Strange Times, Strange Voices

UPDATE BELOW

 It's been about six weeks since we last were drawn up and into the distress about the 'Point Roberts Beach Club at or near Lily Point Housing Development."  At that time, the County was about to approve the environmental assessment plans of the development company.  And, in general it did, although it also put some things over, including a historical assessment of the two houses on the property.  Also, over this time, the developers, mainly Wayne and Anders (of previous discussion) have been meeting with a group of folks on the Point in an attempt to reconsider some of the planning, including saving more of the trees that border APA.  All to the good.

But not, necessarily, all to the best, at least not to those who think that a development of this sort is a poor plan for Point Roberts, although it might be a good plan for providing economic improvement for Wayne and Anders.  But this is the sort of thing that will doubtless go on here for years to come.  In fact, of course, this particular one has been going on for years, although the players have occasionally changed.  I think that the opposition is not so much a 'not in my backyard' feeling as a sense that things are difficult enough in this strangely appealing place without adding to the difficulty at the same time as one is taking away part of the appeal.  And especially when, on the other side, there is nothing much more than money to be made by outsiders.  (I know, Wayne lives here, so he's not an outsider.  But in my view, developers are by nature outsiders.  I will not defend that proposition here, however.)

Anyway, there's this general community uneasiness about this proposed development, even if it's not as over the top as the former version of it.  And, during this past six weeks, there have apparently been two incidents in which some vandalism has been committed or allegedly committed on the property.  Survey sticks removed, strings uprooted, etc., causing economic loss to the owners.  The only reason I know about this is that Anders has written the residents of Point Roberts twice--on Point Interface--to warn us that if this doesn't stop, he will be obliged to close up the property so that we can no longer have access to it.

I found these communications strangely condescending.  It's his property, of course, so he can keep it unfenced or fence it or whatever.  And, since most of us here don't spend a lot of time trotting around in other peoples' property, it is likely that closing it off will be no greater loss to us than the loss of access if Anders takes to building 30 or 40 or whatever number of houses on it.

But beyond that is the assumption that it is the readers of Point Interface who are up to no good here, while the Lord of the Manor is killing himself trying to accommodate our views.  Such ingratitude on our part!  And so in need of a punishing response.

So I just want to take this opportunity to say that, if he keeps up building this development the way he seems to want to, then I will really, really be offended, even though I'm normally a friendly, good-time Charlie.  Further, to clarify the extremity of my irritation,  I'm throwing down the gauntlet right now.

Anders:  If things go on the way they are,  I'm not inviting you to my birthday party....Not this year, and not ever. You've been warned.

Reber informs me today (May 30) that the County has voided/declared moot the previous ruling on the Beach Club project that it made earlier this month (because of technicalities) and the whole process now starts over again.  June 15, July 15 seem to be relevant dates for further hearings, meetings, what have you.  One is reminded that 'the wheels of justice grind slow but exceeding fine.'  And, in this case, perhaps all for the good, once again.

The Value of What? And, to Whom?

Okay, so yesterday's bottom line was that the members of the community in attendance at the new Lily Point LLC development didn't want it to happen but figured that the best way to have the development avoided (or at the moment, the only way since the actual hearing on the development itself isn't until June) would be to have the County planning board decide that more work needed to be done on the environmental impact statement that they'd already said didn't need any more work.  However, they left it up to the public to point out where they might be wrong about that.  Thus, the meeting was intended to encourage people to write about that.  It was more a matter of using whatever law was available to slow things down because there is a general concern that the trees are at risk of being cut very soon.

But, here's my other concern.  I certainly share in the general emotional concern of those at the meeting that this is not what I want for Point Roberts, nothing that is likely to improve Point Roberts, nothing that is likely to make it more scenic or more livable.  But there is a very big 'not in my backyard' nature to that concern.

Wayne and Anders have, after all, laid out real money for this property and this is, after all, a country devoted to capitalism, profit-making, and private property and everybody owning a house or two.  So why shouldn't they be allowed to do that here?  Granted, we'd all like it done somewhere else, but so what?  There are plenty of things in the world that I'd like done somewhere else, but I have no evidence that my wishes in such matters carry or should carry any particular weight.  Even when I would like something done somewhere else, it's very likely that some of my neighbors either don't particularly care or in fact value whatever it is being done in our neighborhood. So, I don't know that just not wanting something to happen is much of an argument, even if it's a strong feeling.

