You take 7.5 years and 7,641 articles and you distill it into one moment and it is this — the day Joltin’ Jae LeVine shocked the softball world and dethroned Klahowya. The biggest heart of any athlete I have written about. Flash4Ever.
When I was younger, we used to go visit my grandmother in Tillamook, a town on the Oregon coast where the cows outnumber the humans.
Or at least that was the PR spin offered by the local cheese factory.
It’s a cheese factory which makes a lot of cheddar, both of the edible variety and of the financial kind, so it’s working.
Tillamook has multiple beaches, and me, my sister, and our cousins, who lived there, frequented them all.
From the sand dunes which stretched out into eternity, to the far more wind-swept ones where you could imagine Poseidon rising up in front of you and sending the crews of wayward ships screaming to their death.
It was on one of those beaches, where, after I “accidentally fell” into the water after being told not to, for the 10,000th time, I first saw a row of small, nondescript rental huts.
They captivated me then, and continued to do so through countless visits.
I imagined leaving the world behind and going to live in one of those shacks, my only companions the howling winds and the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the beach, my unkempt, Poseidon-like beard scaring off the tourists.
Seeing how I was not quite a teen at the time, and all the hair on my head was still perched up top, with none having migrated down to my chin area, that last part was a bit of a stretch.
But, the idea of leaving the world behind burned then, and never really faded through the years.
Which is a long way to get around to this — even as you read this, I’m gone.
Not to Tillamook, but out to the woods on my sister’s 5.5 acre farm in Freeland.
I’ll still live in Coupeville, in my own version of a waterfront shack (though if Poseidon rears his head in the fairly tranquil waters of Penn Cove, it’s gonna freak out the mussels), but my days will largely be lived with the squirrels and the blackberry canes.
Those damn, dirty canes…
Yes, for the third time in a run which has encompassed 7.5 years, 7,641 stories, and 810,433 deleted spam comments (and that last number is real…), I’m stepping away from writing Coupeville Sports.
The first time I stepped back, I went for a couple days. The second time, a couple weeks.
This time, it’s going to be for a lot longer.
If I come back, and that’s an if, it will be six months or so from now, in the early fall, as a new school year starts and Coupeville High School moves into the Northwest 2B/1B League.
But that’s an if.
We’ll see how I feel, health-wise and head-wise, at that point.
Right now, I want to fix my health and turn the noise off.
I don’t have any Chinese viruses (that I know about), but I have been tearing down a path to full-blown adult onset diabetes, and I need to reverse that, now.
My mom didn’t, and the disease ate her alive, cost her the use of her legs, and ended her life prematurely.
So, armed with a pair of loppers and a Katana (chain saws are for cheaters), I will continue my previous work of opening up severely-overgrown woods, carving trails, and using an “outdoor gym” to work on losing weight.
There are a lot of factors involved in trying to arrest diabetes before it takes full control of my life, but this move hits at many of them – weight loss, better eating habits, less stress, better sleep, etc.
Plus, I need the quiet right now.
All social media does is make me mad, all the time, and if I’m not wrapped up in the 24/7/365 world of Coupeville Sports which I created for myself, I don’t need social media.
Which is why I vanished off Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Messenger moments before I hit publish on this article.
It’s time to rewire my brain and rework my health.
All while staying faithful to the tradition of Thoreau, and going into the woods, but not far enough away I can’t still get laundry service and a sandwich.
