Fall Appears

This morning, when we awakened around 8 a.m., the temperature had not yet made it to 10 degrees Centigrade (about 50 degrees Fahrenheit for the non-metric-fluent among us).  We have not seen such a low morning temperature for many, many weeks.  And now, by 5 p.m., it is unusually dark outside because there is a heavy cloud layer and the rain is coming steadily down upon us.  I recognize that sound; I remember that sound; I just haven’t heard that sound for quite a while. 

And so it begins again, that go-round of seasons and of year that, for me, anyway, begins in September, not January.  Did the Romans get it so wrong because they lived farther south?  If the Romans had lived in  Nova Scotia or Maine, would they have thought that anything actually began in January? 

But, in any case, it looks like we are really here at the Fall, even though a few weeks later than usual.  And in Fall, our thoughts turn to warm fires and cozy things.  Which brings me to thoughts of community and why it is that I am so fond of the idea of community.  I mean, I’m pretty much of an introvert and I happily spend most of my days alone, although Ed is of course somewhere nearby.  But I still think that it would be a good thing if people could get together to do well things that need to be done.  Like healthcare, say.  Or like getting the community events sign replaced.  (We’re pretty okay on the latter, but suffering greatly on the former, of course.)  Or maybe like just getting ready for fall--we could help each other get our gardens ready for the winter.

And in light of that, I was told yesterday about “Blitz Day” in my younger daughter’s hometown.  It seems that every year, one of the local churches organizes a day in which they gather up as many volunteers throughout the town as they possibly can gather (including kids), and everybody goes to work on that day to improve the community.  Blitz Day was last week in the mid-size town where she lives in southeastern Missouri.  It’s a small town inthe midst of a rural area with a small-town feel, a kind of southern U.S. feel, a town where you can imagine lots of people rising to the occasion.  And, indeed, she tells me, 1200 people signed up to participate.  They did all kinds of things: my 12-y/o granddaughter helped to seal the asphalt in a playground; my daughter cleaned lawn furniture at a long-term care facility (pointing out along the way that she might think about offering this service to her own lawn furniture).  A good day, a good job, a community thing.  Gladdens my sentimental heart.

So, of course, I got to thinking about what it would mean if Point Roberts had that kind of response to a call for volunteers to serve the community for a day.  Obviously, 1200 people aren’t going to volunteer because we barely have 1200 people, but I’m thinking about how many one could get, and also about exactly what they’d do if you had them.  Then it occurred to me to compare the populations.  So I looked up the population of my daughter’s town and it turned out to be much larger than I expected: 70,000.  If you compared that to Point Roberts, it means that we could expect about 20 volunteers.  Which doesn’t seem so unlikely.  Surely we could do that well.  But what would we do?   The thoughts of fall.

Mandala Day

Last week was Mandala Painting Day in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast. Each year, the community repaints the mandala which, because it is right out in the open and immediately in your path if you are walking to the beach or the pier, needs to be repainted. But more than re-painted, each year it is re-designed in its shape format and then entirely re-designed in the contents of those shapes. Everyone in the community--kids, adults, artists, novices--is invited to come and participate, to claim a space, to pick up a paintbrush and to make their marks for everyone else to see and appreciate for the next 365 days. And then it is time to repaint the mandala yet again.

It’s a great sight to see, not only because of its size but because of its variety. And because of its size, its variety is essentially a mystery because unless you spent a lot more time at the beach/pier than I do, you could never really get a handle on all the things that are there within the mandala. Well, you can see them all, but you can’t really internalize much of what you’ve seen. For that, it would take living with the mandala. But that’s okay, because it’s not meant to be absorbed in its particularity entirely so much as to be absorbed in its wholeness and informed by the suggestion of its particularity.

It’s a terrific community exercise and Roberts Creek does it proud each year. It stands out from the host of festivals that clutter the calendar in the summer months in the sense that it is entirely participatory. Even watching the completed project feels participatory, whereas going to the jazz festival or the fibre arts festival, say, feels like being a member of the audience, like being an observer.

Point Roberts has a little of this in the so-far yearly Art Walk, which happens next Monday from 10-4. Unlike the Mandala Project, though, it doesn’t focus on a single event that stays with the community. Instead, a half dozen or more different individuals/groups offer people who come by the opportunity not only to see some completed art, but also to take a run at doing some of it themselves, in at least a limited way.

The quilters have participated in this for the past three years. We make up small fabric books with blank fabric pages, and people fill up the pages with cut up pieces of fabric (collage images or abstracvtions) which they glue on to the pages, with stamps and ink, with ribbons and glitter. And they take their book away with them. But how could we manage to do something that would involve a final product that, like the Mandala, would last for a year and then would be replaced the following year?

Obviously no time to think sufficiently about this before Monday, but there is next year to think about. Certainly everyone who comes could make a painted quilt square and the quilters could subsequently put the squares together for some temporary (i.e., year-long) purpose. Or, perhaps something else that incorporates the other artists. Ideas would be appreciated.

