On Being a Dog

There's a very famous New Yorker cartoon in which a dog is sitting in a desk chair at a computer and he is saying to a friend, 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.'  But it is also the case that on the Internet, sometimes you look like a dog even if you don't mean to or really aren't one. 

Today, I got an email from a gentleman who owns one of the abandoned houses in whose images I have made quilts.  He had been given a link to this blog and probably to a post in which I had written about his house and a farmhouse on APA Road, each of which were showing some signs of restoration.  Unfortunately, he took my post to be one of complaint that his property was something of an eyesore because it appeared to be 'abandoned.'  He explained that he had suffered some illness that had seriously slowed him down and had unsuccessfully tried to sell it.  But he wanted to apologize to me for not appearing to be a responsible property owner.

Now I have to say that if someone wrote about my yard (whose lawn is never mowed, e.g.) as a neighborhood embarrassment, or even implied such a thing, I would think that person was a dog and not a good neighbor.  So I am now acutely embarrassed for having anyone think I would say or even think such a thing.  I have written him to assure him that I meant no such thing and that, in fact, I love the way his house looks, even though it looks abandoned.  It is that which is so appealing to me.  Although I know that people own these properties, my conception is that for whatever reason--and life surely offers plenty of reasons for a property in Pt. Roberts no longer to be a home--the owners can no longer exercise the ideal care that makes a house a home and the houses are now their own custodians, doing the best they can under the circumstances.

It is just because Point Roberts has so many 'abandoned houses' that I wanted to draw attention to them and to preserve them as they slid down their own slide, each one in its own way.  They are one of Point Roberts' things of beauty to me: not only because some of them are of historic importance, but because all of them are of 'historic' importance, even if I know the history only of their last years.

I wrote to the gentleman and explained my views and he offered to call me and tell me something of the history of his house.  His misunderstanding of my motives thus results in his helping me to understand what his house has been doing all these past years, including a previous owner who was a nun (perhaps a former nun, insofar as the Catholic Church doesn't usually have nuns living on their own in coastal retirement communities where there is no Catholic Church).  The Internet triumphs!  Even for apparent dogs.

Rural Renewal, Part II

There are a lot of trailers in Point Roberts.  There used to be 3 trailer parks; now there are only two, I think, as Whalen's closed down a year or so ago.  But there are lots of lone trailers behind houses, and lots of mobile home trailers that are permanently grounded on a lot: that are more like houses than trailers in their function.  A lot of them are not lived in or are seldom lived in and are a lot more like abandoned houses than they are like anything else.  Because they are mobile home trailers, they are built to move around the rounds, even if they are not doing it, more than sitting unattended in a damp, cold climate.

When I was making the abandoned house quilts, I had a number of trailers to choose from, but I picked the one at the corner of APA and South Beach, because it was so available to public view and because it seemed quite typical of all the other abandoned trailers I'd seen around on my walks.

Here's what it looked like the first time I saw it, in 2003. 

It was probably around February when I took this picture.  Ivy was growing up into the house; there was no sign that anybody was living there.  I took pictures through the windows of the front door and it looked like an earthquake had shaken all the contents around.






I completed the trailer quilt later in the year, but only after I had rephotographed it some time during the summer, when it was of a sudden draped with tarps, and I combined the winter/spring pictures for that quilt.

I have continued to photograph this trailer over the years.  It gets attended to; it gets abandoned all over again.  It's covered with tarps, and then they're all gone and a little table and chair are set outside; it gets a coat of paint, and then the grey runs return..  And the cycle repeats.  Thus, this trailer, the trailer representative for the Point, is a little more problematic in its renewal.  Unlike the APA house from the last post, the trailer mostly gets cosmetic improvements, and then it slides back into abandonment.

Here it is this past week, 8 years after the original picture: its tarps are all gone again; its paint is looking pretty good, the leaves are raked off the yard and it almost looks as if the grass may have been mowed.  Even more important, it now has a little car parking area with fresh bark chips marked out in front.  It's Its apple tree is blooming, because apple trees, all over the Point, continue to bud and bloom and fruit whether anyone cares for them or not.  That's one of the differences between houses and apple trees.

