TANGERINES AND WHALES, 1/30/10

                                                TANGERINES AND WHALES 1/30/10

Thanks to visitors I’ve been out and about more than I’d be likely to otherwise this past month.  And almost every time I’ve spent any time overlooking the Ocean any closer than our house I’ve spotted at least whale spouts in the distance and often they have been close enough to see backs or tails.  Usually I think it’s just cows with their calves lazing about.  Yesterday with visitors we think we saw a show-off male repeatedly smacking his tail making huge splashes.  According to the paper the humpback whale winter visitors have not shown any slump in numbers, as have the human visitors the past year, and are around 10,000 in state waters probably until the end of March.  Although Maui gets most of the breeding activity, birthing is commonly reported off our shore.  I remember going out on a whale watching boat from Newport Oregon when the Baja migration was returning north, getting beat around by rough seas and only getting a brief glimpse of one whale.  As many as we’ve seen here it is still something of a thrill, I think because the Ocean is so awesome and their comfort in it is so reassuring.

We also saw spinner dolphins leaping way clear of the water yesterday and “spinning,” and as usual year around here, we saw sea turtles.  In fact, at a spot we call the slosh box because it is only the size of our swimming pool in Chattaroy surrounded by rock except for an opening at both ends and the waves and back surge make the water “slosh” back and forth, just as I was jumping into the water from a rock I saw a large turtle was on the bottom right below me.  I wouldn’t have been able to stop at that point but I was able to clear it by a good margin as I had been planning to dive outward anyway to reach deeper water.  

We finished yesterday with John and Rachel, our visitors taking us out to dinner at The Ponds restaurant.  Being there reminded me of how many large buildings here have what I call “outside inside” architecture.  Usually this means having a courtyard that the rooms open to even in a place like the public library or the Hilo Federal building.  Restaurants here often have a lot of openable windows and never seem to have a problem with flies.  This restaurant goes this one better (for a pisces like me anyway) by being built right over a pond full of a great selection of uncommonly beautiful koi and having all the windows open.  They are also uncommonly fat so I wondered if patrons feed them bread and I serendipitously threw them a small piece from the window at my elbow which started a bit of a pile-up.  Later a waitress at another window gave a patron a mallet to ring a bell hanging outside that window.  The fish all piled up there just like Pavlov’s dogs and then the patron threw out all their left over bread.

In the morning yesterday we went to the younger and larger of the two tropical botanical gardens near us.  This one was only started in 1996 and will doubtless look a lot better in future years but it is amazing what they have already!  While there I struck up a conversation with one of the two head gardeners and the three of us got invited to try something I’d read about but never experienced –miracle fruit!  He gave us each three cold capsule sized berries and told us mash the pulp but not crush the seeds with our teeth and roll them around our mouth.  Then he gave us each a chunk of lemon.  The lemon in our mouths was not at all sour and was amazingly delicious.  Then he gave us each a chunk of orange and it was the most wonderful out of this world fruit we’ve ever eaten!  We have a miracle fruit bush that I planted in September without ever having tasted one.  Now I can hardly wait till it produces!

Today I packed our orchard ladder on the roof rack of our car and we went to a neighbor at the end of the street to pick some of her surplus tangerines.  Prior to this we have been treated to some from a closer neighbor each time we visited them but their tree’s season is almost over and there are two loaded trees at this widow’s house.  So picking only from the top of the tree so that those remaining would be easy for this lady and her weekly visiting daughter to pick over the next couple weeks I quickly got more than us and our neighborhood acquaintances could use.  We distributed bags of them on the way home then set up the juicer to make yummy juice to save in the refrigerator past when the fresh fruit will keep we hope.

At this point the mangos are past full bloom and the avocados are getting close to full bloom.  They have abundant flowers but there is talk that there are not enough bees to pollinize everything here.  The Mac nut growers are especially worried.  The Mac nut flowers smell great along the roadsides!

I hope the month ahead is a sweet one for you!  If Spokane continues to have such a mild winter I’ll bet the spring dauphne will start to bloom by the first of March.  And if it does I’ll take credit for sending so much Aloha your way.

Aloha!