Community Disorganization

Here’s how the All Point Bulletin summarized last month’s meeting of the Taxpayers Association in Point Roberts: “The board of the local taxpayers association shrunk again as directors declined to run for another term and no new blood came forward.”

Now we hear from the Point Roberts Voters Association, which held its monthly meeting last Monday. On the agenda, was a visit from the County Treasurer and the Deputy County Administrator, which constitutes a fairly intense level of county participation, I’d say. The Voters Association is perennially concerned with questions about whether Point Roberts gets adequate attention (which is to say resources) from the County compared with the funds that Point Roberts generates for the County. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not clear exactly why so many people are convinced that there should be some parity on this funds in-funds out.

Certainly it’s not true of the U.S. more generally where states like California and New York pour vastly more money—per capita--into the federal government than comes back to them, whereas states like Mississippi and Alaska (states whose spokespersons are highly committed to the idea that the federal government is their enemy and is taking away their freedom of action) get lots more, per capita, from the feds than they send to the feds.

Well, it’s hard to be a taker all the time and I suppose that explains all this to-do from these taking states. By contrast, it ought to be morally pleasing at the very least to be able to give more than you get. It speaks to doing well, to generosity, to a community’s status as part of the solution not part of the problem. Thus, it seems to me that Point Roberts is in a position to be less of a whiner that it sometimes seems to be.

Unfortunately, I was already gone to the Sunshine Coast by the time the meeting occurred, so I don’t know whether anyone was convinced by the Treasurer or Deputy Administrator. I did hear from others, however, that the meeting was somewhat less than successful. The important agenda item was the question of the Voters Association merging with the Taxpayers Association. Whatever Point Roberts is, it isn’t a place that is big enough to accommodate two civic action groups, so this merger made a lot of sense. Both groups have trouble attracting steady members, but between them they might have enough to sustain and achieve something. The recent history is of tension between the Americans (who constitute the Voters group) and the Canadians (who are strong in the Taxpayers group). Was it going to be time to get past all that? I certainly hoped so.

But it turned out not to be. Although the Taxpayers had been supportive of the merger, the Voters voted, 8 to 7 against doing so, I am told. What they probably also voted for was our continuing to have ineffective community groups. At least 8 of the 15 attending Voters members wished to let the rest of us know that we are not all in this together. Perhaps the other seven would like to consider just joining the Taxpayers Association instead. That group seems to be showing the right spirit.

Give Me Money, Please

Point Roberts seems to be suddenly and desperately in need of money. Toward the end of last month, there was a dinner with an auction sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce to raise money for the 4th of July parade. We’ve had a July 4th parade every year that I’ve been here, but I don’t recall that anybody ever raised money for it previously. It’s been getting a little less impressive every year for the past four years, I’d guess, so maybe money will take the place of lack of participant enthusiasm. Hard to know. In the years long gone when we had fireworks, there used to be a jar to put change in at the USA gas station to pay for them. But that didn’t work either and so we haven’t had fireworks for years.

This month, there was an auction to raise money for Lily Point. Today, there was a flea market at the Cannery (now to be known, apparently, as Pier Point or maybe Pierpoint—I’m not sure which—but why they are playing on the name Pierpont I can’t imagine) to raise money for the ‘Dollars for Scholars’ program which gives money at graduation to kids from here who are going on to college.

Unfortunately, there was another flea market two or three months ago to raise money for the Emergency Preparedness Program (to sustain us in the case of tsunamis or whatever else the universe has in store for us on this rather susceptible and easily isolated peninsula). It is probably the case that we have enough stuff to stock a flea market every week, but I don’t know whether there are enough buyers to make the stocking up worthwhile. I dropped by both events. The earlier one had an awful lot of stuff left over ten minutes before closing, and today’s didn’t have a large clientele at just before noon today when it as almost over, although others told me there were lots of people there in the morning.

Within the next few weeks, we have another auction+dinner to raise money for the Food Bank. And the Lutheran Church sponsors a concert almost every week in order to raise money for a generator for the aforementioned disaster. There’s some kind of on-going attempt to raise money to get a lighthouse for Lighthouse Park, and it’s possible that there’s a third parcel of Lily Point that somebody is raising money to buy. Doubtless more that I am not remembering, but it’s a lot of fund raisingfor a small place.

All good projects, but it’s beginning to seem like the world’s least efficient way to raise money. Maybe they could have one of those dinners where you pay not to go. I appreciate the idea that these are expressions of community, but if the community was so anxious to demonstrate support for these community projects, maybe they could just put up the money directly without having to have an event to go with it. How did ‘Community Chest’ work in Monopoly? Can we have one of those?

Interfaced!

In clothing construction, the interfacing is a piece of special fabric that goes in between the outside and the inside fabrics in order to stiffen slightly a particular part of the garment. So, for example, a collar or a lapel will have interfacing in the middle, attached in some way to both inside and outside fabrics usually, so as to emphasize the shape of the collar or lapel as well as to give it a little more body and make it able to resist wear better. I mention this because there is an email list on the Point called ‘Point-Interface,’ and it is an inspired name, because it does exactly what an interfacing does for an item of clothing. It gives Point Roberts a little more shape, a little more cohesiveness, and in the long run will make Point Roberts wear better, I think.