Rural Renewal: Act I

Here is a picture of the historic farmhouse on APA Road.  This picture was taken in 2008.  The first picture I took of this house was back in maybe 2003, before I had a digital camera.  The house looked very worn out at the time, but not so derelict as it did in 2008.  The house sits in the center of a large, undeveloped, untenanted parcel of land, several acres of it.  It used to be a farm, but not in my 15-year-old memory, of course.  It has never been tenanted in my memory.  It is just another of the many abandoned houses here on the Point that struggle along and alone until someone stops their struggle by tearing them down.

Early in the 2000's, I made 16 or so quilts based upon the abandoned houses of Point Roberts.  By 2010, the quilts remain, but at least half of the houses that brought the quilts into existence have permanently exited this world.  The abandoned houses that remain are mostly getting worse, what with rain and cold and wind and time making their inexorable inroads. 

This is the quilt that memorialized the APA Road farmhouse in 2004. Back in 2004, plywood covered some of the windows, but not all of them.  By 2008, most of the plywood was gone.

And this is the APA Road farmhouse in 2010.  It is heading to restoration, not degradation, and not disappearance.  It is a bright, bright sign in our landscape.  And when Lorne is done with it, I'll make another quilt of it for him, to thank him for what he has done.

Sign Still Becoming

Just before we left Point Roberts this week, I spotted yet another advance on the long march of the Community Events Sign: some part of the roof is now in place.  I assume there is to be something yet to cover this roof (shingles, marble, hammered copper, whatever is sustainable).  Also new is the sign on the east side of the sign providing credit for the sign’s construction.  I’m glad it is volunteer labor, rather than conscripted labor or prison labor or whatever other kind of unpaid labor might be available.  However, if I’m around the next time that the sign has to be rebuilt (unlikely), I’ll be speaking up in favor of paid labor.  I’m grateful that the Woodshop and Point Roberts Volunteers are doing this work, but I continue to be sorry that it is taking so long.  Not their fault; after all, they are volunteers.  My sorrow (and my apologies) are directed to whatever Gods may be for my having advertised the sign as a quick project.

And another sight on Point Roberts that took me aback.  The farm house on APA Road is being spiffed up after all these years of abandonment.  As I was driving by (without my camera), I saw there was new white paint on the siding and new dark red trim on the windows.  But subsequently a blog commenter (Hi, Fun Guy!) said he thought that there was a new foundation and a new deck.  Which makes it sound as if the building might actually be being restored.  If that is true, I truly apologize (today is the apology edition of the blog, I guess) for my sharp comments about the ‘No Trespassing’ sign that was put up on the property.  I still don’t think it’s necessary, but I would have balanced that conclusion with the good work of the restoration.

And, finally (although totally unrelated), Whatcom County Council member Barbara Brenner has not yet sent me her amendments to the septic inspection program, but she has requested that those of us with Point Roberts mailing lists clarify a matter at the meeting last Monday.  Specifically, there was some dispute about expensive new systems and their costs and particularly about Glendon systems.  Brenner suggests caution if an inspector tells you that you need an expensive new system, and says: ‘Try to get a second opinion, heck even your first opinion, from someone you trust a lot.’  Which seems like good advice in any case.  Although, it’s hard to know exactly whom to trust ‘a lot.’

The Ravages of Time

At a social event the other day, I found myself in a conversation about the many abandoned houses in Point Roberts.  A local resident, who knows that I have made a series of abandoned house quilts based on these buildings, offered me her views on this matter.  “I think it’s just a shame that the County doesn’t require that these houses be torn down, don’t you?”

Well, since I definitely don’t think that and in fact have gone to considerable trouble to honor the houses in their current state and thereby to express my admiration, I was surely taken aback.  Not so far aback that I couldn’t express my disagreement, but still…

Like everybody, I find that there are things that seem so obvious that I can’t quite believe they aren’t obvious to everyone.  Before I made the house quilts, I understood that there were people who were trying to force their destruction because, as they said, they were ‘eyesores.’  But I actually (obviously naively) thought that in making the quilts I would in some way be showing them the beauty that was there.  And indeed, my critic (or, more accurately, the houses’ critic) went on to say that in making the quilts, I had of course made them beautiful but that was because I was an artist.  But, her look suggested, they are not beautiful; they are an eyesore.

