Can't Win for Losing Department

From New Mexico comes this story about Bellingham and farming:


http://rightofassembly.com/diary/206/organic-produce-grown-with-nonorganic-manure-fail

Medical Care in Pt. Roberts

We are currently down in Bellingham pursuing a little medical care in the enormous medical complex that is housed there.  I'm used to being around hospitals, but that was two decades ago, and the changes in those intervening 20 years have been amazing.  There's the hospital and then there's dozens of buildings surrounding the hospital holding all kinds of specialized facilities, some belonging to the hospital, some not, but a place for every organ, every individual system, every conceivable need.

This stay at St. Joseph's (we're in to the 2nd day and Ed is the patient while I'm the family member) has been very good so far, given that one is dealing with a hospital.  We have no complaints whatsoever; although we might be unhappier if things weren't going well.  But it is reassuring to feel that, despite the isolation of Pt. Roberts, that there is good medical care accessible, although you do have an hour's drive to get to it.  But once you're here, you are here.

The other benefit we have come to more fully appreciate is the fact that Point Robert's Wellness Clinic provides not only initial wellness care but also, and even more important in this case, connection to physicians.  If it were up to us, I suspect, we might still be phoning around trying to get a physician to accept us as Medicare patients.  Or at the very least, trying to find one who would accept us and about whom we had any reason to feel confidence.  Virginia, the Saint of the Wellness Clinic, did that work for us.  And those who set the Clinic up originally had the foresight to make sure that that service was part of the foundation of the clinic. At least as far as I understand it, St. Joseph's-affiliated physicians are in some way obliged to accept referrals from the clinic.  We have surely had that be our experience, and are very grateful for it.

It's one thing to say that a hospital has to accept you in the Emergency Room, but they only have to do it until you are stabilized.  After that, you might well be on your own, even with insurance.  Having assured physician access means a lot.

Very Late Night Coffee

We spent the last 30 hours out in Rotus (the Rest of the U.S.), driving down to Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, to visit an old friend from California who has joined the general progress to the Northwest. South Whidbey, it appears, is rapidly filling up with our old friends and neighbors. (In urban California, not categories to be confused, generally.)

On our way, we stopped in Bellingham to get gas, where prices turned out to be very cheap. Point Roberts’ five gas stations appear to operate, for the most part, as a resource for Canadian drivers who would just as soon not pay the high taxes that Canada reasonably adds to its gasoline prices. The real costs of using gasoline, of course, are not just the costs of getting it out of the ground, refining it, and getting it into our cars. Instead, they also include all the costs generated by the CO2 that gas-run cars generate, CO2 that muddies the air we breathe and warms the globe as an afterthought. Canada, like Europe, adds some to gas taxes to take that into account as well as to increase the price so that people pay more attention to using it carefully. The U.S., unwisely, does not.

The result of this is that Point Roberts' gas stations are more likely to be competing with British Columbia’s gas prices than with Whatcom county’s gas prices. Yesterday, in Bellingham, the lowest price I saw was $1.59/gallon. The price in Point Roberts was $2.65 earlier in the week, and $2.17 this evening. So that’s a negative feature of living here in the exclave: higher priced gas. On the other hand, it’s as well to discourage use by higher pricing. But I guess I’d prefer that the increased price was going to taxes rather than to even higher oil company/gas station operator profits.

The Bellingham gas station had pumps that could accommodate about 12 – 16 cars at a time and, since it was all credit card driven, very fast. Cars got in and out quickly, but there was, nevertheless, a line, in which we were number six. I don’t think I’ve been in a gas station line-up since the late 1970’s when we had the great national gasoline shortage and people were shooting each other for jumping the lines. Yet one more opportunity to be remembering various sorts of bad old days. Gas shortages, depressions, stock brokers jumping out of windows, soup kitchens.

While we waited, I noticed next to us a maybe 25-square-foot building which advertised itself as an espresso hut. Not so strange except that it is open 24 hours a day. Perhaps too long in Point Roberts, I cannot for a moment imagine why anyone any place in the world would need a 24-hour espresso hut, let alone enough people to make it profitable. Is the larger world really filled with lots of people roaming around at 3 a.m. feeling a big need for espresso? Why would that be the case? Coming home from a late shift, a graveyard shift? Surely espresso would not be what is needed. Surely the next point would be sleeping not caffeine injections.

A truly strange form of economic development, but there it was, obviously in business. Could this substitute for our failure to have local pizza delivery? After all, if Bellingham can have multiple 24-hour espresso huts, why can’t we have at least one? Don't we want to be just a little more like Rotus, just a little wider awake?

Volunteer Rules

My daughter is a volunteer Girl Scout Troop leader. She says that the G.S. Council doesn’t have a lot of rules for the volunteers, but the one they really impress upon them is that they are NEVER to talk to the press. If something happens, let the Girl Scout Council’s media person talk to the press. Seems like an interesting rule, but its importance was made apparent to me last night when I was alerted to the fact that there was an article about the Point Roberts Community Council in the Bellingham Herald.

The Herald is the daily paper in Bellingham, the seat of Whatcom County, the county that houses Point Roberts and administers most of such governance as we get. Well, a little publicity never hurt anybody, right? Except, the front-page (on the Net, anyway) article focused on the idea that Point Roberts is very distressed by the nature of its relationship to the county and the residents are talking about seceding from the county, the state, the world, maybe, and that the Community Council is a venue for discussing this, maybe making it happen. The article was accompanied, at the time I read it, by 26 comments, most of which felt that selling us to Canada would be the best thing that could happen to Whatcom County and that we were a community of whiners and foreigners, so who cared what we thought or what happened to us.

Ah, I thought, that article is definitely not accurate and certainly not helpful. And it was even more not helpful that the only two people from Point Roberts who had been interviewed for the story were people involved in the formation of the Community Council, with the vague implication that they were speaking on behalf of the Council and endorsing secession. If only the Point Roberts Community Council were as smart as the Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Girl Scouts Council we’d have had a rule that prohibited any of us from talking to the press.

Perhaps we should tell the Herald that the only act the P.R. Community Council has so far set in motion is to redesign, rebuild, and landscape the Community Events sign. Surely not the act of a lot of secessionist hotheads? Or maybe that’s where hotheads do start if they don’t have Fort Sumter to work with? I’m invoking the rule for myself: no volunteers speaking to the press on behalf of the Community Council. But there's a lot of talking among ourselves about the article: unhappily, it was, last night, the #1 'most emailed article' in the Herald.