The person who presides over Point-Interface does so somewhat by accident, as I understand the history. It started as a list for the Red Hat Group, and then over time, other names were added and now it has several hundred names. Anyone can ask to be added to the list and if you do you will get maybe 8 emails a week with a remarkable range of information. Perhaps you would like to buy a lovely carpet that someone on the other side of the Point needs to have out of their house; join a group that is coordinating neighbors who are able to provide one another occasional transport to the airport; locate your missing cat or your missing drill; rescue a pet whose owner is not findable; be told about the latest gallery show at The Blue Heron or a concert on Sunday at the Lutheran Church; be reminded of the meeting (and the meeting's agenda) of the Taxpayers or the Voters Associations; or hear about a new book of poetry that a resident has published; or be brought up to date on a new transit program that Whatcom County is offering to those of us on the Point. It’s a wondrous grab bag of emails, some of which I file away, some of which I delete, all of which I am glad to have seen and know about, even if I don’t respond specifically to them. It's a little like a tiny, kind-of-daily newspaper.

Last year, when I thought that the Point Roberts Community Association might reasonably have a website , I thought that such a mode of communicating might be a feature of that website, but I didn’t know then about Point-Interface. And I suspect that eight months ago, it didn't have as wide-ranging a series of community announcements and information as it now has. Currently, the list-keeper has a large enough base of people interested so that Point-Interface has enormous potential for providing community cohesion without anybody having to attend meetings or be made the president.

The key to making this all work, I suspect, is that the person who runs the list has only two main jobs: One, maintaining the list of email addresses, and, second, receiving information and making a judgment as to whether any particular request should go out to everyone on the list. All replies come back to the person who wants the information posted. So, if you want to locate your missing cat, you send the information and a picture to the list keeper, and your message with your reply information then goes out to the list. If you want to engage the help of others, point-interface is a great place to start. I'm working out the possibility of starting a hand sewing/embroidery class for kids on the Point, and once I get the preliminaries worked out, the point-interface list is where I'll go to find out if there actually are any kids interested in learning hand sewing/embroidery. There's simply no other way I could effectively get that information. Great thanks to the list keeper! By contrast, if you want to fulminate about Obama, or the Whatcom Council, the All Point Bulletin's Letters to the Editor is the place for that information.

If you want to be added to the point-interface list, send your name, phone number, and email address to point-interface@pointroberts.net. Try it, trying being a part of the connected part of the Point.

Community Organization

Last night the Point Roberts Taxpayers’ Association held its monthly meeting. (I’m not down at the Point right now so I didn’t attend and can't report on what happened.) Both the Voters’ Association and the Taxpayers have recently been making considerable attempts to renovate their status, to reinvigorate their memberships, to become more relevant, more in-demand, more leaderly, for lack of a better word. Having put in a year on the Point Roberts Community Association, a group that continues to wither on the vine as I type these words, I can understand the desire of members to make these other groups work. But, there is also the reality of history.

As far as I know, there are no long-standing community-governance-type groups in the recent history of Point Roberts. By that, I mean groups that have even a 10-year history of creating, maintaining, and pursuing a coherent community-governance agenda. Which does not mean that there are not regular attempts to create such groups, but just that the results of such groups are spotty, at best. So, the prospect for the Voters and the Taxpayers does not look good. Currently, the two groups are considering amalgamating their groupness, thus metamorphosing into something that might be called the Point Roberts Taxpaying and/or Voting Association.

The problem with such fusion is, perhaps, that a single organization will not have enough slots for all the would-be chiefs. Two organizations? Twice as many slots. One organization? Half as many. The Taxpayers are apparently (according to their minutes) also looking into creating municipality status for Point Roberts: an option that may also create some problems around chiefs status, even fewer slots in the governance of a tiny municipality. Point Roberts may have more than its share of chiefs-in-waiting, or it may just be another by-product of American Exceptionalism—and thus found in every small and large U.S. community—whereby almost everyone thinks of himself as a potential leader.

I have been reading Winston Churchill’s books on World War II. Here was a leader. It is quite remarkable how committed he was to his vision of what had to be done. I suppose that is a good part of the definition of a leader, which may be why contemporary Liberals tend to do so poorly at the task—they always sound pretty apologetic about even having a view, let alone insisting on it, or, finally, about drawing others to their organization because of the strength of their commitment. It’s more like ‘Why don’t we all get together and see if there’s something we can agree to support/pursue/encourage/whatever.’ If the Taxpayers and the Voters get together, will they then have to figure out a mission they all can drum up some enthusiasm for? Tune in later, and see, I guess. But at the moment, if I had to pick among the Taxpayers, the Voters, and a revived Thursday night Bingo Game, it wouldn’t be a hard choice.