My view, of course, is that all I did was reproduce what was there before me;  if she can’t see that the major difference is between life and fabric, between what actually exists and what I have the technical skill to reproduce.  Ah, well.  There you are.  People.

But it made me think once again about why I think the abandoned houses are so beautiful, why they grab my attention.  It's mostly a matter of contrast, I suppose.  First, of course, is our time's peculiar obsession with youth.  Not so much being young as pretending that we are young, whether it’s cosmetic dentistry or cosmetic surgery or the sudden abundance of strawberry blondes among women of a certain age.  The houses are not kept up, but if they were, we would not even notice them; they would just be another of the many unremarkable houses that line streets and roads.  It is their age and their agedness that draws me so to them, that makes them exceptional.  Like so few things we people touch, they are—or at least have finally become—exactly what they are.

Second, we like trendy things, new things.  ‘Can’t sell our house,’ a friend says, ‘because we don’t have granite counters in the kitchen.’  And how many millions of houses have there been that had no granite counters and that were beloved by the people who lived in them?  The abandoned houses surely don’t look new or trendy; they look old and ravaged.  They look like houses that have been around for awhile and have bravely survived the loss of the need they once served.

Third, we are afraid of growing old.  And the abandoned houses do it and they do it publicly.  Time to convene a death panel?  Or time to see what we can learn from them?  Certainly time to go visit them all again, at least all those that are still standing, and to take another round of photos for their autobiographies.

Cherry Tree Lane

Today seemed on the verge of being the first day of spring so I took a walk down APA Road (named for the Alaska Packers Association cannery) to visit the cherry trees on Cherry Tree Lane. That’s my own name for something which has no name and almost has no existence. I first saw them maybe ten or twelve springs ago…a half dozen cherry trees, neatly lined up on each side of a narrow pathway on the north side of APA. The pathway led, precisely, to nowhere. And yet, I knew it must have once led to somewhere. There must have been a house to which those trees invited friends to come in for a cup of whatever. There must have been kids who walked up that little lane after a day in school. This abandoned house had been for a long time, apparently, more than abandoned: absolutely disappeared, with no sign of the house’s previous placement even.

During most of the year, you’d barely notice the trees, but in April (or sometimes March) when the fruit trees begin to bud out, these six trees spring into bloom. And so they are beginning to do this week. The picture above is from the first time I ever saw them.

In the intervening years, I made a quilt from the picture and added those children I was sure had been there. And in the intervening years, someone came and bought the land and added a new big driveway twenty feet or so from the cherry trees. The driveway, in the nature of driveways, travels a goodly distance back to a modern house that in no way resembles the kind of house that was once there. You know that, even if you have never seen that original house. The cherry trees now looked strangely dwarfed by the new driveway, but in spring, this week, if you stand right in front of them, all the changes wash away, and they are there as they were back maybe 50 years ago. And even farther, when a neighbor (Mrs. Gudmanson?) brought the tree starts over.

For me, because I live in this part of Point Roberts, Cherry Tree Lane is one of the most memorable parts of this small peninsula. Whoever planted them can hardly have imagined they would still be here in the 21st century, still capturing our hearts and imaginations! Our gratitude goes to the new owners who were gracious enough, knowing enough, to leave them where they were in the trees' declining years.

Looking Ahead

When we first came to Pt. Roberts, a long time ago, and were looking at houses to buy, we made on offer on a tiny little house down on Maple St. in the South Beach area. It had a downstairs and a loft that was high enough to have a bit of an ocean view. It was one of those houses that you don’t often find when you are out looking: houses that are perfect as they are, that own themselves, that don’t need you to take them in hand in order for the house to continue to lead a respectable house life. Unfortunately, somebody else saw that quality just a few hours earlier, so they bought it and we didn’t.

