Walkway Fledglings

Spring/Summer 2015

Moorage legend has it that when Diana and Tim Larson bought Smitty's houseboat, they were going to remove the little birdhouse on their fence, because what bird is going to nest right there on the walkway with people shlepping past all day and night? What bird? Swallows, that's who! Neighbors assured them that swallows did use that little birdhouse regularly, and so the Larsons left it, to the charm and entertainment of the rest of us passing by.

Iris Beauties

Spring, 2016

I know these plants are an invasive species, but paddling along a shoreline of blooming irises is lovely nonetheless.

The Great Deer-Under-the-Deck Rescue

March 26, 2016

This happened at George and Monica Fetzer's and I'm going to let Monica tell the story:

"So...what takes 1 firefighter, 2 doctors, 1 nurse, and a photographer/water carrier?  Give up? Need a hint? It happened right here, on our moorage...you might say right beneath our feet!

Give up for real? Ok...drumroll...

We saved a deer that got stuck UNDER our house! Yes. Believe it, we have the pictures to prove it!

Last Friday George and I were peacefully watching a documentary about the Hubble telescope. It was about 9:30 p.m. I kept hearing a funny noise...kind of an erratic kerthunking. After about 15 minutes of this I asked George if he heard it...in effect I guess I had unwittingly called the fire department's closest first responder! He thought the sound was coming from the dock side of our house, grabbed the flashlight, and headed out the back door. I headed out the front door. We converged at the corner of our house, where I saw the area had been soaked by some intense splashing. Hmmm....that's odd. Then I heard loud breathing...almost snorting...and saw plumes of hot air emanating from under our house What???!!!  I cautiously shone the flashlight under there...and with shocked disbelief saw two huge ears, attached to a large head with bulging black eyes and a long nose..."George...there's a DEER under our house"!  Now what! Unsure that we could get this resolved on our own, I called Mike...you know, the emergency doctor!! After a "you've got a WHAT stuck under your house?" he gathered a small arsenal of equipment and came down. In the meantime Ed and Ellen (cue doctor #2 and the nurse), on their way home, stopped to see what the commotion was all about and to try to help us figure out what to do! By the time Mike arrived George was taking up deck boards, as it was quite clear the deer wasn't getting out the same way she got in. 

Once she was exposed, Mike (with the strap he had just bought that day) was able to pull...I mean really PULL her up. I swear it looked like a deer was being delivered from between the logs of our house. Once he got her onto the dock one of the doctors diagnosed hypothermia and ordered large amounts of warm water. Just about then the nurse noticed a rounded belly...she's most likely pregnant! About 100 gallons, 2 blankets, and LOTS of intense shivering later, our 'patient' finally started looking around and moving her ears. That was when we started wondering how we were going to get her off the dock to the safety of land! Pulling didn't work. Pushing didn't work. Herding with a lawn chair didn't work. Waving our arms didn't work. We considered trying to load her into a dock cart...that CERTAINLY wouldn't have worked.  A boat was even considered.

Eventually, she started to walk...but the 'wrong' way, towards the end of the dock, still wearing a blanket. Now word was spreading, and Tom Jr joined us. He must have had the magic touch though, cause no sooner had he approached this slowly reviving deer, she knew what she had to do and SPLASH...jumped into the water and enthusiastically swam to shore! We followed her progress up the bank, through the heavy shrubbery, until we knew she had made it!   

After 2 hours, our job here was done! And yes, George and I finished our documentary...just a bit more aware of the wonders NOT only in the heavens...but also right under our feet!"

Upriver, a Stunning Greenpeace Protest

July 30, 2015

I was heading to Seattle or I would have been in my kayak, upriver from my houseboat under the St. Johns Bridge, supporting the Greenpeace protest of the the Shell Oil icebreaker MSV Fennica. I wrote the USGS film "Tracking Pacific Walrus: Expedition to the Shrinking Chuchi Sea Ice" (on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF-aNYhCr8k), so I have been well aware of the dangers of Arctic drilling. The protest was daring, stunning, and breathtaking, with thirteen Greenpeace protesters suspended from the bridge, each with a colorful colorful streaming flowing in the wind. The protect slowed the ship for a day and did not eventually stop it, but drew worldwide attention to the cause.  