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.

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.

Meeting, Writing, and Writhing in Coils

Another two-event day, or in this case a two-event night. The Community Center on Thursday evening hosted both the P.R. Community Association monthly meeting and the monthly meeting of the Point Roberts’ branch of The Regional Assembly of Text Letter Writing Club (whose main headquarters is in Vancouver). Unfortunately, both were scheduled for 7 p.m. Seeing as how I am the note taker at the Community Association, I concluded that duty required me to go there, rather than across the hall to the Letter Writing Club.

The Community Association continues to explore or maybe just to try to understand its potential role on the Point. The other main all-inclusive groups on the Point are the long-time Taxpayers’ Association and the Voters’ Association, both of which wax and wane over time. The former, of course, includes Canadians and Americans who own property here, and the latter includes U.S. citizens here who can vote in the U.S. Both these groups have, historically, been organized around political action, either with respect to actual elections or to dealing with government entities (federal, state, and, county). The Community Association, an organization less than a year old, is understood to be open to anyone who lives here for at least some part of the year and focuses on smaller scale projects to improve the community life, particularly projects that do not require involvement in any significant way with government agencies/entities.

Thus, its first task has been to rebuild the local Community Events sign, but it has taken much longer than anyone expected and has led to some discouragement. Nevertheless, the group perseveres, and I with it, hoping that its next task (putting out a questionnaire to residents about what kinds of projects would most interest them) will move a little faster and will provide it with a better sense of what people want or care about here in Point Roberts. But I continue to be puzzled about the actual process: how does a group without a clear sense of purpose move forward? I worked for years creating ethics committees in hospitals, and that was hard enough to do, given the severe institutional hierarchies involved. But at least I understood where those groups were trying to go. Not so true with this one, but then it is not my job to make it happen, either.

By the time I got to the Writing Club meeting, everyone in that group was packing up and going home. What the ten or so people who had been there had done was to write letters on old-time hand-operated typewriters. They had a bunch of them there, ranging from ones like the old-time Underwood upright that I learned to type on in 1951, to smaller, ‘modern’ portable typewriters like the one I had in college in 1954. Although I actually made a small living in graduate school by typing Ph.D. dissertations, which means that I was pretty fast and very accurate, I am sorry to say that 25 years of computer use has rendered me actually too fast for a manual typewriter (the keys kept getting caught together as they rose to imprint the paper). Furthermore, I am also absolutely too weak in the little finger (both left and right hands) to get the a, q, z, and p keys to make even a faint imprint.

The first practical typewriter wasn’t invented until 1872. I remember years ago thinking about how George Eliot and Charles Dickens wrote their very, very long manuscripts by hand, with not quill pens, but stick pens. And then when they went back to edit their manuscripts, they got to write them by hand a second time. A book could take a very long time to write that way. It does make me wonder why they didn’t think about the possibility of shorter novels. Well, they missed the typewriter age. But now, although I actually did write a book on a typewriter in the early 80’s, I can barely remember how it would have worked to have to retype it every time I did an edit. Writing now is an easy four or five edit job, but all done within the text of the first draft.

The Writing Club is not encouraging the use of manual typewriters for manuscript writing. It is encouraging its attendees to write letters--personal letters--the kind we used to write to friends and relatives far away and put in an envelope and send with a stamp. I wrote such a letter to an old friend (with a pen, as it happened) four or five years ago. She wrote back (also with a pen on paper and in a stamped envelope) that receiving my letter made her feel like she was a character in a Jane Austen novel. That’s a gift to give to someone! You live long enough, all kinds of ordinary things become rarities.

Neatly Done

Home by dinnertime after 2+ hours of roadside litter collecting. Here’s the sociological data: Ed registered us in for this previously announced community activity this morning. We were responsible for doing the 6 blocks of South Beach Road, down to the beach. A neighborhood group was responsible for Maple Beach. No one else had registered by noon. We were given half a dozen large, clear, plastic bags and offered tongs and orange vests. We took the bags and declined the accoutrements because I have my own trash grabbers and I figured we could be seen on the road adequately.

Around 3:30, we headed out with the tools of the trade and indeed were visible on the road. One neighbor couple out for a walk congratulated us on being good citizens; a man in a car stopped and told me that there was really a lot of roadside trash about a block further along and also, ‘thanks for doing this’; a man on the beach, when we got there, asked us if we were doing this on our own time; a woman with a baby was reminded by the sight of us that this was the day to collect litter and vowed to get involved next time; and a lady in a car, as we neared home, stopped and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry; I thought you were someone else.’

The wages of the work? Well, a tidy pile of asphalt shingles, an extraordinarily heavy glass bottle that had at one time contained some fancy kind of alcohol; various metal pipes and strips; a real estate sign; a regulation-sized tsunami warning sign complete with post; a deteriorated aluminum lawn chair; and a plastic quart jar about one-quarter full of pennies. Also, the expected beer cans, soda cans, newspapers, bottle tops, plastic cups, plastic bags, and cigarette packages. The worst? Hundreds of cigarette butts. The other worst? Styrofoam packing peanuts. And the final worst? Plastic bags that have started to fall apart into a hundred smaller pieces of plastic bags. Worst in a different category? The neighbor who has a sign on her front fence that says, “Beware of Dogs.” When you walk by, the dogs race out of the yard in a very threatening manner. Maybe she should keep them in her yard if I need to be beware of them.

