Geography Lesson

Another thing that you are likely to know little about if you move—even part-time--to another country later in life is geography. Before I came here, I knew that Canada had provinces, not states, but I couldn’t have named them all. Indeed, only yesterday while trying to name them all, I could not find New Brunswick located in my mental files anywhere. Wasn’t that I had forgotten it: it just wasn’t there. And you are also, unless you have traveled extensively in the country before you move there—which I hadn’t— unlikely to know much about how its parts are located relative to one another.

When I was in the sixth grade in Idaho, I distinctly recall learning that Canada’s plains states (what did we know about prairie states?) were Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba, and I was encouraged to remember them with the mnemonic device SAM. As a result, I always think that the province next to B.C. is Saskatchewan. I still can’t name one large city in Saskatchewan other than Saskatoon. It astounds me to think that Manitoba has polar bears (at Churchill) or that B.C., so far away from Massachusetts, is a big cranberry growing area. My ignorance about the geography of Canada is so extreme that it doesn’t surprise me that they don’t want to let me live here full-time.

I was bewailing this lack of knowledge the other day to Ed, who reminded me that Americans don’t know that much about their own geography, so maybe it's just a general problem either for everyone or at least for Americans. It is true that if, as an evening’s party entertainment, you give your (American) guests a sheet of typing paper (computer paper, I mean), have them turn it landscape direction (as opposed to portrait), and ask them to roughly draw in the 48 connected states that are south of Canada and north of Mexico, the results are unlikely to be all that impressive. In my experience of doing this, people tend to know the part of the country they’re from or that they’ve lived in, but become pretty vague at best (hopelessly lost at worst), about most other parts.

A simpler version of this is to draw a vertical line somewhere toward the middle of the paper, call it the Mississippi, and get the states on each side of the river from north to south, in order. Here’s a hint: it’s Minnesota at the top and Louisiana and Mississippi at the bottom. Fortunately, I had a daughter, a daughter-in-law, and a son-in-law in school at the University of Minnesota so I got to see the Mississippi right there, with my own eyes. Something of a surprise there, too.

Well, this may all just be that kind of foolish, book knowledge, knowledge about words (or places, in this case) that the elites value but that real people don’t care much about. Why does it matter if you don’t know where to put Delaware on the map if you aren’t going there? Why does it matter if I can’t even remember that New Brunswick is one of the provinces of Canada? It’s a province, whether I know it or not. I think I just feel more settled in my mind if I can explain something about where I am and what’s around me. I feel more like I'm entitled to be there. Not only that, but if Delaware or New Brunswick ever become an issue, I’ll at least know where (or that) they are. What if, say, Sarah Palin had been from New Brunswick? Or even Delaware? I'd know whether or not she could see Russia. Or Maine. Or Washington, D.C.

Thanks, Here and There

Last week was Canada’s Thanksgiving; next month is the U.S. Thanksgiving. Same holiday, different countries? If so, why six weeks apart? Perhaps it is the case that whatever country you are born/raised in, that country’s customs, holidays, ways of being are incorporated as originals with every other country being considered somewhat derivative. Or perhaps U.S. citizens are particularly prone to this me-first-ism. Either explanation seems viable to me. In any case, when I moved to the Northwest and began to move back and forth between Canada and the U.S., I just assumed that the Canadians must have picked up Thanksgiving from us, but had decided to move it to a different time to differentiate their experience of it from ours. The different date, however, constantly eludes me. I can never remember exactly which month it is in (September? October?) or when in the month it occurs. It’s not at the end of November is all I know.

This year, toward the end of September, our neighbors invited us to their Thanksgiving dinner and I was happy to accept the invitation, except that I somehow assumed that it would be toward the end of October and not toward the beginning of October. I mean, how can I be expected to remember not only that it isn’t in November but that it also isn’t toward the end of the month? As a result, I was left making sorry excuses and apologies when, shortly before the 13th, it came to my attention that Canadian Thanksgiving was quickly approaching and we were residing in the wrong country to be dropping over for dinner.

This kind of thing happens to me not infrequently. This results from coming to a second country late in life. You’ve already gone way past the time and place where you are supposed to learn all the important cultural knowledge and any further learning is likely to be embarrassing because you don’t actually know what you don’t know and you just stumble into it. For example, I knew that Canadians celebrate Victoria Day, and also that they celebrate Canada Day and B.C. Day. I understood that Canada Day was sort of like the U.S. July 4th. But we don’t have anything like B.C. Day, so there was no parallel for it or Victoria Day. However, I jumped to the conclusion that because B.C. Day was a celebration of the Province’s coming into being, Victoria Day must be a celebration of the Province’s Capital’s (Victoria) coming into being. I couldn’t have been more surprised to discover that it was about Queen Victoria’s birthday. I imagine every B.C. schoolchild knows that, but I wasn’t here at the right time to learn it.

