Blogging Made Me Do It

Today, we drove to the airport to pick up our oldest (18 y/o) granddaughter. Along the way, we stopped at a traffic light in the little Canadian town across the border. There was a young guy, 18-ish, who caught my eye at the intersection because he was wearing an interesting black t-shirt with a raised-gold city-skyscraper drawing (maybe puff paint?), and then I saw that he was wearing those dopey, droopy black levis, but with beautiful gold-embroidered back pockets (somewhere in the vicinity of the other side of his kneecaps). As I was watching, he pulled out a cigarette pack, pulled open the thin cellophane strip at the top, and then dropped it onto the sidewalk. I gasped mentally. And then he took the rest of the cellophane package and threw that, too, on the sidewalk.

Because I had been writing about this kind of thuggish behavior only a day or so ago, I felt that I ought to do something, so I rolled down the window and yelled at him, “Hey, don’t throw your trash on the sidewalk!’ And as I did so, I realized his ears were all stoppered up with iPod earphones. So, I yelled it again, but louder; loud enough to penetrate the 15 feet and the earbuds that separated us.

He turned and looked at me, heard me, squinched his eyes up, gave me a disdainful look, and proceeded to walk across the street as the light changed, absolutely indifferent to my views. And we drove away. So there it was. Action following words. Talking the talk and (sort of) walking the walk, or at least talking the walk. Like anyone who has ever taught elementary school kids, I have the general feeling that I’m entitled to correct young kids in public should the need arise. But I have never, in all my years, corrected a perfect stranger of even vaguely mature years in a public setting.

This is what went on in my mind in that brief moment: it seemed to me that if I was going to write on this blog about how much I dislike that kind of behavior, about how uncivil it is, then I ought to be willing to back it up with actual words spoken to actual people upon need, even if they were, gasp!, not little kids. So, the blog made me do it. I don’t know whether the blog is thus making me a better, more consistent person or just a crankier person, but if it’s the latter? Well, in one’s eighth decade, one is entitled to choose curmudgeonliness--at least now and then.

Trash, Again

Here it is Bastille Day, that terrific holiday in which everybody locked up in a Parisian jail was set free in a mad frenzy of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Something about that image really captured my imagination as a schoolgirl so that the date is firmly fixed in mind. Presented some other way, it could appear to a kid as some kind of scary jail break, I guess. Well, perspective is everything: perspective, in the sense of from what angle you are viewing this picture, which is very probably not ‘the whole picture,’ for example. In fact, it’s really hard, in the short run anyway, to get anything like the whole picture, the title of this blog notwithstanding.

More about the trash in that respect. The full email box that I mentioned yesterday was obviously not about an abandoned roadside stove but instead about the issue of how garbage and recycling will be conducted in Point Roberts. When we moved here, some fourteen years ago, nobody was collecting trash. The County has some legal responsibility to do something, but my recollection of what it did was this: it operated a transfer station which was open a couple of days a week and you were free to take your garbage there on those days and pay a fee directly. I don’t remember that they had recycling, but that was a long time ago, too long to remember what is usually a minor issue in my life.

Nine years ago, a guy came to town and set up a regular garbage and recycling collection business, licensed by whoever in the state does that kind of licensing. He’s a nice guy in my experience and easy to do business with, at least if your business is household business. His business seemed to work, although there were obviously inherent problems because the government would not mandate that everyone participate in and pay for garbage collection service. Since only about a quarter of the homes here belong to full-time residents (those who were likely to subscribe to the trash collection service), he had a very small customer base. The Canadian cottage owners, for the most part, didn’t want to pay for service that they weren’t using most of the time and they could always take their trash to the transfer station and pay a single fee for whatever amount they brought, or take it home with them to Canada, or bury it in their backyards, for all I know. But refuse/recycling collection equipment is expensive, and needs to be spread over a bigger customer base than the trash business has.