So now, we’re all tidy on these streets. It’s a nice fall activity; makes me feel at one with the numerous spiders on our house and in our yard who daily mend and straighten their webs. I hope that there are lot of other Point Roberts residents who are feeling satisfied with their contribution to the community this evening.

What's Our Problem?

I remember World War II quite distinctly and especially the sense of urgency about doing things that were in the service of the war. The ration books that told you how much stuff you could obtain, the saving of things that the war somehow needed: tin cans, toothpaste tubes (which I think you had to take back to the drug store when empty in order to get a new one), jars of meat fat from cooking (like bacon fat), tin foil, tin anything (I guess). The saving of small amounts of money so that you could buy War Bonds. (If you could get together $18.75, the government would pay you back $25 in, as I recall, ten years). Even little kids saved their money for War Bonds. The practice air raids in which the black curtains had to be put on the windows and the local air raid warden walked around to make sure no lights were visible. There was such an every-day presence of the idea that we all were in a big problem and only if we all worked on the big problem would the big problem find its ultimate solution.

It is such memories, I think, that made the 9/11 advice from George W. to go out shopping so profoundly irritating. One the one hand, I was being told that life as I had known it was now gone (as in, after 9/11, everything changed); on the other, I was being told that nothing was any different, just get a nice, expensive meal at a nice expensive restaurant and you’ll feel fine. Cognitive dissonance, I believe that’s called, and an invitation to a schizophrenic response. So maybe we are just in the schizophrenic response phase.

It certainly appears that we are in a really big problem, at least as big as World War II. Perhaps we are just waiting for the equivalent of Pearl Harbor to join up. What would that be? Record floods? Record large hurricanes? Record heat waves? Melting glaciers and ice shelves? Apparently not. Whatever it’s going to be, I guess it will have to be more astounding than 9/11 for everything to change.

I saw Al Gore’s film; I thought it wonderfully impressive and, given all the positive response, I thought that the film itself might be somehow the equivalent of Pearl Harbor (at least in the sense of convincing people that something astoundingly dangerous had happened). Al Gore now has a website where you can sign up to be part of the solution: it’s called ‘We Can Solve It.’ I signed up, you can too, but so far I doubt if any of us signing up will be as helpful as my saving tinfoil was in WWII, and believe me I don't think that had much effect. But it’s something. Maybe it’s a start. The site itself urges you to tell other people to sign up and to nag your elected officials. I have to say that the site disappointed me because I want to be saving tinfoil or being told what my ration card allows (even if I don’t particularly long for a ration card itself). [ JUST IN: Having sent out a puzzled cry for help to my offspring, I am told that Al Gore’s site does have advice for individual action. It’s well hidden here. And it’s good advice.] /

Switzerland has something called the ‘2,000 Watts Society,’ which urges people to try to think about the energy they use. If everybody used 2,000 watts/year, that would be sustainable. In Europe, the average per-capita use is 6,000 watts; in developing countries like India, closer to 1,000. And, in stunning first place, we find Canada and the U.S., with 12,000 watts per person. So my next job is to try to figure out how many watts I am using per year and at least to think about how I can reduce it. I already have the swirly low-watt lights in all the places they can be; I keep the thermostat in the house at 65 degrees during the time we need heat, and we don’t have or need air conditioning, luckily; full washer loads, only, with cool water; clothes drying outdoors during the non-raining months; no driving without multiple reasons to go out. Stuff like that.

A small community like Point Roberts is, conceptually, a wonderful place to try to create community programs to showcase what people themselves can do, either singly or as a group. But somehow, I have the feeling that the libertarian nature of Point Roberts doesn’t exactly lend itself to this. But in time, real necessity will overcome even that, I suppose. I have been saving flattened tin cans for several years: it was for an art project, but maybe it will come in handy to defeat global warming. I mean, didn’t it work to overcome the Axis Powers?

No Clicks Without Bricks

Today’s post is primarily from Shelly Albaum who explains what he meant when he told me that a web site would not be sufficient to create community communication because ‘no clicks without bricks.’

"The research shows that most people do not regularly visit very many websites. They have dozens or scores of bookmarks, and they could check them all regularly, and a few people do, but the vast majority have only a few well-traveled paths -- less than 10 sites visited weekly -- and people are resistant to change. For example, just knowing that a great website is out there, or a better search engine than Google is out there, has almost no impact on my actual behavior.

That's because I don't have a real problem with Google, and information overload is such a serious problem for most people that news of a new website isn't really all that welcome. Or at least it's not particularly good news.

So creating the website that has all the information about Point Roberts is critically important, and is a must-do, important step. However, 95% of your intended audience won't remember to go there, and thus they will not hear the news. RSS was supposed to solve this by pushing the information out to your customized Yahoo Portal Page or your iGoogle Page, or your iPod, or your cell phone, but that still doesn't reach most people.

In the physical world, we have many more well-worn paths and thus are way better at receiving serendipitous information from our peripheral vision. That's why the big sign at the main intersection is so helpful.

What you'd want ideally is a big comfortable public space with great seating, occasional entertainment, lots of displays and bulletin boards, great drinks, cheap food, and convenience services like photocopies, faxes, or whatever people need. This would be a meeting place that everyone would have occasion to visit daily, or at least regularly, and would encounter visual reminders of interesting things, and then they would check the website to find out more. In its most fully articulated version, this idea would actually bring blogs and web sites into the physical world with large screens and plenty of free browsing terminals.

This kind of thing would have a different personality in every town, but every town needs something like it. Almost no town has one, though, I think. The main thing is to create a common public meeting space that is analogous to and complementary of the virtual town square that is a web page."

The Point Roberts Community Center comes immediately to my mind. It isn’t what Shelly describes, but it is extraordinarily easy to imagine it being that. I can see where we are; I can see where we can end up; but I can’t at all see what are the steps in between. I suppose that’s why ‘almost no town has one.’ More to think on.

Institution-less in Gaza

And maybe eyeless as well. I got an email the other day from a sometime Point Roberts visitor and relative of locals who is putting up a new web site in hopes that it will help to address Point Roberts’ residents’difficulties in creating some kind of community voice both for dealing with the community and for all kinds of other purposes, as well. So, I’ve been thinking today, having witnessed some of that broken-ness yesterday at the 4th of July parade, about why Point Roberts is so fractured. Things work for awhile, and then--all too frequently--they suddenly fly apart. Maybe it's not 'too frequently' but inevitably.

There are all the obvious reasons for the fracturedness and fractiousness of the Point community: lots of full time residents who don’t actually live here full-time; more Canadians than Americans who own property, but more Americans than Canadians who can vote; the border (which could itself be reasons numbers one through ten); a substantial portion of community members who are retired and thus less concerned pragmatically about the issues that affect younger people (jobs/economy) and younger people with children (schools, recreation). When the old people want some recreation, they take a cruise.

Other reasons are possible, but I don’t have any data to confirm them. However (never to be stopped by the absence of data), I strongly suspect that there are a lot of people who came here just because it was a kind of outpost where they weren’t going to be put upon by other people and weren’t going to be badgered into being members of a community. Voting patterns here suggest a hardy band of libertarians and they are bound to come in conflict with that other resident group of former hippies who are happy to have everybody in the soup together.

There are plenty of reasons why community doesn’t really work here. But I think the biggest one may be that we are a community without community institutions. We have a community health clinic, and a community library, and a community center and a community church. None of those institutions is set up to in any way create a sense of community beyond their narrow focus. Kris and staff run a great little library; Virginia and staff run a much needed health clinic; the community center itself is just a building, really, for events that somebody else has to figure out. The church is as ecumenical as a Lutheran church can possibly be, but it has worked hard to broaden its reach without substantial success, although the new minister is working hard to bring more people into the church for non-religion-specific events. But there’s nothing else: the newspaper, once a month, just isn’t enough, or often enough, to provide that center point.

In a brief conversation with my son (a web publishing/internet maven) about the possibility of a website as a community institution, he replied cryptically to me, ‘No clicks without bricks. You need a pub.’ I’m looking forward to hearing more from him on the topic, but I have so far figured out that he’s saying a website won’t work if it doesn’t also have some kind of physical community presence. I’ve looked at a few previous local website attempts, and they certainly don’t seem to have generated that conversational focus on their web basis alone.

So, we need a pub; I don’t think he meant a bar, though, because there are plenty of those already. It hasn't helped.

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.

Volunteer Careers

When people move to a place like Point Roberts, it is often because they have retired from some other career or, have achieved semi-retirement with some continuing career work via the net. One couple retired from a university somewhere else but are extending their academic career at a Canadian university in Vancouver. Ed and I took another alternative and, for three or four years, lived here for a month and then returned to Los Angeles working the next month there. Over a decade, the six months in each place slowly turned into no months in Los Angeles and all the rest of the time here in the northwest. And then, there you are with every day open to whatever suits you.

It’s a lot of time to work with after the first few months. Most of us have lived lives of carefully and full-time scheduled lives. Without all that work stuff, we are left with three meals a day (which, of course, take on great new significance) and whatever other routines we can figure out. Lots of people who come to Point Roberts under those circumstances take to volunteer work of various kinds. There are a lot of organizations on the Point that operate with volunteers. But it isn’t entirely easy being a volunteer as compared with having a job because jobs are relatively clear and suited to your abilities, while volunteer jobs often are neither clear nor suitable.