But I still vaguely think of it as one of my former houses, so I keep an eye on what is happening to it. Today, I was walking down that way and found that my house was fine, but that the neighborhood was going to the mcmansions. Next door, someone has scooped up four or five adjoining lots, cleared them all of whatever was on them, and are now building a house that fully occupies three lots. It must have 20 rooms. Maybe the new owners are planning to offer a home away from home for the L.A. lady with the octuplets. Maybe they are going to operate a hotel (although I’m afraid the zoning is all wrong), or maybe they are just some more of that long line of folks who retire to giant houses. I always wonder whether they spent their previous 60 years feeling dreadfully crowded and only now can spread out. Whatever…

But because I am always thinking at some level about abandoned houses, I wondered if these houses will end up in that way? If, as seems quite possible at this moment, the U.S. is going to undergo a serious and long-term readjustment in its way of life, what will become of such houses? Who will want them twenty or thirty years from now when families are even smaller and when Pt. Roberts will probably still be trying to figure out a route to economic development?

When you go for the big house after retirement, you are somewhat unlikely to have a host of children and grandchildren who have fabulous memories of going to the grandparents’ for wonderful summer vacation and thus are anxious to keep the fabulous house of their summer memories in the family. When the inevitable comes, the house will get sold, but who will want so much house?

I think that the larger abandoned houses we already have have something of that kind of history. Too big, in the wrong place, family members no longer nearby even to use it let alone create grand memories, and no one anxious to buy it. So the now-untenanted house lingers around in some kind of limbo, and then it just begins to house itself and there aren’t many memories left of it. The next thing you know, it’s become an abandoned house.

So, now I’m looking at these oversized houses with different eyes. They have a future that may be of considerable interest to me. On the down side, of course, their future and mine probably won’t have much of an overlap.

The Way They Built Then

Here is the Hansen/Johnson house. It is probably the first or second best-known of all the abandoned houses in Point Roberts. It is located immediately across from the post office on Gulf Road, When I first went into it in 2002, I walked around the various rooms, which were very clean, very tidy, but a tad exposed to the elements on the south side underneath that vigorous vine you see growing on the right hand side of the house. The main room was wallpapered with cream colored paper with a fairly large floral print in oranges and beiges and greens. I could hardly imagine living with such wallpaper day and night, week after week, except for the fact that I remembered such wallpaper from houses when I was a kid, 60+ years ago. We liked it then.

The house is very sturdy and I was told that the walls themselves were built of reclaimed crab traps, wood long soaked in the ocean. And the house is, indeed, still very true. There are some things about it that puzzle me: e.g., it does not face Gulf Road. You would think it would, but it faces its own driveway, which comes off Gulf Road up the front door. Also, it has a very small skylight. Surely not something originally part of the house, but so small that it is hard to imagine that it would provide much in the way of light.

When we left the house the day we visited it, I picked up a piece of wallpaper that was lying on the floor and put it in the back seat of my car. I rode around with it in the car for several months, with the sun shining on it and drying it up and curling it up. Then I realized that the wallpaper piece was a vital part of the quilt I was making and I was obliged to resuscitate it with moisture and weights. And it flattened out well because it’s much thicker wallpaper than they make nowadays, I’d guess.

The first picture of the house comes from early in the spring of 2002; the second picture is the house in December, 2008. It has changed relatively little in those intervening 6 years. By contrast, some of the abandoned houses, less well constructed, have fallen apart in six years. Mr. Hansen, Mr. Johnson, whoever you were, good job!

The quilt depicting the Hansen/Johnson house is currently displayed on the wall of the waiting room at the Aydon Wellness Clinic in Point Roberts. It is 30”x37”, and is framed with wood reclaimed from the fence in my yard. The piece of original wallpaper lies underneath/behind the quilted house.

APA Road House

The abandoned house on the tract of land off APA is one of the three ‘big’ abandoned houses on the Point: ‘big’ in the sense of well-known, because everybody sees them regularly, because they are on the main roads. They are all three what I think of as original houses, which is to say houses that the Icelandic settlers who came here from Vancouver Island would have known, would still recognize if they were to return, even though all three have long been without tenants.

If Point Roberts was seriously into the history business, they would be ‘historic houses,’ and at least one of them would have been restored and tourists would come and walk through the rooms to see how the fishermen and farmers and their wives lived here a hundred years ago. As it is, despite the good and steady work of the P.R. Historical Society to keep the Point’s history before our eyes, the houses are just an owner away (and maybe less) from being razed.

