Very Crafty

Today was the Christmas Craft Fair, brought to us here on the Point by a group of extraordinarily hard-working volunteers. I went over this morning early while the people were setting up in order to drop off some donations (quilt stuff) for the raffle, and it was not clear whether these tireless organizers were seeking sainthood or martyrdom (or perhaps were just garden-variety masochists), given the difficulties of getting lots of people organized once a year for a complex but short event in a confined space. The Point Roberts’ Food Bank, which is the financial beneficiary of their work, surely thanks them in any case.

Seeing an event like this when it is empty of attendees and just about half put together by the participants is an interesting kind of sight. For me, it is actually possible to see it at this point, because when every thing is in place and the rooms in the Community Center are filled with sellers, buyers, and great quantities of goods, I am so overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and movements that I retire to the corners and close my eyes. But this morning, it was just about right: all sparkles and not too much sound or motion. The sparkles, of course, are because it is a Christmas event. For Easter, e.g., you wouldn’t get near so many sparkly things. Maybe that’s because Christmas and the Solstice are sister events. Easter, more related to the equinox, is a less sparkly kind of event.

I went back in the afternoon, when the sights, sounds, and motions were at a pretty maximal level, and did not manage to stay long, though I did manage to buy some sweet treats from three pre-teens who had a table full of home-baked goods. There were beautiful jewels, garden ornaments, knit and crocheted goods, plants, scented bottles, soaps, and candles, Christmas goods and ornaments, lovely objects d’arts—and especially the painted gourds--and more than a few food tables that weren’t going to make a big contribution to that ‘heart healthy diet’ so much not-discussed at this time of year. I also bought a little bag of scrumptious candied orange-peel made by a woman who lives down the block and around the corner. In addition, you could buy a fine-smelling lunch to keep up your energy during the event. The parking lot of the Community Center was full, fuller than I’ve ever seen it, and I ran into lots of people I know. All-in-all, it appeared a very successful event. It’s the first of the Christmas craft fairs I’ve been to this year, and the first is, of course, always the best.

There were something like 32 different tables, most of which were personned by people from Point Roberts. We do a lot of things here by hand; there is a lot of interest in art; and we are a community concerned about being a community. It is doubtless that which leads to our complex blend of communitarian impulses and libertarian orientation. We reach out to one another, we pull back into ourselves. Today we had on display the best fruits of both tendencies.

Big World

We went out to the big world tonight. Point Roberts is thirty minutes from Vancouver Airport, thirty minutes from Richmond with all the malls that Vancouver’s Hong Kongese immigrants could ever want or imagine, and thirty minutes from Steveston’s Silver City, an 18 or so screen movie complex. Also, we are 45 minutes away from Bellingham’s world of shopping and medical care. Thus, we can talk about our isolation, and we are isolated down here, but an end to all that is very nearby if one chooses to go there.

I am occasionally chastised by friends and acquaintances who feel or perhaps even think that ‘I don’t get out enough.’ But, I think I get out just about enough. Somehow, traipsing back and forth between two countries seems quite a bit of ‘out” to me, even though Roberts Creek and Point Roberts share the same sense of isolation. But today, we did make it to the world of art and culture because we made the thirty-minute drive to the Richmond Art Gallery (The RAG). We were there to participate in the big trading night following the one month exhibit of artist trading cards from all over the U.S. and Canada.




I’ve described ATC’s here, but in brief, they are like baseball trading cards in size (2.5"x3.5") but instead of cards picturing guys with chewing tobacco, they are each a little bit of handmade art. They can be in any conceivable medium—oil or acrylic paint, collage, pencil, crayon, watercolor, fabric (not so common), metal (even less common), toothpicks (very rare); and they are traded not sold. The RAG has an open exhibit each year: you send them nine cards in a regular trading card sleeve, and they put everything they get up in an exhibit. It is wonderfully interesting to see hundreds—actually thousands--of these cards, each one different, each one worth looking at for a bit. But of course, you can’t look at them each for very long or you won’t make it very far into the exhibit and your brain will close down from sensory/response overload.

Nevertheless, some of the cards are particularly noteworthy. At the end of the show (which was tonight), everyone who exhibited cards offers the cards up for trade. Even if you aren’t from nearby, you can have someone at the gallery do the trading for you. Last year, I didn’t make it to the trade, but this year I did. My cards (one of the themes, this year, was 'Life As Art’) had a series of fabric elephants who wore their art on their sizable sides.

