Cloud City Dock

It had been an extraordinarily sun-drenched week, and overnight the sea vs. air temp flipped causing a thick gray blanket of mist to blank out everything past a few yards. Me, J and Four cruised past Deadman's on the way to town in Four's K-town mobile. You could see the pavement slipping through the floorboard, and occasionally small pieces of corroded steel would take their final flying leap, trailing behind us a dusty explosion. The only thing keeping our feet from recreating the Flintstone's ride was a vintage vinyl floormat, one of those with the overly perky playmate showing off her assets. Staring down I was almost sure she winked at me.

Scanning the horizon, if you hadn't traveled that route a million and a half times, you wouldn't know the bay and mountainous coastline across it even existed. To me it looked more like we were approaching Cloud City and Lando would be greeting us soon. But no such luck, Four flicked his blinker and took a right, landing at the City Dock, way too early in the morning. Even the one seagull that was pacing the pilings didn't seem quite awake in the eerily quiet fog.

Four's given name is actually Thorton Tortelsen. We both attended Main Elementary as kids, and he was a little later than most in the ability to produce the sound "th". Due to his speech impediment when introducing himself, Thor became Four for life. His parents own a small seiner that when fishing is good pays the bills, but otherwise is a purchased full-time job without benefits. Often the neighborhood children would be roped into deckhand grunt labor or any task that required little or no pay. My penchant for pretending to be pirate hoisted me into indentured slavery some summers. Pirates smell like herring you know.

Straddling bracings in the truck bed are two plastic totes containing some old gill nets. This is the first year Four purchased his own subsistence license and was hoping to take the skiff out and drop a few sets - enough to brine and smoke a freezer full of Reds. Unfortunately no one knows how long these nets have been in the garage and what decaying treasures may have been buried amid the coiled line. J suggested, "by the weight of it there's probably a body," as he struggled to slither the tote to tailgate.

"Guess we'll find out soon enough," said Four, lifting the end cork and lead line with some grimy gloves and walking backwards as click, clock, click the white oval corks tapped over the plastic edge and tumbled down just to be dragged across the empty asphalt lot.

Net mending on a rather blustery day

A kelp-ridden grid was splayed across the grass, and occasionally staked to keep everything in place. It seemed as if we were trying to keep the undead from escaping the ash and topsoil, but more mundanely some idiot (or in this case "idiotrix") decided to drag the gillnet across an outcropping of barnacle-encrusted rocks.

The damage really wasn't any more severe than being visited by the Rottweilers of the Sea, but from one end to the other we were going to have to perform the ritual of netmending, one that created Ground Hog's Day-ja-vu and repetitive stress injury nightmares.

For most of the morning, me and J crawled around on our hands and knees hunched over opposite ends with a rhythmic unwind, unwind, spin, twist, flip, tighten. Normally we'd be jamming out to Ministry with Ziploc-waterproofed I-Pods, or hurling insults back and forth - but the island weather wasn't in a kind and cooperative mood today. There were winds gusting at what I'm sure was 70 miles per hour, giant raindrops in a showerhead downpour that changed directions randomly. I'd bet God was up there with one of those adjustable flow heads giggling each time the little spiders fought to stand straight and then he pelted them in the other direction by switching it to pulse.

It was a good thing I hadn't buried my raingear in the closet of doom, (although I did get beaned on the head by an errant halibut rod while extracting it). It had been years since life stapled me to the shore, and other than a skiff ride or two for out-of-towners, I'd managed to duck out of subsistence service as well. There really hadn't been much use for a brilliant orange pantsuit with matching cloak, I think the look would be considered overkill for a run-to-your-car drizzle. Pulling the canvas-backed hood over my head I'm hit with the scent of escaping polypropylene fumes, and reeled right back to a stop on memory lane.

I have always found the power of olfactory-driven memories fascinating. One sniff and you are sitting right behind that pungently cologned classmate, or hugging your grandma, or getting dipped headfirst into the water next to the bilge line. The raingear had me spinning tangents.

I'll have to elaborate next time, for now I'm headed back out to weave and bob invisible line before it gets any darker... or any of the Zombies start escaping the mud like the suicidal earthworms on the sidewalk.

The "it is not a windmill" debate

What landscape structure has giant arms that spin in the wind like a pinwheel? Ask anyone they'll answer windmill, however, I keep getting corrected on the fact that what is up on top of Pillar is not technically a windmill.

My neighbor, Mr. Smug-pants was trying to inform me that it is in fact a wind turbine, as a windmill is only for grinding grain. So I took him for his word until I decided to finally look it up for a better explanation and ha ha Mr. Smug-pants wasn't entirely correct.

According to the world's most accurate internet encyclopedia... (does sic mean sarcasm intended? if so sic)... a windmill is a wind turbine, but a wind turbine isn't a windmill. No wonder I have recurring SAT question nightmares.

A wind turbine is a rotating machine which converts the kinetic energy in wind into mechanical energy. If the mechanical energy is used directly by machinery, such as a pump or grinding stones, the machine is usually called a windmill. If the mechanical energy is then converted to electricity, the machine is called a wind generator, wind power unit (WPU), or wind energy converter (WEC).

So what we have on top of Pillar as a whole machine would not be a windmill, as there isn't a Little Red Hen grainery or water tower on the side of the mountain. It contains a wind turbine, but would be classified as one of the three bolded terms from the quote. I'm not sure which one KEA prefers, but I like wind energy converter. Of course this is new terminology, as it says in the windmill article, the wind turbine title is 'recent', so I guess if you are over a certain age your ability to call it a windmill is grandfathered in.

Here's my wikipedia links if you really wanted to know: wind turbine, windmill

I also had another laugh at myself as we headed out to White Sands on the 4th of July, as we turned the corner I was startled with a thought of "oh wow, they put them out here too?". Luckily I caught myself before I spoke remembering, although yes it seems like we've been driving straight, this is the backside of the mountain. It was not like I didn't know that, we've ATV'd to end of the road parties many a time in high school revelry... just caught me off guard... there hasn't always been such an obvious landscape reminder there.

A video in honor of windmills dedicated to Mr. Smug-pants: