Is This Your Cat?

Started a nice beach walk from Slip Point yesterday. Found this cat in a plastic bag on the beach.

Cat on beach

Is this your cat? It's a large, black-and-white cat. I don't know the gender; we didn't dig around in there much.

There was also this pair of flannel pajama pants, and what looked like medical gauze, two pads of it. Was that a chemical smell?

The bag and its contents weren't soaked in seawater. It was oddly dry.

We think that the owner, unable to pay for the medical needs of a sick cat, might have chloroformed and drowned it. The paw-printed pants make us think this might have been the case. People are desperate up here, and have to make hard decisions for family members.

OR, somebody did this to somebody else's cat. We turned over the body (no, I'm not saying "carcass" about somebody's pet) to local law enforcement. For one thing, we can't just go bury it in the woods, because unless we put it down 6 feet or so, something hungry will dig it up - and if not for reasons of decency, then that domestic animals can spread diseases to wild animals, and back again.

The police sergeant said the Sheriff's office has a vet that will examine the animal to discover the cause of death.

He also said the Sheriff's office been dealing with a very nasty business with pet deaths in a neighborhood in Forks.

We lived in a poisoning neighborhood in Bremerton. Back then, the cops didn't care about animal abuse. But since then, the link has been made between animal abuse and someone psyching himself up for abusing humans. 

Cat in bag, and pants. Junior helping.

There's been a rash of missing cats around Clallam Bay, including our neighbor's beloved "Gus," a little tabby Manx cat.

We assumed this was the result of the refugee predators trying to find food after being driven from their homes by the nearby clearcut, but we don't know of any mountain lions or coyotes that use plastic bags. So, if somebody is killing cats, the cops know, and you don't need that grief.

Paw pants

No, we don't know the gender of the cat. We didn't poke around in the bag much, because we have cats ourselves, and diseases can spread, if any exist in the bag.

We're sorry this happened, especially if an owner felt so desperate, with no place to bury a pet, that he (or more likely "she," with those pants) had no other option but a water burial. The pants hint at affection, rather than revenge.

However, there is a strange logic in the minds of people with pets or even small farm animals around here. When an animal is sick or even if the owner can't keep them, they won't take them to the Humane Society, "Because they might kill them." These people miss the word "might." There's a BETTER than 50/50 chance an animal will survive, or find a new owner, or at least have quiet last days. If they kill the animal themselves, it's a 100% chance the animal will die. Do they think it's better to be killed by Mommy? 

There are resources in the area, and the Humane Society knows them all. Contact them.

Oh, and the woman on the beach who thought we were the kind of people who would laugh at the remark, "There's a lot of my neighbor's cats I'd like to do that to!" and "Well, don't you feel like that some time?" -- no, we don't feel like that sometime. The times we had trouble with marauding dogs killing animals in our yard, we used the police and fences. We're not the sort of trash who would kill our neighbors' pets and cowardly try to hide them - or think it's funny. What is WRONG with you?)

Evidence of Happy People

Dreams on the Beach

For once a nice post. On the beach, yesterday, Dan found a message in a bottle - or rather, a test tube. It had been sealed with electrical tape, but had leaked, so I'd had to peel the paper out very carefully. It's too fragile to go back into the water, so it's going down to my collection at San Diego State University.

Ran into a guy called "Ken," who told me a story about how he and some friends started the idea of the Tribal Journeys in 1989, when they just decided to take off in canoes, and took five months to paddle to the Alaska end of Vancouver Island.

He gave me detailed instructions on making the canoe paddle required if one wishes to walk up to a canoe and ask to help paddle. And how awful it feels the first half hour, with muscle cramps, hard breathing, even vomiting, and what to eat and drink beforehand to feel better: "Raw potatoes and bananas. And lots of electrolytes."

Cartoon face in the sand.

He also told me that cold-water immersion training involved picking up a big rock and walking further into the water every day. Do I believe him? On the one hand, if it's physically possible, some fool has done it. On the other hand, Irish folk hero Finn McCool couldn't swim, so it's said, when he fell out of his boat, he just walked along the bottom. I wondered, 'How did my dad possess you? Because he'd pull that one, too." 

Ken was giving me the "we're all brothers" thing, but as a commercial fisherman, when it came to seals... there's always an animal pisses somebody off. I think I might be the only person on the planet really knows animals are just other cells in the planetary system, and not PUT here specifically to make us miserable or piss us off. That would be like a liver cell getting mad at a heart cell.

Dan walking by cartoon

Cartoonists on the beach! Anybody know who these sand drawings represent? Or is this original? Nice to see some kid - or maybe adult - using the sand the way any artist would, faced with a blank surface and any sort of drawing implement. 

