Tag Archives: Effects of the Great Recession on family

To the River House

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Our blended family’s joys & sorrows finding, gaining, enjoying, and losing our dream house and the many wacky adventures & jolly mishaps in and around the area, 2007 – 2010

*Click on any picture to expand and enlarge*

*This is a graphic intensive foto essay with 246 fotos & 1 video, and the larger the screen the better*

Kristina out in front of our new home with our realtor Randy V. We called it The River House. I took this picture with a LG smartfone camera at the time, Tuesday the 16th of October 2007, down in Mule Tail Flats outside Plain, Washington, in the Greater Stevens Pass – Leavenworth – Wenatchee Corridor.

The River House, Monday 18 August 2008.

Our back yard ends here at the river. The Wenatchee River flows thru the Cascade Mountains from Lake Wenatchee down thru several canyons before merging into the huge Columbia River. Wednesday 26 December 2007.

Blended family dynamics, y’all! Trying to get ourselves togerther for a family portrait by our comic genius Emily, one of my oldest daughter’s closest friends. I’m on my knees in the snow. Behind stand L2R: Talia, Kate, Morgan (now Dylan), & Kristina. Wednesday 16 January 2008.

Kids were at the right age for goofy pranks, too. Here my oldest, Morgan/Dylan discovers, well, this shower stall doesn’t quite work like one of Dr. Who’s TARDIS booths. This one here just sucks people screaming down the drain merrily, merrily, merrily into oblivion. OK, well, I don’t know exactly what she’s up to here, LOL! But Emily does! Mid-January of 2008.

Talia & Kate wrecked & laughing at the Sledding Hill over in Lake Wenatchee State Park close to the River House. A big day for Talia as she got back into snow sports after breaking her leg in a sledding accident on the same run two years earlier. Taken on Monday 15 February 2010.

The back side of the River House, the side facing the Wenatchee River. Yeah, I cleared and cleaned up what was an overgrown, debris-strewn yard. “Parked it out,” as the locals say. Took many long days and weeks. Had to for wildfire insurance, too. Hot tub on the deck picture right, and an onion swing, a fun gift for the kids from family friends up in Edmonton, Alberta just left of center. Aye, we love this place. Took us a long time to get over its loss. Was a house we’d expected to leave to our kids and their kids and have family & friends from around the world visit us here. Monday 18 August 2008.

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Morgan at Whitehorse Mountain, June 2010

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A father struggles with PTSD as he idolizes his daughter in the wake of tragedy and before she changed their name to claim a deeper, truer identity

Dylan Blair, age 16, nine years ago as I write this, back when she was known as Morgan Hannah. She stands in a roadside field in the Stillaguamish River Valley below the bulk of Whitehorse Mountain.

Being outside in nature can kill you. Or nature can heal you. My family and I needed nature’s medicine. We lived in Edmonds, Washington at the time. Just north of long, skinny Seattle. Been there only three months. Moved in on the 20th of December 2009. Five hectic days before Christmas. Our large, rental house, a temporary abode in the wake of losing our homes and finances in the wake of job losses, embezzlement, and the Great Global Recession, caught on fire and burned down one Saturday morning in March of 2010. My oldest daughter, still called Morgan back then as she hadn’t yet changed their name to Dylan, was celebrating her 16th Birthday with a close circle of friends on the weekend following her actual birthday. I was out and away picking up her two younger sisters, Kate and Talia, from different sleepover parties at their respective friends down south in Seattle. Kristina, my third wife at the time, was at the vet with our dog, Jo. Apparently so much thick, toxic smoke rolled up from the basement rooms no one could get out the front door. Her friends, all high school girls in their mid-teens, had surprisingly expensive belongings downstairs where they had spent the night. The day was warm and sunny for March. Indeed, this Saturday the 20th was the first day of Spring.

The flames spread fast in a big house designed to function like a tipi merged with solar panels and a hot rock room. The home was a gorgeous experiment built on a steep slope near the head of a large ravine. It faced out to look west towards water and mountains, and had been designed by an already deceased husband-and-wife team of architects. Thick, toxic, black smoke billowed up the stairs from the lower levels where the kids had slept. The girls made a flurry of fone calls to 911 and to parents, but began to panic. They were desperate to race downstairs to retrieve personal items such as sleeping bags, clothes, shoes, gifts, smartfones, iPods, toiletries, luggage, school books, papers…when Morgan shouted at all of them they “all need to get out now! We need to get outa here now! That way! NOW!!!”

Following her lead, they raced across the house towards the back, the side facing water and mountains. There the teenagers climbed up over a wooden railing and jumped off the deck. Jumped off wearing a mix of t-shirts, underwear, pajamas, gym shorts, socks, and bare feet. Depending on the incline, the deck was anywhere from one to half-a-story up in the air. They were terrified! Fire and smoke and poisonous stench and crackling, crashing noise seemingly everywhere. Within moments after all of the teens climbed over the wooden railing and jumped off, possibly within seconds, the whole back deck, the one facing down a wide ravine to look out across the Salish Sea and the Olympic Mountains, collapsed in fire and smoke and disintegrated.