This spring, the company stopped picking up recycling when its recycling truck reached its final hours, but we could still take it ourselves to the transfer station. For most of us, not a problem. But a big problem for some parts of local government and for some locals who think that a contract is a contract and since he said the business would provide curbside recycling he must do that or go out of business.

In addition, I hear, there is an issue about how the business was charging for collecting containers of building debris. Some people, especially those who had building debris that needed to be disposed of, found his attitude hostile and his prices too high, and a couple of them went into business in competition, sort of. That is, they aren’t collecting building debris, but are collecting and recycling building debris, though how that stuff gets recycled is not entirely clear to me, and apparently not to some others.

My part in this brouhaha was to forward to a dozen or so friends and acquaintances a letter explaining why one couple favored the County helping the current guy to continue in operation. Forwarding this email turned out to be one of those good deeds that does not go unpunished. Two people—friends--immediately wrote back, outraged that I had forwarded this letter to them, even astonished that I had engaged in ‘politics,’ and insisted that I immediately remove their names from my email list.

The response seemed way out of proportion to the “affront.’ Just politics in a small town, is what another friend told me today. But all the emotion and energy involved in this topic suggests something bigger at play. Is the trash collecting monopoly license for Point Roberts really a treasured asset? Are there big bucks involved? (Follow the money is never a bad strategy for understanding les choses Americaine.) Loose talk tells me that there are people lined up to take over the refuse/recycling collection monopoly license here on the Point, despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to be a paying proposition. New efficiencies? Higher rates? Outside forces? Secret deals? Who knows? As the war in Iraq (possibly) tapers down, are the private war companies looking for other income streams? If that’s what it is, I’m thinking Halliburton or Kellog, Brown, Root will soon be providing our trash service. Ed, though, says his money is on Blackwater.

Neighborhood/Neighborly Trash

Yesterday, my email box filled with trash. Well, that’s not unusual, but these were messages about trash and the local collection thereof, rather than that dreary array of penis enlargement, drug access, Rolex watches, and fake Louis Vuitton handbag scams. Here on the Point, it appears, trash is a really emotional issue.

Who knew? It’s sometimes an irritating issue, certainly. Anyone who has ever lived in a resort community in the vacationing season will know what I mean. Take a walk and take note of not only the beer cans and fast food containers, but also the entire bags of garbage that fill the byways of your little community. I’ve never actually seen anyone pitch stuff out the door of their moving car, but it must be happening, because there are the roads, there are the cars, there are the tourists, and there are the trash bags. Hard to think of any other explanation. And, since we live in two different resort communities and we have experienced this detritus-by-the-road in both, that seals the case for me.

Right now, down the street, there is a painfully unusable 4-burnerless electric stove sitting by the side of the road where someone has kindly offered it to his neighbors as “Free!” I guess so, since garbage has such a low value. Some irritated local has crafted an additional sign on the hapless stove, pointing out that some ‘loser’ is hoping others will take his “free” garbage to the dump for him.

At least, the tourists can’t be blamed for this unless they are now vacationing with their old appliances. I can’t think of any way that the high price of gas would account for such activity (“What with the price of gas, we had to dump our old stove by the side of the road when we were vacationing down in Point Roberts”?), so I must assume it is one of my less-than-thoughtful fellow community members who has decided he’d like to share the view of his old stove with the rest of us. Years ago, when I used to attend rural auctions in New England, whenever some obviously useless bit of crap was being put up for auction, the auctioneer--facing no bids--would eventually point out to us that object could be used for a planter. So maybe a stove planter is in somebody’s future—you could put a geranium pot in each of those burner holes. Actually, I hope someone picks it up for that purpose. Otherwise it’s going to be a long summer, fall, winter, spring and summer again before that stove goes back to the metallic dust from whence it came.

Some years ago, up on the Sunshine Coast, we came upon a tourist bag of garbage that had been slung by the side of the road. Good sports that we were, we carried it home to dispose of in our own trash barrel. When we got home, though, we found that there was an interior bag entirely filled with junk mail addressed to a fellow in North Vancouver. So we mailed that part back to him, with an enclosed letter pointing out that his junk mail was even more useless by the side of the road in Roberts Creek, so could he please attend better to it and, if he couldn’t master the skill of properly disposing of personal goods, could he try vacationing somewhere else in the future. He didn’t write back. It is possible we did not include a return address, of course.