Month in, month out, I find myself astonished to find yet something else I have been confused about. It’s a humbling experience when repeated so frequently. And as for Thanksgiving? Well, the first Canadian Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1578 by English explorer Martin Frobisher, whereas the Pilgrims weren’t even thinking about getting to the New World at that time, let alone making friends with Squanto and the fish and corn thing and all that; not until 1620 could they put in their claim. So the Canadians didn’t exactly ‘get it from us.’ The U.S. government frequently declared ‘Days of Thanksgiving’ and individual states also did this periodically, but it wasn’t until 1863 that Thanksgiving, the last Thursday in November, became a statutory holiday for all states.

Canada, too, had Thanksgiving Days periodically declared for many years, but after World War I, Canada amalgamated Armistice Day and Thanksgiving, only separating them in 1931. Not until 1957, however, was Thanksgiving moved to the 2nd Monday in October. Interestingly, it is not a statutory holiday in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. If I had lived here all my life, I’d probably know all that without having to look it up. Without engaging in research, however, I can say with absolute confidence that we both do turkey and football for Thanksgiving.

Economic Development

This is the land exit from Point Roberts, the Canadian border crossing you go through to the rest of everything. Not much of a line-up on this day. Past this little building that looks like a strip mall start-up, lies all of Vancouver--greater metro and city center--and, with a hard right turn, the ROTUS (rest of the U.S.). Point Roberts is not about shopping; it may be the only place in America that is not about shopping, so it may be worthy of your attention on that ground alone. Here’s the total shopping possibility: grocery store (1), hardware store (1), liquor store (1), gasoline stations (5), arts/crafts gift stores (2), plant nursery (1), very small liquidation store (1), 2 bars, 3 small eating places, and a ship’s chandlery at the marina. That’s it, I think. You won’t starve or be deprived of an evening’s scotch and soda, or be unable to hang your curtains, or honor someone’s birthday or drive yet another mile. On the other hand, it’s not much of a basis for an economy.

Some of the locals worry a great deal about the lack of an economy and therefore regularly talk about economic development and how the Point really needs a lot more of it. Recently, someone was talking about how great it would be to have a row of shops on Gulf Drive, little antique-y stores and the like. Such shops, they imply, would result in an economy because we’d have more Canadians, especially, spending more money down here, and thus the Point will have more ‘good jobs,’ as the politicians say, although retail clerking is not famously one of those lines of work that I’d describe as a good job. When they start walking (and talking) down this road, I always think of George the President telling us, after 9/11, to go out and buy things, eat at a nice restaurant, go to a Broadway play. Maybe we could move Broadway to Point Roberts? There’s room, still--next to Lily Point. And parking is just not a problem.

My preferred plan is to make Point Roberts Washington’s first wireless community, although I have no particular idea about how that would result in economic development. Alternatively, maybe it would be a good economic development plan to ensure that everybody in Point Roberts has a visual skill that could be paraded for the Canadian tourists (sort of like Williamsburg, Virginia, but without the costumes, although costumes wouldn’t hurt: we could all dress like Icelandic farmers in 1908). On the weekends, all the people with horses could drive small carts along the road; all the quilters could quilt in their front yards; maybe I’ll dye wool in a big, steaming vat; somebody could operate an apple press to make good use of the Point’s multitudinous orphan apples; a forge in someone’s front yard with small ironwork pieces being constructed for home and garden; dozens of people could make jewelry; others could chop firewood into kindling; free-range chickens could wander around; children could ride bicycles! Everyone could participate; everyone knows how to do something. Such a lot of fun. At least once, but then we might grow tired of being on display. And once probably won’t work for economic development.

Tsawwassen (the small Canadian town immediately over the border, which Point Roberts would look just like if it ever got developed) was once described (unkindly, ungraciously, ungenerously) by the National Geographic as ‘strip mall hell.’ That’s economic development you can believe in, my friends.

Well, if not Williamsburg, what else? What have we got here? Ocean, sky, big trees, beaches, four parks (!), a lot of undeveloped land (still!), and a sort of temperate climate. Instead of selling things at all those places, maybe we could just invite folks up (or down) and charge them for a rest cure. For shopping? Well, there’s always Vancouver and ROTUS and the internet.