We arrived just as the trade was about to start. There were maybe 30 people trading their own cards, plus the many cards from the show that were being traded but not personally because the people who made them were from far away. The trading is always a little intimidating. You have to walk up to people and thrust your cards out and while they peruse them, you say, ‘Want to trade with me?’ Everyone always says YES, but there’s always the feeling that someone won’t and I just don’t know quite how I’m going to respond to that if it happens. Probably, I’ll just say OK, and move on, but still.

Tonight, most of the traders were adults, but there were a number of kids with terrific cards. One card I came home with was a brush painting of mandarin oranges, done by a 12 year-old Chinese-Canadian. The kids’ work at every trade I’ve ever been to is the freshest, the most spontaneous, often the best, if not the most technically skilled work there. Another card I brought home is a lovely little painting of a woman holding a cat. That was particularly pleasing not only because it was beautifully executed but because it was made by a woman who lives in a small town in Missouri, right next to the small town in Missouri where my younger daughter lives. I’d been to the cat-painter’s home town, in fact. I’ll probably email her to thank her. Most of the artists include their email addresses and home towns on the back of the cards, along with their names.

People were trading not only their exhibit cards but also other cards that they had brought, so I came home with 24 new cards. Not only that: I got to see the two other exhibits at the gallery. A veritable banquet of art and culture, enough to last me for awhile. Thanks to all the traders and to the very idea of ATC’s itself!

Sign of the Times?

This is the colorful, attractively-designed sign at the border station coming into Point Roberts. We all see it every time we cross that border, which is thousands of trips (cumulatively) per month. In fact, last month, the border crossing figures into Point Roberts were thus (with the October, 2007 comparison figures in parentheses):

Total Vehicles: 56,980 (58,673); Nexus Vehicles: 29,932 (16,299). The Nexus lane vehicles are a part of the ‘Total Vehicle’ numbers, but obviously there’s been a very big increase in Nexus lane crossings, even though overall crossing numbers have gone down slightly.

Now, back to that sign. At the border crossing there are, I believe, four lanes. The Nexus lane is #3; the sign in the picture is on the far side of lane #4. Which is to say that it is more visible from the Nexus lane than from the first two standard lanes. So those almost 30,000 vehicles that pass close by the sign every month have a very good view of it. Despite this fact and despite the fact that people in Point Roberts discuss the border on all social and business occasions, I have never heard anyone inquire or question or comment on this sign. At no time has anyone, to my knowledge, mentioned the parrot.

The sign orders us to declare fruits, vegetables, plants, and meats. It shows us, as examples of those categories, a tomato (perhaps), an orange/lemon/grapefruit, a philodendron, a ham, frankfurters/cocktail sausages, …..and a parrot. Surely not a fruit, a vegetable, or a plant. Surely not, well, …..I mean, What about the parrot?

Information and Freedom

‘Is it possible to blog for years about Point Roberts?’ my daughter inquires, and then answers the question herself: ‘I guess so. After all, while the rest of us will always have Paris, you will always have the border.’

Alas, she is probably right. I met a fellow recently who had experienced the border people’s refusal to renew his Nexus card, the card that gets you through the border with some speed. The point of such a card, for those of us who cross the border frequently, is that since you have do it all the time, you ought not to have to wait for hours each time while they decide, each time anew, whether you are a decent person. With Nexus, you pay them some money, they check you out, you get a card with your picture on it, and then you can go through the fast lane. You still have to declare goods, there are a whole set of rules you must master in order to use the card, and you still are subject to random searches. It’s just that most of the time, it’s a quick experience. They look at you, they look at your card with its picture of you on their computer, they see that it’s okay, you tell them what you need to, and they send you along. Good process, good idea.

The Nexus program thinks of this all somewhat differently, though. They refer to it as ‘The Trusted Traveler Program,’ so in some unclear way it depends upon whether they trust you. Having a card doesn't mean they trust you. At least that appears to be their view. Thus, the border people had refused this guy’s renewal on the usual unknown grounds. (I run into these people regularly: people who've had renewals or initial requests denied for no reason given.) ‘No,’ they say. ‘We don’t trust you and we don’t give information to people we don’t trust. Additionally, we are not going to tell you why because we couldn’t possibly be wrong, so there’s nothing you need to say to us and nothing that we need to hear from you.’

Some people lose their Nexus cards for actual reasons: a daughter’s jacket left in the car, something in the car that the Nexus rules declare you ought not to have in a Nexus lane. We could argue about the appropriateness of these reasons, but you can’t argue about whether ‘No Reason Given’ is an adequate reason to deny you your renewal. This guy had had his renewal refused for no reason, had requested that the decision be reviewed, and after a review, they refused it again for no reason. Next, he decided to put in a Freedom of Information Act request for information the border was holding about him, presumably information that was being used to justify their refusal.