It seems to me that by the time you’ve finished off your work life, the people you know and work with pretty much understand your strengths and weaknesses, your skills and your non-skills. You are generally encouraged to do things you do well and discouraged from doing things you’ve shown no great aptitude for. And life is the better for that most of the time. But you move to a new place where no one knows any of those things, you may well be asked or encouraged to do things as a volunteer that you have no ability to do, but not asked to do things you really know about.

In my work in Los Angeles, no one I know would have ever allowed me, outside of a classroom, to be involved in meeting with and encouraging a lot of people I didn’t know to do something. I’m a bedrock introvert and I hate asking people to do things that they haven’t already agreed to do. Other people are terrific at doing this kind of thing (think of all the people who are fund raisers for various causes, which seems to me the very extreme end of this kind of job). Nevertheless, I have somehow found myself agreeing to do just this thing in my attempt to be a cooperative volunteer, and nobody stopped me.

So, here’s the small lesson: before you become a post-retirement volunteer in a small community project, remember to remember what you do well and try not to stray too far from that, at least not as a first step in expanding your abilities.

The Community Council Stands Up for Inclusivity, Perhaps

The Provisional Community Council of Point Roberts held its second meeting (at least that I’ve been to) this past week. At the end of the previous meeting, you may recall, a decision was made to place an announcement in the local paper inviting any of the many groups on the Point to send a representative to the April meeting. The result was not impressive, alas, although a couple more people showed up. At the end of the second meeting, the decision had been made to write a letter to all the groups on the Point inviting them to send a representative to the next meeting of the Provisional etc. (Isn’t there a Provisional Council in Star Wars??? Readers, please enlighten; perhaps we could work it in.)

Which would seem to be no progress. But only seem, because actually writing a letter requires deciding who will receive a letter. And on this issue, there was genuine if not unanimous progress. As near as I can tell (and being there is all you get for proof), the decision was that, for a group to be eligible to send a representative, the group must be in Point Roberts, involve volunteer efforts, and the voluntary effort must be on behalf of the interests of the community. Thus, I was obliged to argue, the P.R. Quilters Group was eligible because we have made numerous quilts for the community itself or for local groups to raffle in an attempt to raise funds for community projects, but that the gentleman to my left’s poker group was not eligible because, although in Point Roberts and voluntary, NO apparent community benefit was involved in their game. A harsh move, but that’s the nature of politics, I suppose. He was still disputing this with me as we left, however, so his poker group may yet show up with a letter and a representative who I think will be him.

The second possible progress is not so clearly a step forward yet. The discussion stepped right up to and then danced away from the question of whether commercial interests—if sufficiently large—would have membership independent of the local Chamber of Commerce, which would otherwise represent all business interests. The commercial interests at issue would, I am guessing, include the real estate agents, the contractors’/developers’ association, the golf course, and the marina. This could still go either way (a big argument for inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness was made), but—and less clearly discussed—a feeling at least on my part that there was an awful lot of business interest potentially showing up at this table, as opposed to community interest, lingers.

Thus, the Walking Group, the Gardening Club, the Lutheran Church, the Historical Society, the Arts Foundation—all of whom meet the voluntary/community interest qualifications—will get letters. Similarly, the Chamber of Commerce participates in community activities. So, we will see to whom the letters actually will go and we will see who shows up next month.

As one long-time activist resident said to me on the way out the door, “When I take even a little step forward, that’s progress. I’m content with that.” I’d be willing to go farther than that, I think. If you don’t go backward, that’s progress. However, operating in this 'theory of democracy' territory seems strangely foreign to me. I think it is largely because this community council idea is not yet framed in any way for me to be either comfortable with the concept or deeply opposed to it. I am waiting, fairly patiently, to see what is the frame that emerges. And the second part of this hesitation is my firm belief that most of the people who live here permanently as well as part-time are genuinely estranged from this discussion we are having. As one Canadian neighbor said to me, “I love coming down the Point where I don’t have to be responsible for anything but my own house.” It’s the libertarian streak in all of us that can do us in.

We're All in It Together, Sort Of

It is hard to know how to speak about Pt. Roberts as an existential phenomenon. It isn’t a small town; it isn’t a village; it isn’t a little resort community. I am pretty much unable to come up with a word or two that captures that particular aspect of a place where people live. It’s maybe a small community. If that is what it is, then presumably a commitment to community values or even communitarian values might be demonstrated by the residents.

Of course, that is not entirely true of the residents here, or it is true, perhaps, but not in the same way. There are some people who have an historical connection with the place: they, their parents, maybe their grandparents were born here. For them, their sense of the Point is bound up with the geography and their families’ involvement in shaping the place. Everybody knows them or at least their names, and they are participants in the community in a special way.

Others, especially Canadian cottagers, have been spending vacations here with family members for generations, and it is that family history that is important to them, rather than a commitment to the larger community, although they may have some more traditional sense of community with a particular area of the Point (e.g., one of the neighborhoods, like Maple Beach, or Freeman Beach, or Bells’ Grove). If their permanent Canadian residence is nearby, they might have a toe in community activities.

