Fall Events

Even though summer is over and we’re finished with tourist events, Saturday was an at-least 2-event day here on Point Roberts. Probably more events than that, but at least two that all the people were invited to attend. First, at 1 p.m., was the Obama Rally at the Community Center. I needed to go pick up a book at the library and get an envelope in the Saturday mail, so went off to attend at noon, unfortunately, having confused the time. On my way, I saw leaf piles burning here and there, smoke drifting through the air, reminding us all that fall is here—which the recent warm weather has belied--and that others are not committed to saving their leaves for compost. Arriving at the Community Center at 12:15, I took note that no one was attending the rally.

By the time I realized that I was early (not late), I had run out of time and thus left before the rally started. I talked later to someone who said that it was thinly attended, but if a city the size of Salt Lake could drum up only 1,000 people for a rally, how many people would you get in Point Roberts where there are maybe 800 voters (of whom perhaps one-third will vote for Bob Barr)? About 1.3? There were, at least, more than that: another friend drove by at 3 p.m. and reported to me that there were 16 cars in the parking lot at that time, although some of them would be people going to the library. Bumper stickers were available, I was also told.

I don’t know; my idea of a rally is when you go out and yell, ‘Hell no, we won’t go!’ or ‘Down with the plutocrats!’ or something like that. My sense of rallies (too much sixties, I suppose) is that their purpose is to show opposition to someone/thing who seems to have a lot more power than you do and joining together gives you the (momentary) illusion that you just might be in charge of things. I don’t really think there’s a giant McCain majority out there, working to oppress us, given the massive opposition to the current administration and the lack of difference between it and the McCainites.

The second event was the Art Opening at the Blue Heron. The Blue Heron is a long-standing art and craft gallery, run by Kitty and Paul Doyle. Both residents and visitors shop there and many of the items are made by local artisans and artists. Each month, a different local artist is featured, and yesterday was the opening of a new show of fiber art. It’s a tiny little gallery, so work has to be fairly small to be shown, but each month something new and interesting is on display—painting, jewelry, glass work, photography, weaving, wall quilts, ceramics, etc.—and I go to celebrate its arrival. The quality of the work is very high. Also, in addition to the show, there are drinks and desserts. Nice way to wrap up a windy Saturday. Photos of the current exhibit (Artist: Joyce Wensley) are here.

Wild Life in Our Life

Word comes round that gunshots have been heard and that it may be people shooting coyotes in Point Roberts. Certainly possible; there are plenty of coyote around and doubtless people with guns, as well as people who don’t feel kindly toward coyotes. Coyotes are not considered game animals in Washington, but you do need a license to hunt or trap them, unless the coyote are causing damage to crops or domestic animals on your property . In the latter case, you can trap or exterminate them without a license.

When I lived in Los Angeles, we had a cat who was killed/eaten by coyote and it was not uncommon to hear and even see coyotes walking down the streets of West Los Angeles, coming down from the hills to the north. I hear them occasionally here on the Point and less frequently have seen them. Our neighbors have lost chickens to coyotes, but their chickens run around on the unfenced lawn, so that is not surprising, and several people I know have had cats disappear. The conclusion is that they met up with local coyote.

It’s a little hard to imagine people shooting coyote on local streets, in the same way that it would be difficult to imagine people shooting coyotes on the streets of Los Angeles. Not so densely populated here, but still, this is hardly hunting land. We have deer, too, but I don’t think anybody would think it was okay to shoot/hunt them here since when seen they are usually in someone’s backyard.

I don’t have small pets or small children or sheep or cattle or goats, so I’ve got nothing at stake in this dispute between people and wildlife, but it does seem to me that people tend to think that wildlife ought always to defer to people. It’s like, ‘Well now I want to live here, so you have to move someplace else.’ But exactly where are the coyotes on Pont Roberts to move to? Richmond? Vancouver?

Up on the Sunshine Coast, where we have a plentiful supply of bears as well as coyote and cougar (and deer), there is a steady public education program encouraging people to learn to live with the wildlife by NOT encouraging wildlife to get too friendly with people, too used to hanging around people. The same advice goes for coyote. They’re less likely to be a problem to people if people are not encouraging them to come around houses. According to the Washington wildlife people, don’t leave pet food outdoors (including food for feral cats), don’t feed the coyote, don’t leave small pets out at night, don’t leave fruit lying on the ground when it ripens because coyotes eat fruits and vegetables as well as meat prey. With bears, you can’t even leave fruit on the tree, but coyote happily are not capable of getting up in the tree as the bear can.

I grew up in a hunting household, but not in a ‘varmint’ hunting household so I can’t really understand the impulse to shoot coyotes just because you don’t like having them around. If they’re a problem, the wildlife people will come and trap them or deal with them otherwise. That would be my response. But it at least appears that others here may feel differently. Of course, when the coyote are gone, we can then rage about the way that rabbits, mice and other rodents are eating all of our whatevers. Coyote keep those populations in check, doing some excellent work for us. Think Aristotle, think moderation, think reasoned responses.

