Storm Developing

Some years ago in Point Roberts, there were plans for a big golf course on the bluffs at the south eastern end of the peninsula. Several hundred acres were to be involved and I think there were also to be houses along the fairways. This was back before 9/11, I am pretty sure; back when we first came here. But the plan for this all fell apart for some reason. Later, a different 18-hole golf course was built up on the northwest side of the peninsula and, I suppose, everyone breathed a sigh of relief because surely we wouldn’t have two golf courses inflicted upon us. That completed golf course had its problems: it immediately adjoined the heron rookery, one of the largest on the West Coast. A lot of negotiation resulted in a special building schedule to keep the developers from irritating the herons during the nesting season. The developers followed the rules, but within two years of completion, the herons up and left anyway. Not actual partners to the negotiation, they were apparently irritated by some other part of the deal. So now we have the golf course but we don’t have the rookery. Unintended, if foreseeable, consequences.

The original golf course planned property, however, remains an issue. There are three pieces of it (roughly 100 acres each, I think): the first part is Lily Point, which is now a public park area. The second part appears to be the subject of negotiations for an additional park area, with big conservation groups actively involved. So things look good for maintaining those areas.

The third area, however, is more of a problem. There is now a plan before the county to create a gated community on that 100 acres: a private and gated “Beach Club,’ with about 100 residences, a ‘community center’ (in quotes because, of course, it wouldn’t be a center for the Point Roberts’ community, just for their community), and a swimming pool, and presumably an enormous amount of traffic increase down that narrow road that would bring those 100 families into town should they ever want to drop in to see how the other 95% lives. Emails have been flying about locally on this issue and clearly the air is growing thick with unhappiness.

Development rarely draws a lot of ‘Hurrahs!’ from local residents anywhere but, in the case of Point Roberts, everyone who lives here is a local resident with respect to any development that is planned. This development—unlike anything here on the Point--will, of course, be made possible by those recently discovered water connections (see July 30, 2008 post, below, ‘Mistake Were Made’). It’s not a done deal, of course. We are in a pretty bad time for selling a hundred high-end houses in a gated community inside another gated community and where access to the ROTUS is difficult at most times. It’s going to be a hard selling campaign: I mean it’s a Beach Club, but they’re high on the bluffs, way above the water: it’s more of an ‘Ocean View Club,’ at best. Nor will they be docking their boats at the bottom and thus never having to deal with the border for ingress and egress.

I don’t think it’s a project I’d be willing to invest in, but if nothing else, the past five or ten years have shown us that people are willing to sign bizarre pieces of paper if, thereby, they think they’re going to make money. The storm approaches.

Good Manners

This past week, we have crossed the border in the not-Nexus lane a number of times because of having children and grandchildren visiting who don’t have Nexus cards. What that means in practice is that you have to go through the lanes with lines. We have them fly into Vancouver rather than Seattle because that eliminates having to go through the extremely long lines at the main border crossing. (It is in this that I most experience knowing how the actual rich live: when you pay more just to avoid some inconvenience that irritates you but isn’t of any real importance. Specifically, a plane fare to Vancouver is maybe $100 more than to Seattle, and I’m willing to pay the $100 extra (or, apparently, have others pay it) to avoid having to sit in that long border lane. I don’t find this particularly admirable in me, but at least I am aware of what I am doing, which is the only consolation I get out of it other than, of course, not having to sit in that long line.)

In any case, we have gotten to spend more time in the border lines than usual and, happily, the border agents in each of these interchanges have been notably pleasant and non-intrusive. They have asked reasonable questions and have said things like, ‘thanks,’ and ‘have a good day.’ It is amazing what a difference that kind of thing makes to the person who lacks power in the exchange. I'm not thinking about inviting them home to dinner, but I'm also not thinking that they are planning to cause me harm.

