Partners, Please

Back in Point Roberts, I was suitably impressed by the speed with which we were hurried through the border station. It was almost as if they had finally decided that having a Nexus pass actually makes you a ‘trusted traveler,’ as they say in all their published materials, rather than just someone called a 'trusted traveler'; trusted enough to get to go through without a lot of questions about why you are here, e.g. ‘I live here,’ the routine answer. Not only was it fast but the border agent, one of several known for less than stellar cheerfulness, said ‘You’re welcome,’ when I offered my routine ‘Thank You,’ as he told us to go on through. I am forced to conclude that they finally hired some higher quality communication-education programs for them.

And then on to a newspaper filled with events of the past month that we didn’t much know about because you can’t know about them until the newspaper comes out on the first of the month and tells you about them. One other newspaper event also happened. The Bellingham Herald, which last month featured a very critical article about Point Roberts, an article that occasioned about thirty people to write very unkind comments in the on-line edition, turned out an extraordinarily welcome editorial on the topic of Point Roberts. (I wrote about that article on May 26, 'Volunteer Rules.')

‘Give them a break,’ was the essence of the editorial, titled ‘Pay attention to frustrated Point Roberts residents.’ (May 31, Bellingham Herald, B3). My favorite sentence is ‘Because of its unique geographic position. . . the Point has scores of unique problems and conditions.” Absolutely: that is exactly the point about the Point that, I think, we would like the government to understand. The problems are unique, and whether we get standard solutions or no solutions because the problem is unique is irrelevant because both make us fairly crazy.

At the moment, the recycling issue is boiling over again because the county is recommending that our trash collector (private) be decertified/lose his trash collecting license, because he can’t offer curb-side recycling. If he and his business go away, there won't be any trash or recycle collections, let alone trash and recycling handled exactly the way that some legislative entity thinks it should be done everywhere in the state. There aren't likely to be a line of people anxious to collect the trash and recycling of approximately 17% of the local households. We need to hang on to what we've got.

Listen up, Whatcom County! I think it’s important to admit, to make absolutely clear that we understand one thing: our problems aren’t more special than any other community’s problems; it is just that solutions that work most places probably won’t work here. Here’s the chance for you all to demonstrate your creativity, to demonstrate that government can work, can be responsive to local issues. And here’s a chance for the local residents to demonstrate their creativity, as well, by understanding that the standard response to slow government won’t work here either. Threats, whines, generalized complaints: we need something better, more imaginative than that kind of stuff. The County has to work on their end, but we need to work on ours, too.

Also, Whatcom County: Thanks for the financial support in purchasing Lily Point.

Patriotism Week, On and On!

Today, July 1, is Canada Day in Canada; but last week, on June 24, it was also Canada Day in Canada. That’s the day that Quebecers and perhaps Francophones more generally celebrate Canada Day by celebrating Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (John the Baptist), and also for those of a mind, by celebrating the summer solstice a few days earlier, just to be genuinely ecumenical, I guess, according to the Canadian Heritage homepage .

The Globe and Mail is celebrating Canada Day today on its front pages by noting that the the B.C. government has increased gas taxes by 2.34 cents as of today, bringing the local prices to $1.52/liter (which is to say over $6 for four liters which is a little more than a U.S. gallon). It is also pointing out that Prime Minister Steven Harper once again apologized to the First Nations people for having forced all their children to go to residential schools, where they were very badly treated, in the early 20th century. The idea was that by separating them from their parents and putting them in government-run and religious-run residential schools, it would be possible to integrate them into Canadian society more effectively. I suppose it might have worked but there was a substantial amount of physical and sexual abuse, which is bound to ruin a lot of hopes. So, this past month, Prime Minister Harper issued a formal apology, and today he did a little more of it.

I’m not sure this is what is meant by Canadian patriotism, but it is consistent with the country’s sense of responsibility about taxing gas to make the price of gas reflect its real costs to the society, and about trying to do right—albeit often ineffectively or downright badly--by the people they displaced when the Canadians decided it was their own country and not that of the First Nations, and about accommodating its multicultural realities, even if it means including the Wiccans.