Time After Time

Still in crisis mode, Americans are needing to expand their vocabulary yet once more. The word for today is tick-tock. Obviously, the sound of a clock, but in the world of political journalism, a much bigger concept. While reading various blogs and reports here and there on the net on Wednesday, I ran into the word three times, and then on Thursday, Kevin Drum sent me to Joe Nocera’s tick-tock at the New York Times.

A tick-tock, it appears, is a minute by minute account of events. By analyzing the tick-tock, one can derive some greater meaning from or about the outcomes of those events. Now, it’s not entirely clear to me from jargon dictionary definitions whether the ‘tick-tock’ is the chronicling, the analysis, or the combination of the two, or whether anyone cares. It’s American journalism jargon, so those folks may have not carefully worked out a definition, but we can see how it works.

Thursday tick-tock.
7:45. My brain awakens and notes that a bird is calling, meaning that it is past 7:30, which is the time the computer randomly chooses a bird call to awaken me every morning. In theory, I would learn to identify the calls of birds from this, but ten years of experience has shown otherwise. I do not learn because the bird refuses to say its name.
8:00. My eyes open and see in the overhead skylight that the sky is gray and I consider changing my plans for the day not to include gardening because it is probably going to rain again.
8:15. I get to the computer to read the news headlines and the morning blogs, mostly political. I find myself reading the same analysis over and over, just written by different people.
9:00. With coffee, I settle down to read the most recent New Yorker. It is providing me with a long analysis of Lionel Trilling’s work by Louis Menand. I think about how, in 1960 when I was in graduate school, I read Trilling’s work and talked endlessly with my colleagues about the meaning of literary criticism, and now it is 48 years later and I am reading about it again, although I no longer have colleagues. Louis Menand is not my colleague.
9:45. I am finished with Lionel Trilling and move on to an article that questions the wisdom of pets inheriting millions of dollars. I think about how, also in the 1960’s, I audited many law school classes instead of writing my English Literature dissertation, and finally quit going to the law classes after I spent two hours listening to arguments about whether the law should allow people to leave millions of dollars in trust to their pet. In the particular case at hand, the pet was a turtle. And now, 45 years later, I am reading about it again.
10:30. Took a walk to the beach and found that the tide was in again. Very reliable, the tide.
12:00. Lunch, day after day.

Well, you get the idea. Reading the Thursday tick-tock suggests that the outcome of Thursday, for me, was largely influenced by repetitive events. Much like the failure of the financial system: deregulation leads to financial crisis; belief that there is a free lunch, leads to no lunch. I am reading about it again.

Tulips Not Forever

I am a believer in tulips and their everlasting quality. That is to say, I believe you plant them and then year in and year out, they come back as tulips. They are perennials in the same way that gladioli are perennials. In other gardens in other places, that was my experience. Which is to say, in Idaho that was my experience. Here in the northwest, not so much.

I have come, over the past 16 years, to understand that if I want five dozen tulips blooming in my spring garden, then in October I will have to plant five dozen tulip bulbs, regardless of how many I planted last year. And the same for daffodils. If I plant five dozen tulip bulbs and 2 dozen daffodil bulbs in October, the following spring will provide 5 ½ dozen tulips and 2 ½ dozen daffodils. Some of the bulbs give a second year; sometimes, even a third year. I have had two of eight species tulips show up for at least three years. Maybe next year will be a record fourth year for at least one of the two. But for the most part, the tulips and daffodils are all—regardless of the label that talks cheerily about their naturalizing qualities—annuals.

I have read about this problem and been told that it is necessary to feed them during their blooming season. Some gardeners say they are to be fed just after they bloom, others want me to do it while they are blooming. It doesn’t seem to make much difference. I have come to believe—and this is a belief, not a scientific or any other kind of fact, as far as I know—that the ground I put them in is just too wet too much of the year and they succumb to water before they get a second chance to bloom. I know I could get round this if I put them in large pots and all that, but that’s how you grow tulips in California: you spend about six weeks with your refrigerator crisper filled with tulip and daffodil bulbs and then you send the bulbs to school in large pots in dark places and then in light places and then outdoors and finally, Hosanna!, they are risen and blooming.

I get my bulbs from Skagit County, the home of The Tulip Festival. When we arrived back in Washington this week, the bulbs were sitting in a beautifully packed and ventilated box at the post office (and had been there for five days). When I order the bulbs, the company tells me that they will ship them sometime during a four week period when the weather is right for me to plant them. Tomorrow and many other tomorrows it is going to be raining, so today it was time to send the five dozen bulbs to bed, even if I had to do it in the near dark, which I did. Already, though, I'm imagining them up and providing another amazing show. Like Broadway, new shows every year.

