And They say Oregon is Wet!

My part of Washington is really, really wet right now and supposed to get wetter. We're in the bulls eye area for inheriting the big storm Alaska jus91 t finished with. I don't mind the wind and rain, being a native Oregonian. Lots of rain is what makes the Pacific Northwest so beautiful. In Oregon, though, there's a coast range of mountains between where I come from and the coast, so the coast gets the brunt of the storms. Here, I'm in the southern Puget Sound area where there aren't the mountains to shield us, I guess.

Due to a glitch, I didn't have internet yesterday and I didn't have cable either. They're both from the same source so when I lose one, I lose the second within a little while. During the wind and rain storm yesterday, I was reading a book called American Sea Writing, which is a compilation of writings from the 1600's to the year 2,000. It seemed pretty apropo to the driving wind and rain. I could kind of imagine being at sea. One of the writings was an excerpt from a woman who would sometimes go out to sea, kids and all, with her husband on his travels.

This woman was Mary Rowland. She and her husband had two little girls, so the children were with them on their travels. She writes of it being 91 degrees below decks, with very high humidity from the steam coming off the stuff stowed in the hold, so it was difficult to sleep. She describes being "tormented with vermin" meaning roaches by the thousands. They were everywhere, including in their trunks of clothing. And roaches didn't respond to "scalding" so I guess she tried to kill them with boiling water. Then she mentions that the millions of flies had finally subsided, but maggots had hatched out. She wrote that maggots will bite a live person. And then she also complains of mosquito infestation, and since they're out at sea, the mosquitos just eat them alive since there are only 20 available humans on board. She says the maggots crawl out of the raisins and figs they're carrying in their food stuff and that she tries very hard to get the beds cleared of the maggots and cockroaches before going to bed at night but that it doesn't help any because the cockroaches and maggots then crawl on the ceiling and drop back down into their beds.

Reading this story in the book, I wondered how anyone could take their little children and just live at sea like that with them, husband or no husband. But they'd been married 24 years and the books says she often went with her husband, so I guess she didn't mind. She also speaks of cutting out and sewing clothing while at sea. She mentions that she met other women in the ports who had been at sea with their own husbands and how they tried to socialize together while the husbands were off-loading and taking on new cargo but that it wasn't easy to do.

We think our mail is slow and unreliable in our modern times. In the years when ships were the chief means of getting around, the ship had to take any letters they wanted to mail, wrap them around a rock or brick and tie it and then when they could get close enough to another ship in port that was going the direction they wanted the letter to go in, they'd climb into the rigging and throw the mail at the deck of the other ship. If they missed, the mail ended up in the sea where it sank to the bottom. Maybe our mail service isn't so bad after all.