Somebody once said of me, I could draw on a shovel with a stick. The truth is, we all would. Artists love all the toys. So those arguments about whether digital or traditional are better or preferable - we don't care. We love all the bafoys.

You'll All Be Welcome In Virginia

Crap all over a beach.

People up here are really getting into loving and taking care of the planet they live on. It's amazing to watch their energy. They're rescuing a little river, and picking up the woods.

But we came upon a kids' campfire that looked like it was out of 1954. Garbage all over, burnt bottles and cans, dumb overuse of the wood. Okay, they're kids. But shouldn't kids know better? They have grownups who teach them, right? My mom taught US to pick up after ourselves, on the beaches of Mukilteo and Everett - back when Mukilteo was like out here, before the pulp industry ate it (Paper From Trees is From Stupid People. Period).

Then we saw what these kids had been using for firestarter - pages of a magazine. Kids get magazines from home, where they're received by adults. Take a look at who publishes this magazine. 

Guns and garbage.

Anybody surprised? They talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. Anybody who claims to "Love America" and want to protect it needs to do better than this. In training their kids in something better than just AIM and believe bullets evaporate (oh, and they all do). And they do everything they can do to keep wiping out native species, like buffalo, wolves and cougars.

They really don't like it here. After all, the English ancestors got here with the hope they'd get to go back and be Dukes with their ravaging wealth - and everybody afterwards mimicked the bad example. WHEN will they ever learn?

And yes, we'll keep cleaning their nasty campsites and picking up their garbage - because WE're grownups. Maybe someday the little babies can be housebroken - or we may have to accept they're mentally limited and have to be treated like the kind of yard dogs who never get to learn how to behave like adults. Butt-wiping of the immature we shall always have with us.

Ruby Beach is Creeping?

Garnet sand?

Patches of garnet sand on the Clallam Bay beach? These usually only show up at Ruby Beach, down the Pacific coast.

Building on the beach.

Here's a shot of a little pile of driftwood several people seem to have been working on as the days goes by. Sometimes it's a house, sometimes its collapsed into a decorative heap. Sometimes the sea takes it back.

Happy dog

And fun with dogs up on the Hobuck Beach, near Neah Bay: Shaun Allyn and two unidentified dog regulars at Hobuck Beach. It seems to be a local law that, if you go to the beach, you will be issued, like Allyn, with a large, friendly Beach Dog, who will return all those precious sticks you so carelessly throw into the surf. 

While the law requires all dogs to be on a leash, in a large rural area where people need to get along, animal control's unofficial view works: if the dogs don't cause problems, the officers "aren't going to shake any trees." Friday, May 24.

I Hope It's Not Naughty

I hope it's not naughty....

Just some rocks found on the Clallam Bay beach. They sorta look like Chinese idiograms, to me, especially the one on the lower left.

Any Chinese friends can read these?

Have I got them all right-side-up? 

:D

Toilet float!

We thought this was a bottle, because of the screw neck, but it's completely sealed.

The texture is uneven, as though it's been rolled in a cloth while still hot.

What am this thang? It had some of the yellowish crud on it that says "Tsunami debris," but we dunno.

Going to troll around the interwebs and try to find out.

And now we know. A nice gentleman named Stu Farnsworth, who knows about floats emailed me:  

"Hi Donna;
  Thanks for your note, pretty easy one here. This is a Toilet Bowl flange used in the holding tank for the water pressure. Early ones were glass some like this were totally sealed and many think they are Glass Floats. It is possible it could have been used for that if it was found on the Beach because the family operations would use anything that floats that would hold up their nets.
  This could very well be something from the Tsunami if it was found on the beach because lord only knows what is going to show up. Hope this helps."

Houses used to stand on the beach. As the river sands re-align and release their buried objects, we've been pulling out and disposing of everything from old piping to toilets to actual tin-foil to ancient tires.

I dunno if a glass toilet float is worth anything, but it's interesting! 

Challenge Buddha

Buddha has a new hobby.

If you meet Buddha on the beach - skip a rock.

There's a town law; when you got to the beach at Clallam Bay, you're issued a big dog to fetch sticks and pee on the grass.

Buddha is our regular issue. He's part Lab and part - what? Grayhound? Arctic wolf? Whoositwhatsit? Anyway, he's fast.

When we first met him, he thought catching small rocks was the coolest game. But it's bad for his teeth, and we stopped that. Then he decided having the biggest rocks he might be able to get his jaws around was the right thing for us to throw far past his head, so he could pretend to dig them out of the sand, barely ducking the surf. Then it was sticks thrown INTO the surf - but not too far.