It does seem to me that the government ought to figure out where citizens have the most contact with the government and then make absolutely sure that, at those frequent contact points, good feelings, civility, manners—all that kind of stuff—are emphasized. Even when the interchange is not what one might want or have expected, it need not be done punitively. That probably isn’t going to be a useful plan in the prison system, say, but at the border, at the Department of Motor Vehicles, at the Post Office: civility is critical. They like to call it professionalism, but my grandmother would say good manners.

Swing Time

For the past several days, we’ve been learning West Coast Swing dancing, compliments of the 18-year-old. She’s off to Berkeley shortly where she is hoping to really learn how to do it and to find someone to really dance with. But in the meantime, there’s Ed and me. And there’s YouTube. She calls up some videos showing people doing it. Then she calls up some instruction videos, same source. And we watch intently on our fairly big, flat screen monitor. It’s 1, 2, 3 4, 5&6. Or something like that.

We try singly, then partner up, then back to singles. And we sort of get it. And then we lose it. We give up on the YouTube videos and try to find some music in our own CD collection, since the YouTube videos are fairly short in length. Maybe Abba? No, too, too, too fast. Maybe Manhattan Transfer? Should work but doesn’t. Maybe I’ll just sing ‘42nd Street’? No one waxes enthusiastic about that attempt. It turns out that we have only singing music, and no dancing music in our CD collection.

Finally, we borrow a Fred Astaire CD from a quilting friend and we discover that ‘Swonderful’ works perfectly. Eventually, near exhaustion, I go to bed, only to find myself lying there, moving my feet in that 1,2,3 and 4,5&6 pattern. Do I have the triplet right? If I do, why am I ending up on my right foot, which I need for the next 1? Can’t sleep, can’t dance.

I’ve never been much of a dancer. My older brother taught me to jitterbug in the early 50’s, but I was never sure he knew how to do it, so didn’t trust that I was actually learning anything useful. When I was in high school, maybe 14 or 15, I went to an LDS Stake House dance and danced with an 18-year-old who obligingly told me I was a terrible dancer and didn’t follow. That probably sealed my doom.

The sixties worked pretty well for me because during that time we just gave up on the idea of partners who do the same thing but in reverse. I can move my feet to the music; I can keep the time and even feel it as I move. But I don’t get the idea that we all have to be doing the same thing at the same time. I like doing my own steps, my own way. Which may be true in more ways than dancing.

Nevertheless, there we are, dancing to YouTube, learning the steps that I will sooner or later refuse to follow. Ed and I and the granddaughter are all in giggles by the time the first evening of dance lessons is over. Ed and I couldn’t be more pleased to be doing this with her, couldn’t be more surprised to be doing this at all. We tend to think about what we can do for the grandchildren, and here is a grandchild doing something for us, instead. Even if I never do West Coast Swing dancing again, we’ll always have this week in August. Which is at least as good as always having Paris.

Sedentary Art

Today, B.C. Day, marks the 150th anniversary of British Columbia. Considerable fireworks last night, followed by a very hot day that provided much beach celebration. Also, this is the Monday of the Art Meander (previously called the Art Walk, but people got a lot slower, I guess). Last year, it was organized by one of the local glass workers (there are a higher percentage of artists in Point Roberts than in most places, I suspect). This year, the glass worker who did such a good job of publicity and enthusiasm generating was elsewhere, so this year’s Meander seemed to have a smaller turnout. Could this possibly be caused by global warming? Or election fatigue? Or the fact that the temperature in mild P.R. was about 85 degrees?

The Point Roberts Quilters--a hardy group of about 11--take part in this escapade. The idea is that the local artists/artisans set up shop somewhere (in their own studios or in available public spaces) and do their thing while the local non-artists/artisans walk around and look at what the artists do. It’s a kind of artist/artisan zoo experience. But, it has the added feature of allowing the spectators to do some art zoo things themselves. So each place has some activity that kids and adults can participate in. Down at the Maple Studio, people were painting rocks in aboriginal dot painting formats; at The Blue Heron, they made artists’ trading cards, which can be traded at a later date. The quilters provided lots of fabric and lots of scissors and glues so that people could do fabric collage.

