A COUPLE OF weeks ago, Jacque (“Jackie”) Booth was working in her yard in Brinnon, fertilizing plants around her deck.
Looking up, she saw an unwelcome visitor on the bank that borders the road above her property.
She froze. The visitor froze. Then, he started running down the slope directly at her, and she took off running.
“I was scared to death,” she said. “I barely made it in the kitchen door.”
The unwanted guest had shown up at her house before.
That first encounter is etched in Booth’s memory.
“I was standing at the china cabinet and saw something go past the sliding door,” she said.
“I looked out and saw a big black bear going after my bird feeders hanging on the porch. He started ripping out the arms holding up the feeders and tipped over barrels of feed.”
Booth rapped on the glass, thinking it would scare him off. Instead, the bear came over and stood up, raising his front paws over his head. He looked about 7 feet tall.
“All I could see were shiny black nails and big white teeth,” Booth recalled. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I’m 84 — not a young woman.”
Booth called Fish and Wildlife and was told that bears coming out of hibernation are hungry and that if she put away all sources of food, it probably would not come back. She did. The bear came back.
Not finding the usual snack dispensers, it hunted down a bag of rhododendron food and ate the contents. Booth called a friend, who brought a pistol and fired a warning shot as the bear departed.
The next day, Booth invited three friends over for a meal and an evening of cards.
They were at a table in front of the sliders when the bear arrived on the porch, startling her guests.
It started circling the house, looking for food, with Booth and her friends going from room to room, tracking his progress.
“We wanted to see what he was up to,” she said.
Setting a trap
After the repeat visits, Fish and Wildlife came back and set up a trap, Booth said. But when the bear didn’t show up, they took the trap back.
Last week, Booth was putting up hanging baskets when she decided to take a coffee break. She had just sat down inside when the bear walked by the window.
On Friday, Fish and Wildlife was again scheduled to send out a trap.
“I’ll call and tell you if they get the bear,” she said.
Booth, who has lived on the 5 acres, not far from U.S. Highway 101, for 40 years, said she hadn’t seen a bear on the property before.
But when she was a teenager and someone shot a bear, her mother would corn the meat by soaking it in brine. It was not Booth’s idea of fine dining.
“I love corned beef, but I didn’t like corned bear,” she said. “It’s very stringy meat.”
But under the circumstances, you ate what you had.
Booth’s father died of tuberculosis when he was 36.
Her mother, Helen McFaren, supported the family during the war by working as a machinist for Boeing.
When the war was over, the women were laid off, and her mother went to work at a cookie factory, Booth said.
Not liking the work, McFaren sold everything and went into partnership with her brother and a friend in a dairy farm in Brinnon when Booth was 16.
The friend turned out to be a poor business partner, and after struggling for a year and half, his partners lost everything.
“He had even mortgaged the cows,” Booth said.
After that, McFaren and her three children lived on Social Security payments of $11 a month per child.
Rent was $15 a month, but there was no utility bill because there were no utilities.
Even when her mother remarried and moved to Dabob Bay, Booth said, the house lacked electricity — any game meat, including corned bear, was taken to a frozen food locker in Port Hadlock.
Booth also remembers going down to the creek to “smack salmon” or, if possible, grab them by the tails. The chum salmon weren’t good for eating, she said, but her mother would can them for cat and dog food.
“I think my mother enjoyed adversity,” Booth said. “The poorer they were, the happier she was. She liked to do, make, sew and can.”
Booth married and moved to California but came back home regularly to visit her mother, who eventually got electricity, running water and a telephone.
At the end of one visit, Booth walked in the kitchen to find her mother packing up a box of canned food.
“I thought she was sending it home with me,” Booth said. “I asked what it was for, and she said, ‘This is a box for the poor.’”
Booth said she has seen cougar on her property but had never seen a bear.
It’s not something she wants to see again, even though it did get her blood moving.
“I didn’t think this old lady could run so fast,” she said.
May flounders
With all the rain we’ve gotten this spring, Brian Norvell has been able to take a break from gardening and indulge in his other favorite backyard activity: fishing.
Norvell lives on Center Street in Port Townsend, which turns into Center Lake after a deluge.
So he thought he’d get out his fishing rod and see what he might catch.
Did he land anything besides the rubber sole?
“Not yet, but a friend said he could bring me a frozen king salmon,” Norvell said, “but then I’d probably get a ticket for fishing without a license.”
Norvell said ducks flew over and looked down, as if thinking, “I’ve never seen a lake there before.”
When Center Lake dries up, spring fishing gives way to another sport: pothole vaulting.
‘The Great Turtle Hunt’
Unless you live on a lake or Center Street, turtle hunting is not exactly a backyard sport. But it can be every bit as exciting as bear sprinting and also drive the plot for a story.
That’s what Ashton Hoye discovered.
A fourth-grader at Blue Heron School, Ashton and his family visit his grandmother, Lora Keena, every summer in Conklin, Mich.
Part of last summer’s visit: a turtle-hunting expedition by rowboat on Crockery Lake.
The expedition was progressing nicely when the turtle hunters, startled by the sight of a huge specimen, dislodged the plug in the boat.
Water started coming in, but Ashton managed to replace the plug, and the hunters returned to shore, their enthusiasm for the sport waning.
Ashton turned the adventure into a story, “The Great Turtle Hunt,” which he wrote for the Writers in the Schools (WITS) program.
Sponsored by Seattle Arts and Lectures, the program brings writers and illustrators into schools.
At Blue Heron, they were author Karen Finnyfrock and illustrator Jesse Watson.
Ashton, who is 10, read his story at a “Cocoa House” at Blue Heron School. He also recorded it for KPTZ radio, which is playing it today at 6:30 p.m. on the station, 91.9 FM.
And May 22, Ashton will read “The Great Turtle Hunt” in the Microsoft Auditorium of the Seattle Public Library.
The program, which is free and open to the public, starts at 6:30 p.m.
Ashton is one of 50 students from five school districts chosen to read a story.
Other Blue Heron students who read their stories are Olivia Crecca, J.R. Kienle, Tuula Morley, Samantha Smith and Nicolas Winegar.
Ashton’s mother, Shannon Callahan, said both Ashton and his sister, Lily, love to write stories about their experiences, something she thinks they get from their grandmother.
For more information about the WITS Student Celebration and Reading, email wits@lectures.org.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or email jjackson@olypen.com.
