marsupial is Washington State’s number one road-kill. Fifty teeth (the most of any mammal) make her final grimace frightening beyond her peaceful ways. Opossums eat insects, dead animals, worms, berries, fruits, and on a lucky day, pet food. Long, widely separated toes with an opposable thumb on each rear foot make her suited to tree life, and incidentally, easy to track. Her prehensile tail is rat-like and unappealing. She has thirteen nipples which expand and “lock on” suckling infants which are in her pouch for about 2 months. Graduating from the pouch the kids have two weeks of on-the-job training with mom, and then they’re on their own. When surprised, opossums have a shock reaction which renders them flaccid, their eyes closed, a protruding tongue protruding and a markedly reduced heart rate. They are all but dead. It is their involuntary defense mechanism. This one is not “playing possum.”
We reach the top of the hill and descend. The base of this hill is the east bank of the Samish River. At the bottom we turn left across the bridge. There is a beautiful little valley of farm land and wet lands. I would return to this spot with my camera on the following day, as chronicled below.
I made this second trip to take the photographs to illustrate this story. When I stopped at the Samish River on the F&S Grade Road, I found a golf ball, fresh footprints and graffiti under the bridge. On the river, I meet Doug and Tasha from the Washington State Fish and Game Dept.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“Counting redds,” Doug replied.
“A redd is?”
“A nest in the gravel, in this case, made by a female steelhead – a Gaelic word I think.”
“It’s a new one,” Tasha called up from the stream.
He pointed into the riffle, “See the fresh white gravel she’s dug up. It stands out from all the black gravel which is covered with algae.” Doug is a biologist who has walked a four mile segment here on the Samish every 10 days so he can find each new redd before algae provides its camouflage. Doug has been estimating the size of the returning run and number of redds in the whole drainage by walking several segments.
While Tasha was wading up the stream, I asked, “How are your findings used? To set rules for the fishermen?”
Doug smiled. “Not even that – first we want to simply know whether the fish population is increasing or decreasing.” He looked skyward at circling birds. “Strange,” he said. “That’s an eagle in the middle of all those vultures.” He looked at my face and knew that I needed help. “Vultures have dihedral wings,” he said, “They go up at the tips.” I nodded. I sensed that he is not a talkative sort, but doesn’t mind talking about the things he studies. He likes his job. I asked if they know how much sport fishing depletes the population. They can only guess. They do know of poaching by some local fishermen. He doesn’t do enforcement, but knows they are difficult to catch, fishing at daybreak or dusk. The worst damage they do is driving ATV’s in the stream beds, through redds. In the first thirty five days the eggs are extremely sensitive to movement or weight on the gravel which will dislocate the embryo from the yolk sac. “When they develop eyes, we call them ‘eyed eggs’, and they are pretty tough,” he says. “The hatchery guys say they can bounce them on a concrete floor and they’ll still hatch.” The Samish count is up this year to about 700 fish from March to September at the current rate. They have found 25 new redds since March, 13 of those in this month of May. Doug is approving of the increase, ecstasy bound by the decorum of science.
“Do they all die like salmon?”
“Lots of the males die, but a significant number of fish spawn more than once, sometimes up to three times. They have much more diverse life cycles than salmon. They are anadromous but spend up to four years in the river before going to the ocean for one to four years. A fish banded in the Sea of Japan was caught in the Skagit River, so they get around.”
“How do you determine that a fish is a second time spawner?”
“For some reason the largest are first time spawners, but it is scale analysis that tells us their age and when they entered fresh from salt water.”
“Like tree rings?”
“Kind of, yes”
“The large ones, what do they weigh?”
“Biggest recorded was around 50 pounds, but most are four to eight.”

I persuaded them to let me take their picture but the acceptance was grudging. Doug wanted to be left to his science and out of the limelight.
“Can you find every redd?”
“On the stretch that we walk, Yes.”
“There are more fish than the number of redds aren’t there?”
“At least twice as many.”
“How do you get to the size of the run from your data?”
“We count redds and add the escapement adjusted for estimates of sport fishery, commercial fishery, natural disaster, and poaching.”
“Lots of estimating isn’t there?”
“We can’t even count every fish escaping even for a short time because of expense. You have to pump about 1500 gallons of water a day to count fish.
Tasha was back, and had been waiting in the truck for about ten minutes. “I should go. We have a couple more to do today,” he said.
