The Kids
by Mike Thompson, 12/27/2022
Jane and I met in the summer of 1979 at the Larson Park Tennis Tournament in Yakima, and were married a year later. The photo above was taken on our second date, a hike at Mt. Rainier. Promising your love to another person for the rest of your life is a big and beautiful step, but deciding to bring another human being into the world is an even bigger one. Having kids is a totally-committed leap into the deep end of the pool! Jane and I both longed to pour our love into children, and we were lucky to be able to have kids and get to do it.
Jane found out that she was pregnant with Erika while we were in Hawaii, two months into a loop we were doing around the Pacific Rim that included stops in Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii. We intended to finish off the trip with a month in Europe. While four-wheeling over the lava flows on the west side of the Big Island on our way to a campsite by the ocean, Jane found herself feeling extraordinarily queasy, which prompted a trip to the doctor, who told Jane that a baby was on the way. So we called off the Europe leg of our trip in order to get back to Seattle and start making preparations for the new arrival.
Erika was born on December 9, 1982. She loved to be wrapped up tight in a blanket and then walked slowly around the house, which I remember doing hour after hour. Jane and I were renting a house in Magnolia at the time. I had just begun a career as a software developer ("computer programmer" in those days) at Western Data, where I met Doug Walker, Craig McKibben, Mike Richer, Marty Quinn, and George Hubman, later of Walker, Richer, and Quinn. Jane was working at Puget Sound Institute of Pathology, a medical lab.
We bought our first home in Greenwood just before Laura was born on April 17, 1985. At that point Jane and I were both working, in addition to caring for a two-year-old and a newborn, in addition to trying to fix up a little house built in the 1920's that needed a lot of repair. Life was full, to put it mildly! Caring for children is a vast amount of work. Thankfully, when they appear and the doctor hands them to you to hold for the first time, you discover that you’ve also been given a vast amount of love. It’s that love that powers you through those wonderful years when your kids are small and you're not getting much sleep.
Family get-togethers were a big part of the program when the girls were growing up. Jane’s parents, Paul and Marian Feroe, lived in north Seattle so they were close and we saw them often. Jane's brother, John, his wife, Lyn, and their two children (Tracey and Jill) lived in the midwest, so we only got together with them occasionally. Jane’s two cousins, Christy and Marty, lived in the Seattle area, and Christy and her husband, Tim Austin had four children (Charlie, Kelsey, Brady, and Mickie). The first picture below was taken at a get together at Christy and Tim’s, and includes most of Jane’s family. Top row: Paul Feroe, John Feroe, Mike Thompson, Marty Robb, Tim Austin, Dick Robb. Middle row: Marian Feroe, Lyn Feroe, Jane Thompson, Marsha Robb, Christy Austin holding Mickie Austin, and Mickie Robb. Bottom row: Tracey Feroe, Jill Feroe, Laura Thompson, Erika Thompson, Charlie Austin, Brady Austin, Kelsey Austin.
My parents, Agnes and Al Desserault, lived in Yakima, a three-hour drive away. My sister, Susan Goodman, her husband, Bill Goodman, and their three children (Katie, Maggie, and Billy) lived near Auburn, an hour’s drive to the south. Easter weekends were spent at Grandma Agnes and Grandpa Al's house. It was always nice to get away from the wet, gray spring weather on the west side of the Cascades to enjoy the sunnier, warmer weather of eastern Washington. There was usually an easter egg hunt, sometimes at Ken and Dolores Desserault’s house out near Moxee. While in Yakima we often made a trip out to Grandpa Al's hop ranch near Moxee. In one of the photos below we're walking out through the corral to see a recently-born foal. Part of the Easter tradition was getting everyone's picture taken, usually under the Magnolia tree in the back yard, which was almost always in bloom at Easter time. Erika, Laura, and their cousin, Billy liked to go down into the basement and type on Grandma Agnes' old Underwood manual typewriter.
In the late 1980's and 1990's I worked at WRQ, a communications software company founded by some wonderful people that I met while working at Western Data near Green Lake. Other than family, a lot of our social life revolved around the great people that I was working with at WRQ, including Doug Walker, Craig McKibben, Don and Lisa Immerwahr, and Mary Siple. It was while hiking and climbing with the WRQ gang (Doug and Craig were both very accomplished climbers) that I gained the skills needed to make our family backpacking trips possible.
Mary Siple, lead of the technical writers at WRQ, had two girls, Ashley and Margaret, that were the same age as Erika and Laura. They joined our girls for outings at the park and for summer camps at the Lake Serene Pony Farm. Doug Walker's daughter, Keena, was a couple years younger than our girls.
In the early 1990's, with the girls in grade school, Jane played some competitive tennis again. In 1993 Jane was ranked #1 in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Colombia) in the Womens 40 Years and Older division in both singles and doubles! Quite remarkable for someone that didn't start playing competitive tennis until after college. Jane had an all-court game, wonderful touch, and played smart tennis under pressure.