By Friday, of course, we will be moving on to U.S. patriotism. Although actually we seem to have our heads full of it already with General Wesley Clark’s scandalous suggestion that having been shot down in a plane and becoming a prisoner of war was not a particular qualification for being president. Was he talking about John McCain? Well I guess so. And did anybody ever think that having been a prisoner of war meant you’d be a good U.S. president? These days, it’s hard to imagine what would qualify you to be president, other than being related to some other president. I wonder what Amy Carter is doing? Somebody ought to stuff a sock in cable TV if this nonsense about John McCain’s patriotism being questioned by Wesley Clark is going to keep being repeated.

I hope that by Friday, we might be able to remember that of all the freedoms that we are celebrating on July 4th, the first of them is Freedom of Speech. Wes Clark can say what he wants, but if he is to be criticized for it, then it ought to be for what he actually did say, rather than for what the Fox and CNN hysterics would like him to have said in order to justify their ‘oh my god, the sky is falling’ performances. Maybe Fox people think that being a prisoner of war is a TERRIFIC qualification for being the president of the U.S. They are surely free to say so, but, of course, we would all laugh at them if they did. That idea is just silly. On the other hand, being a prisoner of war who endured torture might be the perfect qualification for a presidential candidate.

Very Pacific

In my June 16 post ('Not So Pacific'), I was describing the difference between the wild ocean in central California near Bodega Bay, and the largely calm ocean that I see from my window or on a walk on the Sunshine Coast in B.C. The two pictures above are taken of the Sunshine Coast's Pacific Ocean: respectively from the Roberts Creek pier and from the promenade at Davis Bay, about five miles north of Roberts Creek. These are both south-facing beaches, and the mountains in the distance are the mountains of southern Vancouver Island, about 26 miles away, if you are a crow.

I guess there are a lot of different Pacific Oceans, depending upon where you are. On the island of Yap, in Micronesia, there was a surrounding reef that tempered that Pacific as it entered the transparent and turquoise lagoon (whose water temperature was usually in the 80-90 degree range because it was so close to the equator and because the lagoon was not very deep). In Santa Monica, near where I once lived on the ocean at Venice Beach, there are surfing waves but there aren't the kind of rock formations that central California boasts. To live on the ocean is, actually, to live on a very specific point at which the ocean meets the land. In that sense, there really is no single ocean, I guess; no one Pacific, no one Atlantic, probably not even one Mediterranean.

Taking in Boarders

There are a lot of retirees living on the Sunshine Coast, generally. These are the retirees who worked somewhere else, somewhere to the near south or to the east, and then came here to do the golden years part. Such retirees often talk about ‘having a little B&B when they retire.’ And a lot of them do more than just talk about it, I’d guess, given the number of Bed and Breakfast places that seem to have recently opened up on the Sunshine Coast.

When we first came here, eighteen years ago, we stayed in the only B&B on the Coast, or at least the only one we could find, a very cute little place in Roberts Creek called “Rose Cottage” (in the picture above), managed by a charming weaver named Loragene. Her husband worked in the local pulp mill and she wove rag rugs and attended to guests. She was extremely gracious and the cottage was absolutely exquisite. It was the kind of place that you might imagine finding in the English countryside in the 19th century: brass beds and handmade everythings, including bed quilts and rugs, and old, carefully made, comfortable wooden furniture. There was a little kitchen area, and a wood stove, and everything charming and tasteful but not newish—that is, it didn’t feel designed by some decorator and never touched by human hands. It felt like someplace you might have always been visiting.

We arrived in the late afternoon and she had us into the main house for tea and scones or muffins or such and she provided us with lots of information about where to go to do whatever it was that we were doing. Then, in the morning, we had a more-than-abundant breakfast of pancakes and bacon and eggs and toast and coffee and hot chocolate and fruit and homemade jam and who knows what else at a lovely old round table in their kitchen. Her husband had his coffee with us while she cooked and served and we had a lovely conversation. It seemed so very welcoming; it was so very welcoming.

We stayed with her a couple of times after that—she even recommended a great real estate agent to us--and we always found it as fine an experience as the first stay was. Eventually, they expanded and built an entire additional building with 4 suites, I believe, in addition to Rose Cottage. I am not the least surprised that she has had a very successful career as a B&B operator; she surely had the personality for it.