Tree Swallows in my Art Birdhouse--At Last

Summer, 2015

Years ago at Cracked Pots (my favorite of all the art shows I go to with everything uniquely made from recycled stuff) I bought an Art Birdhouse from artist Donna Mauch. It literally is an art birdhouse, made with old-fashioned tin watercolor sets, a paintbrush for a perch and a rake painted with moon and stars for a post. It is free-standing and I'd had it on the deck at my forest house, and then here at my riverhouse. No bird had every nested there. Then this year, came the tree swallows!

It was very exciting to watch the lovely blue-backed swallows come and go from the birdhouse right next to my outdoor table, entertaining me and all my guests. (Donna Mauch's business is called "2nd Site: Yard Art and Furniture" and she can be reached at 503-312-5633.)

The parent sits, watchful, on copper tube garden art by Jane Tivol

Oh, for an Oshatz Floating House

June 20, 2015

I signed up for "A Rare and Amazing Architectural Tour: Homes by Architect Robert Oshatz," a fundraiser for the Portland Chamber Orchestra. I had read a piece in the paper about the tour and swooned over the photos of curving ceilings and extraordinary shapes. I felt like I wanted to be in these places. The tour did not disappoint -- it was astounding. The four houses included Oshatz's own house, and a floating home called The Fennell Residence, in Sellwood along the Willamette River. The tour brochure described it as "The imaginative use of curved glue lam beams evoke the poetry of the ripples and contours of a river. The expansive glass facade embraces the river and frames the sunset. The curvilinear forms create spatial differentiation that enhances the experience of time as light plays through the daily and seasonal changes."

Visitors drove to the different houses and I happened to start and go on the same schedule as Oshatz, who was making an appearance at each house, so I was there and got to hear him talk about the houses and answer questions. The Fennell Residence was stunningly fabulous in its imaginative shapes, sweeping curves, open space inviting in the river views, and beautiful details.

View from the moorage walkway

From the outside deck 

Inside looking out 

From the inside loft area looking out to the river

Architect extraordinaire Robert Oshatz

The home's entranceway 

The Raysark, Lily White and Portland's "Aquatic Awakening"

 

My neighbor Mary, knowing what a magazine junkie I am, gave me a stack of hers that she'd read. Among them were a few issues of a magazine I'd not seen, called 1859: Oregon's Magazine. The May/June 2014 issue's cover and lead story were titled, "The Life Aquatic" featuring three different Portland area houseboats in different locales.

Writer Melissa Dalton also penned an accompanying story called "The Legacy of Lily White and The Raysark." Lily White, born in Oregon City in 1866, was an amateur photographer who designed a houseboat and had it built to her specifications. "It would be 80 feet long, contain six rooms furnished in natural wood, and have amenities such as a three-ton ice chest, running water, and an up-to-date darkroom."

The story goes on to say, "The Raysark was part of a larger 'aquatic awakening" happening in Portland at the turn of the century. Portland's first houseboat was completed in 1901, when F.S. Morris shelled out $1,500 to bring the East Coast houseboating trend to the West. Before then, Portland had only seen houseboats in the form of 'scows.' These were essentially shacks upon log rafts, populated by the city's poor who needed the cheapest plot available--the river. The more extravagant houseboats such as White's and Morris' started a trend for the ultimate 'temporary summer abode,' the ideal weekend getaway for the office worker who had to be downtown on Monday morning. Mentions of houseboat parties frequently populated The Oregonian's society pages.

Our houseboats aren't travelling up and down the rivers and I don't believe any of us are making the society pages--is there even such a thing any more?-- but I was enchanted by the idea that as a writer I'm here as part of a continued artistic awakening, another houseboat-dwelling woman inspired by the beauty of the river.