One Sunday evening Jane returned from a tennis tournament in Yakima with a new friend. A young dog had been hanging around the courts that day, nobody knew who owned it, and it didn't have a collar or ID tag, so Jane brought it home. She ran an advertisement in the Yakima newspaper but nobody claimed the dog, so we named him Buddy and kept him. He was to be the girls' best friend for the rest of his life, and was so sweet that we called him Buddy the Wonder Dog.
He looked to be a yellow Lab with maybe a little German Shepherd mixed in. They say that mutts always make the best dogs. Buddy was incredibly patient with the girls when they pulled on his ears, when they dressed him up in a headband and a skirt, or when Erika tried to train him to pull a sled or wagon. He was the most lovable dog imaginable, and all he ever wanted to do was be with us. He layed under the table each night when we ate dinner. When we were hiking he trotted up and down the trail, making sure that nobody got too far ahead or too far behind. Buddy was everyone's buddy, including our cats'. Patch, when he was a young and playful kitten, used to grab Buddy by his jowls and pull and pull until Buddy agreed to play with him. Buddy was also great friends with cats Spot and Charlotte, who came along after Patch was gone.
School days bring fun with friends: slumber parties, birthday parties, playing in the yard during the warm days of summer, and more. Our home was often filled with the happy sound of little girls' voices.
We were lucky to be living near Lake Serene while the Lake Serene Pony Farm was still in operation. When they were in grade school, spending a week at the pony farm was absolutely, positively the highlight of the girls' year! They rode the ponies, brushed them, braided their manes, fed them carrots, and then rode them some more. The Johnsons, with the help of their daughter, Kris ran the pony farm for decades, much to the delight of the hundreds of boys and girls that went there in the summer and fell in love with horses.
Erika and Laura were joined at the Lake Serene Pony Farm by Ashley and Margaret, Mary Siple's daughters, and by cousins Kelsey and Brady Austin. It was here at the pony farm that Erika's love of horses really took hold. When Erika was a senior in high school she bought Sheba, an Arabian, from the Johnsons. Erika took Sheba with her to college for her Freshman year at Montana State University.
Jane and I both loved the outdoors. Jane's family had gone car camping to Cape Lookout on the Oregon coast when she was growing up, and she and her brother, John went on backpacking trips with her dad, Paul. I became enthusiastic about the ocean during the year I spent living, surfing, and diving in Hilo, Hawaii, and really fell in love with the mountains while working with many climbers and hikers at WRQ. Jane and I both wanted to share our love of the outdoors with the girls.
We started hiking with the girls when they were quite young, initially with short trips. One thing we discovered early was that water was a big draw for them, so we often picked hikes where the trail passed near a stream or waterfall. The girls were also more eager to go if they got to bring a friend along, and when we started taking them backpacking they almost always brought along one of their friends.
The girls did some challenging backpacking trips when they were growing up, the most notable being trips into the Goat Rocks Wilderness. Shellrock Peak, near Rimrock Lake on Highway 12, and Sand Point, on the coast in the Olympic National Park, were two of our other favorite backpacking destinations. Pictures from a number of those trips can be found right here on the SurfCanoe.net website.
Erika and Laura also got an early taste of surfing. We bought them a kids' wetsuit and took them surfing in small waves on our trips to the northern Oregon coast. Short Sands (Oswald West State Park), between Seaside and Cannon Beach, was a favorite spot. I would put them on the board, walk them out into chest-deep water, and give them a push when a suitable wave rolled through.
Our favorite car camping destination was Cape Lookout State Park, where Jane had often spent a week camping with her family when she was growing up. I discovered Cape Lookout for myself in the course of searching the PNW for places to surf during the 1980's and 1990's. While scanning a map of the Oregon coast, I saw a point jutting two miles straight into the Pacific and wondered if good waves might form there. Bingo! Where the south side of the point intersects with the shore turns out to be one of the best surf spot in the whole Northwest. It's one of the few places up here that can deliver rideable waves when the swell is ten feet or bigger. I surfed it at ten feet on an unusually large summer swell one July in the early 1990’s, which was one of the best and most exciting days of surfing in my life.
It takes an hour-long hike on a narrow trail to get from the parking lot at Cape Lookout down to the beach on the south side. It's a lot of work, but well worth it. The beach there is never crowded because it's so hard to get to, and better yet the beach is protected by the cliffs from the strong, northerly winds that blow on summer afternoons. On a sunny day it's absolutely the nicest beach on the Oregon coast, and the view is nothing short of spectacular.
We enrolled Laura in an introductory music program called Kindermusic, then bought a piano and signed both of the girls up for piano lessons. Jane had taken piano lessons while growing up, and Mike had taken a couple years of accordion lessons while in grade school, so introducing the girls to music felt like the right thing to do. Laura took to the piano right away. Each time she would pass through the living room she would stop at the piano and play a piece or two before continuing on her way. Playing was always fun for her and we never had to ask her to practice, and so Laura's love affair with music began.
As for Erika, it was more like my non-love affair with learning to play the accordion as a kid. The enthusiasm just wasn't there, and we had to check in with Erika to make sure that she was practicing. Before long Laura was playing more difficult music than Erika was, and who likes being shown up by a younger sibling? When Erika said that she wanted to drop piano lessons, Jane and I agreed.
