Although the weather keeps us in ignorance of its schedule, the chill today forecasts a just-around-the-corner imminence to complement the northern blue, pale and patchy among the clouds. It makes its pronouncement in clear syllables, the warning implicit: the tenure of autumn is done and winter is in its ascension to the throne.

Sun, that odd light in the sky which has not been seen for many days, now pierces the hummocked cumulus surrounding the Mountain and shows something which crept in at the rain's back to take possession of the foothills' peaks. The great Presence to the east is not the only figure with a cloak of white around its shoulders, no. Among the piled batts of cloud, the upland crags display a garb of ermine and the evergreen boughs are bent earthward beneath a coronation cloth of new and deeply fallen snow. Silent and stealthy and determined, winter seeks to usurp the reigning season and to seize the valley for its fief. Benevolent or no, the despot holds the serfs in thrall.

Well, as floods go, this one ain't much, though I could hear the river pounding as I marched down the back of Dan's property in my gumboots, aiming for the riverbar. After four days of steady rain, yesterday she came a gullywasher, dumped 2.60" in the pluviometer and the weather department issued flood warnings for most rivers in the western part of the state. A right frog-strangler, as they say, so I headed down to the river via the back path, hoping to take pictures to keep my Georgia man amused. Oh yes, it was still raining, and hard. Got over the first crossing on a stick after getting mired in the slop of a little mudflow on the first try, but the second? Little side stream which normally wouldn't have wet the tops of your shoes was flowing muddy, fast, and a good eighteen inches deep, so that was where I dead-ended.

Undeterred, I went overland along the back of Ole Tom's Place, sweeping aside scotch broom which towered over my head, slipping in the wet fall of alder leaves, clambering through a boulder field covered with the local version of kudzu (sweet pea vines) until after almost getting my foot trapped between two hidden rocks, I finally reached the side of the railroad trestle which spans one of the Mountain's great rivers. Fought blackberries to get up the steep, short slope to the tracks, and cast a baleful eye toward the backside of the "No Trespassing" sign which had prevented me from taking that route in the first place.

Below the first part of the span (a wooden bridge with a walkway), the side stream had swelled and was now running as a second channel of the river, leaving islands of alder standing in the bends of its café-au-lait coloured braid. The main flow had broadened to encompass most but not all of its bed, roiling over any obstruction in its path, tumbling huge boulders beneath its surface with dull, growling sounds which could be felt as well as heard as they transmitted through the superstructure of the bridge. Waves mounted against the concrete footings, and the bank had been etched away into sharp cliffs on either end of the second metal span, a stretch which had collapsed in the Flood of '96 due to debris build-up against its upper side. Downed timber was building against the pilings, and in the center of the metal bridge, a Doug fir had fallen some time since Sunday when I'd last heard the train pass through.

As I stood there taking pictures, the rain was still coming down hard, and I had no intention of tackling the back route home again. Figured as long as I hadn't officially read that "No Trespassing" sign, I could be excused for coming up behind it now that my mission was complete.

Rings and chains form in my fingers as they fly in one of few needlearts not learned at my grandmother's knee, for she had no ken of the tatting shuttle nor its knotted threads and picot joins. In essence simple, in practice not so, I had failed many times to master the skill through written instruction and only when employed as a needlework consultant in my eighteenth year did I find a person who could teach me the art. Shoba Devi's patience with me is something for which I wish I could now thank the East Indian woman, for this simple pastime has rewarded me with many fancy laces and enjoyable hours through the years.

Tatting (or 'frivolity' as it is sometimes called) resembles crochet it first glance, however most pieces are made with two running threads, one each from ball and shuttle. It consists of simple half-hitches, much like macramé but made on a much smaller scale. It is in the making of the rings that the beginner is most likely to err, for with the thread looped around the hand, the shuttle passes over and under it to form the knots with a snapping motion which transfers the bend from the running thread to the looped thread so that the running thread becomes a core. One knot left in the running thread in error, and the ring made of half-hitches cannot be drawn up properly and closed.