He has a new passion, for which he has abandoned all other challenges: trying to catch skipped rocks.

That's right, he follows me bug-eyed as I pick up flat rocks to skip. Then he tries to catch them in mid-air as they whiz past him into the surf or the river, yipping each time, as he misses. I have learned to skip a rock OVER a dog's head and UNDER a dog's head and BEHIND a dog, and IN FRONT of a dog, and quickly while he's still out after the last one.

Nothing else will do; when I try to throw big rocks or sticks for him, he looks like I've hurt his professional pride.

This is more exercise than it sounds like. For two miles yesterday, I collected, flung, ran, and otherwise tried to outwit and outspeed a very fast dog. So far, I'm winning, but he's come close three times. No wonder, as we're heading for the beach, he romps up with flopping ears, his entire aspect proclaiming "Ohboyohboyohboy!"

Well, it beats going to the gym. And the neighbor has a dog-walker.

(Buddha passed away August 24, 2013. Good running, dear, dear beach-dog and friend.)

Cabezon

This is a big old Cabezon, dead on the beach. Why didn't anything eat him/her? About as long as my arm. Old age? Disease? Swallowed a hook?










Now something has begun chowing down.

Nothing left but the backbone.

Finally, the jawbones float loose and end up farther down the beach. Someone else made a nice circle of red stones, to which could be added the bones.

Greenling are Green

Why they call these fish "greenling."

They have the most meat per pound of body size on them, too.

What greenling fillets and backbone look like crispy-fried.

Cleanest Beach on the West Coast

Dan and I estimate we've carried four tons of debris off the Clallam Bay beach since 2003.  And that's a very conservative estimate.

This is the debris-tree near the Clallam River bridge. Every year we pile the stuff that's too heavy to carry all the way back down the beach.  Then, each spring, when the bridge extension is replaced across the river, we get our wheelbarrow and haul all this stuff to the Clallam Bay Park dumpster.

This is the other tree, with a big flivver tire on it.  It must have been buried in mud, all these decades.  That rust thing used to be a coil of wire.

This is the cleanest beach between Alaska and Tierra del Fuego.  I dare somebody else to show us a cleaner beach, anywhere, year-long, that's over a mile long. 

All we do is always take a plastic bag along and fill it with every scrap of man-made detritus we see.  We hacksaw big metal apart, and use everything from the tiger carry to fulcrum power to get compressors and piping down the beach.  Yeah, we're a little obsessive.

But we have the cleanest beach on the west coast.  From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

Clean Way To Go

      A young Cooper's Hawk on the beach below the bald eagle's nests, during the time of year when the big birds are tolerating no interlopers, whether they compete or not.  It's also likely the kid made it through the winter, to finally starve in a tough, cold spring.

     We pulled another huge garbage sack of detritus off this beach, but here's some good news -- almost ALL of the garbage was very old.  A couple new Pepsi and Malt Liquor cans and a chunk of Styrofoam were the only really new pieces.  So, except for a few kids and drunks, people up here are pretty aware of the treasure of their own beach.
     There are worse places to end up.

SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

Dan and I pick up the Clallam Bay beach as we're walking, or at least the mile or so on the east side of the Clallam River.  We're not civic-minded; we just don't want to look at it.  We've hauled off all manner of crap over the years, from tiny to huge, from unknown scrap of plastic to bags of human shit to old rusty lead pipe to an ancient rusty compressor to a complete toilet (we had to break it up and carry it away in pieces).

Dan with all the garbage we found on the entire beach behind him.  Now.  In 2003 when we moved here?  Just imagine.

Yesterday, in passing the Clallam River park bridge, we placed some garbage at the head of the attached ramp, to pick up when we got back, to dump, as we've been given permission, in the park dumpster.  I make no assumptions about whether any of the following people thought a raggedy chunk of fiberglass and a broken tin roof fragment belonged to anybody or was other than junk:

Three catch-and-release trout fishermen.  Stepped over it.

Two blimpish white boys who gave us a dirty look on the beach (we have black hair).  Went around it.

Three aware-looking teenagers. Probably not aware of the junk.

The other side of the river, where we normally can't reach, not even at high tide in summer, now.  Somebody on that end -- and I suspect the owners of the Three Sisters of Clallam Art Gallery and their friends and family -- is keeping it as clean as we keep our end.  Somebody on the road to Slip Point is picking up everything we used to pick up.  The worst pickup on the beach is found 100 feet from the end of the bridge, during the summer.  The attachment is removed during the winter.  Draw your own conclusions - and say "Thank you," if you know those people.