I’ve never seen a FOIA letter and when he showed the papers to me, I was pretty interested. It included a half dozen or so pages relating to individual border dealings, and almost all the information on the forms was redacted, other than the guy’s name and the bottom line that all searches, whatever their occasion (and no reason for anything is specified), were Negative. Some guy in Washington gets to go over each of these pages and black out sections and give a number for each black-out. (Now, there’s a job you wouldn’t much want to have.) The number is to tell you one of the dozen or so possible reasons for this redaction. In this particular case, every redaction seemed to be justified by the page’s naming specific border agency people or specific border protocols.

So, he concludes that Nexus has no reason to find him untrustworthy. On the other hand, it must be that somebody, somewhere else in the government, has decided he can’t be trusted. And if he can just figure out who that person is, and where that person works, then he can, I guess, make another FOIA request. There are other alternatives, of course. He can never leave the Point, can come and go only in the middle of the night when there are no lines, or he can burn up a lot of gas waiting in the long lines of the regular lanes during normal transit hours. Or he can just sit down with a nice copy of Kafka's relevant work, and get over it.

Change, Plus Change

We were at a Point Roberts party this weekend when I had a brief conversation with someone I had just met who told me that, although he now lived in Vancouver, he used to live in Point Roberts.

“What a loss,” I said, extending my sympathies, as it were.
He didn’t seem so sure although he acknowledged that “it was a nice house.”
“Where was it?” I asked.
“Down by the boondocks,” he responded.
“Well, the whole place is pretty much the boondocks,” I countered, asking for something more precise.
“No, The Boondocks,” he explained, making it clear that it was a place name, not a description.
“Where was that?” I asked.
“Down at the foot of South Beach.”
“But I live near South Beach…and there’s nothing named that there. Or at least not for the past fourteen years.”
“God! Has it been that long?” And we went on to talk about what had replaced The Boondocks, specifically a restaurant named the South Beach House, run by Max and Diane who, apparently, also ran The Boondocks.

I’ve never heard of The Boondocks. Although I’ve eaten a dozen times or more at the South Beach House, and have talked some to Max and Diane and their grown children as well, nobody has ever mentioned The Boondocks. And that’s not because it wasn’t a wonderful place, as this fellow assured me it was, but because life in Point Roberts is very transitory. People, and places, come and go. Well that’s true anyplace, of course, but here it is the more notable because there are so few people, so few places. And the places do occasionally come but mostly they seem to go. Since we’ve been here, The Breakers (a bar beloved by apparently everyone in Vancouver) has gone, as has Blackberries clothing store, the prom dress shop, The Secret Garden (tourist gifts), The Roof House Restaurant, and the Maple Beach general store. What has come includes a kind of dollar store called McFrugals, and The Big Maple Studio and Gallery which has mostly hand-made goods of various sorts, and the Café Cappana. What has come AND gone includes The White House (a thrift/recycle place), Christie’s (interior décor), the Maple Beach Restaurant, Sunflowers (another craft gallery), and Brewster’s Restaurant. So just add The Boondocks and all the other places that gave it up before I got here to that list.

Of course, there are lots of places that were here before we got here and will probably be here after we leave. Perhaps the most likely of those stayers to keep on staying is The Liberty Wine Shop, a purveyor of fine wines, a place I never even remember is here, probably because I am not a consumer of fine wines. I was reading an article in the New York Times today about some guy whose house was ‘under water’ (meaning it was now worth less than he owed on it) and he was talking about how he was holding tight right now. However, he said, there were limits: he was not about to give up his $24 bottle of Petit Surrah. Well, I just stand astounded and astonished. But that’s why The Liberty Wine Shop will probably always be here in Point Roberts.

I have less tolerance for change than I used to, of course, because I’m an old person. I think that we all have in our genes only so much ability to cope with change and by one’s 8th decade, the ability is likely to be running low. So, I’d like the places that are here to hang on for awhile in order to outlast the comings and goings of the current people, especially me. The old timers talk about Ben’s Store as if it had closed a few weeks ago, not a few decades ago and doubtless if I last another ten years, I’ll not only be talking about Brewster’s the way that fellow was talking about The Boondocks, but also talking to people who don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, la plus ca change, etc.

Keeping in Touch

So, how do we do it, when there are so few of us down here over the winter? There are lots of ways. There are events like the Christmas Craft Sale and Community Dinner. Usually those are both in late November or early December, but this year they've been separated into the Craft Sale in mid-November and the Community Dinner in January. It's a lot of work to do these two events (all volunteer efforts) and the decision was made to separate them so it wasn't so much work all at once. The Craft Fair is this Saturday and I donated a quilt to its raffle.