As with many crafts which people find difficult to effect, tatting is on its way to becoming a lost art, so one year, I attempted to teach a class through a local fabric store. The venture was a smashing failure. Despite taking the hands of my pupils and forcing them to perform the stitches correctly and repeatedly, not one of the students was able to create a functional ring once I had walked away. For the longest time, I faulted myself as teacher although I have taught other needlearts with great success, and only after giving individual instruction to a friend and having her master tatting with relative ease was I finally satisfied that perhaps the fault was not entirely my own.

Today I sit watching the rain fall in torrents, my tatting shuttle slipping through the threads twined in my fingers as if empowered by some spirit of bygone days. A sadness falls with the grey rain, a sadness that I can find no other to whom to pass this fading skill. Under the shadow of technology, no one cares for frivolity these days.

Smoke from the neighbour's chimney drifts lazily across the fence, barely skimming the top wire on a downdraft and bent on a clandestine mission: the invasion of the crawlspace beneath my house. Its first incursion of the year always surprises me as it is drawn up by the furnace in the middle of the night and its faint odor is dispersed by the fan into my bedroom, but it is never long before I recognize it as the annual event from the higher note in its scent which tells of burnt junk mail. Dennis is adhering to the letter of the law which prohibits disposing of the universal plague in an outdoor fire.

With a state election only a few days away, the number of political fliers in our rural mailboxes has been growing daily and certainly among the neighbours here, quite pointlessly as well. I am not the only one who folds the glossy leaflets into a shape suitable for recycling without a glance at their content, and the only influence they might have on my decision-making process would most certainly be negative if I happened to notice the candidate they touted, based solely on the ecological insensitivity their propagandizing shows.

My sentiments run even deeper toward the canvassers who have not the common decency to provide me with a human being to curse when they wake me with a call. These I have made note of, and in every case, I have cast my vote against or not at all. Let me say this to those canned politicians who call me after bedtime: your rudeness is detrimental to your cause, your blindness to that fact shows that you are an idiot. If you wish to gain my vote, respect me and my privacy. Stay out of my bedroom, whether you intrude as a voice or a wisp of smoke from a neighbour's fire.

Weather in all its forms wields an undeniable reality which these last few days bears calling a confining rain. It has come down remorselessly, soaking its drench into the hillsides, ripening the soil to potential landslip, punishing the summer-dried earth for having discarded its memory so soon. The gutters are filling, the amœboid puddles merging, and the rivers are on the rise, prompting a flood watch in the lowlands. Still it is falling without trace of conscience, sheeting roadways with its burden which are too worn to shoo it to the swollen ditches, too wearied by its overstayed welcome and anxious to see it home.

If many of the author's perusals dwell on weather, there is good reason, for no other event touches us so regularly nor manipulates our lives with such persistent subtlety as it does. Whether outdoorsman or office worker, who does not wonder upon rising what the day's weather portends? Wind, rain, sleet or snow, it appoints us in our daily rounds surer than a clock, for the artifice of time is no more than a schedule over which we have some modicum of power. Yet we need not yield to it fully, for although we take shelter against its mood, there are comforts to be gained from its directives. Why else would a cup of hot chocolate sound so good right now?

Her paws twitch and the muscles of her back ripple, whiskers vibrate as if searching for the proper frequency on which to attune her other senses. The cat is asleep on my lap, dreaming of some pursuit, be it play or prey.

What do critters dream, I wonder? Do they experience the same random closing of synapses that humans do, those anomalies which generate piano-legged dogs and familiar faces which turn into telephones or pterodactyls? Do Skunk's sleep patrols range over fantastic shapes of furniture, or does she fancy flying after birds, soaring weightless in the sky as people sometimes dream? Are there sounds in the shadowed corners of her mind as well as images? Or tastes and smells which no human dreamer can access? The cat sleeping on my lap is clearly dreaming, and in my arrogance, I wonder: Does she dream me?