As their truck pulled away I had an impulse to run after it. I forgot to ask how they know that a redd is a steelhead female and not a salmon. I guessed that they see enough fish to know that the steelhead are running now and the salmon aren’t.
That was my road side chit chat, on my day after, second pass trip for photos. As I cruise by the bridge with Ron and Sally today, I have no inkling of that future, no image in my mind of scientists in plaid pants bouncing “eyed eggs” of steelhead on the polished concrete floor at the fish hatchery.
Ron leads Pinky and Sally across the broad valley. I am “lanterne rouge” (A French cycling term, derived from the red light at the end of a train). There is a flood of yellow from tiny flowers that fill the valley to the south. The valley to the north has a recently hayed field. Abbott has dismounted where F&S intersects Prairie Road. He’s complaining about the speed, the distance he has ridden and the hill he is anticipating. He curses at me softly as I pass him.
“What do you think this is, the Iron Man?” he grunts.
“I’d ride a hundred miles to see that red face you make,” I reply. As Prairie Road goes up the valley it crosses the Samish River two more times. The land here is in one to five acre parcels along the road with farm land in the center parts of the valley. There are country estates, large gardens, horses, barns, riding arenas, and some storage of industrial equipment, trucks, and farm implements. The architecture includes shacks, falling down barns, and double wide trailers as well as tiny houses with big gardens, and a few large expensive homes. We pass through Hickson, a tiny community boasting a volunteer fire station, gun club, and community center bearing its name. We turn on Parson Creek Road. On the corner there is a red barn three stories tall but only about 25 feet long. It has fresh white trim and looks like a one third section of a regular barn, chopped off. Next door, 4 trucks, 3 cars, two trailers and an old tractor lie in wait for use, more likely for salvage or rust. As we climb the gentle hill, Abbott is grumbling again, and our wives call an emergency stop. Pinky and Sally disappear into the underbrush for five minutes. I hear a shout, then cursing. “Nettles,” says Pinky coming up the bank. “Nettles are the only thing worse than mosquitoes if you’ve got your pants down.”
Sally pokes Ron in the belly, “Wipe that smirk off of your face. I got it on my leg – no place else.”
“That goes for you too,” Pinky says to me. “If you had to squat to pull your Willie out, you wouldn’t be laughing about the nettles.”
The forest is lush and green here. There are no houses and the creek is obscured by thick underbrush. Further on, we cross Highway 99. The abandoned Alger Video Store shows the weather of several years, the broken marquee implores, “Stop in. Check us out.” A wrecked Chevrolet pickup is on blocks where its rear axle was removed. It is a fitting complement to the building. We continue down a short hill to Donovan Park on Friday Creek. Friday Creek is a beautiful clear stream in a narrow valley with tall hills on each side. It feels like we could be in Alaska. There is a mix of deciduous trees and evergreens. A picturesque weir spans the creek. There is a wonderful beach. The tables, fire pits, and playground equipment are unused today, and there are only gurgling creek noises. It is my favorite park. It’s hard to believe that I-5 is only a mile to the west, over the mountain in front of us as we stand on the creek. The Abbott’s leave us here, where they parked. They drove here to avoid Cain Lake Road which is on of our few roads with no shoulder and heavy traffic. Pinky and I are extending our ride about 30 more miles. We need the miles in preparation for the Seattle to Portland ride with Cascade Bike Club in July.
“STP. It’s not legs you need. An hour or two of couch time would be cheaper,” Abbott tells us.
“It’s their butts they are worried about,” says Sally.
She is right. It’s one hundred miles. At fifteen miles per hour, that is 400 minutes or 6 hrs and 40 min of saddle time on each of two days. The seat is so narrow –more akin to a colonoscope than a chair. That tender skin which meets the seat needs conditioning, a coat of Chamois BUTT’r lube, and bike shorts with no seams in the crotch. Muscular condition is less important. But general condition is important in that is related to concentration. You need to concentrate to stay safe among 5000 other riders who have riding styles from wild and erratic to smooth and steady, have ages from 11 to 70, and are riding road bikes, mountain bikes, tandems, recumbents, tricycles, and bikes pulling toddlers in trailers. There is everything. It’s a happening, a bicycle Woodstock.
