Dateline June 17, 2018, Family and the North Cascades

After our fine visit with John and Sandy we drove along the Columbia and crossed at last into Washington, the Mount St. Helens vistas beautiful along the way. It was a short day, because we were spending the night with Mark and Cathy Wanick, old friends of John's family. Mark had gone to high school on Long Island with John's brother Will and his sister Carol, and the Wanicks had lived near us in Florida before moving out to Washington a few years back. We had a fine dinner and good wine and talked well into the evening.

A round at Renton. In the morning we said our goodbyes and drove to Renton, where the United States Golf Association was holding a qualifier for the U.S. Senior Women's Amateur, a championship it has run since 1962. Janice meant to try for it, and they let John play a practice round alongside her since he would be caddying the next day. We had a good round at Fairwood Golf and Country Club, and the club kindly let us park there overnight.

Janice played her qualifying round the next morning, and played it well, but for three holes where, as she put it, she must have been asleep. It was a fun morning in the company of two very nice women, one of whom had her eleven-year-old daughter caddying for her, a darling girl from Hawaii who had just won her age group in the national surfing championship out in Orange County, California.

Will. John's brother Will had been through surgery, and a complication from an earlier operation had kept him in the hospital in Everett longer than anyone wanted. We drove straight there, and his wife Cathy met us outside; we had a good long visit with Will, who was coming along. Then we followed Cathy down to the ferry for Whidbey Island, where they have their home.

Cathy's sister Beth was out helping get the house ready for Will to come home, and a kind next-door neighbor lent us their place to stay, so we ferried back over to Everett each day to sit with Will. Friday evening their son Chris turned up, and we were delighted to find him there over coffee the next morning. Chris is just retiring from the Coast Guard; his work has been a kind of air traffic control for all the ship traffic around Seattle and Puget Sound, and he has taken the icebreaker Polar Star down to Antarctica more than once. That afternoon his brother Stephen came by to say hello. We were sorry to miss their wives and Chris's boy Aiden, but we did have the good company of Bullet, Chris's dog, who was boarding with Cathy.

Lee Taylor. Saturday brought a barbecue, and with it Lee Taylor, a friend of John's from boyhood. The friendship runs deep and goes back generations: John's grandfather and Lee's were great friends, and so were their sons. Lee's father was John's father's dearest friend, known in the Wilson house as Uncle Frank, and Lee's mother Phil and John's mother Jean were close, and played a great deal of bridge together. John and Lee had not laid eyes on each other in twenty years, and the evening went long with old stories.

Deception Pass. Monday morning we got an early start and drove north up Whidbey Island and over Deception Pass.

The crossing is really two bridges, joining the island to the mainland, built back in 1934 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the views from either side are stunning. Chris had told us not to miss the Cascade Loop over the mountains on Highway 20, so that is the way we went.

The North Cascades. They call the North Cascades the American Alps, and the drive earns it; the road runs past a string of lakes made by dams, and Chris had singled out Diablo and Ross as the ones to see. He was right.

We stopped at the Washington Pass Overlook and walked the mile of trail up for the views.

There was a plaque set in the ground up there honoring a Jack Wilson for his hand in building the highway through the pass. John's father was known as Jack, so we got a kick out of it; he had, we should say, nothing whatever to do with this road.

From the pass we came down through a few small towns and pointed ourselves toward the great dam country of the Columbia.