Her cheeks are pouched with a cat-smile and her mascara lines sweep upward in amusement at whatever whimsy now makes her tail tip quiver. She reaches her arm out, curls her paw around my arm and draws it closely to her face. Barely a whisper, a tiny purr shivers against my leg and I have found the answer to my question from a dream which has no words.

It was called "The Book of Knowledge." Although the volumes looked encyclopedic, they held so much more than dry histories and cold scientific facts, and any dreary day, you might hear my mother answer my plaintive, "Mama, I'm bo-o-ored!" with an injunction to pursue amusement in their pages. The set was geared to young, inquiring minds somewhat older than my own, but I had always been a forerunner in academic pursuits and had no difficulty with comprehension when reading the proper procedure for mounting a collection of butterflies, nor did I stagger at descriptions of glacial movement and the evidence it left on the earth's face. Indeed, when the skies cleared, I might next be found chasing swallowtails or examining boulders with a magnifier, so much did these books stimulate my interest in the natural world.

It was there I learned more of beadwork and basketry, of batteries and gears. I followed experiments with exotic substances like water, alcohol and salad oil to determine which floated on which, and why. Each section of instruction ended with questions far more penetrating than any asked by my grade-school teachers, calling on my brain to analyze and process what information I had discovered, and sometimes suggested carrying that new-found knowledge to another article within the books.

There were other delights interspersed among the more serious studies; parlour games to play, toys to build, arts and crafts galore, and very few of the projects would have required more than minimal adult supervision, even by today's standards. Each was illustrated by simple black-and-white line drawings which were the set's only graphics, clearly showing each step in the production of some item with which a child could entertain themselves for days beyond the time it took to construct. Yes, I sometimes made mistakes but had only to refer back to the presentation to see what had gone wrong and, through this inevitable exercise, I developed analytical skills which I use even today.

My "Book of Knowledge" went the way of all good things when I had supposedly outgrown it, but although I frequently refer to the "World Book" purchased in the year of my birth instead of the later "Encyclopedia Britannica" to look up facts, it is the plain blue set I wish I had kept these years for its wealth of information and for the friendship it gave me in my lonely, inquisitive youth.

A sudden and spirited whirlwind dashed up the bigleaf maple at the edge of the neighbour's woods, stripped it of its leaves and carried them aloft. As quickly as it had frolicked, the breath went out of it at a sigh, leaving hundreds of autumnal kites to drift like great coloured snowflakes in whatever direction they had been bound. It was a whimsy, nothing more, which disrupted the chimney smoke's lazy ascent with a spattering of golden confetti and, as the column regained its composure, only the lawns told the story of the breeze's brief jest in an irregular calico. I, the solitary witness, was amused to watch the contrary motion of the leaves fluttering skyward as the embarrassed maple's limbs bent with the wind as if to hide its nakedness from view.

My father made a deliciously fearsome pirate, swarthy-skinned and tan from summer's labours in his garden. With his eyebrows thickened by pencil and a beard and moustache illustrated on his face, he played the part as well as Erroll Flynn (at least to my young eyes) and his theatrical interjections of "Yo-ho-ho!" and "Pieces of eight!" simply added to my childish delight. In a cherished photo, he is crouched with rubber cutlass drawn beside his cheek, and I am dressed somewhat less flamboyantly as a witch replete with broom and ready to fly out into the night, trick-or-treating.

Our rural acreage had few neighbours, so my dad (still in costume) would drive me through the "project," a population center of a dozen houses a mile from our own where most of my schoolmates lived. He'd wait in the car as I ran alone to the clustered doors to gather my tithe of popcorn balls and candy in the evening chill, then speed me home to hot cider and a conservative sampling of my treasures. Even today, tiny Tootsie Rolls and candy corn remain some of my favourite seasonal nibbles.

Always there was some family activity in reserve for Pacific Northwest weather whether it was cookie- or fudge-making or a game of Scrabble by the fire. Once when the night was rainy and trick-or-treating had to be foregone in favour of bobbing for apples in a washtub on the kitchen floor (a messy exercise which was never to be repeated), my father had a plan meant to amuse me. He pretended to go in search of the tub and exited via the back door, ostensibly to go into the utility room, only to return a few minutes later by the front door in disguise.