Protecting the Land

According to the Lily Point website, Stanton Northwest has done some initial work on the property that abuts the Lily Point Reserve/Park in Point Roberts, including cutting down trees and brush. I suppose once you own property, you can pretty much do whatever pruning and trimming and mowing you want to do, even if it is, in fact, some kind of site preparation for a project for which you don’t yet have approval. Of course, if that site work includes taking down trees that are eagle nest habitat, that is a different matter. I can imagine that for lots of people, the idea that a developer would be restricted from developing land he/she owned because it would inconvenience local bald eagles is an outrage or at least news. But whether it’s an outrage or not, it’s a law.

Some years back, when we were building a smallish outbuilding on our property so that I could have some space in which to quilt, we went down to Bellingham to get permits for the building. I’d never been involved in that particular kind of citizen/government exchange and was both interested and puzzled by the nature of the process. I can certainly understand, after that several hour activity, why people get so angry about bureaucrats, but the thing that most surprised me was the eagle issue. We went through person after person getting okays for various aspects of the project (keep in mind that the permit was for a 24x12 ft. structure without water/plumbing) and, at the very end, we were interviewed by the eagle person. She looked up on a map and determined that we were within the area of an active eagle nest which, she said, could change everything. The tree with nest wasn’t on our property, and in any case we weren’t proposing to cut down any trees. But it turns out that if you are planning to build anything that is within the area of an active eagle nest, there are additional regulations, including specific times of the year in which you may not build. This all happened some years ago and I can’t recall the specific months (in the spring, though), but it surely surprised me to find that that was the last approval we needed. After all, if we’d actually had an eagle nest on the property, the rules would have been even more stringent. Since it would have been a deal breaker, I would have thought they’d check that issue out first.

Anyway, I have some minor experience with eagle rules and can well imagine that there are people not too impressed with the idea that eagles would take preference over their own plans. The people at lilypoint.org say they have evidence that trees with eagle nests have been cut down, which would definitely be a violation of the law. They have a new video on their site to accompany that claim. I don’t have any independent evidence, but trees come down all the time on the Point, and not always from natural causes.

I still have trouble believing that a company with a relatively small repertoire of finished work is going to be able to find financial backing for a Point Roberts project that involves as many as one hundred homes in the million dollar range in these times of difficult credit and a dead housing market. Indeed, if they had such funding, I’d want to know the name of the bank that’s providing it so I could be sure I didn’t have any investments/accounts in that bank. This development may not be realized. But it would indeed be sad if in that process of not happening, the terrain of the land were irreparably destroyed by a lot of clearing and deforesting.

Does the County know or care? I guess we’ll find out. On October 11 (10 a.m.), the P.R. Taxpayers Association will be holding a meeting at the Community Center about the Stanton Northwest development proposal and the County’s zoning views. Everyone welcome to attend, I’m told.

10/1/08, Follow-up: A friend points out that the bald eagle is no longer on the endangered species act (as of June, 2007). However, there are still many federal and state laws that deal with eagles and eagle habitat. The most recent (February '08) information on Washington law is here.

Be Prepared

So many things to be prepared for. Girl Scouts didn’t really fully equip me for either economic depression or community disaster, so I’ll just hope that the Boy Scouts among us are better situated for life as it continues to surprise us. Listening to the bailout bill go down this morning in the House, I thought about how we sat around and listened, moment by moment that time when the news came from Texas, almost 45 years ago, now. A different kind of unbelievable moment, but just about as unbelievable. I used to work for the House of Representatives—in the 60’s—and one thing I learned from that period was how organized the House really was. People knew what was happening before it happened; there were no surprises. The whip knew how to count votes, and when something had to get done, it got done. Not so much anymore. Be prepared for almost anything, is my new watchword.

And continuing in that vein: someone wrote me today asking whether Point Roberts had a plan of preparedness for unexpected events. I’m not entirely sure that it’s right to say it has a plan, but it certainly has a group of people who are working on a plan: Point Roberts Emergency Preparedness, PREP. PREP has already arranged for special disaster preparedness training for some residents, has set up a hotline and a website, and is currently working on a residency database to establish who is likely to need what kind of help in the event of a community emergency. PREP meets the first Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m. in the Community Center, and everyone is welcome to attend, to get involved, to be prepared!

PREP’s main point is that, in the event of a real emergency (earthquake is surely the most likely, in my view), Point Roberts could be cut off and would need to provide its own help for some time. Even if the landbridge to Canada was unaffected, the Canadians might have some priorities ahead of us. According to the group’s information sheet, PREP thinks ‘we need to be prepared to go it alone for up to 3 weeks following a disaster.’