I have thought about running a B&B in the intervening years. I mean, you have a lot of time on your hands in retirement and, even if you are filling it up quite adequately, there is a vague feeling that you ought to be doing something to earn money and a B&B would be so easy. Loragene made it seem very, very easy. I have a quilting friend who, as she retired, did indeed operate a B&B for several years. She thought it would be a fun way to meet people coming through the area, and after all they wouldn’t stay all that long and how much work can it be to provide breakfast for a nice couple each morning? She pretty quickly found that it was not only a lot of work but a lot of work for demanding and not particularly appreciative people. Although she is a most outgoing lady, she was not outgoing enough for that kind of dealing with the public.

Me? I wouldn’t last two days at it, I imagine, but it is still one of those careers that I vaguely entertain having. A charming little place like Rose Cottage, with delicate teas and scrumptious breakfasts and people as interesting as Ed and me coming to stay and to chat with over breakfast and appreciate what I've created. Sounds great, but only as a fantasy, alas. I think we'll be outsourcing this career to Loragene who really does know how to do it and who accepts reality. If you come to the Sunshine Coast, stay in her B&B and let me know if she is still keeping up her standards!

What Are You Growing?

I think the first farmers’ market I ever went to was in Los Angeles, about 60+ years ago when, in a post-WWII extravaganza, my parents—accompanied by 4 children—drove to southern California to visit relatives. One of the places we definitely went was the Farmers’ Market (at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly) in West Hollywood. I had never seen fruits of such size or of such abundance. Although I very much doubt we actually bought anything, it was plenty wonderful just to look at it all. In those days, you got lots of fruits and vegetables in the summer, but of a fairly narrowly-defined variety. The Farmers’ Market had things I’d never seen: artichokes, giant dates, limes, strange varieties of berries. It had more different kinds of cheese than I could have imagined existed in the world, let alone in a single market. It was amazing.

Fifteen years later, on a summer visit to Pennsylvania, I went to an Amish Farmers’ Market near York, PA, as I recall. They had eggs in a bowl—eggs that came without shells, twenty different kinds of lettuce, strange sausages, molasses pie (called ‘shoe fly pie’). Farmers’ markets in Massachusetts, many years later, were mostly about the many different varieties of local apples I’d never heard of and certainly never eaten: the macoun remains my best memory of an apple, although it might or might not be as good as the fruit on my own jonagold tree. Two weeks ago, in Sebastopol, CA, every crossroad seemed to have a little farmers’ market/fruit stand with all the wonders of central California edibles on display.

So, today, I wandered over to the Sunshine Coast’s Farmers’ Market in Sechelt to see what we had growing here. The weather has been so cool, I didn’t expect there to be much of anything at all, really, and I was not much surprised. There was one stand with four cartons of tomatoes (grown in a greenhouse somewhere locally, I imagine, as the nighttime temperatures are barely warm enough to permit fertilization of a tomato blossom, let alone growing and ripening of a fruit; another with garlic ‘scapes’ (the long green leaves of the underground garlic bulb which are sauteed and garlicy of taste) and ‘sea asparagus’ (this salty delicacy will be found wherever sea kayakers lurk. Carpeting the water’s edge on mud flats, sheltered coves and estuaries, sea asparagus … say no more, I think); yet another had some lettuce and other salad greens. No blueberries (yet), no strawberries (yet), no raspberries (yet)…not much of anything edible, really, and very little promise of too much more in the days to come.

But there were many, many booths, because, for the most part, the Farmers’ Market is a craft sale. There were lots of stands with jewelry, with hand-knit scarves and hats and kids’ sweaters, with garden rocks, with pottery, with more jewelry, with wind toys, and with driftwood decorations. Tables with carved soapstone, with potted plants, with yet more jewelry, soap, locally ground soft wheat flour (!), paintings, drawings, and finally tables with a palmist and a quick-sketch character artist and a busker playing the accordion.

This is what happens when you try to do a Farmers’ Market in an area where there are no farms and where, instead, artists and craftspersons are very thick on the ground. But perhaps we could just think of ourselves up here on the Sunshine Coast as people who farm art and craft, and it appears that we have raised a bumper crop of both.

A Banana for Manitoba

Is this just a North American story or is the rest of the world equally prone to such strange ideas?