I had to be coerced to pose that evening in my jammies with my dad in what was to be the best piece of costuming he ever put together, and the simplest: a nylon stocking pulled over his head. I'm certain he didn't expect to frighten me out of my wits, although he succeeded admirably at the job for at least several minutes until I finally picked out a feature I could recognize and at last accepted the change in my father's handsome countenance as a masquerade. In hindsight, this remains the high point of my Hallowe'en recollections: a dear family moment coupled with the lesson (however unintentional) that fears could be met and overcome.

A hard frost dazzled my eyes when I threw back the drapes this morning, glittering beneath an almost cloudless, crayon-blue sky and the dazzling, newly whitened figure of the Mountain. As the north winds had thrown hail yesterday evening, so they brought arms full of cold to dump unceremoniously into the valley, with the thermometer still registering a sharp 25° at 8:30 AM. "A bit early," I said as I jotted the figure on my charts, and the chill on my back was not only a measure of the degree but from a vision of the winter's future. October sees the 20's rarely and rain has been scant, a combination which bodes well only for the purveyors of heating fuel if climatic history is the chronicler. The cycle of low minimums is coming 'round again, overdue by some half a dozen years and marking time with precipitation which has yet to catch up to its annual performance.

Given this, I wish to go on record and take a precaution here by publicly forecasting a hard winter; "precaution" I say because my horse never wins the race, "precaution" because arrogance is its own downfall, and by asserting my prognostication so boldly, I rob blind the chance of its occurrence, simply by taking its side. I am casting my vote in favour of snow and prolonged nights at zero, do you hear me? A hard winter we will have, so say I, and dare the gods of ice and storm (beg them?) to prove my prediction wrong. Tricky logic? Perhaps I have said what I propose too fully, for in arguing that my forecast must be shown wrong by virtue of assertion, it almost certainly ensures that it will prove right after all.

The weather has definitely been temperamental today, starting with rain in the early morning which cleared off abruptly and gave way to brilliant light and a perfectly cloudless sky for more than an hour before the first puffs of cumulus began returning to their lairs. Little by little, the hummocky cover thickened and deepened, grew grey with suspended moisture and drooped low over the hills as a light wind rose among the trees, spiralling leaves from maple, cottonwood and alder. Above the valley floor, bold spotlights of sun shone checkerboard on clearcut and forest, only to be fretted suddenly with a fall of half-inch hail which scratched and pecked against the windows.

If seasonal mood struck the weather, so too did the artificial disruption of daylight discommode the author. I do not object to springing forward to the extension of evening's light, but falling back to the standard of early darkness for winter seems a bit backward to my way of thinking. If daylight is to be conserved as the name suggests, does it not make better sense to do so when the commodity is at a premium? Who among us would not prefer later light of a winter's afternoon to trying to close our weary eyes with the summer sun yet in the sky and a day's work on the morrow? It would seem today that even the weather was crabby as it rushed to accomplish its variety of tasks before the sun went down.

After 23 years?

AWK!!!

Another crisp morning! The temperature sensor for my weather station seldom reflects the lows or highs for the simple reason of critical positioning. Its installation requirements were quite specific in stating that it should be out of direct sunlight and not exposed to the possibility of frost accumulation, so I chose to put it at the outer edge of the carport roof and close to open air where it should have been unaffected by radiational heat from the house. It soon became obvious that the distance was not adequate when the blasted thing would sit solidly at 34° when a heavy rime was apparent on the ground and the fence rails glittered with ice. I confirmed the reading using a second mercury thermometer which, when hung on the exterior of the same wall, gave 30° instead. Likewise, the summer highs are influenced, although seldom as radically, even though one would expect heat to accumulate beneath the protection of the roof. Compared readings give only a variance of a degree or two on the upper end, but neither high nor low is reliably off by the same margin, so I've followed a practice of recording what the instrument tells me, and in the final telling, the annual mean temperature will still be accurate within a degree. It's not a perfect solution by any stretch of the imagination: technology running only one step ahead of looking out the window to see if there's ice in the washtub, more or less.

