Chapter 6

Claire’s turn:

It was the best summer of my life, even if the good times didn’t start until July.

I did a lot of the cooking, such as it was, when I lived with my mother, but I started learning how to really cook from her mother, the retired Home Ec teacher. It was great.

On pasta:
“Okay, here’s what we mean by al dente,” she said, handing me a linguine noodle. “You have some room for error with something like linguine or fettuccine, but with something like angel hair, you have to be very on the ball. Also remember that if you’re going to put the pasta in the oven later, like lasagna or baked ziti, you don’t want to cook it as far because it will continue to cook in the oven.”

On meat:
“The thermometer says that the roast is not quite rare, right?” I nodded. “The thing is, it’s so big that there’s extra heat still trying to make its way into the center of the meat. If we pull it out now and keep it warm by tenting it with foil, in twenty or thirty minutes it will be just past medium-rare, right where we want it. It’s called carryover cooking, and it’s very important if you’re looking for just the right temperature.”

On dessert:
“You use a water bath for baked custard to help protect it by buffering the temperature on the sides of the ramekin. Without it, the edges cook too quickly and the proteins in the eggs are likely to curdle, squeezing out the water they’re supposed to be holding onto. You use boiling water for the bath to help keep it as close to the temperature of the oven as possible, so the custard is cooking evenly from all sides.”

Even better, we were almost always cooking for four, since Charley almost always ate with us. It was really nice eating with her there, too. We still playfully flirted while we ate.

Grandpa worked with me on my art. In particular, he tried to get me used to seeing light values instead of objects.

“As it stands, you’d be a good draftsman,” he said. “At this point what you need to do, though, is forget the edges, forget that a wall is a hard, flat surface. Just look at the colors and tonal values, not the objects. Later on, you can add edges back in, but if you have them now, they’ll still be guiding your eye.”

Pointing to a section of one of the walls in the hallway, he said, “Really concentrate for a moment on this part of the wall. The paint is still off-white, but the color here is more like a flat blue-gray due to the shadows.”

Next, he made up a masking board for me and taught me how to use it.

“So if you look through the hole in the board, you can see just the color. Forget the object that’s reflecting the light for the moment, just focus on the light itself. Your eyes don’t actually see the object, only the light, right?” I thought for a second, then agreed. “So focus on what your eyes are seeing instead of what your mind knows is there.”

It helped, but my mind kept trying to take over from my eyes. Where the wall and the ceiling joined, I still wanted to put in a line to represent the joint, even though it was pretty much obscured by the shadows.

I promised myself I’d keep on working at it, but it was proving more difficult than I expected.

As much as I enjoyed the time with my grandparents, though, I lived for the time with Charley.

She bought me a nice bike so I could ride with her. At the start, we rode every day after work if my butt and legs could handle it. I quickly got to the point where I thought nothing of doing twenty miles after she got off. That’s when the riding got more interesting.

“I’m thinking of taking a couple of days off next week,” Charley said during dinner Wednesday night. She looked at me and continued, “What would you think of doing some sections of the Discovery Trail out by Sequim and Port Angeles? I’m thinking Tuesday and Thursday, so we’re rested up enough for the hike on Saturday.”

That explained why we were unloading our bikes in a park and ride lot along the trail mid-morning the next Tuesday. I didn’t know the area well, I just knew we were several miles east of Sequim, planning to head out that direction.

“This section of the trail is really nice,” Charley said. “Until we get into Sequim proper, it’s almost all strictly non-motorized and smooth. Even in town, part of it is separate, and the rest is on low traffic streets.”

“Scenery?” I asked.

“A lot of the ride is in the trees, but we’ll also be running along Sequim Bay for part of it, then the section in Sequim proper. I’d also like to stop at the S’Klallam art gallery in Blyn on the way back,” she said.

I almost laughed. She’d said that like I should understand what she meant. “The what? Where?”

“The Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s headquarters are in Blyn, just at the south end of Sequim Bay. They have a tribal art gallery there that has some beautiful pieces.”

“Okay, if you say so. How long a ride are you thinking of?”

“I’m thinking of turning around at Railroad Bridge Park, where the trail crosses the Dungeness River, so about thirty miles. We can stop at the marina for lunch on the way back.”

Later, looking down on the river from the bridge, Charley said, “We’ll want to come back when the salmon are running. It’s fun to watch them going upstream here. In the shallower areas, you’ll sometimes see their bright, red backs running above the surface.”

I’m glad I wasn’t really counting on lunch. When we got to the marina on the way back to the car, we found the restaurant was only open Wednesday through Sunday.

“Damn! I was really looking forward to a crab melt,” Charley said when we discovered they were closed. “If I’d realized they weren’t open, we could have gotten something in Sequim. Oh, well. It’s not like we’ve been riding all day. We’ll stop and get something when we get back to town, instead.”

The art didn’t do much for me, but that was okay — Charley enjoyed it and I enjoyed seeing her happy. The ride itself was as nice as she’d promised. The trail was smooth and most of the hills were much more gradual than they were around town.

