CATEGORY: PORT TOWNSEND

I don’t remember how I got back to Seattle after the Moose extravaganza.  What I do remember is that there were parties.  I say this in plural because when I decided to have a Moose party for all the people who had been involved (even the owner of the antique warehouse came) I did not know that Bob was having Moose parties almost every weekend.  These were enhanced by the presence of the moose on the bridge with hanging baskets of petunias suspended from its antlers.  

My own party was a real “happening” as we used to say back then.  I told one of my clients about the moose and the party I was having.  I rattled off all the “moose” things I was preparing, including chocolate mooses.  Then I said, “What I need now is real moose meat.”  The next morning both she and her husband showed up at my door with a 13 lb moose roast.   Her husband had been in Alaska when I told her about the party, and he was flying home that very day.  She had called him and asked him to bring home a moose roast.  She said all their Alaskan friends had freezers full of moose meat.  I was blown away!

My friend Gwen, who is a superb cook, told me how to cook it.  She gave me a recipe for marinade and told me to marinate it overnight.  It was the best roast I ever tasted and the gravy was supreme.  For liquid refreshment we had “moose swamp punch” made authentic by floating water lilies, a moose delicacy.  The water lilies were the kind with yellow blossoms and I got them by wading, and then falling up to my neck in Anderson Lake.  YES!  ANDERSON Lake!!!  They looked lovely floating on brew that would put M.A.S.H. gin in the shade.  To go with the roast we had “mooshed” potatoes topped with the afore mentioned gravy, moose hangin’-from-the-mouth greens, chocolate “moose,” and I even found a moose mold (at a shop in Port Townsend of all things!) and made chocolate mooses for good measure.

You may think this is the end.  It isn’t.

Bob was going to put his new friend, Happy (it looked like it was grinning) in his garage and leave his car on the street, but Happy was taller than the door opening. Neither could its antlered end be tipped under the lintel because the garage had an overhead garage door creating its own ceiling for about six feet beyond the opening.  So he left it on the bridge next to the house and put a tarp over it and its petunias.

Moose sat there for a couple of years and then an acquaintance of Bob’s wanted to buy it, promising to give it a good home.  He was building a new house and said he would enlarge the garage into a three-car space, so the moose could have its own slot.  Bob finally sold it to him for $250.00.

I won’t go into the whole fiasco of the move.  Suffice it to say the first moving van wasn’t big enough and they had to send back for the largest size available.  After trying twice, the driver of the van found he could not maneuver on the narrow winding street so had to go all the way around to the end of Terwilliger Blvd. above and come down the steep end of Bob’s street from there.  Bob took pictures of Happy padded and tied in the middle of the truck.  

The next time I saw Bob, I asked if IT was now safely in its new snug little home.  He said, “When they got it to the new house–guess what?–the garage had an overhead garage door and they couldn’t get it in.  The last I heard, the moose was out beside the garage with a tarp over it.”  I didn’t ask if there were petunias hanging from its antlers.