You Can Keep Your Shoes On

A bad border experience yesterday, after several months of good ones, so I guess the border people haven’t entirely internalized their new polite professionalism. In this case, the Nexus agent didn’t like how the Nexus card was being held to the card reader: ‘ Up!’ he ordered,’Get it up here!’ He sounded like a guy who was having a very bad day and didn’t want to be further irritated by the mortals passing by. I can imagine feeling that way myself, but of course I’m not in his line of work. He continued to be irritated by the fact that the car’s driver had nothing to report in the way of goods being brought into the U.S. He was not impressed with the news that we were coming from Point Roberts to the rest of the U.S. A little more surliness and he deigned to let us through. Then, he called out, still in full surly: ‘You got a problem with anything I just said to you?'

Well, what are you going to say to that? ‘No, sir,’ seemed about right. He’s got all the power here and the traveler has none, so it’s unwise, at that point, to be discussing one’s assessment of his professionalism. Especially when, only the day before, a friend told me she had just been turned down for a Nexus card for no reason. This is her second go round. She had a Nexus card for five years and when it came time to renew it, the terrorist chasers said, ‘No.’ When she asked, ‘Why?’, they answered, “Not going to say, but you can reapply if you’d like and, by the way, send us another $50.’ (It sounds a little like a shake-down, no?) She thought about it for awhile—over the summer when the lines are their worst--and decided to try again since it really is inconvenient, to say the least, to live here without being able to avoid the border line-ups. They just refused her again, on the grounds that she is, according to their letter, “not eligible for the Nexus Program.’

What could that mean? The legal requirements are that you must be a U.S. or Canadian citizen/legal resident and have lived in the country for the last three years; not have a criminal conviction; and not have a previous border violation. She’s okay on all those things. The last eligibility ”requirement” is that one not have given false information on one’s application. So, if they think your name is Sam and you are pretty sure your name is Robert, then you are giving them false information if you say your name is Robert. Catch 22 is what that is called, I believe. And they won’t tell you any more than that they refused you because they refused you.

(Actually, there is one more eligibility requirement that is right beyond Catch 22--maybe 22 through 1,000: you are not eligible for Nexus if you "fail to meet other requirements of NEXUS." It does not specify what these other requirements might be, so it is certainly possible that my friend failed to meet them, as it is possible that any of us might fail to meet them, since they are not specified and I suppose they can just make them up on the spur of the moment.)

So, it’s no good to go arguing with them too much right there at the border if you don’t have a lawyer on retainer and in your car, is my view. Thinking back about their position on plants that might have dirt on them coming into the Point without special certification: well, I suppose we should be grateful that they don’t also make us take our shoes off and leave them at the border.

Community Blooms

Point Roberts has a high proportion of retirees, and what are you supposed to do when you retire? Garden. So there’s a lot of gardening that goes on here. Gardening, of course, involves border problems. When we first moved here, you could bring annuals but not perennials across the border with no questions asked. That was good, because for the most part the border people (who are, of course, not retired) don’t know the difference between an annual and a perennial or didn’t care to discuss it anyway.

But time passed and they decided that horticultural terrorists were coming in on those annual roots, in that annual dirt, so they presented us with a new dictum saying that plants with roots can’t come across the border but plants without roots (i.e., cut flowers), can. You can always buy stuff at a Canadian nursery and pay extra to get a certificate of hygiene to accompany your rooted plant, but every plant must have its own certificate and every certificate comes at a price unless you are buying a lot of rooted plants at once, in which case a nearby Canadian plant nursery will offer you a deal on all the certificates.

In principle, you could bring your plants from the rest of Washington straight through if you didn’t get out of your car in Canada, but that is a principle I don’t care to test while travelling with plants in any quantity or with my Nexus card. So, I’m not much for importing plants from anywhere. Fortunately, we do have a small nursery here on the Point to serve the needs of the retired gardeners. And that’s a good thing.

The gardeners have also gotten themselves together into a garden club and each year they put on a garden tour and tea which is a fine summer event. But last year, they went beyond that, moving out from their own particular gardens and onto the easements of the main road. Working with the County, they started with a pair of raised areas on the corner of Tyee and Benson, which areas were planted with fancy grasses and accoutered with driftwood and rock. Then last October, they expanded all the way down the road to the International Market, on both sides of Tyee with multiple raised beds—more appropriately called dirt berms, I think—which held daffodil bulbs and then daffodils this past spring. It was a splendid show (‘ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance’). There must be 12 or more of these berms on each side of the street, several dozen daffodils in each for our visual pleasure. Then came summer and the daffs went away, only to be replaced by billows of California poppies. And now for the early fall, we have towering pink cosmos. It’s a great sight and a much appreciated contribution to our lives.