Thursday’s ride was nice, too, but different. It was about the same length, starting east of Port Angeles and going through town to get to the bridge over the Elwha River. One stretch through the city was fairly hectic, though, since it ran along the waterfront on some of the busier surface streets. Luckily, once we got away from that, it was fine. There was a bit of climb up from the waterfront, then we ended up giving back a lot of that elevation to get down to the bridge over the river.

The bridge itself was different. It had two decks. Cars used the upper deck, while bikes and pedestrians used the lower. That meant we didn’t have cars whizzing past us as we stopped to look down at the river, so we could really relax and enjoy the view. We wouldn’t be watching salmon from there, though — it was a lot further above the river than the bridge in Sequim.

“There used to be a couple of dams further up the river,” Charley said as we looked down on it. “The way I understand it, back in the 70s there was a big court decision that allocated a lot of the salmon catch to the native tribes since they’d been promised that in their treaties. [Author’s note: The Boldt decision, 1975] The dams pretty much killed off the salmon run on the river, so the Elwha tribe kept trying to get them removed so they could restore it. Eventually, they won.”

She pointed to the river bed and said, “See all that gravel and sand. That was trapped behind the dams and started coming down when they took them out. They finished taking them out a couple of years before I moved here, but there’s still sediment washing down. Now, salmon are starting to repopulate the upper stretches of the river, but they’re keeping it closed to fishing until the runs are bigger.

“I’m taking the week of my birthday off next month. I’m hoping we can hike up to the remains of the upper dam some time that week. It’s pretty cool to watch the water rushing through the cut they made.”

“Do you think I’ll be able to handle it?” I asked.

“If we keep riding and hiking, I don’t think you’ll have a problem with it,” she said. “It’s not that bad, really, but it is a bit long compared to what you’ve been doing. Maybe we can do some longer, flatter hikes before then to make sure you’re ready.” She thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe we’ll try to do the Dungeness Spit lighthouse the first weekend in August. It’s longer, but very flat.”

Saturday, we drove south along Hood Canal to hike the Staircase Rapids trail. The trail turned out to be pretty easy, so Sunday we took a longer ride around home.

The following Saturday, I fell in love all over again when I tried kayaking, especially when we tried out a tandem kayak. The connection between us in the kayak, where we could feel each little weight shift and could talk so easily, captured my heart, and from the look on Charley’s face it did the same for her. The next day my arms and back were a little sore, but I still talked Charley into going out on the bay with me. No matter how much I enjoyed our hiking and biking, I really wanted to spend time out on the water with my love.

Through it all, we strove to avoid what I’d seen referred to as the near occasion of sin. We found we were comfortable alone together, just not alone in a completely private setting. We made it through the few times it happened, but we agreed it was better not to tempt fate. It sucked, but with everything else we did together, it wasn’t too bad. I’d made a promise, and I was going to do everything in my power to prove, to her and to my grandparents, that I was mature enough, and trustworthy enough, to justify their faith in me.

On the plus side, we spent so much time in our outdoor pursuits that I was in the best shape of my life. Charley said that she was in better shape as well, but she was starting from a higher base, so it was harder to tell. I still wasn’t an Amazon, but by the end of summer I was definitely building upper body muscle from paddling around, and my legs were in great shape.

In Tacoma, my summers had been spent, much like my afternoons during the school year, in the library. I loved to read and learn, and I didn’t want to be around my mother any more than absolutely necessary. The library was an ideal solution. The librarians at the branches I frequented knew me and were generally happy to see me. I spent a lot of time on fiction, but I also read history, the sciences, math — really pretty much anything that would engage my mind.

A little over a week after I moved in with Grandma and Grandpa, I found that the local library wasn’t quite what I was used to.

“I’m sorry, Claire, but our local library just isn’t that well stocked,” Grandma said after I’d spent some time trying to find something interesting to read. “Tacoma has more than twenty times as many people, so they can justify having a much larger library system. You can always get something on loan from one of the bigger libraries, but just browsing the shelves isn’t going to get you the same variety.” She thought for a moment then said, “Tell you what, though, you were saying that you love learning, right?” I nodded. “Then let’s see what we can find for online classes that you can tackle at your own pace.”

We brought the idea up with Charley at dinner that evening, and she liked it. “If you still think you want to go the software engineering route, then you might want to focus on things that’ll help you later on in school as well as helping you through the next few years of high school,” she said. “Where were you at in math in Tacoma?”

“Last year I took geometry for math, and biology for my science class,” I said.

“Then you’ll probably want to start with trig and chemistry. If you get through those, then move on to calculus and physics, though you might want to add linear algebra as a lot of the more technical programming involves systems of equations and matrices are everywhere in programming.”

I smiled and said, “I don’t think I’ll have any issues with trig and linear algebra. You know how much I love to read, right?” She nodded. “I’ve read books on those, calculus, chemistry, some physics and even some popular science type books on quantum theory. We didn’t really talk about this before, but your wife-to-be is a nerd!”

“Oh, my,” she said. “We’re going to be nerds squared, then. I didn’t so much read books about specific topics, but I still read all the popular science books I can find, as well as some about having fun with math. Uh, how were you doing in school? I probably should have asked before, but you’ve always seemed bright and engaged, so I figured you did okay.”