Then there is church every Sunday at the Lutheran Church where people check in on one another. There's the Wacky Walkers, who walk most mornings, even in the winter. The library (open on 3 days of the week) and the grocery store (open every day) are places where we see one another and find out what's up. The grocery store has a coffee bar, as well as a big bulletin board that is particularly worth attending to. Here, you can buy (or sell) a wood stove; rent (or sell) a cabin, a house, a boat, or a car; solicit baby sitting work; or advertise a concert. And most of the local groups, including the quilters, meet monthly throughout the winter. The quilters have a festive pot-luck dinner at Christmas. We had an intense discussion at last week's meeting about whether the husbands should be invited to the dinner this year. The final conclusion was they should come because they help to eat up the too-much food that we always bring and because some of them like to see the work we're doing and because some of them like to see the quilters themselves and don't very often do so. This is the kind of critical issue we are facing, now that the election is over.

The Cafe Cappana is open all winter and there is always someone there drinking coffee, eating lunch or breakfast, or using the computers. The Cappana is the kind of place that every small town has or needs. Lake Wobegon would admire it: good food, familiar staff, local, in every good sense of the word. There is nothing about the Cafe that feels processed or chain-store-like. And you can read the newspapers there, too.

So there are all kinds of ways of staying in touch. In addition, there is the electronic connection. For some years, one of the good citizens of the Point has maintained an email list called 'Point Interface.' People send her notices, ranging from meeting announcements to lost cats and dogs to misplaced electric drills to free furniture and well beyond these. When Ed finished his photos of the Point Roberts coastline, an announcement of their existence went out on Point Interface.

Anybody on the Point can request to be put on the list, and the list, according to its owner, is expanding considerably. For those of us who have kind of given up on the telephone (count me as one of those...remembering that we don't have much cell phone coverage here on the Point), this electronic line is extraordinarily useful. The amount of work involved in screening the items that people ask to have sent out to the list (the owner exercises sole and total discretion about appropriateness) and in keeping the list up to date is considerable, and I am very grateful to the list owner for doing all this. I imagine that someday, everyone on the Point will be on that list and it will become to the monthly newspaper something like what blogs have become to journalism: less hierarchical, less categorized, more spontaneous, in real time. To get on the list? Email your request to point-interface which is to be followed by atpointroberts and then dot net Of course, you do that in the standard email form: i.e., in regular type (not italic) using no spaces and with @ and .

So, through these gray days, we do keep in touch in many ways. We know we aren't the only ones left on the Point, even though it sometimes feels that we might be.

Anyone Here?

The days are short now; by 5:30, it’s effectively dark, and tonight there is an egg-shaped moon rising through the trees to the south-south-east (or something like that: I am direction-challenged). I went out for a longish walk this afternoon, a walk through what surely seemed a very strange landscape. It was darkening, but not yet dark, and it looked very much as if I had wandered into a setting for some Hollywood sci-fi movie, the vision of a town in which everyone had disappeared toward the end of an otherwise pleasant Sunday afternoon. House after house showed no signs of life, no lights of any kind. No cars were advancing or retreating down the roads. Driveways were empty. So inclined, I might have believed that The Rapture had happened, sadly—tragically—leaving me behind, and alone.

But, in fact, it is just Point Roberts as winter closes in on us. It wasn’t a very wintry day, today, but enough for Ed to get the winter lights up. These are not Christmas lights; they are not even decorative lights. They are lights attached to the trunk and branches of a mountain ash tree next to our porch. They turn on each night in order to communicate to anyone who might drive or walk down our street after 4:30 p.m. and until 11 p.m. that there is someone in Point Roberts, alive and well and wishing this/these other persons the best of an otherwise gray season.

After an hour of walking, I had seen one other human being (a man walked out of his door, picked up a big chunk of wood from his woodpile and returned to his fireside), as well as three cars in a row (a party I wasn’t invited to, I guess). There are only 1500 (circa) permanent residents here, but in the late fall, even that number drops as people drift southward. Of our ten quilters, one has gone to Mexico; another is heading soon to Florida, yet another is basking on the Hawaiian beaches for a bit. The folks who inhabit the marina have also headed to sunnier climates.

I don’t have much in the way of longings to be somewhere warmer, but I am always startled by the sense of desertion that arrives with November. And I wonder about the new people who have immigrated to P.R. over the past few years: what must they think when they see us in November? Or, more to the point, don’t see us in November. It is hard to convey the quiet, the stillness, the absence in such a walk. I mean, it’s not as if I were walking in some primal wilderness; I was on paved roads with many houses in view at all times. It’s a long way from living in Los Angeles, and I never feel it so much as during these November late afternoons.