So, those of you who are driving and walking about, throwing garbage and trash out on the roadsides where other people live and walk: Cut it Out! If you think somebody else should be taking care of your garbage, you are either a full-fledged loser, as the sign says, or an immature teenager. In either case, time to grow up.

Sixties Momentum

This past Thursday was the monthly meeting of the Point Roberts Community Association. Everyone, at some time in his/her life, goes to meetings like these, I imagine. A somewhat amorphous group with a somewhat amorphous purpose struggling to find a way forward. Such meetings are profoundly frustrating in some ways (can’t we just do what I want and then get on with doing it?), and profoundly interesting in others (what’s really happening here?). The frustrating part is immediately available to everyone, I think, but the interesting part takes a little more work to discern.

The ten-twelve people who show up for these meetings do not come from the same generational, educational, or experiential backgrounds. They are not all committed environmentalists, or political enthusiasts, or evangelical Christians, or home schoolers, or anything unifying. Except for the fact that they live in Point Roberts—well, that’s the unifying point. And it’s often hard to believe that that is enough of a shared experience to make the group work.

It sometimes feels like that reality TV show—which I have never seen, so I may have it wrong—in which a bunch of people get put on a desert island and each week, I think, someone is voted off. Similarly, at the end of each of our meetings, I worry about whether someone will decide not to return the next month. After all, if the members of the Point Roberts Community Association can’t get along together as a group of people willing to try to work together, why would we think that the larger community, whose members have not made any particular commitment to trying to do something together, could operate in a more harmonious fashion?

Why would we think that just showing up in the same place (either in Point Roberts, or at the PRCA meetings) would be enough to enable us to overcome all our differences? I ask myself this frequently, and especially right after the monthly meetings. And the answer, for me anyway, is that I come from the land of the ‘60’s, when people with vastly different views, ages, experiences, and backgrounds came together all over the U.S. in very different groups and made something happen.

It’s hard and maybe impossible to explain the sixties (and early 70’s) to someone who wasn’t there. The feeling of hope, the feeling that things could change, the fact of endlessly multiplying groups that formed to carry forward those hopes and actions, ranging from the many groups that went to form the Civil Rights Movement (it wasn’t just Martin Luther King), to the Black Panthers, to the Free Speech Movement, to the Students for a Democratic Society, and on and on. This blog post would be a lot longer if I just let myself list all the groups I can remember. And though all those groups had disagreements with one another, there was a steady sense of forward movement in which the various institutions of society (the press, the courts, even the U.S. Congress and state legislatures) seemed to be reflecting, following, or even leading, on occasion. That sense of movement is what kept us going. And momentum is a very big thing.

Not so much now; really, not any now. Starting anything nowadays is starting from pretty much a dead stop. The internet is full of recently-formed groups/movements, but they pretty much just talk to each other and/or send checks/emails to one another. So, the fact that a dozen people are willing to come to a meeting in a building once a month and do anything at all is a great success, I remind myself. At least we aren’t voting each other off our island.

The sixties made it seem easy. But it wasn’t, even then, as I recall.

Spoils for Our Elders

An acquaintance and fellow blogger down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, posted a story the other day about age, mortality and the shedding of belongings. It seems that an 80-year-old friend of the blogger had had a mild heart attack, and that this brush with mortality had loosened his hold on his belongings. A box of treasured opera CD’s arrived by mail to the blogger, a gift that seemed to offer some kind of continuity to the giver. The puzzling part was that the blogger himself is 85-years-old and had several years ago suffered some very serious cardiac problems. Now, the 85-year-old has even more of things he needs to get rid of, while the 80-year-old has somewhat fewer.

