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.

Progress

I’ve been reading a strange little book about Icelandic settlers in the Northwest: specifically, in Point Roberts, Blaine, Bellingham, and Marietta. It’s a a 2004 reprint of a 1925 book, in which Margret Benedictson took to creating a kind of census of the original Icelandic settlers in these parts. I read only the Point Roberts’ section which chronicles the arrival of 58 individuals and their various family members.

The names are mostly familiar ones if you’ve read much about the history of this place, or even if you just live here, since they are memorialized in street names: Benediktsson (which is Americanized to Benson in Benson Road), Jonsson (which becomes Johnson Road), Arnason (which becomes Anderson Road), and even Whalan (which becomes Whalen Drive and although Whalan is not an Icelandic name, it is the married name of Ingibjorg Samuelsdottir). The Thorsteinssons, the Magnussons, the many Myrdals (one of whom, Arni, was the first to have electricity in his house: he was, the author says, a very talented man with machinery). The first to arrive here was Kristjan Benediktsson and he and his wife came with such of their 16 children as were still alive.

The author had a special fondness for and/or knowledge of Point Roberts as she writes a lengthy, detailed, and glowing description of Point Roberts as it was when the first Icelandic people arrived. I had always thought that they came via Vancouver Island, but in fact the first four (in her version, anyway) arrived in 1893 from Bellingham, and another four came from Vancouver Island the next year. They initially came and took up large tracts of land—60, 80, even 160 acres. At that rate, there wouldn’t be room for many people to settle on our tiny peninsula, which Ms. Benedictson refers to consistently as ‘a spit.’

Soon there were lots of cattle on the island, not to mention lots of salmon up out of the ocean. She describes thousands of salmon being caught in a single trap, and as many as 25,000 salmon left on the beach to rot because they couldn’t get them canned fast enough. Thousands and thousands of salmon in a single day caught here, imagine. "Nowadays,” she says (and recall that she is writing in 1925), "the salmon is depleted; that is how man’s greed treats nature’s best gifts while times are good. In hard times they complain even though they were the cause of the destruction.”

Also, she describes Point Roberts as a tiny area with thousands and thousands of trees. She refers to the land as so heavily forested that it was virtually impenetrable until they cleared trees for farming and for roads. People at the southeast end would have to go by way of the beach to get to the main settlement on the western part of the spit. There were special ‘ladders’ to get up from the beach, including one called the ’99 step ladder’ at the edge of the Thorsteinsson home off the south side of APA Road.

It’s very difficult to imagine what Ms. Benedictson would say if she saw denuded Point Roberts in 2009 (she died in 1956 in Bellingham). Salmon scarce and trees getting scarcer. It’s what we call progress, I guess.

N.B. The book is currently in the P.R. library, or it will be later this week when I get it back: Icelanders on the Pacific Coast. Another fascinating book about the settling of this part of the world by Europeans is Annie Dillard's The Living, which is a novel about the founding of Bellingham, although it mentions Point Roberts only casually.

Discussion or Shouting Match?

When the B.C. Ferry Corporation changes its schedules and policies, ferry riders usually feel that something is being done against them not for them. They frequently protest, although the effects of those protests have not been particularly noticeable. The Ferry Corporation is busy appointing citizen advisory panels and the like, but they pretty much seem like window dressing. Nevertheless, after the most recent cuts in the schedule, 300 or so people up here turned out to object strenuously not only to the reduced number of sailings but also to the ever-rising prices and surcharges.

And then B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell went on the TV and announced that there will be a one-time $20 million increase to the ferry budget in order to restore those ferry sailings that were being removed and to reduce the cost of ferry crossings by a considerable amount. Well, that is pretty amazing, no? Of course, the fine print is that these awesome changes will be in effect for December and January, periods when there is massive vacation travel on the ferry. Well, maybe not so much response to local outcry. Maybe more of a response to an as-yet unannounced upcoming election?

That’s what the local newspaper editor suggests. He also suggests that everybody ought to be grateful for Campbell’s gift, even if it is motivated by political calculations. I’m struck by my reflexive resistance to his argument. Since it’s reflexive, of course, it’s suspect. Have we become so weary of political action that we can’t imagine there is anything coming out of politicians’ mouths that is oriented toward the public good? Always working to their own interests, not ours? Can we imagine that an action could simultaneously serve their interests and ours, or that it could just serve the public’s?

I don’t have any answer to that. And that is part of the anti-government tendency of our times. We riders can, of course, enjoy reduced ferry costs. But what if they are held low just long enough to get these people re-elected, at which point the costs are increased from what they previously were? Or, alternatively, what if there really isn’t any reasonable way to reduce the costs of ferry transport and this $20 million gift is just a way of postponing some other day of reckoning, a day they don’t want to talk about because the public is too uninformed to accept it?

I am inclined to this last thought because I have been reading historian Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Limits of American Power. Bacevich argues that the U.S. has come to the end of its economic, military, and political influence in the world (and he is writing a year or more before the current economic free-fall) because it has refused to accept that there are limits. A big part of his argument is that the U.S. has for decades put off the day of reckoning with respect to our dependency on foreign oil because those governing didn’t believe citizens would accept the bad news that they might have to do without some things or pay more for some things, if the country was to prosper in the future. No, we wanted cheap oil and we wanted it now and forever.