So Pinky and I strike out by ourselves from Friday Creek toward Alger in the name of STP fitness of our butts and legs. We follow Friday Creek, crossing it several times as we approach the Alger Tavern. The rest of the town (the motel, a garage and small office building, and a residential junk yard) is distributed around a flashing yellow light where uneven concrete slabs of Highway 99 cross the heavily traveled, infamous and narrow Cain Lake Road. We turn left and in a mile, cross I-5 and climb slightly to turn south on Barrel Springs Road, passing by the Barrel Springs Mill. It is a small intermittent operation, and today, has a modest log pile in front. Over here the country is mountainous. Some houses are like my subdivision house. But many stand out as owner-built, before strict enforcement of building codes, maybe back when there was evasion of whiskey tax. There is a sailboat in a building almost like a land locked covered dock. We are in a land of yard collections -- junk. But there are a few small country estates, with the earmarks of expensive daughters – horses, trailers, barns and arenas. We wind around the mountain on steadily narrowing pavement. Some buildings are near collapse. A sign proclaims: “School Bus Turnaround,” Pinky doesn’t like this. It is the first indication that I have tricked her into wilderness ride. Again. Then there is “Pavement Ends,” and finally the sign that says, “Primitive Road, No Warning Signs.” It has recently rained and there is a slightly soft mud texture to the smooth dirt road and skinny tires sink in a little, slow us down, and we have to shift down a gear. The mud takes her to the brink.
“How far is it?”
“A couple of miles. I know where I am.”
“We’re lost!” she says, on the verge of tears. This is an early stage of bikephobia. For a few minutes, she believes she is irretrievably lost with the only hope being to backtrack. That is how far away it feels here, like some kind of wilderness preserve.
Then we come to a large new house and intersect a paved road. The view is spectacular. We are looking out on Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands spread out in front of us and across the whole western horizon. The foreground is covered with large farms on the flats. We descend to the little town of Bow, which is now simply a little cluster of houses, a little neighborhood. It used to be a larger town four miles from its sister city of Edison. The Bow Post Office is about two miles to the south on Chuckanut Drive across the street from the upscale Rhododendron Restaurant and the Chuckanut Store. We turn downwind and fly there at 22 mph. Pinky loves the spinnaker run and has forgotten being hopelessly lost in the outback on Blanchard Mountain.
We fail in our resolve to travel slowly and look, rocketing to the next intersection at Allen West Rd. The yellow hangar has no signage. It used to sell and service farm equipment. The cinder block grocery store, has added an espresso and hot dog stand. My favorite bike ride convenience store across the road failed several years ago, and it is now The Vanilla Swan selling sandwiches, espresso, and ice cream and is sporting a clever and expensive-looking swan logo on the sign, “Now Open ‘til 9 PM”.

We high tail it all the way to Burlington on the good shoulder of Chuckanut that is smooth until we hit Cook Road. I silently curse the large gravel chip seal. I believe that it loosens your fillings, removes any bike part not welded on, and pounds your prostate flat as schnitzel. “Our cost cutter county… I wonder where the saved money goes.” I grumble to Pinky.
“You have a suspicious mind. Ask them if you really want to know,” she replies.
Certain that the gravel has become larger in the last few years; I call Jim Sullivan at maintenance department for county roads the following morning. He explains. An oil sprayer makes a layer of hot oil, dump trucks fill the hopper of the chip spreader that lays down a mixture or sand and ½ in. rock in a uniform 3 in. thick layer. It is left on the road for about 10 days and then broomed off. The rock that has been through a crusher, then a cone shaped grinder and then shaken through a screen with a grid opening of ½ in. square, so some rocks squeeze through diagonally and may be slightly larger than ½ in. They tried 5/8 in. rock several years ago but switched back to ½ in. and that is now used on roads classified “heavily traveled.” “Residential” class roads get 3/8 in. rock. He says that the Overlay Program has been terminated. That means the “high travel roads” which used to receive a new layer of asphalt for maintenance are now getting ½ in. chip seal. That is the cost saving strategy. He feels that asphalt should be used rather than chip seal, but they don’t ask him. Maybe it is chip seal where there used to be new pavement that causes my discomfort. Jim doubts rock size is my demon since the 3/8 in. is about the same cost as ½ in. rock. Still I was not able to determine the extent and dates of the trial using 5/8 in. rock.
