Fall Bursts In

Ouch! The calendar page turns, the sky turns dark, the rains start to gather, the vine maples turn red, and every tourist on the Sunshine Coast and in Point Roberts heads for the exit. The ferries today were backed up for at least three sailings from Langdale to Horseshoe Bay, even though it’s Tuesday, the day after a non-holiday, ordinary Monday. So apparently we’re into fall, even though Labor Day is yet a week away.

I was reading while waiting the two hours for the next ferry and during the ferry ride itself a book about art and art museums by Peter Schejldahl, who is the art critic for The New Yorker. In particular, his division of museums into categories made me think a good deal about Point Roberts, strangely enough. He describes museums as being either encyclopedic (like The Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art; he compares the encyclopedic museum to Home Depot, the place that has everything you need and a bunch of stuff you don’t need but might some day); or homelike (a museum created by a single person in which everything is chosen from a single perspective of meaning); or ‘the boutique’ (very narrowly defined area of acquisition); or ‘the laboratory’ and ‘the pavillion’ (a sculpture garden would be included in the latter, L.A.'sTemporary Contemporary in the former); and ‘the destination’ (Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Portugal--[Ed says Spain and I'm afraid he's right).

Over the years, there has been endless talk about having a history museum here on the Point, but nobody is ever quite able to generate the funds for a building or its maintenance, even though there is already something of a collection of historical goods, tended by the Point Roberts Historical Society. So what I was thinking was a kind of entertaining thought experiment. If there was to be a museum about Point Roberts in Point Roberts, what would be in its collection, what kind of museum would it be?

It could be encyclopedic, presumably and just put the best of whatever has happened here in it in documents, video, photographs, and actual stuff that remains. I have an ironing board allegedly made by Arnie Myrdahl, an original settler, although it has a Canadian company’s name on the bottom of the board, so maybe not so much, but I’ve also seen some original settler’s spinning wheel, and there could be other things like that. It could be homelike, and then the Historical Society could just pick whatever things they like and that have meaning for them. Or it could be a boutique museum that just focused, say, on the fishing and canning industry that operated here. Or it could be a pavillion/laboratory style in which Lily Point would be treated as a museum ground and wonderful things could be included there, creations consistent with Lily Point’s nature (like Storm King Sculpture Park in New York ). Or it could be a destination and either Frank Gehry or all the summer festival operators could get together and design a single, spectacular venue to house the irrelevant artifacts that would be contained therein.

I realized halfway through this process that the window sills in my houses function as tiny museums, places where I leave strange seeds, dried flowers, glass bottles, other odd objects that have come to my hand and that I was unwilling to let go of, at least yet. I leave them there in little unrelated groups (rather encyclopedic) for years at a time. Over time, I consider how they came to my hand as I stand before them and look out the window through them (a more home-like museum). I’ve come to have a substantial collection in this way, but it's narrow, boutiquey, and sort of like a laboratory in the sense that some objects are beginning to relate to others. Schjeldahl doesn’t mention that museums are also places filled with mementos of many sorts. Must be fall that turns my thoughts in this direction.