So, I’m thinking: what if there is no way to maintain cheap ferry traffic in B.C., at least not without giving up something else that is also important? Should the public and the government be talking about those tradeoffs and exactly what they are? Or should they just be talking about how the interest group identified as ferry riders is always trying to get something for itself and the interest group called politicians is always trying to get something for itself? Well, the ferry riders certainly can’t talk about tradeoffs if they don’t know what they are. And the government? Well, if they know, they’re not mentioning it. Maybe a folie a deux: those never end well.

English Major Needed

I’ve finished James McCabe’s book about the solution of the U.S./U.K. water boundary problem in the Northwest back in the 19th Century. The Treaty of 1846 says you go west on the 49th parallel and then when you hit the ocean (which would be at Point Roberts, as it turns out), you go out to the middle of the channel and head south to the middle of Juan de Fuca. Unfortunately, the treaty text is no more specific than that, so the question of over 25 years of discussion between the U.S., the U.K., and eventually the Canadian Federation, was ‘what channel would that be?’

It’s extremely interesting to read at this century-and-a-half distance how this extended set of discussions went and what kinds of issues arose in the long process. I suppose it is always the case that historical issues are made much more lively when the reader has some actual connection to the places involved in the outcome. The Battle of Bull Run is vastly more real when you have stood on the actual battlefield, in my experience. This water boundary question, too, seems more vital as I look out each day to the waters that were involved in this argument.

In my view, the strangest (from a 21st Century perspective) of the issues that arose in the course of figuring out who owned the land and water that lay to the south and west of Point Roberts was, post Civil-War, when the Americans were worrying a great deal about how they were going to pay for the extraordinary costs that the war had brought to them. (That sounds familiar.) One of the outcomes of the Civil War was the destruction (by the Confederate Navy) of much of the U.S. maritime fleet (i.e., commercial ships), a destruction that the Americans strongly felt that the British were responsible for because the Confederate Navy ships were welcomed into British ports before they went out on their predatory runs. The U.S. thought that the British should (and could) be made to pay for this ship loss and thus help the U.S. to cover much of their war losses. This was all subsumed under something called the Alabama Claims.

Then comes Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts (he whom South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks beat into unconsciousness on the floor of the Senate just prior to the Civil War, using Brooks’ own gutta percha cane for the assault), who decided that an even better idea was to have the British give all of Canada to the U.S., thus paying for the Alabama claims with this generous gift, a gift which would additionally make the northwest water boundary issue moot. Well, that would have eliminated Point Roberts’ anomalous status. Unfortunately, though Sumner held to this belief for a number of years, it was not to happen. But it does suggest some current foreign policy approaches that we may have neglected. How about we propose to Iraq that, given the extensive costs to the U.S. of the recent war, they give us, say, Kirkuk and all its oil wells? Just a kindly gesture of international friendliness and cooperation, not to mention an October Surprise for the Kurds.

Well, it finally all ended in 1871 when the U.S. and U.K. agreed to a ‘grand bargain’ set of negotiations in which they took on all the current issues involving Canada: Alabama claims, fisheries disputes, Fenian raids into Canada (never mind, I’m not going into that!), and the water boundary question. Canada got sold out on the fisheries and both the Alabama claims and the water boundary question went into separate arbitrations (which the U.S. had previously opposed). The water boundary arbiter was the German Kaiser and his three experts found, 2-1, that the American claim as to the definition of ‘channel’ was more compelling, which resulted in all three of the major San Juan Islands going to the U.S. The arbiters seemed to have found that this result was what the original treaty negotiators had intended, but from reading this book, it seems that the original negotiators didn’t have a common meaning to ‘channel.’ Bottom line: Next time you’re writing a treaty, maybe best to hire an English Major to provide assistance.

54/40 or Fight!

Amazing how certain phrases stay in your head from that decades-ago education, even when they aren’t connected to much of anything but themselves. I remember learning that ‘54/40 or Fight!’ was the compelling American slogan with regard to the northwestern borders of the U.S. when the States and the English were trying to figure out what was whose. It was a little surprising when I moved to Point Roberts to learn with some considerable degree of reality that the U.S. had apparently decided not to fight and had instead accepted the boundary at 49 degrees of latitude instead of 54 degrees and change somewhere in some distant past, even earlier than my grade school days. Perhaps I missed that lesson. Nowadays, I guess the slogan would more likely be ‘54/40 or Whatever.’