There is no therapy quite like a walk in the woods, so when I woke from an uncharacteristically deep nap shortly after breakfast wondering if I was sickening with some malaise, I decided to seek a cure among autumn's painted hills despite the film of fog which had not yet fully lifted from the valley. In fact, I had a dual purpose in mind. One of Bob's geocaching travel bugs had arrived in my mailbox a day too late to participate in my first-to-find sweep of the area, and since the cache site bore a coincidentally similar name to the TB, I thought it would be appropriate for it to visit the spot for photos. One thing was certain: the mission called for swift action with snow dodging at the highest peaks already and due to cut off ingress at a moment's notice. Since the length of the hike to lakeside was barely greater than a walk in the back forty, I dispensed with packing and simply pocketed the bug, the camera and a pair of mittens, slammed on my hat and dashed out the door, ready to brave those Volkswagen-swallowing potholes once again.

Although it had only been a few days since I'd travelled this same logging road, noticeable changes had occurred in the trees and brush. The vine maples, so golden and lush at the bridge less than 72 hours ago, had now released more than half their pennants and the remainder had taken on a duller hue, while the bracken fern, previously sickly green, had gone to flaxen beige and softly rose-lit tans. Along the trail, the Canadian dogwood had shrunk into itself, the devil's club had peeled its bulk of thorns and the creek ran with more ebullience and vigour down the course of boulders, singing to the accompaniment of a woodpecker's drum. Little remained that was not marked by the season in some way; fading, falling, withdrawing into the roots and the soil to husband the germ of life throughout the winter.

The bowl of the lake had escaped northerly notice, and the sun beamed from behind the craggy ridge onto a mirror of water with only a faint tendril of mist suspended above its shine to haze the reflected evergreens, so different from the thready snow I'd seen just days before. Had it not been for the overall damp and spilled beads of dew on every surface, it could well have been a picnic day among the cover of moss and canopy of boughs.

It is a kindness of the backcountry to lose one's in-dwelling self therein, and as I posed with Bob's travel bug, I found that the spirits of water and stone had silently commanded health from my lapse into introspection. My vision had refocused on surroundings again, those things which define the world in its true perspective. My malaise forgotten, I had found renewal in both the forest and vicariously sharing it with the center of my heart.

The elk have sensed the change of weather and begin to straggle down from the hills into the pasture which now stands shoulder-high to them in thistly disarray, grey as old ashes and slumped under the lowlands' drizzle. The day is chill, and behind the foggy veil, the higher forests give only a forced and stilted welcome to the ill-mannered snow which has come so early and unannounced to displace the former guests.

The pasture has little food to offer these intermittent travellers: twigs, mushrooms, and short, poor grass hidden deeply in the parched and pathless thorns. For now, the great beasts follow the rare natural byways, keeping to creekside and clearing, or along the margin of the woods where the low-hanging boughs of maple dip their last sweet yellow leaves within reach. Only when compelled by hunger will they chart routes through the harsh thistles to reach the oases of brittle grass hidden in the interior, or search out a solitary mouthful of dandelion, determinedly green.

Looking at the pasture in its present condition, it is incomprehensible that the five members of the advance guard could find adequate nutrition to carry them through the winter amid the largely inedible fare which blankets the acreage, yet in another two weeks, as many as a hundred more may have joined their number and most, if not all, will survive every hardship but the hunter's gun. If Nature promotes the doctrine of minimalism, the elk is surely its grand master.

The cat's warmth in my lap is welcome in the cool morning, and I sit in the rising fog of her dreams, nodding against my intention. I am ordained to sleep beneath the comfort of her living blanket, my mind attuned to the alpha waves reflected in the twitches of her whiskers and paws as she pursues the prey lurking in the tall grass of her idle snyapses. My head lolls forward, and I am lost into an undeniably drowsy feline peace which no mere mortal could refute.

