Celebration of a Sort

This weekend is Point Roberts’ traditional International Arts and Music Festival, a phenomenon that is organized by three or four people in the community every year. It can only be a phenomenal amount of work to get a couple of dozen vendors, food sellers, and musical groups to come down here or up here, as the case may be, and do their thing, such as it is, to the limited audience of Point Roberts.

We went over to Lighthouse Park, the park with no lighthouse, this afternoon to watch a couple of groups, including a sorority of belly dancers, and to see what food and craft were on offer. Lighthouse Park normally is a series of small buildings and boardwalks on the beach that house, most memorably, an Orca Center. But today, there were tents and sound systems and a filled parking lot in addition. And a respectable crowd of visitors, but not an overwhelming one.

The grandchildren, who come from bigger places than this, were underwhelmed, but one takes what one can get here if you, as taker, are a resident. For anyone to come here from outside to work, whether selling hammocks or a group’s latest CD, requires that anyone to cross the border at least once and, in the case of U.S. residents, twice on their way up, and to do it again on their way back down (or up, depending upon which way they are going). And to do it in the heart of summer when the lines at the border are at their very longest. And no going in the fast Nexus lane because you can’t be in the Nexus lane and have items related to your work. That is, no business materials. And if you are Canadian, I am not at all sure how you come down here to sell your goods or your time (if you are a performer), but I would bet a lot that it involves more than just mentioning to the border guards that ‘you’ve got a gig in Point Roberts.’

So it amazes me that the organizers can get anyone at all to make the effort to entertain us at such an event. But it is probably the case that those who are willing to make the effort didn’t have a significantly better offer. Nonetheless, we appreciate the effort. Like the Fourth of July parade this year, better this festival than no festival.

I walked by one lady who was watching the belly dancers cavort while herself knitting a tweed wool sweater. Dozens of little girls crowded the boardwalk stage to take digital pictures of the belly dancers. What will they do with those pictures? A ton of shaved ice, at least, made its way down the gullets of young and old alike, festooned with syrups of colors that don’t even vaguely resemble anything seen in nature. It is hard to imagine exactly what we were celebrating, but perhaps just a sunny day in August.