You can’t live here without frequently wondering why the British didn’t lean on the Americans to make an exception for Point Roberts, given that the Americans made a big exception for Vancouver Island, whose southern end is well below 49 degrees latitude. That was much more territory than P.R.’s little 4.5 square miles. So I was interested to read the other day that the British did intend to get Point Roberts after the treaty of 1846 (the treaty dealing with the Oregon territory boundaries). That treaty left the water boundaries a little vague and when the British sent some folks over to figure out how to get that straightened out (and, incidentally, how to get most of the offshore islands for themselves), part of their task was to survey the area and to obtain Point Roberts for the British, according to James O. McCabe’s 1964 The San Juan Water Boundary Question. Apparently, the survey results made that unlikely, numbers being what they are, and in any case the question of the fate of the Gulf Islands was of much more importance than the fate of Point Roberts.

This book is hard for me understand, really. First of all, it requires one to be absolutely clear on the fact that the Americans were generally pretty hostile to the British and suspected them of being uptonogood at all times. They were occupying the U.S.-designated Evil Empire slot in those days and that’s, as my granddaughter says about such things, really hard to wrap my head around. The English? Shakespeare? Wordsworth? Queen Victoria? Dickens? Those guys were running The Evil Empire? No, I don’t think so. And then, when everyone really got on with trying to sort out whom the Gulf Islands belonged to (particularly Orcas, Lopez, and San Juan), the cast of characters broadens to include General Winfield Scott (later seen as the noble and very elderly U.S. General who headed the War Office under Lincoln during the Civil War) and Captain (U.S. Army)/General (Confederate Army) George Pickett whose military career, if not his life, ended with Picketts’ Charge at Gettysburg. It was like running into an old friend at a strip club: you’re not sure what either of you are doing there.

In any case, Pickett, while still in the U.S. army, did some good work in trying to get a war started with the British over the San Juan Islands, and Scott got in and quieted things down. It was all about something called ‘The War of the Pigs,’ which was actually the death of one pig owned by the Hudson Bay Company and killed by a U.S. squatter. This part gets a little easier to recognize because it reeks of WMD’s and where are they? E.g., did the British really try to arrest the pig killer and transport him to Vancouver Island. No, but there were a lot of assertions that they had. And any number of people thought this would be a really good time to teach the British a lesson that they needed to learn. (This was right before the Civil War started: excellent timing, I'd say.)

Anyway, when you get through reading about how hard it was to figure out who got which islands, it’s pretty easy to see why Point Roberts fell by the wayside. But now, we’re left with the results. I suppose that is what’s meant by the importance of trying to look ahead.

(Not really integral to the account above, but I’m delighted to find that the oldest house in Bellingham is one built and lived in by then-Captain George Pickett when he was stationed there and working on elevating the pig war into an international war. Next visit to Bellingham, that’s a destination. And if you're not familiar with Pickett's Charge, try the film Gettysburg, because after seeing it, you are unlikely to ever forget what that charge must have looked like.)

It's All History

Yesterday and everything before that: history. All we know: history. Our entire lives: history. You might think with history comprising almost everything about people that people would be more interested in history. But, it seems so, well, past. Even Point Roberts, anomaly that it is, joins the rest of the world in having a history. And it also has a historical society. What it doesn’t have, though there have certainly been efforts to obtain it, is a place for the records of its history to call home. There’s a community project in need of being taken up by the larger community.

The historical society also has an extensive collection of photographs of Point Roberts and of its inhabitants of long years back. I’ve seen a number of them because the Point Roberts Quilt Group looked at them before it made the Community Quilt that hangs in the Community Center. Each block in that quilt is based upon an actual photograph of a Point Roberts long gone. I made the one that has what looks like a lifeguard station at Lighthouse Park, but is actually the lighthouse that was there before it was a park. And also the heron part of the center panel.

The Historical Society has turned some of the photographs into notecards that are sold at The Blue Heron. The Society also runs programs each year, including an excellent one on the Point Roberts’ cemetery. An accompanying booklet is available from them about the cemetery and its origin and experiences. And some years back, the Society sponsored a show of 'Abandoned Houses of Point Roberts,' a series of wall quilts I made. They've been terrific to work with.

Most recently, the Society put out a call for those of us who are the Point Roberts of the ever-so-brief present (and who will be part of the Point Roberts past all too quickly) to write the story of how they came to Point Roberts. They hope to collect enough to create and ultimately publish a kind of social history of our own times, a time when photographs are so voluminous that they need to be accompanied by more words than are now being written. There used to be letters and journals to tell about daily life and daily decisions. Now, there are blogs, of course. But I can count on the fingers of one finger the number of actual letters I’ve received in the mail during the past eight months. So the Historical Society is hoping to get people to do a little writing, and their members will be responsible for keeping track of it. Imagine, years in the future, social historians and local scholars reading through your accounts of how you got here (that, of course, assumes you actually are here). Imagine you, in the nearer future, reading about how your friends and neighbors got here.

I wrote ours awhile back and a nice guy from the group called me up today and thanked me. That alone might be enough reason to get your story to them. He’ll probably call you, too. Anyway, if you are a local dweller and own a pencil or pen, you can send your story to The Point Roberts Historical Society, at PO Box 780, 98281. And if you don’t have a pencil or any paper or a stamp even, you can just email it to them at historicalsociety, followed by at-pointroberts-dot-net. (Do the address the right way; I just write it this way to keep their spam mail somewhat reduced.)