Plenty of the people, including plenty of the permanent residents here, probably rarely go down to this property.  I live near the road that heads to it (APA Road) and as far as I can tell, it is a little trafficked road.  And many of those who are driving down it either live that way or are going down to the Lily Point Preserve which is, after all, being maintained as a preserve exactly because it merited protection.  Isn't this next piece of property just a ragged edge, of which there is bound always to be one?  And isn't our concern a tad impersonal in the sense that we are mostly concerned about the idea?

If this property is so extremely valuable to those of us who live here, how come the Point Roberts Foundation (a non-existent non-profit corporation that we could all contribute money to for such purposes if we had one and if we wanted to make such contributions to improve the community's life) doesn't offer to buy it from the bank and Wayne and Anders?  And, more to the point, why isn't there a Point Roberts Foundation to do such things?  A couple of years ago, I was proposing that everybody with a house on the Point donate, say, $500 a year for the community betterment.  If we'd been doing that for a couple of years, we'd be on our way to buying the Butler property's 40 acres and saving ourselves the inconvenience and unaesthetic qualities of this development and its minus trees.  My guess is that the people with houses here, regardless of whether they do or do not have discretionary income, would mostly say, 'Hey, I already pay taxes.  Why should I pay more to live here?'

I suspect that, for the most part, people here would not be willing to put significant amounts of money to this purpose.  They would not, e.g., all give up their vacations next year and put the money they might otherwise spend on the vacation into the buying out Wayne and Anders fund.  Instead; they largely just don't want Wayne and Anders to put their money to their purpose.  The Nature Conservancy, or the Trillium Corporation, or Whatcom Land Trust will be encouraged to reach into their deep pockets, but those of us who live here and care about this?  Well, my guess is not so much.  My guess is that the Point Roberts Conservation Society still exists as a legal entity to donate funds for taking treasured Point Roberts property out of the development arena.  It was started to try to raise money for Lily Point before the Nature Conservancy, Whatcom Land Trust, and the County and State ponied up those funds.  But it was not phenomenally successful in getting contributions from Point Roberts homeowners; not in the millions of dollars, certainly.

But if we really want to preserve this property, maybe we ought to be thinking about what those of us who live her and care about it need to sacrifice for that goal, not just what Wayne and Anders ought to sacrifice.

So, those are the two sides of my conflicting views.  Today is the final day for comment to the County planners on the SEPA plan.  I wrote such a comment, in line with my first post and in particular in light of my attachment to the Point's rapidly disappearing historic houses.  But, in line with this second post, I doubt if it would--or even should--carry much weight in anybody's decision to move on with this project.

The Price of Everything

Monday night was the meeting about the Stanton Northwest Properties development at Lily Point, which is now called the Lily Point development.  About 75 people showed up with dour looks to discuss what could be done about the matter.

It was an interesting and puzzling experience.  The community members appeared to have  pretty much a single position (This is a very  bad idea.  Why is such a proposal being made again, when the collapse of the real estate market and the banking industry had already defeated it once?  Do we have to have that happen again?).  On the other side of the question was the new developer, or at least half of the new developers.  The pair, let's call them Wayne and Anders, which makes them sound like an old comedy team even though they have nothing to say that is funny, sent Anders to represent their interests.  And their interests appear to be money and perhaps quick profits.

I have taken awhile to write about this because I was very conflicted about the meeting, so the blog is going to have to carry my description over two or three days' entries as I try to explain what was so puzzling.  When the original Stanton proposal came up, with its 100 houses costing a million dollars each and its beach club front and its swimming pool and expansive community center and, for all I know, its polo pony fields, one of the things most people had against it was its over-the-topness.  Now, Wayne and Anders have modified the plan and I was struck with how lacking in vision it was.  Thirty-nine houses for starters, maybe a tennis court, a little meeting place, no curbs and sidewalks.  Stanton wanted something grand, which at least befit the locale.  But W and A want something small, 'cottages' they call them, with piddling amenities, but something that will net them some very big bucks by the time they have disposed of the trees and the lots, letting actual builders move in later to assist the lot buyers.

Way too much of the meeting was devoted to Anders telling us how their plans differed from Stanton's, even though they are still operating off Stanton's plans and environmental impact statement because, he assured us, it was 'so much more efficient to do so,' which is to say 'so much cheaper,' because they don't have to start all over in the process of permits and all that.  I have rarely heard someone talk about a project in this particular manner: nothing seemed to be of import to him other than the financial issues, the 'economic viability.'  I have long known the phrase, but rarely run into someone who, at least to me, so clearly represents someone 'who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.' 