Within the past ten years, they were charged with being eyesores and dangerous structures, but most of them survived that kerfuffle. Nevertheless, they are still somewhat susceptible to wind and weather damage. Fortunately, they are very well made houses, sturdy lumber that endures even without an owner’s care, perhaps because of the nature of their construction. I have been told by various people that much of the wood used in these original houses came from fish traps, meaning the wood would have been well-seasoned in the ocean before it came to hold up the houses.

But no quality of wood, no aesthetic or historic value stands in the way of those who are indifferent to the houses’ value in comparison to a desire to build a bigger, fancier, up-to-the-minute house on these beautiful great lots. It is a different kind of beauty than Lily Point, of course, but I find it no less beautiful because it is grassland rather than tree land, no less worthy of being preserved. These are the sites of the farms that fed more than lived here. These are the sites of apple orchards whose variety name is no longer known. They are, in a sense, abandoned; but in another sense, they are vibrantly with us, filled with what they were, as seen through
what they are in the process of becoming.


The first time I saw the APA Road house, it looked like this picture. I couldn’t actually get right up to the house because it was surrounded by closely growing brambles. But it stood very straight; none of the sloping roofs or sagging window frames I’ve seen on the newer abandoned houses. It’s been about six years since I took that picture.


Last month, I took this picture. I think the property must have been bought in the past year or so because the grasses have all been cut back, making the house more accessible and making it easier for strangers to assist in its decline. The cutting of the fields around the house also makes the house look exposed, frailer, more accepting of the razing that is bound to be in its future.



The quilt of the house is 42”x34” and was completed in 2003. The day I finished it, I was driving down APA Road (incidentally, APA stands for Alaska Packers’ Association, the owners of the cannery that was in P.R.) and glanced out the car window at the house as I went by. There, in exactly what would be the lower left corner of the quilt, was a coyote, almost invisible against the tall grasses and bushes. I turned right around and went home to see if I could incorporate him into the quilt, but it was too late. And now, we rarely see coyotes. When I see the house nowadays, with its ‘KEEP OUT’ sign and chain next to the road, I feel strongly that it may be too late for it, too.

Simple Dichotomies

I’ve pretty much heard enough for several lifetimes of binary assertions like ‘you’re either with us or you’re against us.’ Almost always, I think, it’s just not quite that clear. You might be more or less ‘with us,’ and also less or more ‘against us.’ You might not care one way or another because you don’t think it’s an important enough issue on which to have a unilateral stand (or to learn enough to try to acquire a unilateral stand). You might be against us, but only because we don’t share a common view of the relevant facts of the situation, or because we don’t have any facts in the first place. And the same could be said for a lack of common values: you might be for your own values without, particularly, being against ours. It goes on like that for me. Your standard liberal who just isn’t willing to take a stand.

On the other hand, there are some things that seem so self-evidently true that I can’t imagine how we get to thinking there’s any possibility of another side. For example, Jimmy Carter said "War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.” I just don’t know what ‘the other side’ of that could be.

But, binary thinking is part of our nature, and so it crops up all the time. For example, I found myself thinking about dichotomy this morning while doing some errands about the Point.

This photo is taken on Benson Road, at Drewhenge. The iconic cow is close to his barn and is now well-dressed for winter with blanket and hat. I think the very existence of the cow, not to mention his wanderings and changes of attire, can only be characterized, with respect to neighborliness, as FRIENDLY.



This photo is taken on APA Road, facing North at Calhoun St. It looks on to a large tract of land that houses one of my beloved abandoned houses. I have walked onto this land any number of times over the past ten years to look at the house, to photograph it, to be drawn into the past it represents. In contrast to the cow at Drewhenge, I would characterize this newly-erected chain, posts, and sign yelling POSTED/NOTRESPASSING/KEEPOUT, with respect to neighborliness, as UNFRIENDLY.

Drewhenge and the APA tract owners: With us or Against us? You be the judge.

Mr. Boyd's Girlfriend's House

This is what I call The Covered House, but is perhaps more aptly called Mr. Boyd’s Girlfriend’s House. After I found Mr. Boyd’s house and photographed it, people on the Point told me that there was another abandoned house on Rex Road. I went back but couldn’t find it. So they described it for me more carefully. ‘It’s right after you turn onto Rex Road.’ If it were this week, they could say, ‘It’s right across from that snowman in an inflatable globe.’ Then I would have found it maybe, but back in 2001, I definitely didn’t.

