'Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind'

That’s what tonight promises us. We normally don’t get much snow in the winter, or very low temperatures, but we always get big wind. But tonight they are promising all three for our dining and dancing entertainment. The most immediate worry about a big wind storm is that we’ll lose the power and whether I’m in Roberts Creek in B.C., or in Point Roberts in WA, my locale will pretty much be the end of the list of places whose power needs to be and gets repaired. We have gas heat and cooking at both places, which is a very good feature, but we don’t have gas-powered internet or lighting.

No internet can be tolerated, I believe on principle, but the fact is I’m awfully used to just having it instantly and constantly available. No electric lights, on the other hand, is a little harder with the days being so short. But candles and propane lamps and flashlights are perfectly tolerable substitutes if it doesn’t go on for too long. I think the longest we’ve been without power in the past 16 years is about 3 days after one storm. Irritating, not desirable, but endurable. Some people seem very enthusiastic about generator backups (which are pretty pricey), but I’ve never found it necessary, probably because I don’t keep tons of food in the freezer.

The real thing to worry about is trees falling and big branches breaking off. The latter is particularly worrisome when the temperature is so low because the trees will have zero flexibility, will be very brittle. Both our houses are surrounded by many tall trees and the firs’ and maples’ branches, in particular, are prone to crashing down in big wind storms. Last winter, two of our neighbors had large branches come through their roofs. This is not good in a very big way, even if you are not in the room where it comes through to. Lots of people address this problem by cutting all the trees down on their property. They move up here because they love the trees, but they aren’t up to having them on their property. Good of us to keep them available for their scenery requirements. We can think of our place as a kind of tree zoo, I guess.

But at this moment, you just do what you can. I ground a container of coffee beans because we also don’t have a gas-powered coffee grinder. I put out the candles and matches and oil and propane lamps so they are readily available. Put my tiny flashlight in my pocket. And that’s about it. Ten o’clock tonight is the expected time of arrival. I’ll just go to bed then, anyway, and sleep through it, maybe. That would be good.

As Shakespeare reminded us, though, all those centuries ago:

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly. “

If I’m gone for a few days, you’ll know that life has just gotten very jolly.

Under the Canopy

We had dinner with friends last night, one of whom referred to Point Roberts as ‘the last great nowhere surrounded by somewhere.’ That’s a good description. Its nowhere-ness is one of its most soothing qualities. When I was making the quilts of the abandoned houses on the Point, I used to think of Point Roberts as the place where dreams go to die, and certainly that was true of the dreams that produced those houses. Over the years, they have continued their dying, and now many of them are actually dead: blown down by winter winds, dug up and carried off by contractors and land owners with new dreams that will maybe work out better. I visit the houses that remain fairly frequently, taking new pictures of them, and it is about time for another set of those pictures.

But not today. Today, we are all about coming to Point Roberts. The photo above is of the canopy of trees that you see as you pass through the border station and enter this place. At the end of that road--on a day with sun--is the silver sheen of the ocean. The canopy looks the same, summer and winter for the most part, because the trees that make an impression are the tall Douglas firs, the hemlocks, and the red cedars, which are the primary evergreen forest trees here, with the occasional Grand Fir making its own impressive appearance. By now, all the deciduous trees have shed what is to be shed and it is only the skeletal outlines of the tall alders and big-leaf maples, the cottonwoods, poplars, and willows that fill our skies along with the evergreens. In spring, all different, of course. But not now.

A number of people who live here have commented to me on occasion what it is like to see that canopy on each return to the Point: a feeling of being rescued, of calmness, of serenity, of enclosure and safety. On the other side of our border is Tsawwassen, a text-book suburban/exurban town with houses laid too close, each one very much next to the other because land is too valuable not to get a lot of house placed upon it; a town with lots of clustered shops and malls, with sidewalks and streetlights. But with no canopy of trees like the one on Tyee Drive. That is partly because the roads there are too wide and partly because there is less unhoused land there, land with nothing to do but house trees. Tsawwassen is a part of the world of busy houses and busy clocks; and Point Roberts is not.

So, it’s good to be nowhere; it’s good to be under the canopy. But it’s also good to be surrounded by somewhere if you happen to have a need for what somewhere has to offer: all the things that flow from clocks, mostly: trains, planes, buses, high culture, and the availability of made things, many of them beautiful and many not. The city, I found, was often too much with me, late and soon; Point Roberts, by contrast, leaves you room.

Meet the New Neighbors!

It’s been a very noisy past few days on our normally quiet road. Roberts Creek is noisier than Point Roberts because we are closer to roads that permit speeds of 40-50 mph. Also, ambulance sounds are more common as late night drivers fall off the road and into the ditches with remarkable frequency. Nevertheless, it’s still a pretty quiet place compared to the city.