There is a lesson to be learned under the passive tutelage of a cat: that relaxation is no halfway state. Both mind and body enter a form of suspension from awareness which is absolute, the consciousness only peripherally in touch with external stimuli which might threaten survival. That which is familiar becomes irrelevant to the cat who sleeps like a child does, subconsciously trusting in those around it to ensure its security.

I am not so confident as the cat, and yet when I wake from half an hour's doze at the sound of a car on the highway, a sense of ease surrounds me. The sound of her breathing wheezes beneath the paw which shades her eyes from daylight, her muscles and whiskers are still, and her weight across my knees is greater than the gravity it demands. Her wisdom is contagious, and my eyes again fall closed beneath her subtle instruction to seek the path to enightenment which only a lazy cat can ever truly know.

Botherin' me, that's what it was doing, so as soon as the sky started to pale, I began putting together the essentials for a quick dash into the woods despite the fact that it was raining steadily and fairly hard. That dang geocache was still out there someplace, and nobody'd put their name on it overnight. I'd taken a bit of a blow to the old reputation by dint of having gone up the wrong road, y'see, and the need for personal redemption was sittin' sorta heavy on the shoulders.

In full rain gear and an extra layer of woolies, I hit the road with wipers running and the GPSr wedged up against the windshield where I hoped it could get a satellite lock through the trees and clouds. Sometimes weather can play hob with the reception, and although the Summit is one of the best instruments to use in heavy tree cover, I still wanted to give the little gadget plenty of time to acquire a signal before we got into the deep hills. 'Bout the time I crossed over the river, he'd latched onto the sky bugs and was carrying on a good conversation with them.

With that covered and a few more miles behind me, I turned off the paved road into the first maze of potholes, all now filled with muddy water and their depths impossible to guess. The narrow wood bridge crossing the stream a quarter mile further on was trenched crossways at either end, and the holes threatened to pitch the car against its abutments amid splashes and splatters. This short stretch is the greatest challenge to drivers. Once through it, one must continue to watch for foot-deep chuckholes, but most can be circumnavigated with only two wheels in the brush. The mainline, which is travelled more frequently and by larger vehicles than the secondary roads, was in poorer shape than the spur road which I had missed yesterday. The lesser road was rocky and rough, however, and required almost constant use of second gear. A few large trees had fallen across it and in many places, fragments of them remained where the logs had been winched off to one side, but neither rock nor branch blocked the way to the pullout at the trailhead.

The rain was coming down hard and it was chilly. The GPSr indicated a straight-line distance of .36 miles to the cache. The trail, however, ran along the contour, climbing through dense forest, crossing a creek twice and then cutting a final switchback directly to the lake at the top of the rise. It was here that the GPSr ironically lost contact with its satellites, here in the more open trees exposed to a broader expanse of sky. Within ten minutes, another satellite had tracked through the heavens and I once again had signal, although spotty and inconsistent in where it directed me to go. At no point was accuracy greater than 248 feet, and with a cache hint of "inside a stump," I definitely had my work cut out for me. By triangulation, I was able to narrow my search to four or five likely stumps, and the third proved to hold the cache: a hide-a-key in a baggie, wedged into a deep hole and filled over with twigs. As I signed the log, it began to snow lightly, with a slight breeze blowing the stuff in curtains across the misty lake. It was the perfect ending for a four-cache sweep, and I headed back to the car, content.

We got into a little predicament, the car and I. Somebody thought there was light at the end of the tunnel of slide alder which had linked its arms above the ratty old logging road, the brightly beaming light of a geocache which had not yet been found. That in itself would have been enough to tempt me out on a cold and frosty morning, but in truth, there were four...four brand-new caches, and all on familiar, nearby ground.

The problem was that I was on the wrong road, although I didn't know it as I nosed the car forward into the constriction of alder. The GPSr was telling me the cache was a mere .65 mile away, across a 400-foot deep gully, and the topographic map in my hand was woefully out-of-date. I felt a bit like I was entering a crawdad trap as the car pushed aside the brush...you know, one of those contraptions which once entered cannot be escaped?