I think once one hits one’s 70’s, the awareness of how many things one has and the question of what is eventually going to happen to the more treasured of those things (not IF but WHEN one dies) presses more quite sharply. Because I’ve moved around so much, all my life, I have (happily, I think) ended up with nothing from my ancestral life other than a couple of photo albums, and my mother’s christening dress. When I lived in New England, I was amazed at all the houses that were chock full of ancestral belongings. What a weight of the past was there. And, I suppose, the refusal to have that ‘weight of the past’ is much of what the western U.S. has always stood for.

Earlier this year, I sent a box of doll furniture that I made in the 1970’s to a granddaughter, but other than that, I haven’t actually done anything to start this needed (or perhaps unneeded?) dispersal of treasured things. Treasured by me, of course, but not necessarily treasured by anyone who is on the recipient end. Mostly, at the moment, I’m focusing on the ‘finishing unfinished things’ part of the spectrum. Knitting includes unfinished pairs of sox, hats, shawls, sweaters; quilting includes blocks that haven’t yet been made into quilt tops, quilt tops that haven’t yet been made into finished quilts, and no end of pieces in various stages that would someday be an art quilt/wall quilt if I refined my ideas about them sufficiently to progress to that stage. Lots of embroidery work also sitting around in a nearly finished stage.

Only yesterday, though, I actually finished the quilting on a ‘cathedral windows’ quilt that I started 25 years ago. I began that quilt so long ago that I no longer even know how that traditional pattern is made. It’s a kind of origami folding technique: I look at the finished work and, except for the fact that I recognize the main fabric was from a dress that I once wore, I wouldn’t know that I was the one who had made it. So how treasured is that? Well, at least it is a brand-new quilt that is simultaneously and instantly a vintage quilt.

Perhaps the dispersing can be put off until the finishing is done. And then, well, maybe I could start shipping the treasured and finished objects around to friends who are older than I am. If everybody disperses upward, at least we will have avoided burdening the future with our past. But those centenarians are going to have to get much bigger houses in which to store everything.

Always Something

My mother used to say that it wasn’t one thing after another, but the same thing over and over, and the thing she had in mind was things that didn’t work, things that broke. My father was a great fixer of machines (for a living, he fixed radios, two-way communication systems, record players, and tv’s), and I think that made him somewhat more confident about having things around that were likely to stop functioning. But, like the shoemakers’ children who have no shoes, our house had shelves full of things that were waiting to get fixed. Real fixing went only to fundamental needs.

My life in that household led me, as an adult, to put very little stock in having things that were likely to break because neither I nor anyone I lived with for most of that adulthood was likely to know how to fix them when, inevitably, they ceased functioning. For me, when things break, the things need to go somewhere far away where they may or may not recover but I will not need to know about it. Or, if I have things, I am very careful with them. E.g., I have an I-Pod, but I use it sparingly so that I will not wear it out and have to attend in some way to its failure to work.

Not so Ed. He, like my dad, is a fixer of things, but he’s more likely to get around to fixing them sooner rather than later. The fundamental things get attended to right away; the leaking skylight covered with a blue tarp…somewhat later. This week, the Water Department of Point Roberts sent us our bill and a suggestion that we might have a leak, which accounted for the size of the bill. The first task was to locate the leak and pretty quickly, Ed determined that it was between the meter and the house, but not in the house or the yard hoses. The Water Department said, don’t bother to look any further; they are old pipes, they are bound to leak, replace the pipe. Which is, of course, our pipe, not the Water Department's.

So this past week, instead of drywalling, Ed has been digging a trench through the front lawn-like area: 18” deep, minimum, and about 30+ snaking feet long (Correction: Ed says it is 80 feet. I have little ability in the spacial perception aptitude area). Our soil is pretty sandy, so it can be dug with a shovel, but it is pretty rocky. That, for me, is the good part because I have a wonderful new store of large rocks to use in the gardens. Probably less wonderful for the guy on the other end of the shovel.