Time passed and yet someone else would tell me about the second abandoned house on Rex Road and occasionally I’d drive by but see nothing. Then, I drove by in 2003 in the winter and saw it. Covered in spring and summer by the luxurious growth, it was visible (and even then just barely) only when the leaves began to shrivel or disappear from the abundant brambles. It was like finding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The house was right where people had told me it was: on the south side, just after you turn onto Rex Road from Marine Drive. In fact, it is only about 20 feet from the road.

So I produced the wall quilt, ‘The Covered House,’ and went on to looking for other abandoned houses, although I continued to visit all the already-found houses on occasion and rephotograph them. The Covered House in summer was as splendid as the covered house in fall, now that I knew where to look for it. Its only visibly recognizable part was one stone chimney.



Then, one day in 2005, I took one of my grandchildren who had seen the quilt to see the house. To my very great surprise, the brambles had been cut back and the entrance to the house was now not only visible but accessible. We poked around a bit, even got a little inside to take some additional pictures of the chaos that was clearly visible: furniture tossed round, shelves fallen over. For the first time, I understood that it was a log house with two fireplaces, pretty much in the same style as Mr. Boyd’s house.


When we were about to leave, a man from the house across the street (the snowman globe owner, I guess) came out and asked what we were doing. I explained who I was and what I was doing and he told me that awhile back he had seen some people coming around and photographing the house. For some reason (he knew Mr. Boyd, perhaps), he felt some obligation toward the house. I think he thought the photographers might be from the county or some kind of agency that would cause the owner grief, so he cut back the brambles so the house would look better. Of course, it now made it a real attractive nuisance: with the brambles, you could barely see it and you certainly couldn’t get into it; with the brambles cut back, anybody could go inside and that was one falling down house. Pretty dangerous, I would have said, but I have zero risk tolerance.


I return now and then to the house. The neighbor has let it go back to its natural state, perhaps understanding that it is only me visiting occasionally, taking yet another picture. This is the photo from last week, before winter came. It’s looking more decrepit, but more decently covered. It’s falling apart, but it hasn’t fallen down.

The story I got from the neighbor was that Mr. Boyd built the house for his girlfriend, but that when the relationship fell apart, she left Point Roberts. He then closed the house and never again went near it. The neighbor is the one who told me that the current owner is Mr. Boyd’s nephew, who lives in Vancouver. All hearsay, of course.

A Visit to a Former House

Cold and snowy today, which transforms the landscape. Last Thursday, though, it was still fall, and I drove around to check up on some of the abandoned houses. I almost always start the circuit with the Boyd House, which is located at the end of Rex Road, were Mark St. crosses it. Well, that is to say that is where the house would be if the house were still there. But it’s been gone for about six years.

Back around 2000, when I first started tracking these houses, the Boyd house was the first one I ever saw AND also was able to go inside of. It was pretty scary, because even then, it was falling down. The roof had a great sag to it and big holes where the cedars shakes had decayed out; the walls had large openings; the floors were pretty hit and miss; the windows all broken out. But it was an interesting house. It was a small log house and the walls had many 4-6 foot paintings of Inuit totem animals. The fireplace looked like you still might be able to use it. There was nothing inside the house; i.e., no furniture or long-abandoned boxes of mouldy books (both of which turn out to be pretty common in these houses).

I took lots of pictures of it, and within a month or so had completed a small wall quilt memorializing it.







It wasn’t surprising that within a year or so it had collapsed under the force of snow and the winter’s customary big winds. And it lay all about on the ground for awhile.



One day in 2005 when I went to see it, the collapsed house had been disappeared. Instead, the land was covered with trailers. I couldn’t tell what was going on and I knew no one on the street to ask, so I just photographed and moved on.




.





This week, the trailers are gone and, next door to the former Boyd house, a large new house with an elaborate garden has arisen. And the Boyd house, which appeared to be gone in the photo from 2005, now appears to be stacked neatly on the ground in various piles: logs here, stones there, foundation where I last left it.