Kathy Reilly's en plein air painting on my deck

 

 

Artist Kathy Reilly, a long-time friend, was visiting from Colorado with her husband Dale Lanan. We've been friends since the 70s when we both lived in Pittsburgh. I have her art in probably every room of my house. Over the past few years she has focused on en plein air (French for "in the open air") outdoor painting.

 

She travels with a fold-up easel and a kit she made up of oil paints and brushes. One of the days of their visit she set up her easel on the back deck and made this painting of my neighbors' deck filled with spring-blooming flowers. 

 



Her talent constantly amazes me. I can recall years ago when we took a watercolor class together. We were at a picnic table with a vase of orange nasturtiums in front of us. I sat there, perplexed with my tubes of paint, unable to figure out how to even mix the colors of the flowers. In the meantime, she painted a frame-able work of art.

Here is the finished painting, which she put in a special folder she created so that the oil paint would dry untouched over the following few days.

This week a packaged arrived for me from Kathy - it was this original painting, in a brown wood frame. I hung it in my living room where you can look the painting and simultaneously look out to this view. You can see Kathy's work at www.kathleenreillyart.com/ and kathreillyart.blogspot.com

Close encounters of the sea lion kind

This is my fourth year of living on the water and I think up to this point I had seen sea lions only twice. Then here I was paddling saw a large lump floating in the river a few yards away from me. I thought it was a log. But then its head rose and with a snort it dove underwater. A sea lion! As you can see from the photo, I was just upriver of the Sauvie Island bridge.

One does not want to get to close to a sea lion, so I followed the trajectory of where I was near shore and floated downriver parallel to the marine mammal. It was huge. It must have been sleeping because its head would come up and breathe in a rhythmic pattern. If I recall correctly, I would count six seconds and then the head would go back down. Eventually it woke up, turned and looked at me, dove, and I didn't see it again. Once it disappeared and I didn't know where it was, I paddled all the way over to the shore, just in case.

 

A week later when I was paddling I came across two sea lions, downriver ahead of me. They were barking loudly with a sound I'd never heard before. I tried to paddle really fast to keep them in my purview but they were moving along at a good clip and not long afterwards I lost sight of them.

Harrowing installation of purple martin boxes, Series 2

Don and Carolyn Vinton are long-time fans of purple martins and have gourds on their houseboat, too. After Dave Fouts, aka The Purple Martin Man, passed away, his sister Judith and friends including Rita Price have been trying to figure out how to carry on his work. One current big problem has been the sorry state of the wooden houses Dave installed on pilings along the channel. Don Vinton volunteered to work on replacements this year.

But oh! what a harrowing and magnificent thing he has done. The river is low, and, wearing a GoPro camera, Don climbed high up a ladder from a boat below to install these two-story "townhouse" purple martin houses that were built by (a group of children?-- I have to check) whose names are on the bottom of the nest box. 

You can see the whole 10-minute YouTube video at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuRjTV1v-f8&feature=em-share_video_user

I helped Dave years ago do a similar thing, but the river was much higher then and the pilings weren't so decrepit, so even though I thought what Dave did was scary, what Don did is much more so. Afterwards I asked him about it and he said the guy in the boat below was keeping the engine revved up just enough so that the nose would stay steady 'held" by the pilings. At one point the engine conked out and the guy in the boat hurriedly got it started again so that the boat with the ladder and Don high on it would not start to drift away.

In the video Don describes how he is using plastic straps to attach the houses because the pilings are so old he feared they wouldn't hold nails or screws. Below are photos I took when I paddled beneath the new houses -- I think he put up four of them. The other day when I went by I saw a purple martin at one of the houses. Success!

 

Flotsam float from The Kaisha Lenae

This day-glo orange and green float is one of my more exciting flotsam finds. It was stuck back behind logs in an eddy. It's about 15 inches long and was attached to a lot of rope. There's a green plastic tag attached to the bottom that says "059. Kaisha Lenae. 96263. 2014-15 ODFW."

