JUNE 30, THURSDAY

BELLINGHAM AND MT. BAKER AND THE MAHY FAMILY

Yesterday and for the rest of this week I am being opened up to two things. One is a little taste of what it is like to live in the extreme Pacific Northwest of the United States and, secondly, to the very different life style here of, at least, the Hested family.

Susie Mosher, my daughter, entered the Mahy family twenty years ago when she and Todd Mahy became attached for life and soon moved to their tiny home in a mountain holler with woods all around in Madison County north of Asheville. The four Mahy children Sara, Todd, Kirke and Mary grew up in Vienna, Austria where their father worked for the Atomic Energy Agency in safeguards. They went to an international school there but almost every weekend their father would put them into their VW camper van and off they would go to see another part of Europe. They were all travelers and all skiers on the slopes around Vienna.

A chance visit by Gordon Mahy, their uncle, to Ithaca, NY, led to my discovering and then coming to Warren Wilson College where Gordon and I taught English to together for three years until his retirement. While at Warren Wilson I took students very second year to Sri Lanka and India. Sara was on the first Sri Lanka trip and Todd came on a later India trip. So I have been entwined with the Mahy family for a long time, since 1965.

But the ties deepened over the last 15 years when Kathe and I were invited to an extended Mahy clan and friends week together every second year at Christmas time and just after. All four Mahy children would come from Europe and across the United States to spend a week together at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. They rented the same giant beach house every other year with room enough for in-laws on every side. We would spend a week walking on the beach and opening Christmas presents and sharing communal meals. It was a high point of every other year.

But also over this period Susie and I started going together to India every other January, the alternate years to the beach stays it turned out for a couple of months. Todd was soon persuaded to come with us. On the way to India in each direction was Geneva, where Mary Mahy worked with the United Nations on AIDS prevention. So the three of us would stop in Geneva for a week or longer when going in each direction. Mary has a big house in Gex, France, just outside of Geneva and would lend us a car for a week to travel around in. Mary and her husband, Craig, cycle all over Europe in the summer and ski in the Swiss Alps in the winter. So for at least 15 years we have had an extended visits with different Mahys as well as visiting with them when one of them would come to Asheville.

But this time I am visiting Lisa Mahy in Bellingham where her husband, Jim Hested, has lived since he was 11 and his parents live. I had known Lisa and Jim and their children, adopted from Ethiopia, Kalifa and Lulu, all these years as the children grew up. But I realize that I am only now just getting to know how they actually live. They live on the Pacific Ocean and have just bought a new boat which can take them out on the ocean and to Lopez Island where Jim’s parents now live. But they also live two hours from the Mt. Baker, 11,000 feet, ski area (5000 feet) and are all avid skiers. Jim and Lisa are constant backpackers as well as are many of their friends. For them living between the mountains and the sea is the ideal life.

And yesterday I got to see the mountain side of their life. We drove up into the Cascade Mountains (which as an ignorant Easterner I had equated with the Rocky Mountains (where Glacier Park is) although they are hundreds of miles and an overnight train trip apart. The Cascades are higher and every bit as spectacular as Glacier National Park as you can see from the photographs. The packed snow at the side of the road in 70 degree sunshine was over six feet high and the snow on the mountains is thick enough to cause common avalanches. The ride up was through a forest of straight pines reaching over a hundred feet up, rising shoulder to shoulder on the steep slopes of the mountains. Jim told me earlier that this is part of the ring of fire, volcanic mountains, still rising, with Mount St. Helens exploding not long ago, a ring that curves through Alaska and all the way down the other side of the Asian Pacific.

Because of the clouds sweeping off the Pacific the lower valleys are a rain forest where it rains almost every few days and the trees are covered with deep green hanging moss. Everything including the Hested garden is lush and beautiful. (Luckily it was sunny yesterday, the second perfect day of the year according to Jim. The mountain views were clear. We couldn’t reach the highest point because even at the end of June snow still covered the road and the parking area. But we had a picnic in the car and a great ride back down, seeing a thundering waterfall on the way.