The sounds that one really doesn’t like to hear are the noises of big chain saws. There’s plenty of arguing about how many trees ought to be cut up on the mountain, but we can’t hear the sounds of those trees being cut. On your own street, however, it’s a very big noise. And if it goes on for very long, it does make me wince.

This particular noise was issuing from a house up the road that was recently sold. I’ve walked and driven past that house every day or so for the past fourteen years and never gotten a clear look at it. On foot, you could stand at the edge of the driveway and actually see the shape of the house, but driving past, you knew there was a house there only because there was a driveway and a trash can on Wednesdays.

The first few days, the noise was identifiably chain saw. The third and fourth days were different: at first I thought that it was a helicopter overhead, but it turned out to be a very long logging truck, loaded right up with 20-30 foot trimmed logs from that property up the road, now driving very slowly and very noisily down our road. Then, later in the afternoon, the helicopter sound started up again and eventually a second fully laden truck came down the road past our driveway. And the next day, the same.

Many trees-now-logs have by now passed by us so, today, I walked up the road to see what had transpired. And there was the house, never before seen clearly but now in full view. Logs still piled up, so presumably the big logging trucks will be back on Monday bringing us again the sound of destruction of the owner’s and resident animals’ habitat.

Roberts Creek is famous for its trees, so it always puzzles me that people buy property here and then proceed to cut down all the trees. If you are going to build a house, you obviously have to cut some trees so you’ll have space for the house. But clearing enormous spaces of trees or of cutting any trees when the house is already built seems to me to want an explanation. I’m told that people worry about having the trees fall on their houses and that’s why they cut so many. And it’s true that tree branches often come down in the winter winds and damage roofs, but that requires the tree to be very close to the house. Some people may be just taking a little profit as the trees are worth a lot if they are cedar or fir ($1,000 or so/tree, they say), and real estate prices have gone up here sufficiently that a quick profit may be needed. Some people are said to want more light. But then, why buy a house in the northwest where it is mostly grey (even on the Sunshine Coast) and mostly forested and not very light? Maybe it is just a manifestation of humans’ desire to improve things or at least to change them or to make them more like where they came from (the prairies?). Maybe it is just a yearning for a creative touch, for making what is in some way different and thus one’s own.

Whatever it is, I hope it isn’t followed by a need for a lawn, a riding mower, a weed whacker, and then a leaf blower, but I won’t be surprised if they and their accompanying noise all appear, as the days and seasons go by.

Whose Woods These Are I'm Pretty Sure I Know

When we moved to Point Roberts, we bought a little house on a little lot and the lot had a few big trees on it here and there and a few little garden areas and a bunch of lawn. But that was twelve or so years ago, and over that time, we found ourselves buying the surrounding little lots one at a time, until we eventually acquired six of them, about a half acre that includes the house we live in, trees, another house that Ed has been remodeling for the past three years, and a workshop for me in which to do my quilting. Up in Canada, we have two acres of woods and one house, but the difference between two acres of woods in Canada and maybe a quarter acre of woods in Washington (subtracting the lawn-like areas which are flat but have no grass and thus are not really lawns, the ever-expanding gardens, and the three buildings from that larger ½ acre) is substantial.

The difference lies largely in the fact that two acres of trees is a forest that takes care of itself and ¼ acre of trees is land that requires a lot of maintenance. I conducted a survey of our trees today and here is what we have:

2 alders, 4 large maples and 4 small maples, 12 red cedars, 2 laurels, 1 dogwood, 31 Douglas firs, 1 grand fir, 3 willows, 1 pecan, 5 Italian plums, 2 bartlett pears, 1 walnut, 1 fig, 1 Queen Anne cherry, 4 apples, 1 arbutus, and 2 poplars. Fruit trees are not, by nature all that big, although this cherry is a large tree: our ladders do not go high enough to pick up at the top of it. But the rest of these trees range from very big to enormous. I couldn’t begin to put my arms halfway around any of the Douglas firs or cedars, e.g. They are tall enough that bald eagles consider nesting in them each spring. They are a lot of wood, but not a forest. They are more like a park.

Maintenance for a park includes, each spring, gathering up and causing to go away hundreds of branches that break off during winter storms, as well as the occasional tree that comes down (two last year, but none this past winter). The branches are mostly from the Douglas fir trees, but the cedars, alders, and maples also contribute to this general mess. If you cut the wood up to size, you can burn the wood in your fireplace or wood stove. However, we don’t have either of those. So we can find somebody with a chain saw who wants the wood and is willing to come by, cut it, and cart it off, but most people have their own wood mess for those purposes. Or we can pay somebody about $125/hour to chip it up (which we did last year, but we still have 2/3 of those wood chips in piles waiting for me to cart them to somewhere else). We can burn it ourselves in a 1-2 day extravaganza, during which time we make our major contribution to global warming. Or we can carry it back into the far reaches of the park where it will make its own contribution to global warming by decomposing, but over a longer time than 1-2 days. What to do?

