It was a dark and stormy night

We had a doozy of a storm last week. First our atmospheric river returned with a vengeance, and between crazy amounts of rain and huge king tides there was lots of grass- and tide-lands covered. (I wonder how some of these folks get onto their porches and inside their homes during these torrents?)

Then those 70 mph gusts took hold of us. I watched all day as the tops of the big trees in our Nahcotta neighborhood shook and swayed threateningly. There is one particularly huge one on property adjacent to my neighbor and me — if this one decides to topple, one or the other of us will probably be flattened. We commiserated about it the day after the storm. We’ve both been eyeing it for some time. If Phil Stamp’s assessment is true — i.e. look to see if the top of a tree is healthy — we may be OK for awhile longer. But I can’t help but think it’s the Russian roulette of “treedom.”

Losing power shouldn’t be a surprise for us hearty Pacific Northwesterners, but somehow it always is. The idea that there will be no hot coffee in the morning is shocking. During this last long outage, our pod distributed out the feeding and coffee regime helping each other out depending on what resources we had. The Kovachs, Teri and Steve, on the ocean side in Klipsan hosted those of us in Ocean Park for brunch — they had their power back in four or five hours but ours at the north end was off way into the evening.

The post office was open. Someone there said to me, “Wow, you should see the whitecaps on the ocean,” and I said, “You should see the whitecaps on the bay!”

Then around dinner time, 5:30ish, friend and podmate, Al Betters, had a couple of us to his house on the bayside mid-Peninsula for dinner — though this trip involved a detour south to Cranberry then back north up Sandridge since the road was closed to all traffic at 193rd where the transformer was knocked out by an enormous Spruce. One of the PUD guys I spoke to on Sandridge said he’d been on the job 30 hours. Thanks guys and gals for getting us lit. When I got back home at 8:30 p.m. — yay! — my porch light welcomed me.

Food4Kids

No matter the weather, the beat goes on. The Oyster Crackers — Bette Lu Krause, Rita Smith, Christl Mack and Phyllis Taylor — entertained an appreciative audience last Sunday on a cold, wicked-rainy afternoon in Ilwaco. The performance was a fund-raiser for Food4Kids Backpack Program (www.facebook.com/Food4KidsBackpacks).

As Bette Lu said, “It was pouring! We were glad to have an audience of 54 … we’ve had as many as over a hundred at other times, but the weather was pretty awful. We sang from 2-4 and Carole Bentley spoke about Food4Kids at the intermission. Our concert was a ‘Best of’ the Oyster Crackers. We’re known for our three-part harmonies and we sang a lot of old favorites, but over half of our repertoire is originals too. Rita has written several and about a third of the others are mine. It just feels so good to use whatever talent you have to raise money for a good cause.”

Our community, we know, is amazing and they came through again. Over $1,700 was raised for the backpack program which puts together weekend food for over 200 kids. (One generous anonymous donor wrote a check for $1,000!) Now that sounded like a lot of money to me until I heard from Carole who has stepped in to help long-time program organizer Natalie Hanson.

“Unfortunately, the demand just keeps growing every year — it doesn’t go away,” Carole said. “We send backpacks home with kids for the weekends and now we are packing between 254-260 of them every week, at a cost of $1,500.” This is just for supplies and food. The entire program is held together by volunteers who get together at the Long Beach Elks on Thursday mornings to pack the food.

“Packing the bags is a well-oiled machine,” continued Carole, “and Free by the Sea delivers the backpacks to the schools for us. What we really need is donations. We don’t have any government funding at all — our money comes from local organizations’ grants and individual donations.”

If you’d like to help out, send a check to Food4Kids, PO Box 441, Long Beach, WA 98631.

Note too that half the Crackers — Bette Lu and Rita — will be singing at the Shoalwater Yacht Club (the old Adelaides) in downtown Ocean Park on International Women’s Day, March 8, from 5-8 p.m. It’s a potluck event.

French Air

The beat really does go on at KMUN. There is a lineup of new programming in the works. One of the new hosts will be Renaissance-man and my neighbor Francois Manavit. Francois has been an art instructor, a clown, a gardener, a tour guide, a baker, husband and father, and a radio host in 2005 for a long-running show at WPVM in Asheville, North Carolina. (More about Francois: atlanta.consulfrance.org/renaissance-man-of-the-south.) He was even part of a TV reality show.

Several years ago, Francois saw the name “Oysterville” on a map and, ever the adventurer, said to himself, “I love oysters, I think I’ll move there.” He bought a home and lives just up the street from me on one of the only hills in Nahcotta — the one I’ll be heading to when the tsunami arrives.

Francois, born in Dugny, just north of Paris, fits in perfectly with our independent Northwest milieu and yet he has hung on to his unique Frenchness. As he says, “My show will be right after Fresh Air — so I call it ‘French Air’! I don’t know the starting date yet but it will be a twice monthly program (one hour) dedicated to the Francophile and beyond with a focus on promoting cross-cultural understanding and exchange between France and the United States. At a time when the U.S. seems to want to cut ties with Europe, this is my modest attempt to bring a little diplomacy to the Pacific Northwest. The show will feature French music — Yves Montand, Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, et al. — and news.” In rather a coup, Francois will be including as part of his show a news segment from Radio France International (RFI) which he calls a “Five Minute Rendezvous.”

Francois goes on to say “KMUN is our golden treasure for community connection, free from commercial bias, and amplifying local voices. Long live community radio!” He didn’t say it, but as a Francophile, I will, “Vive La France!”