It surprises me how enthusiastic people get about doing this kind of thing. It is as if no one but the artists/artisans were allowed to have paints or markers or glue or fabric scraps. Of course, the explanation is that few people think to include in their schedule that kind of laid-back activity, and many adults would be hesitant to put themselves in that position because, as they are always telling me at shows and exhibits: ‘You’re so creative; I’m not like that at all.’ I always want to pummel them with timbits when they say that. Because it’s all untrue. Creativity is largely a matter of focus and on having a problem. You find a problem (or a problem finds you), you focus on it, you find a solution that wasn’t in your mind before. That’s creativity.

Sometimes the problem is ‘How can I pay my kid’s college tuition?’ Sometimes, it’s ‘What can we have for dinner tonight that I haven’t cooked ninety times already?’ And sometimes the question is ‘How can I make a really leafy-looking tree using this green fabric that’s in my hand?’ The willingness to focus on the problem and think up an answer is all creativity. If you are lucky, somebody else gets to see and to appreciate the results of your creativity. And having our quilts at the Art Meander is one of those lucky parts.

We quilters set up shop with 20 or 30 quilts around and the quilters themselves working on projects. I took my 11-year-old granddaughter and taught her how to make crazy quilt squares: she was my project. And people came by to look and to talk with us.

Some people looked quickly at the quilts and moved on and out as if they had just checked us off some list. Others looked long and if they did, one of us would go over to them and tell them something about the piece they were looking at. They have terrific questions, reminding me how little people know about the process of quilting. Everyone knows the objects, but that knowledge is pretty much limited to straightforward traditional bed quilts. It’s fun to see their eyes opened to things beyond that, and I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to talk with them this afternoon, as we meandered around the room together while the art stayed very, very still.

CDR from the CBP

Customs and Border Protection, the sterling office of Homeland Security keeping us safe and/or keeping us irritated, announced recently its new program to improve ‘professionalism’ of staff. According to the public information officer down at the Blaine crossing (Peace Arch), the CBP (what do you think that acronym really stands for?) is ‘in the middle of a reinvigorated professionalism training process.’ No more discount charm school consultants, I’d guess. They’re making promises of all sorts, including to treat us all ‘with courtesy, dignity and respect.’ I wonder whether that means I can have my middle name back or whether ‘courtesy, dignity and respect’ is provided only as a last resort, which is to say after all else has failed.

You can see that I’m still pretty irritated about having my real middle name (my maiden name) lopped off by a border agent because his view of the law is that my birth-certificate middle name is ‘my legal middle name.’ No sign that he was a lawyer, so perhaps I should be filing a citizen’s complaint against border agent Sean for practicing law without a license.

Well, I wish them well in their professionalism quest, but I’ve seen these aspirations before with real professionals. That is to say, doctors, lawyers, and teachers. And I was never very impressed with their level of achievement, so it seems unlikely that the CBP would do any better, given that they don’t even have the hallmarks of professionalism (self-regulation, codes of ethics, etc.).

But the effort at Peace Arch may need to be transferred to some other border stations, anyway. To see how it’s going on the border crossing north of Detroit, go here. Yikes! A dramatic increase in potential for losing our Nexus cards, I’d say. Here is a link to the news that the CBP has been given new powers to seize things of ours. I don't know what happened to things like reasonable cause for search and all that. Part of the Constitution we didn't need?

Which reminds me, have I confirmed with CBP that I haven’t moved anywhere? No, I haven’t. But a friend who checked with the Nexus people down at Peace Arch reported to me that those CBP were of the opinion that we didn’t have to confirm that our address was the same; rather, we had to tell them if our address was NOT the same. So, exactly why did the CBP hand out all those flyers telling us otherwise? More courtesy, dignity, and respect, I guess. CDR from the CBP; or something.

Celebration of a Sort

This weekend is Point Roberts’ traditional International Arts and Music Festival, a phenomenon that is organized by three or four people in the community every year. It can only be a phenomenal amount of work to get a couple of dozen vendors, food sellers, and musical groups to come down here or up here, as the case may be, and do their thing, such as it is, to the limited audience of Point Roberts.