Foto of our house in Edmonds erupting in flames moments after the birthday party girls jumped off the back deck in picture left and fled before it collapsed.

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From Nights of Darkness to Days of Burning Light: Family Adventures in Olympic National Park 2011

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*Note this is a work in progress. Enjoy anyway!*

Saturday 27 August – Thursday 1 September 2011

Kate & Talia running along the edge of the Hoh River in Olympic National Park, Sunday evening of the 28th of August 2011.

Recollections and dynamics of a strange and beautiful Family Camping Trip to Olympic National Park and surrounding areas, including the Elwha & Hoh River Valleys including the Hoh Rain Forest, back & forth thru the village of Sekiu, out to Lake Ozette & the Ozette Triangle with Cape Alava on the Wild Olympic Coast, & finally, the Upper Sol Duc. At the time our family was recovering from a series of personal catastrophes and severe financial losses related to the Great Global Recession and a house fire. We felt great disruption and distress as a household. As I look back after nearly 8 years, it’s clear to me now all of us in our own way unconsciously used this grand adventure to reset our blended family. Families are, after all, constant works in progress, and being outdoors in nature was the primary way our family found to heal our relationships.

We looked for light in a dark time. I speak for myself, of course, but share what I sensed in those who lived with me back in those days and nights. Perhaps I am wrong, and being wrong is acceptable. Such is life. As I experienced those years of Hard Times, we searched for anything to give us hope. Ironically, however, we weren’t the type of people to usually waste time “hoping” for something to happen. We took action steps. So for us to hope back in those times was a measure of our collective despair.

Life is messy from birth to death. Struggling to choose freely regardless of our circumstances, we sought to focus on beauty and joy and to let go of dread. This road trip into a spectacular and diverse national park was not a distraction for our family but a trip of purpose to reclaim our fractured identity as a family. We sought to heal amidst nature. There was a drive to redefine what and who we were as individuals, as a family, and as part of a larger network of communities. We sought to anchor ourselves in a national park we all had been to many times in the same way people venture forth to those special sacred places on pilgrimages as physical as they are spiritual. I was, unfortunately, particularly prone towards melancholy and rumination back then as I did not understand depression as disease. These group and individual deliberations were not necessarily conscious intentions at the time but arose from the understandings of hindsight.

Perhaps we forgot the journey itself was as vital if not more so than the destinations, although deep down I sense we all knew somehow the destinations were internal and buried so deep as to feel unreachable. Indeed this road trip of sorts into the Wild was a build-up to an intense Native American Church house blessing ceremony for our then-temporary home. This was the one we had moved into following the losses of our previous homes including one to a devastating fire only to have the “new” house damaged by a natural gas explosion in the house next door. Led by an NAC group inspired by the Rainbow Hoop Prophecy. These events both past and planned loomed over this family adventure into Olympic National Park. At times I felt haunted, lost in what could have been, and at other times I felt joy in the present moment and felt by coming together with others for such a significant ceremony we were in action to accomplish results.

My then-now-ex-third wife Kristina, the mother of my stepdaughter Talia, grew up just outside of it in Port Angeles where she spent much of her youth exploring the national park and surrounding areas with her parents. Her father took her fishing up every stream in the peninsula it seemed. The ONP is also where my then-girlfriend and eventual second-ex-wife Gwen spent the Summer of 1986 back after we began to date earlier in the spring. She worked at Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort during those magickal months. This incredibly varied national park is where the two of us grew into a couple. Gwen showed me the Pacific Ocean for the first time during a camping trip to Second Beach on the Wild Olympic Coast. Years later we had children, first Morgan (now goes by Dylan) and then Kate. We kept returning anyway, Gwen, Kristina, & I, in various combinations with each other, our children, and our friends.

Yes, all six of us experienced many trips to the ONP with our children and sometimes other friends. Camping and hiking trips into the Olympics were a regular odyssey for all 3 of my daughters. Kristina and I wanted to create a sense of continuity and normalcy for the kids, but our different approaches began to clash more and more as we struggled to emerge from the strain of mounting crises. 

As such this 2011 adventure proved to be especially bittersweet in hindsight as it was the last journey to the Olympics for this particular Bass (Katayama-Bass) Family. We had many adventures on this one crazy fun trip anyway. All of us felt blessed to have shared these great road trips together as a family with so many wonderful memories of camping, hiking, swimming, roasting marshmallows, and, yes, even arguing. So…Enjoy!

Family tree hug around a giant Sitka spruce! L2R: Kristina, Morgan, Kate, Talia, & me, William. Foto by an enthusiastic stranger with my Nikon D90. Monday 29 August 2011.

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