What does that mean? ODFW must be the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. 2014-15 must mean it belongs to some research project for those years. I thought maybe 96263 was the project number, 059 was this float number and Kaisha Lenae was perhaps a research scientist.

But upon some googling, I discovered that The F/V Kaisha Lenae is a 48-foot commercial fishing vessel. It was built in 1988 by LeClercq Marine Construction and its Port of Call is Ilwaco, Washington (more than an hour away on the Pacific Coast of Washington's Long Beach Peninsula and north of the Columbia River). I found the name of the current owner and saw that he purchased it from where it had been used previously in Seward, Alaska. I also came across on LinkedIn the name of a fellow who is a deckhand on this ship. I looked up the address and phone number of the owner and called and left a message, asking if he wanted this back and mentioning my blog and writing a story about it. He never returned the call.

  This is not The Kaisha Lenae but it's an image I found on the web of what a 48-foot fiberglass commercial fishing vessel looks like.

So the story of The Kaisha Lenae and the ODFW float is still a mystery. Where was the boat, what was it doing and why and how did this float end up along the Multnomah Channel?  For now the float makes a very colorful addition to the wall of art on my tenderhouse.

Alder Creek paddle flotsam

February, 2015

On my lucky-find flotsam day, I came across this paddle embedded in the eroded shoreline of the channel. I tugged and jimmied to get it out and saw that it was a rental paddle from Alder Creek Kayak, a shop I know well.

I looked online and saw that such an Escape paddle was worth about $100. It had the store's phone number written on it, and the number "220," which originally I thought was the rental stock number but came to discover that it's the paddle length -- 220 inches.

I phoned the store to see if they wanted it back. Well, yes, since it was still in perfectly good shape. So I said I would bring it back in exchange for a story. I dropped by their almost-riverside shop and the story, as told to me by Meloy Ady, is that a rental paddle gets lost probably every few weeks during the high season, maybe a few a month. "Most don't come back." he said. The renter has to pay for it. No one would know how and when this particular one disappeared but he guessed probably last summer. He's worked there five years and recognized that the handwriting on the paddle as his.

Lotsa Flotsam

February 2015

Ever since the logjam gyre where I was always lucky to find interesting flotsam dissembled in high fast water, I often will paddle my whole six-mile route now without finding much of anything interesting. This day, however, I hit the flotsam jackpot. The paddle and the float are intriguing enough to warrant their own posts ... so that will come next.

New photos--testing, testing ...

"donna-matrazzo-image.jpg"

"donna-matrazzo-image.jpg"

This is a test. I needed to update my bio photo on my website and LinkedIn and had these great photos taken by Christian Columbres. I've added them to those sites but they don't show up when I google my name and "images" so someone suggested putting them on my blog and seeing if that gets them there.

Follow up the next day. It didn't work. I came back and added "Donna Matrazzo photo" at the bottom of each and that didn't show up either. Then I googled "How to get picture to show up on google images" and came to a site that suggested describing the photo as I have below -- with a hyphen between the words and .jpg at the end. I'll see how this goes ...

"donna-matrazzo-image.jpg"

The Dagney returns!

Spring, 2015

The Dagney--one of the two large amazing-looking  ships I paddle past on my regular six-mile encounters--was gone this winter, and I feared gone for good. I missed seeing it and tried to discover where it went. There's no simple way, I discovered, to find out where a boat might be that is no longer at a particular marina.

Then one day this spring I paddled past and there it was, like an apparition. Some guys were sitting outside on a small boat next to it and I paddled over and asked what they knew. They said it had wintered at the coast and acted like the boat came and went seasonally every year, but I didn't recall it being gone before. One of these days someone will be on The Dagney when I paddle past and I will stop and perhaps find out more of its story. In the meantime, I'm just happy to see it again.

Happy Valentine's Day

February 14, 2015 paddle ...

I found this flotsam along the shore. A charming surprise on Valentine's Day.