There’s an odd lot (odd not because strange but because as individuals they don’t seem similar enough to fit in a single category) of residents who often have young children and don’t fit in any of the categories above. They seem to me to be people who have chosen to come here in considerable part because they wanted to try to live in a place like this. It’s not because of a job, or family connections, or family history, or a need for someplace to keep a boat, or general enthusiasm for living at the beach or in the woods. If this were 1967-70, I would recognize this group more clearly. But they are a younger lot and they are mysterious to me. If they have children, they are deeply interested in school issues, of course. But they are also likely to be involved in groups/issues that stress the nature of the community, or try to influence it in some way.

A big chunk of the permanent residents are, like me, recent arrivals from some city or another where community was not a big feature, or indeed any feature. I lived on a street in the L.A. suburbs for years without knowing the people around me. Indeed with no noticeable desire to know any of them. This group may find the idea of community appealing, but not be anxious to get involved with people they do not know. They may well be a little leery or unsure of what community requires of them. I feel that way a lot. What is my responsibility to belong to community groups? To attend community events? To bring community to the community? I’m totally unclear on this.

This came to my attention today because it was the first spring-like weekend of the year and, at the grocery store, the Garden Club and the Dollars for Scholars Group had both set up card tables outdoors to urge us to, I guess, be community participants. The Garden Club was selling bulbs and the Dollars for Scholars Group was selling tickets for a fund-raising dinner. The Garden Club is part social group but it also runs a Garden Tour Project in the summer and last fall carried out extensive bulb plantings on the easement of the main road. The Dollars group ensures that every high school graduate from the Point who goes on to college gets a cash grant.

These are good things. In fact, I belong to the Garden Club (which is to say I pay my dues), but I have never been to a meeting. However, I don’t really need any bulbs. Also low on my preferences is going to a dinner that will require me to eat with strangers in a large room with dubious acoustics so that I will not be able to hear what they say. In Los Angeles, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment on this question. But I live in a community now and thus everything is or might be different. I think. In any case, one day soon, I will be the owner of a half dozen pricey lily bulbs that have a high probability of never blooming in my very shady garden. Furthermore, I would have been going to that dinner until I realized that I could just give them the price of admission but promise I wouldn’t come. Alas, neither solution quite satisfactory. If only the Volunteer Fire Department had had a table soliciting new members. I’m pretty sure that they wouldn't have wanted me to become a volunteer fireman.

Roots and Rootlessness

I don’t think that I really know what it means to live in a community where the word actually means something that is different from, say, living in a small town. The people who move to Point Roberts often long to live in a community, but they mostly don’t seem to have any more idea than I do about how to make that happen. Point Roberts is a community for some people: they were born here, their parents were born here, they grew up and maybe went away to school, but then came back and got jobs and houses and spouses and children. They remember it for what it was and is as an aspect of their daily lives, not as an interesting study.

Two of my quilting students come from such a family. Their grandparents were both born here on the Point and I can point to the houses they grew up in. Their grandfather was the minister in the local and only church, a Lutheran Church, but because everyone here was not a Lutheran, he officiated at the church in such a way that everyone felt welcome, and he did so for many years until he retired. The new minister is from away, however.

The minister’s children grew up here and at least two of them have come back to make their lives on the Point. These two daughters are also the mothers of my two quilting students. The girls are remarkable, both in their willingness to work at something month after month and in their sensibleness. When they began, they were 12 and 13; now the older is 16. Both are bright and unusually cheerful considering that they are teenagers, and willing to spend two hours each Sunday working indoors on what is in many ways a very repetitive and slow-moving task, although I try to structure it so that there are frequent opportunities for creativity. They work well and they do good work.

They are happy to have this opportunity, but I suspect I am the real beneficiary of it. Through them, I get to see something of what it might be like to live in one place, and to have that place be the same place your parents and grandparents lived. They have deep roots and long knowledge and a calmness I don’t associate with teenage years.

Here is a list of the places I have lived since I was born: Pocatello, ID; Bozeman, MT; Canton, NY; Morley, NY; San Diego, CA; Brentwood, CA; West Hollywood, CA; Westwood, CA; Beverly Hills, CA; Culver City, CA; Lakeville, MA; Yap, Micronesia; Beverly Hills, CA (again); Venice, CA; Westwood, CA (again); Brentwood, CA (again); Roberts Creek, BC; and Point Roberts, CA.

I suspect my life is as alien to my students as theirs is to me, but I am living perhaps the more typical life of an American in the 20th and 21st Centuries. We all three come from immigrant stock, but some immigrant families stayed put and some learned the lesson of motion and kept on moving, even when there was no more West to move on to. I can’t really quite imagine that I will be here for the rest of my years, unless those years are fairly small in number. But I also can’t really imagine what it is to have a historical memory of a place that is shared with generations. No wonder we never know anything about history, I suppose. The girls offer me some idea of what an awareness of lived history in a community might be like. And they learn to sew and to make quilts.