The other major maintenance of trees has to do with leaves. A tree in your yard provides you with enough leaves in the fall to rake up. Eight maples, two alders, a dogwood, and a bunch of fruit trees provides you with way more leaves than you are going to be raking up, not least because it is November when they fall and it is raining all the time. So you think about the advantages of letting the leaves remain on the ground all winter where they can provide a little insulation for the plants and bushes in the cold, and where they will do a little composting of their own. But spring comes (as it has come this week), and all those leaves are still there and they’re still wet and they haven’t composted one whit and all the slugs are eating the little plants that they are covering. And when that happens, you know it’s really time to rake the leaves and start the serious composting. So this week has been a week of raking when it’s not raining and carting leaves off to the back of the woods where they will go bit by bit into the composter until the next crop of leaves starts to fall.

These woods are mine, and they sure require a lot of work.

The Art of Seeing

The quietness, the greyness, the naturalness, and the slowness of the world at Pt. Roberts has taught me a great deal about what it means to see things. In the city, I worked at not seeing things because there are just too many things, they lack coherence and balance, are too vivid, have too much contrast, are in short too man-made and feel more like chaos than like the world.

Here, I have the time to see things and things can be seen to change slowly over time. For example, 10 days ago, I cut a branch of forsythia that looked dead, and put it in a vase of water on the dining room table. Since then, the bark has filled out slightly, and its color has changed from grey to a brownish color, and its tiny, dead-looking buds have begun to swell minimally, to change color infinitesimally day by day by day. Right now, the buds are perhaps 1/16th of an inch long and have gone from dead grey to crisp brown to a very pale and satiny yellow-green. In another week, those green buds will have separated themselves slightly, formed into petals and changed to a somewhat yellower color. They will open eventually to display their bright yellow four-petalled flower and tiny green leaves will arise to surround them. They will last for weeks before they begin their equally slow decline. But it is only if you have the time and the inclination to watch the process that you begin to see them as something complex, as something more than an object for your momentary admiration as they reach their peak bloom. Similarly, tulips, when they come to us for picking will last for weeks in the house, as they move through the process of bud swelling through various shades of green, of petal-opening and opening even more as the color flows slowly up into each petal, each day more vividly. And then, those petals open and ever so slowly open to a disk, and then amazingly turn themselves inside out, each day taking on a new and exotic shape. They gently decline this way, their color fades back to a dull shade of their original, and then they lose all color to a dusty beige. Eventually they finish their performance by letting loose those reformed petals, dropping them at the foot of their vase. It is like watching a virtuoso ballet performance.

This week in New York, a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ opened. I wish I were seeing it, but I am always seeing it. The NYT’s reviewer said this about it: “The great gift of this production, first staged in London two years ago, is its quiet insistence that looking is the art by which all people shape their lives.” (theater2.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/theater/reviews/22geor.html)

Many years ago, Sondheim wrote the music for a TV drama called ‘Evening Primrose.’ It is about a group of people who have been imprisoned in a department store for many years. (I recently asked a grandchild what he might like for a birthday gift and he reported his desire for ‘a Leggo Jedi Starfighter Hyperdrive Booster Ring.’ (You can see it here: http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=7661) From this I conclude that the practice of locking people in department stores for years at a time is not an uncommon event.) The heroine of ‘Evening Primrose’ has two songs that foreshadow 'Sunday in the Park’: ‘Take Me To the World,’ and “I Remember Trees.’ In the latter, she sings, ‘I remember trees, or at least I think I do.’

Before I came here, that was pretty much a song I could have sung. From 1970-75, I lived in a house in the woods and began to see trees. But I was still young, with young children and employment and many thoughts that captured my attention far more than the trees did. Last night, I was listening to a CBC radio lecture in which some professor was talking about the original meaning of the term common sense. It wasn’t ‘common’ as ‘ordinary.’ It was ‘common’ in the sense that it was the sense that took the information from the other senses and put that information together into a unified whole. That was before we had science to make our unified whole. We are deeply lacking in common sense nowadays, I suspect. Which reminds me of a poem by William Carlos Williams about the death of his English Grandmother. He is riding with this elderly, very sick woman in an ambulance, heading for a hospital against her wishes. ‘What is that out the window?’ she asks. ‘Trees? Well, I’m tired of them.’

I’m not tired of trees. But should I become so, I will know that like those tulips and forsythia, I have reached the end of a long process. For now, however, I am happy to have been taken to the world.