I know a little about the house, or at least I have been told a little by various people who purport to speak with authority but I have no way of knowing what is true. Mr. Boyd, I am told, was a hippy who came here in the 1960’s and built this log house to live in. He was eccentric, even for a hippy, and did not have plumbing in the house. He would visit neighbors periodically and ask whether he could use their bathrooms to take a brief shower. Within the house, there were areas cut out in the floor down to the ground so that local small animals (raccoons, in particular) could visit the house. Mr. Boyd also had a girlfriend here in Point Roberts, but that’s part of the story of another abandoned house. At some point before I moved here, he died. And the property is said to belong now to a relative in Vancouver. But maybe none of that is true. Maybe the true story is yet out there to be gathered.

Seeing As Art

Point Roberts has a moderately moribund Voters’ Association (all Americans) and an equally somnolent Property Owners’ Association (mostly Canadians, although American property owners can join). They keep some kind of indolent watch over the body politic here. Four or five years ago, the Voters’ Association, led by its president, became convinced that the sizable number of abandoned properties (houses, trailers, barns) was at the heart of our stagnant community and was preventing robust development. Somehow the absence of jobs and infrastructure was abandoned in the causative background.

The Property Owners’ Association was not worried about this phenomenon because it was largely their houses, trailers, and RV’s that were at issue. The Voters’ Association President made the 90-mile round trip to the county seat (Bellingham, in Whatcom County) to talk this all over with the County Council. Because, in fact, all this attractive nuisance property involved some kind of zoning violation, the County agreed to send someone up to issue notices of violation to the properties in question. And lo! The notices were made manifest.

I didn’t know anything about this because I never know much about anything until the monthly paper (The All Points Bulletin) comes out on the first of each month. When I saw the newspaper story, I was appalled because, although none of those abandoned properties were mine, there were several of them I was very fond of. They included houses on the main roads that one saw every day as they slowly returned from whence they came, a journey that would clearly take many years and had already been going on for many years.

Fearing that they would all disappear because of the county action, I did about all I could: I took pictures of the abandoned houses that I knew about, as well as inquired of friends about others that they might know about. It was obvious from the newspaper that there were more of them than I had imagined. Several had been immediately torn down before the newspaper even came out. However, after the county made its stand, it retreated back to Bellingham with, apparently, no follow-up. Still, those community members that liked these derelict houses felt that more attacks could come. In a crisis that doesn’t directly involve me, my first thought is, ‘Would a quilt help?’ Almost always, the answer to that question is, 'No.’ But, a quilt never hurts. So I decided to make a pictorial quilt of each of the houses I had photographed. I had never made a pictorial quilt before and had no drawing skills to speak of. But it somehow seemed doable because it seemed that it needed to be done.

A friend heard about my endeavor and arranged for me to visit more of these houses, ones off the main road, and to go inside them and photograph them. Several were among the first houses built in Pt. Roberts. Eventually, I had photographs of 17 buildings and eventually I made quilted portraits of each of them. The quilts range from fourteen-inches square, to about 52”x40”. You can see them here: Abandoned House Quilts. They have been on exhibit a number of times in various places and have taught me more about seeing and sewing than I would have imagined I could have learned. Here is a picture of a particular house in a particular field or a particular forest. Here is fabric. How do you make lovely, soft fabric look like wood and rocks and plants and doors and stone chimneys and ocean and things fresh and things decaying? Each new house posed the question anew and each had to be answered in a different way because each of the houses was different. They were old and they were usually collapsing in one way or another, but they had been cared about as homes and in some cases were still cared about for their past lives. They were surviving in their way with great dignity as they went through this long process.

Since I started this project, perhaps six of the houses have completed their lives: torn down for a new house and eventual home or collapsed entirely in severe weather. The quilted pictures of them will last, of course. That is something of a problem, though, as I am the custodian of all these quilts. Two have been entrusted to people whose lives were touched by the buildings: one a woman who rode horses in a barn now gone, the other a woman whose mother was born in a house now gone. But the rest are with me. Perhaps Ed should build a museum for them.

Regardless of what happens to them eventually, the process itself has tied me to the community in a way I would never have anticipated. They are my stake in Pt. Robert’s past and they anchor my present here. Unlike anywhere else I have ever lived (and there have been a lot of places), I am a part of this community.