We went over to Lighthouse Park, the park with no lighthouse, this afternoon to watch a couple of groups, including a sorority of belly dancers, and to see what food and craft were on offer. Lighthouse Park normally is a series of small buildings and boardwalks on the beach that house, most memorably, an Orca Center. But today, there were tents and sound systems and a filled parking lot in addition. And a respectable crowd of visitors, but not an overwhelming one.

The grandchildren, who come from bigger places than this, were underwhelmed, but one takes what one can get here if you, as taker, are a resident. For anyone to come here from outside to work, whether selling hammocks or a group’s latest CD, requires that anyone to cross the border at least once and, in the case of U.S. residents, twice on their way up, and to do it again on their way back down (or up, depending upon which way they are going). And to do it in the heart of summer when the lines at the border are at their very longest. And no going in the fast Nexus lane because you can’t be in the Nexus lane and have items related to your work. That is, no business materials. And if you are Canadian, I am not at all sure how you come down here to sell your goods or your time (if you are a performer), but I would bet a lot that it involves more than just mentioning to the border guards that ‘you’ve got a gig in Point Roberts.’

So it amazes me that the organizers can get anyone at all to make the effort to entertain us at such an event. But it is probably the case that those who are willing to make the effort didn’t have a significantly better offer. Nonetheless, we appreciate the effort. Like the Fourth of July parade this year, better this festival than no festival.

I walked by one lady who was watching the belly dancers cavort while herself knitting a tweed wool sweater. Dozens of little girls crowded the boardwalk stage to take digital pictures of the belly dancers. What will they do with those pictures? A ton of shaved ice, at least, made its way down the gullets of young and old alike, festooned with syrups of colors that don’t even vaguely resemble anything seen in nature. It is hard to imagine exactly what we were celebrating, but perhaps just a sunny day in August.

Summer at the Cottage

August brings the flood of family and friends for those who live in Point Roberts and all the other resort communities around. Houses slightly too small for the number suddenly accommodated; tight quarters at the dinner table, not quite enough beds, and an endless amount of dishes constantly gathering up in the sink. Grandchildren who are amazingly bigger and older than they were when last seen. Hard to know why this is so amazing, but somehow it always is. Surely we don’t expect them to grow smaller or even stay the same? I think it is more that they are so amazingly themselves at, say, ten, we can’t quite imagine they will give all that up to become some other amazingly themself person of eleven.

And then they get to be old enough to be one of the grownups, or at least almost one. A near 18-year-old grandchild seems to be thinking about whether she’ll ever be considered an adult, while all the grownups are thinking about how very adult she suddenly has become. Point Roberts is full of people who have been coming here for summers all their lives and their parents and even grandparents share that history. Thus, it seems that summers are particularly the time where you are aware of all that family history, of who they were and who they are becoming and who they indeed have solidly become. I’m not particularly interested in genealogy or in nostalgia, but both begin to fight for room in my field of attention on these occasions.

I find myself glancing at a grown daughter and suddenly noticing for the first time ever that she looks, from the side, rather like my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, a woman who has been dead for 15 years and whom I have not seen for 45 years. Her image is there inside my brain though because we spent summer vacations at her house in southern California for a few years after the war. A grandchild, we all suddenly notice, looks surprisingly like an older cousin, whom we never before thought she looked like. When did this happen? Is it something new or had we been unobservant before? It is all that history of summer vacations rattling around inside our heads, I think, mixing up our memories, comparing and reassessing our memories.

Today, we went to Maple Beach at low tide on a cloudy and occasionally rainy day, and, as time passed, we found ourselves in more water than I had expected, resulting in soaked shoes and socks and my long pants rolled up above my knees to stay dry. Walking back through eel-grass filled deep water, I was surprised at how strong the tide was, moving me along. But that’s how this week feels: the tide coming in strong and much more quickly than I had expected.