Burlington has the 4 large Malls, a Costco, the most Mexican restaurants, and most of the other commercial development. Mount Vernon has more people, the county government, and a combination Burlington’s envy and enmity that has not been seen since Sedro vs. Woolley in the 1890’s. We bypass the commercial strip, traveling through a mainly residential area on Anacortes St. and past the soccer fields along the banks of the Skagit River. We turn south across the new Skagit bridge which has a nice bike lane which is a cruel joke. It is isolated with no way to safely enter the bike lane from the approaching streets – a symbol of the grudging nature of bicycle tolerance. It could be worse. We could be truly down and out – we could be pedestrians.
On Fir St., a block from home, in our subdivision next to the Church of the Nazerene and across from the immaculately manicured elder community of trailers lies the most interesting home in our neighborhood to me. About 15 years ago there was a small house occupied by a single old man who farmed a half acre backyard with a Ford tractor. The front yard had a front end loader under repair and a trailer. He parked a dump truck, apparently related to his day job. Several other items of heavy equipment were in the large shed that was open along its front side. His small house burned, and he moved to a trailer which was nestled among slowly accumulating trucks and tractors. The trailer disappeared. Now a forty foot house boat on blocks stands partially sanded and painted. I think that he lives in the boat he was painting, while continuing to accumulate equipment: a large diesel dump truck pulling a tractor with backhoe, 2 forklifts, a D3 Caterpillar, a rusting and very old tractor, and a 2.5 ton truck. Today there was a new addition. A 1966 Merucry Commuter station wagon has a hand written note taped in the driver side window stating, “4 sale, inquire within.” A large garden in back is partially cultivated. The Troybuilt Roto-tiller stands mid row. Four rows of corn are about a foot high.
We are home, done with the ride. In order to resume the bicycle slow travelogue inspired by the Ron and Sally at breakfast, we retrace our first leg out to Sedro Woolley where we met them this morning.
Our standard route on the back streets passes the green houses on Waugh Rd., bordering a swampy wetland known as Barney Lake. We ride up the hill by Centenial School and through a vacant lot on 200 feet of wooded foot path. The exit is onto a street that comes out on Frances Rd. We go the back way through Clear Lake, on Wood Rd., descending to Mud Lake Rd. We are in farm land. There is small fleet of dump trucks parked on a concrete slab that is the sole remainder of the previous dairy farm. Its 40 acres of pasture across the road are split by a muddy road and two huge piles. Sticks and branches in the piles are uniform, even the slash is cloned. Small stumps of hybrid poplars dot the muddy expanse that was a poplar grove two months ago. Just ahead is a recently painted home with out-buildings and a barn, a country estate with a beautiful garden – one plant, a huge blue rhododendron which fills the entire front yard.
I will return to this farm on my photography trip tomorrow to investigate further. I own some land nearby that I might rent for poplars, so I will call the owner. Mike is proud of his rhody, but on the poplars he says, “Don’t do it. A Canadian outfit bought the place and lost their shirt. The trees grew fast enough, but they had the flood and blow down. Then the pulp market took a dive.”
The internet says hybrid poplar is the fastest growing tree with simple genetic code and cellular DNA that is easily modified, allowing selection of trees for herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, low-lignin production, and sterility. It must be pulped 4-6 hours after harvest to maintain its light color so desirable for paper. At about 70-90 tons of trees yielded by an acre of land, this forty acres would produce income of $32,000 - $68,000 after 8 years of growth. Road-mapping genes allows selection of DNA sequences causing a shift of growth from the leaves to the stems and branches – we get more pulp. But there are unanticipated results too: herbicides control competition from weeds but puts Round-Up in ground water, fish, and birds. The 100% sterility cannot be guaranteed, so genetic alteration of wild trees is possible.
Lignins provide strength if chip board is the intended use but the most likely market is pulp, which requires their removal. Those suspicious of big lumber and paper corporate self interest advocate using the lignin free pulp fiber from hemp to avoid genetic alterations. But industrial hemp, though having only a tiny fraction of the psychoactive agent necessary for use in a bong, is currently outlawed as marijuana. We can’t open that door I guess. Imagine getting stoned on the output of the office paper shredder.
Dr. Jon Johnson, researcher and poplar expert at Washington State University says that the pulp market seems to be coming back a little, but large companies are now using poplar for peeler logs cut for structural use in veneer not for pulp. Use for veneer requires longer growth cycles, wider spacing, and pruning. Jon Johnson easily convinces me that poplar trees neither easy nor lucrative.