When she was eleven, Erika started playing soccer with the Stars, a Mukilteo Youth Soccer Association team. The following year the two dads that had been coaching, along their soccer-enthused daughters, moved up to a Select division team, leaving Erika and the rest of the girls on the Stars without a coach. Not knowing a thing about soccer, but believing I could figure it out, I offered to coach the team. Jane and I started watching English Premier League professional soccer on TV. I hit the public library for books on the sport. With youth soccer booming in the Pacific Northwest, I was able to find coaching clinics to attend. And I discovered that there were a group of soccer devotees at WRQ that played twice a week at lunch, so I started playing myself.
Erika played soccer with a fun bunch of kids including Keley Perez (who lived just up the block), Erica Easter (who lived just around the corner), Naomi Melby (who kept us laughing), Kyla Horigan (our trusty, hard-nosed center back), and the speedy Chrissy Meggit. The deal was that if you were one of the first eleven players to arrive in time for the game then you got to be in the starting lineup, and that if you came to play then you would be on the field for at least half of the game regardless of your ability. Placing a greater value on participation than competitiveness, we still managed to win our division one year.
Erika also ran on the cross country team at Harbour Pointe Middle School, and she earned a varsity letter in swimming while at Kamiak High School.
After playing one year of youth soccer, Laura announced that she wanted to try volleyball. But where to play? Harbour Pointe Middle School didn't offer girls volleyball until 8th Grade, but Laura was only a 6th grader. I found out that Saint Thomas More, where we went to church, was trying to put together a girls volleyball team at their school, but didn't have anyone to coach it. Not knowing a thing about volleyball, but (you guessed it!) believing that I could figure it out, I offered them a deal: I would coach their team of 7th Graders if they would allow Laura to play on it. They agreed, Laura had a place to play, and I had a lot to learn real fast!
My first move was to talk with my friend, Wayne Hinkley, who had become a very good volleyball player after finishing his great career in track and field, and to absorb as much knowledge from him as I could. Then there was the public library, any volleyball games that Jane and I could find to watch on TV, learning how scoring worked and all the other rules, learning how to fill out a lineup card for the referee, and so on. Since St. Thomas More didn't have a gym, we practiced at the Holy Rosary gym in Edmonds or at the Lynnwood Recreation Center, where one of the handball courts had been modified so you could string a volleyball net across the middle. Laura played on the STM team for two years, and the second year we managed to get a win over the Holy Rosary girls team and make the playoffs.
Laura played in 8th Grade at Harbour Pointe Middle School. She also made a Snohomish YMCA club team with a terrific coach named Amy Fowler, where Laura played for two years with a great group of girls while developing her skills. That Y team went to Nationals Laura’s final year there, and Jane and I sent her off to play in Las Vegas. The great hands that Laura played piano with were also great at handling a volleyball. Laura had terrific touch and was the most accurate server on every team that she ever played on. She made the varsity team in her sophomore year at Kamiak High School, and in her senior year they came within one win of making it into the state tournament.
We also did some long-distance traveling with the girls. In about 1991 (I've forgotten the exact year) we took them to New Zealand and Hawaii. In New Zealand we began with with a farm stay with John and Annette Hodge, who owned a sheep farm near Auckland and made a little money on the side by hosting guests.
Then we stayed with our great friend Bill Ngawati (whom I had met on my first trip to New Zealand in 1976) and his wife, Jill, first at their home in Auckland and then at their beach place in Hahei, near Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel Peninsula. We even did a little camping on our own in our new backpacking tent.
On our way back across the Pacific we stopped in Hawaii on the Big Island to re-connect with Ed Yokoyama, a former college roomate. I had roomed with Eddie in Hilo for a year in 1978/79, shortly before meeting Jane. Ed and his friends, including James Shimose, Mark Sato, and Gordon Nekoba, took us camping at a remote spot on the west side of the island, north of Kona.
While the girls were studying American History in school we made a trip to Washington DC. There we spent a day with my Aunt Elizabeth, my mom's sister. In her 70's at that time, she walked our legs off as we visited the Smithsonian Museum and other landmarks. Not too surprising - Elizabeth hiked the entire Appalachian Trail when in her 60's, and then did most of it again when in her 70's. We also spent a day in Colonial Williamsburg, and then finished the trip with a couple days on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where we saw the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, visited Kitty Hawk, and played in the warm Atlantic Ocean surf.
About the time the girls were moving from middle school into high school we made a trip to Ireland. The adventure started in Dingle in southwest Ireland. From there we drove north to Connemara, where the girls spent four days riding horses through the Irish countryside. Then we caught the bus to Dublin, where we spent two days. Next we took the ferry across the Irish Sea to Wales, boarded a train that took us east to London, and spent a couple days there, visiting the British Museum among other landmarks.
And then there were graduations. Jane's from City University in 1998, after which she began a new career as a teacher at Serene Lake Elementary School. Erika's from Kamiak High School in 2001 and from Washington State University in 2005. Laura's from Kamiak High School in 2003 and from Bradley University in 2007.