There are big piles of dirt in the yard (one about 24 inches tall I managed to walk into yesterday when my thoughts and my eyes were on higher things), and also a deep canyon wherein the new flexible, plastic water pipe has made its bed and will now sleep in it. About six hours of shut-off water yesterday (the worst: being without water….all it does is make me want to turn on faucets; my needs for water turn out to be non-stop when water is not available), and we have new pipes, a new pressure regulator, and a new water meter. So, for now, it is fixed, and presumably for my lifetime, since the pipes themselves are unlikely to wear out within the next 20-30 years, whereas I surely will. But I was looking suspiciously at the electricity drop line today. Isn't it a little, well, saggy?

Strawberry Success

During World War II, my family had a Victory Garden and after my dad got off work, we would all pile in our tiny car and drive out to it and work in the dirt while there was yet light. I became an enthusiastic gardener in those days (I was almost 5 when Pearl Harbor was bombed), and after the war, when we bought a house with an acre of gardening land, I came into my own as a gardener. Southeastern Idaho has heavy, clay soil and precious little rain, but irrigation ditches are provided and things will grow. My father gave me total responsibility for the strawberry bed and I worked it, ate and sold its fruits, and went to summer camp for an extra week each summer on its profits.

But my strawberry growing days ended when I left that house. There were a few plants here and there, but nothing like that large original bed until four years ago when we bought the lot adjoining our house. There, I found six formerly-producing raised strawberry beds. Alas, they were in disastrous shape, filled with as many weeds as strawberry plants, the wooden surrounds begin to rot out, the ground sodden all spring. I worked the first spring just to get the weeds cleaned out (bindweed, buttercups, and various grasses, all destined to reemerge from the winter’s gloom, year after year). Once I had actually found the plants and brought them into the light, I realized that three of the beds actually weren’t in the light because a willow tree had grown so large as to send them into perpetual shade. So I gave up on those. The other three beds produced few flowers and no edible berries.

Then, in the second year, I had three raised beds. I weeded them, I fertilized them, I improved their wooden surrounds, I kept track of the poor drainage--which their raised bed status helped considerably—I talked to them companionably, and in year two, they bloomed, fruited, and showed great promise. I left them alone in late June just as the fruits were beginning to show a red blush and returned, two weeks later, to find them all chewed up by slugs and sow bugs.

By year three, I had found a 10-inch wide roll of copper mesh to wrap around the edges of the three beds. Slug slime and copper produce a slight electric charge that, wisely, slugs avoid. I got it on in early spring, hoping that the beds weren’t already full of slugs that now, couldn’t get out of the strawberry beds. I did the routine: fertilizer, weeding, and cheerful conversation, and strawberries began to appear. No sign of slug damage, although I hadn’t yet defeated the sow bugs. After the reliable two week absence in late June, I returned to find all the strawberries eaten by raccoons. But, even the raccoon leavings showed no signs of slugs.

For year four, I improved the copper mesh coverage (no slugs), spread straw generously around and under each plant (no sow bugs), bought nets to cover the beds (no raccoons), and talked non-stop to the plants. I didn’t really expect much from it because we had record rains all this spring and the plants were now virtually hydroponically grown, at least as far as their roots were concerned: the plants themselves, though, were sitting well up on the straw (perhaps from this comes the word ‘straw-berries’?).

After the rains, came heat and no rain. Two weeks of heat and three weeks of no rain, that famous two weeks that I am gone turned this year into three weeks. I expected to return to find the plants dried up and the berries dried up with them. But on getting here, there were bright red berries all over the beds. Success! I have gathered this past week about 3 pounds of strawberries and we have eaten them with great pleasure. They, of course, bear no resemblance to what the stores up here sell, those large, hard, beautifully-shaped, beautifully-colored (on the outside; white on the inside), items referred to as California Strawberries. Ours are smaller, juicier, more flavorful, somewhat misshapen, reminiscent of the ones I grew sixty+ years ago, but they are our own and I love them. My dad would be proud of them and me. And if I paid myself commensurately for the pleasure of eating them, I could surely afford an extra week—maybe two--at camp.