So my interest in poplars when I see the slash piles on the bike ride will decline as I learn more.
For the present, we keep pedaling – past the Baptist Church on the right and past Mud Lake, nearly covered with lilly pads, on the left, into the tiny town of Clear Lake – two churches, Clear Lake Elementary School, Evelyn’s Tavern, the Clear Lake Store, and a county park and the swimming hole with lifeguards, lane lines, concession stand, and dressing rooms. I meet an old-timer coming out of the Clear Lake Grocery, as I ready my camera. “Visiting our bustling metropolis are you? Where’re you from?” he asks amused by a tourist photographing downtown Clear Lake.
“Mount Vernon,” I reply. He bursts into hearty laughter as he gets in his ’68 ford pickup. I think because he is incredulous that a resident of the neighboring town would have any interest in this small neighboring village with its “back woods” reputation.
At the south end of Clear Lake, we visit this Lanning’s.
Jill, Will, Monica, and Zachary are known as Lanning’s Mannequins. They are once again dressed to the nines standing in Lanning’s front yard at the bend on SR9. Jamie Lanning and Barbara Rumsey keep their tradition in its 14th year, a front yard greeting that gives the passing world a smile. The figures have a long history, including kidnapping and theft. It began with Lucille, a head and shoulders bust only, so large that she required surgery to get into even the largest of her Salvation Army clothing. “I did the first mastectomy in Clear Lake,” claims Lanning. Then came Will (the husband) from an Army recruiting center in Mt. Vernon and Jill (the wife) from the closet of a vacated rental house in Sedro Woolley. They have traveled to classrooms, a school play, the Four H Club exhibit, vacation bible school, and with Jamie to Mr. Chatt’s fourth grade Christmas Play. Will has lost an arm to a scavenger hunt. In April of 1998 Barbra’s grandchild was born. In celebration they added a cabbage patch doll, Zachary (the son) into the display. He has grown, now being the boy in the exhibit. Monica (the young woman) was inspired by Lewinsky of the same name. “We’ve had people leave clothes, and notes of appreciation,” Jamie says, “and we’ve been in the paper a few times.” Not all the attention has been good. The front yard family has been spray painted, dismembered, and stolen. The sheriff once responded when Jill disappeared, and in fact found her dismembered body, which Lanning was able to repair. Happily the mannequins have inspired poets as well as vandals – one poem, “Silently Observing” by Nadine Bushong, was published in a poetry collection.
We drink cold orange juice and Jamie talks. Proud to be from North Carolina, he ran a backhoe for the City of Sedro Woolley. I ask about his notoriety at Sedro Woolley City Council meetings. He replies with a smile “Yeah, I looked after them for quite a while.” He loves a laugh. He collects toys: little ones for children, and big ones, his Model A coupe with a rumble seat, a pristine model A pickup, a bicycle with a motor on the front wheel, a rubber spider, a mummified cat, a windup monkey that turns back flips and laughs, railroad tracks passing through the middle of his driveway, a windmill, and a quarter epoxy-glued to his sidewalk. I can see why Barbara sticks with him. He is fun. They still change the scene and redress the mannequins about every eight weeks, but Jamie gets around with a cane now. “I’m thinking about selling,” he says.
“Oh, no. You would miss this place,” I gasp.
“Yeah. But it’s just too much work.”
If you pass by on Highway 9, take your notice, chuckle, and tuck it in your memory. It’s not going to be there forever.
We head north, up Highway 9 past Clear Lake. On the right a weathered sign shows a full size painting of a 1957 Chevy. A nearby newly varnished playhouse shows owners with new interests. The South Skagit Highway takes off to the left headed for Day Creek. A home-made junk yard decorates the turn as the road in front of the house turns to its upriver course. We cross the bridge looking upriver through the railroad trestle. Sedro Woolley appears just beyond the lumber mill. Typical northwest low clouds hang half way up the back side of Cultus Mountain. Highway 9 joins Highway 20. Turning right we see the “Welcome to Sedro Woolley sign and the information center dedicated to logging and railroading. We pass through a residential area to the Iron Skillet Restaurant on State St., make a left and go to Metcalf St. and the Hometown Restaurant. The loop is complete.