Richard Olmer

To live is to change - to what?

I have known this to be true for a long time, yet I still am working out the details of what this means. I know that my life's circumstances have changed dramatically over time, my body has changed, and the person who resides in this body has changed.

Recently, I have noticed that I no longer hike just because it is a certain day of the week. I used to hike no matter what the weather was doing, no matter where I was heading, no matter who I was going with. From 1998-2008 I hiked on my scheduled day unless I had surgery scheduled or dire family situations arose.

Today, a thing like three solid weeks of rain can lead me to sit inside and write on my hiking day. True, it is windy, raining and dark outside and it is unseasonably warm, but why am I not hiking?

I never enjoyed hiking in the rain and wind, wearing soggy clothes and unable to see where I was because of water on my glasses, but I never stopped going out. I was like a postman, dedicated to doing my assigned route.

Now I have become a wimp? A sissy? No! I am becoming wise and dull.

I am still retired but I'm also a cancer survivor with a torn-up, inoperable rotator cuff injury, a knee that has had surgery and a stubborn desire to continue to hike. And I still have some goals to accomplish.

Inside my desk drawer sits a completed religious book (quite sophomoric) that I have shared with only one other person, a young man I knew who wanted to become a priest and did. I have a book of poetry that I had to write because I always wanted to be a poet and I want my grandkids to read it. I have a novel that is a mystery set on the Olympic Peninsula that I've shared with a few close friends.

And there is a book about spiritual places on the Olympic Peninsula, which basically contains some old columns from the Sequim Gazette and photos (1998-2002).

Years ago, I tried to get some publisher interested but to little avail. I've got to do something to get something published. Oh, the government's published some stuff I've written but that really doesn't count. My accountant tells me to send out more letters to publishers, but that begins to seem like a lost cause and no one, including me, enjoys rejection letters.

Rainy days are good for creating a strategic plan to generate income to allow me to sit on my duff and continue to write.

The problem is that when I'm sitting here looking out at the rain, stories about my cats seem to lose their compelling allure to readers. Readers seem to like actions like climbing uphill, emotions like fear and awe, and quirky comparisons like comparing a river's movement to a ballerina on stage or my made-up words like "eaglespeak."

Maybe there's a hidden market out there for a book about hiking, written by a cat. Maybe "A Cat's Guide to Hiking the Olympics" is the solution to my dilemma. Candy always wanted to write a book about a cat staying at the lighthouse. People buy books about cat detectives, cat explorers and just plain cats. People like cats.

Cats sell books. Spirituality maybe scares folks. They envision weird creatures slipping through the forest, hunting humans - things like werewolves in Forks. I think that someone's done that already.

I wish that I had gotten a photo of that cougar that jumped across the hood of my Ford Explorer on the way up to Slab Camp ... that would be a perfect (or is it purrfect) cover for a book that might sell.

Sometimes, the older I get, the more I discover the things that I don't understand.

Contact Richard Olmer at columnists@sequim

gazette.com.