Unfortunately, the corner with the fancy grasses is currently over-stocked with political signs. I’m all for free speech and all that, but those signs do seem something of an aesthetic blight in our public garden. Or maybe I’ve just been too long at the election fair.

Blindness

I never lived around moles before; i.e., the kind that dig under ground. Idaho, Massachusetts, upstate New York, Los Angeles: no moles in my lawn. Here in the Northwest, however, we have moles. Most mornings, when I awaken and go out to survey my queendom, I find here and there a small pyramidal cone of dug up dirt here and there, in the lawn and in the flowerbeds, and I say ‘Hi!’ to whatever passing moles the evening has brought me. It’s not like gophers, who eat things from underground: bulbs and the like. As far as I can tell, the mole doesn’t do anything more to me than leave this small pile of soil. Usually, I just smooth it back down with my foot. The mole doesn’t need it any longer; I don’t need it; my foot is plenty adequate for the job.

However, however, however. This approach to moles seems not to be universal up here. I have neighbors who regularly talk to me about their various methods of killing moles. Poison gas into the underground tunnels seems to be a favorite. I am just stunned by this kind of hostility to an animal that is only somewhat bigger than a spider. People are often hysterical about spiders, I know. It seems to be some kind of atavistic fear. I’ve seen families where, virtually from birth, one kid will be terrified of spiders, anxious to kill them, and one or two others have no feelings about spiders at all. It’s as if it comes with the genes of some kids/people.

But I don’t think that’s so true of moles. People aren’t afraid of them, aren’t startled by them and thus quick to strike back. Moles are not in any circumstance some kind of threat. When I ask what the problem is, the mole hunters point to these little piles of dirt. ‘I don’t like that,’ they say. ‘Oh, well,’ I want to say. “Ten thousand things in this world I don’t like, but does that justify killing a sentient being?’ But I don’t say it. I press them, though to no avail. ‘I just don’t like them,’ is the bottom line.

We were visiting an acquaintance this past week who is in the mole-killing business in a big way. Not that he has a lot of moles but that he devotes a lot of his time to making sure he has no moles. While there, we were invited to walk around the property and, among other things, investigate his newest mole traps which kill by concussion. And indeed, there in one of the traps was a dead mole. I’d never actually seen one up close. Amazingly big paws/hands for his overall size.

Actually, much tinier bodies than I would have thought. Hard to imagine going through lots of those creatures to make moleskin hats and gloves. And his eyes? Blind, moles are said to be. It suddenly occurred to me that they might not actually have eyes. When we think of people being blind, it is not because they don’t have eyes; they have eyes that have lost their ability to see. But moles probably don’t actually have eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to poke at his limp little body to investigate this question. There seemed enough blindness in that moment to embrace everyone.

(From Wikipedia: "The eyes of moles and of some burrowing rodents are rudimentary in size, and in some cases are quite covered by skin and fur. This state of the eyes is probably due to gradual reduction from disuse, but aided perhaps by natural selection.)

Trading or Taxing? Huh?

Tomorrow, the Canadians are off to the polls to elect a new national government. The Globe and Mail referred to the campaign as ‘ugly and occasionally brutish’ and, I might add, blissfully short.

All the Canadians I’ve recently talked to have described their national election as boring, in contrast to the U.S. campaign. We’ve not discussed the ugly and brutish part which the U.S. has surely shared, but Canadians seem to think the Canadian campaign wasn’t about much of anything. The people I meet have not seemed to be enthusiastic about Stephen Harper (the Conservative candidate and current Prime Minister with a minority government and likely to get another one when the counting is done tomorrow). On the other hand, they don’t demonstrate much enthusiasm for any of the other four parties, either, or at least not in any noticeable way.

The Liberals are the likely alternative, but there’s also the NDP (socialist, sort of—well, if ‘we’re all socialists now,' perhaps the NDP will do better than expected, thanks to the financial melt) and the Greens and the Separatists who have no constituency in B.C.

One of the most interesting things to me about the Canadian campaign is that the Liberals favor a carbon tax while the Conservatives are cap-and-trade supporters. This is all about global warming and refers to the Kyoto treaty, which Canada signed but the U.S. backed out of. And, as an issue, it's one that the Americans also ought to be concerned about: global warming means all of us, just like global financial meltdown meant all of us. However, I doubt if one in fifty Americans could tell you anything about either choice. And if the Canadians find this all that boring, maybe they’re no better informed than we are. Sobering thought.

Well, once we all finish mastering the intricacies of the financial system, we can move on to learning climatology, oceanography, planetary science generally, and ecology, of course. I can hardly wait.