A Canadian friend came to dinner last night and told us of her recent adventures with the CBC. She, a well-known performance artist, had heard on a CBC radio news program that some citizens of the very small town of Melita, Manitoba, were contemplating a bold new step for the town, a move sure to whip up Melita’s small economic base by flooding the town with tourists. Melita is referred to (by whom I do not know) as ‘Manitoba’s Banana Belt’—a phrase that must have most of its truth in a commitment to irony, since no one in Manitoba is going to be growing bananas very soon unless global warming truly has astonishing consequences.

But nevertheless, there you have it. The champions of Melita wish to build a 30-foot statue of a talking, revolving banana as a way of encouraging the tourist industry that is, apparently, currently lacking. Our friend, who happens to have a large collection of banana objects and information as well as a banana production company , called the CBC to suggest that Melita needed more than a revolving, talking banana because surely, when the tourists poured into town, they would be looking for more information about bananas. So she offered them her banana collection on the condition that they build a Banana Museum to accompany the talking, revolving banana. Her offer was subsequently broadcast by the CBC.

So far, the town’s members have apparently not enthusiastically endorsed the actual building of either the banana or the museum, but if they go ahead, they are not alone in this line of work. One of my own particular favorites is the world’s largest artichoke, in Castroville, California, the World's Artichoke Capitol. Although I would probably not go out of my way to see either fields of artichokes or the world’s largest (30-feet or so) artichoke, I would definitely go there to eat the deep-fried artichokes that are sold inside that artichoke.

So maybe Melita ought to consider, right inside that museum door, the sale of, say, deep-fried bananas, coated in chocolate, with a little ice cream on the side. In the winter, when there are probably no tourists anyway, they could drop the ice cream.

There’s way more of this stuff than you might think. Interested in seeing the world’s largest pysanki Easter egg in Vegreville, Alberta? Or maybe several hundred other Canadian contributions to large roadside signs, photographed by an intrepid collector.

Or how about a variety of U.S. offerings, such as the world’s largest ear of corn, chest of drawers, chair, tire, talking loon, and floating loon? All available when you are next driving around with nothing else to do and plenty of $4-$6/gallon gasoline to take you there.

I'm Not Organizing Sox

When I was in California, last week, I took some time to read Barak Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which gave me some more sense of who the guy is. But what interested me more, in some ways, was his recounting of his 3-year experience as a community organizer in Chicago after he graduated from college.

I’ve been reading about community organizing since the 60’s, I’d say, and I always thought of it vaguely as something like organizing a labor union. Or maybe organizing anything—your children, the sox in your drawer. But I never really thought about the nitty gritty of it. That is, you try to organize workers, you already know what it is they have in common: they are workers and they are not management. You organize your children, and you have some previously established authority, as difficult as it may be to get them to follow your lead. You organize your sox in a drawer, they stay where they are put.

Organizing a community, by contrast, is quite different. It requires attempting to get people to figure out what their common interests might be when there is no previously-defined common interest, no community necessarily other than in your head; when you have no authority to do anything at all, and no one has any reason to go where you put them or to stay there once they’ve been put there. Probably more like the much-quoted job of herding cats when the cats didn't ask to be herded. And what interests me about this is that, after reading about Obama’s experience in Chicago, I realized that community organizing is what the Point Roberts Community Council is trying to do, even if it doesn’t necessarily think of it in those words.

At the last meeting, the ‘Council’ voted to change its name to the Point Roberts Community Association. The general rationale was that ‘Council’ sounded too much like an elected, representative group, and nobody had elected any of us to do anything and we represented people on the Point in only the vaguest of ways. So, now we’re an Association, which makes us something that anyone who lives in Point Roberts can join. We are choosing to associate with one another because we have some common interests. And because we have some common interests, we have the beginnings of a discrete community, even if, at the moment, it’s only the community of the Point Roberts Community Association. One common interest that this small community identified was a need to improve the Community Events sign on the main street. And, with some group work now completed, a new Community Events sign will soon appear. Results!

The next task, then, is to find out if other Point Roberts’ residents have other common interests and whether they and the community of the Association might join together and find some way to advance a common cause. It's baby steps, but I think I’m learning.