If you are not inclined to go to meetings, try this: Washington state has put out several informational packets, including a 44-page Emergency Resource Guide, as well as a quick little ‘Home Preparedness’ guide, and a ‘task of the month’ guide. I picked up copies at the post office, but they are also available at the Aydon Wellness Clinic. We went through the big L.A. earthquake in the 90’s and thus are somewhat more sensitive than many people may be to what can happen to a house in a big earthquake. When we moved up here, we were astonished to find that the house we bought had no structural earthquake protection: in the event of a big quake, it would have simply jumped right off the foundation. So one of our first ‘maintenance’ tasks was to get it bolted down. Neighbors we talked to were astonished: never heard of such a thing. I hope they never have to hear of it again, but I feel the better for knowing about it and knowing that it is done.

A Point Robert’s friend who also came from L.A. understands in a different context what happens in a significant earthquake. She has a large pottery collection and has been very careful about securing the contents of her cupboards. I’ve not done much about that because in the L.A. quake, nothing in my cupboards broke, although an apple pie I had made the night before did bounce off the counter and the glass pie pan broke, rendering the pie inedible, alas. So now, when I make a pie and leave the remains on the counter at night, I wonder whether it will be there in the morning for me. How's that for learning? We learn from our experience, but it would perhaps be better to augment that experience with others’ experiences as well as the information that is being made available to us. So get it, read it, do something about it. At least if you live in Point Roberts. If you live somewhere else, your mileage may vary.

Vocabulary Lesson

If nothing else good can be said about the crises of our time, they at least give us new vocabulary words. For example, today it was reported that the infamous $700 billion for the Wall Street Bailout will not be presented all at once to the Bailout Czar. Instead, it will come in tranches. Barney Frank felt confidence in saying that not because it is true, although it may be, but because this past week we have, if we have been paying attention to national news of high finance, learned all about tranches: it is our new vocabulary word. Last month, no one speaking to the public could have said that something was coming out in tranches. We would have all stared rudely at him/her, stunned and puzzled and wondering just what kind of elitist he/she was.

I made a loaf of bread today, and we are eating it in tranches. Our bacon, too, is being laid upon our breakfast plates in tranches. It is even possible that yesterday, I tranched myself with a knife, but not seriously. I say tranche all the time, nowadays.

Tranche we have previously known in English in other forms: trench, trencher (and trencherman), as well as trenchant and retrench and even trench coat. Tranche is a very old French word (maybe from Latin, truncare, from whence comes truncate and maybe tree trunk, too). Truncare means to cut. Tranche means, to slice. A slice into the earth is a trench. A second earth slice and you have decided to retrench. If you slice off a slab of wood to put your cooked meat on, it is a trencher. If you eat a lot off that trencher, you are a trencherman. If it rains a lot when you are in a trench, you need a trench coat. If you make a remark that cuts to the heart of the matter, the remark is trenchant.

Thus it is that when the investment banks ‘slice and dice’ the mortgages into little pieces and then sell them in tranches, they have tranched them by slicing them, and then have put them back together hugger-mugger into new bundles which are then sliced again not into slices but into slabs called tranches. And, according to Barney Frank, when the federal government puts out our tax dollars to buy the tranches, it will put the money out in tranches. It could be a new slogan for the end times we seem to be in: Tranches for Tranches!

It scarcely makes sense, of course, but I think that’s the point.

Notes for the Curious:

tranche Noun, feminine (a) slice of meat, cake, bread, rasher of bacon; edge of a coin, book; section, tax band, bracket, credit instalment, time slot; ~ de boeuf beefsteak; couper en ~s to slice

trench
c.1386, "track cut through a wood," later "long, narrow ditch" (1489), from O.Fr. trenche "a slice, ditch" (1288), from trenchier "to cut," possibly from V.L. *trincare, from L. truncare "to cut or lop off" (see truncate). Trenches for military protection are first so called c.1500. Trench warfare first attested 1918. Trench-coat first recorded 1916, a type of coat worn by British officers in the trenches.
trencher Look up trencher at Dictionary.com
c.1308, "wooden platter on which to cut meat," from Anglo-Fr. trenchour, from O.N.Fr. trencheor "a trencher," lit. "a cutting place," from O.Fr. trenchier "to cut" (see trench).
trenchant Look up trenchant at Dictionary.com
c.1330, "cutting, sharp," from O.Fr. trenchant "cutting, sharp," prp. of trenchier "to cut" (see trench). Figurative sense is recorded from 1603.
entrench Look up entrench at Dictionary.com
c.1563, from en- "make, put in" + trench.
retrench Look up retrench at Dictionary.com
1598, "dig a new trench as a second line of defense," from Fr. retrencher "to cut off," from re- "back" + O.Fr. trenchier "to cut." Sense of "cut down, reduce (expenses, etc.)" is from 1625.