For a quarter of a mile, I drove at five miles per hour through a thicket of alder with no hope of turning around, listening to the branches squeal and scrape against the shiny finish of the car's side panels and roof, and then all too abruptly, progress was blocked by a washout even a Jeep would have had difficulty negotiating. With the roadbed canted sharply and contorted by mounds and dips, there was no alternative left me but to back out the way I'd come.

The simile of the crawdad trap was more apt than I care to remember. The branches which had bent ahead of the car now tangled in mirrors, bumpers, grill, antenna and wipers. At times, I could not see the road in either mirror and would pull ahead a foot or two to get my bearings, then back out another two or three yards before needing to pull forward yet again.

Suffice to say that the paint job will never be the same, and the cache remains unfound, although I did claim three FTF's for my day's adventure. Still, I think Bob said it best: "Ouch."

No matter what you may have heard, it's not an acquired taste so much as a challenge to the sensibilities. No person who likes fish could find any reason to complain of the taste of lutefisk, nor is its texture as off-putting as one might believe it to be after a visual assessment of its translucent and somewhat gelatinous nature. In fact, the processing it undergoes renders it boneless, an added benefit for connoisseurs of this quintessential Norwegian holiday fare, but still the dish has its reputation to live down, and therein lies the problem.

In the good old days, lutefisk was made principally from the cod which grew in abundance off the shores of Norway, a pungently scented fish to begin with, and the source of lutefisk's unsavoury notoriety. Nowadays, the lye bath and lengthy rinsing phases of preparation are done commercially, substantially reducing the cook's work, and haddock or pollock are used as frequently as cod and are no more highly aromatic than any other fish one might prepare for dinner.

Although I have lived most of my life among the Pacific Northwest's predominantly Scandinavian population, I had gracefully avoided contact with this suspect delight until becoming acquainted with my fishing buddy, a Norwegian of the first water. Now I am adventurous in my eating, so when he tempted me with a ticket to a local group's annual lutefisk buffet, I said yes without much thought to what I was getting into. Truthfully, I knew nothing about the dish other than the fact that it was fish, and as I told him, I never met a fish I didn't like, but when I met the stuff firsthand, I began to wonder if I'd been unwise. The substance did not look much like fish as it sat in the warming pans quivering like so much pale Jell-o at the touch of the server's spoon, but I figured I could gag down a few mothfuls for friendship's sake if all else failed. It did not help that Sande piled his on a piece of lefse, added mashed potatoes and poured cream gravy over the lot before rolling it up and eating it like a burrito. To me, this seemed almost as peculiar as the Canadian specialty of poutine. I followed his lead nevertheless, and found myself somewhat disappointed that the flavour of the potatoes was stronger than the fish. Shortly after that, I began eating the items separately and enjoying each much more fully.

For five or six years now, I have gone with the family to several different lutefisk feeds. The one we now attend regularly is in the artsy little community of Gig Harbor, west of Tacoma and is held in the latter part of October every year as a function of the small Lutheran church there. I have been ever glad of my daring, and with that statement, comes a word of advice for those of you who are reluctant to essay the smallest taste of some exotic cuisine: Life is too short to fear new foods. Live on the wild side, close your eyes and try lutefisk some time!

My tenure as keeper of a virtual bar is about to end. I have survived the requisite four hundred pages with no lasting damage to my psyche, although at times it has been difficult to stand back and take an objective view of goings-on which rub contrary to my personal grain, principally among the younger, more libertine members. Still, there has been a preponderance of good times among the bad, often crossing the borders of cliques when even sworn enemies have disported with the original spirit of abject silliness which brought the thread its fame. I cannot say that the transition comes too soon, but neither do I leave my position without a sense of sadness at having achieved less than my sojourn's unreasonable goal: restoration of the principle intent. As I prepare to hand the keys to the new owner, I am certain he has a similar mission in mind, and far be it from me to offer him anything but the most fervent encouragement although in my heart, I fear he faces a hopeless task. Time...and four hundred pages...will tell.