Our second family dayhike at Ebey’s Landing on Whidbey Island this year, Sunday 7 March 2010
Morgan in green and Kate in blue with Jo Dog in the middle at the Big Dead Tree. We’re atop the bluffs of Ebey’s Landing above Perego’s Lagoon below and the Salish Sea beyond.
Kristina and I returned to Ebey’s landing 15 days after our first visit of the year there and three days before our house burned down. The weather was worse on this second trip. Chilly. Cloudy. Glorious beauty tinged with brooding melancholy, perhaps hints of what was to come, an unconscious uncertainty with a major era in our lives was soon coming to an end as the Great Recession continued to grind on. Even so, we’re out here moving our bodies in nature, activating our minds, working thru our blended family relationship conflicts, grumbling about the weather and still in awe of the magnificent scenery of Ebey’s Landing. This time it was Morgan, who now goes by Dylan, and Kate, my daughters from my ex-wife and still good friend Gwen and stepdaughters to my then-current wife Kristina, who piled into the same minivan with me, Kristina, and Jo Jo Jolie, our English springer spaniel with liver-colored spots. Some weekends Talia is with her bio-dad and stepmother, as she was this time. On other weekends, however, Morgan and Kate are with their mom and stepdad, as they were last time. On yet other weekends all three are with me and Kristina, and once in a while none of them are. It’s not necessarily an organized rotation, tho it often is, but more depends on what the various parents and co-parents planned and agreed to follow. Blended family dynamics are constantly changing in our community.
Ebey’s Landing is a National Historical Reserve and State Park. It’s a unique integration of national park, state park, and local town and county parks. It’s about halfway up the westward edge of Whidbey Island, the largest island in the State of Washington. Whidbey’s also the 40th largest within the United States of America. It is long, slender island and a somewhat crooked extension of a cluster of archipelagos linked together in the Salish Sea. We were happy to be back even tho the weather felt more forbidding than our previous visit. Fresh air and exercise with beautiful and expansive views of nature haunted by gloomy graves amidst the threat of stormy weather made Ebey’s Landing inviting. Well, certainly for us grownups (LOL?).