The meeting was largely devoted to a lot of technical explanations: what had the County approved, what was the SEPA statement that they had okayed but could be objected to by the public, what property or properties were actually at issue?  Wayne and Anders, it appeared, like a Junior grade Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, had been trolling around the bottom as the garbage fell out in the housing/bank crisis and had taken up Stanton's interests for lack of a better word, which included ownership of the closest acreage (called, locally, 'the Butler property'), the plans and permits that Stanton had achieved, options on the additional parcels, and a $3 million dollar mortgage that the bank was still holding. 

The garbage turned out to contain a jewel, of course.  But a jewel with a price.  During the evening's discussion, Anders offered to sell their interests to us for $1.5 million (plus the mortgage).  Which might be a very good deal if you were going to put in a lot of houses and reasonably expected to sell them.  What Wayne and Anders plan initially is 39 lots, 10 or so on the bluff facing the ocean, a bunch more with what he called 'peakaboo' views of the ocean, and the remainder back in what would be left of the 'wooded area' after the trees are taken down for the lots, roads, and all that.  The 'cottages' are to be 2,000 square feet, but that may well be only the footprint, as two stories would be possible under the 25 foot height limit: some cottage!

And what that means, if they actually sold them to the Vancouverites who are their target audience, would be a lot of money.  The 1/4 acre lots in front, facing the ocean would be priced at $500,000 each.  That is the lot, not the lot with a house.  Building a house up here would be in the $150-$200/square foot.  Two or three thousand square feet would get you right up to a million dollars for your cottage with land.  And those little wooded lots in the back would run buyers $150,000 each.  Right away, I'm thinking that the ten lots in front are worth five million total and the other 29 lots would have to bring in 6-8 million (conservatively).  That would be a 12 million dollar return on a $1.5 million dollar (current) investment.  A nice day's (or year's) work.

So, what this certainly seemed like was Wayne and Anders' desire to make many quick bucks off some land that they had grabbed onto in the maelstrom.  Not land they cared about particularly, except for the fact that it had those ocean view lots at the front, way high above the ocean so you wouldn't even have to worry about global warming and rising sea levels.  And after all this discussion and explanation, two of our local real estate sales people, people with long experience in Point Roberts, advised Anders that the chance of selling 39 lots like that in any short term--Anders was talking a year or so--or even in anything but a very long term was very unlikely.  Very unlikely. 

So maybe we are looking at Stanton all over?  Except that, this time, the project could move along far enough before it collapsed so that a lot of trees would already have been logged.  It turns out that the Butler property has the bulk of the big trees, and the optioned property has largely already been cleared.  So by developing the Butler property first, the trees will go first.  But, as Anders pointed out to us, it would be much cheaper to develop the optioned property first, but he and Wayne don't own that property: what they own is the Butler property.

So, what's to be said in favor of this project?  Next round.

End of Summer

The most recent batch of children and grandchildren have come and gone; the house has been re-ordered, the laundry and ironing all done again, beds and bathrooms restocked with linens and towels, the larder replenished, and we are now ready for the next and final set of children/grandchildren visitors. All over the Point, that appears to be the case: there are lots of cars parked in front of individual houses, the grocery store is selling enormous quantities of food to tourists who may come down just to eat, and Dylan’s seems to overflow with people holding ice cream cones in their hands. Across the road from us, the big field behind the house is filled with tents that are in turn filled with that house’s children and grandchildren who are having barbeques and foot races and bicycle riding.

We are all exhausted from so much company, perhaps, so much festivity. Which is to say that Labor Day is fast approaching and everyone under the age of something much less than 70 is on his or her way back to school. Which is to say that the new year is about to begin.

And what will the new year bring us? More strange weather? More disturbed plants? We have begun to pick two kinds of apples from our apple trees (jonagolds and transparents) and both have hollow cores. Said to be caused by excessively hot weather, but it seems very unlikely that hot weather was afflicting these apples at the point at which their cores were forming. I cut these apples in half, and right in the center is a 1.5-2 inch hollow sphere wherein no seeds can be found, nor anything else either. The Japanese knot weed, which normally puts out its flowers in September is putting them out in August. The rest of the plants, which normally wither in September or October are pretty much done with their withering as a result of the long dry/hot spell we had in July and August.

It used to be that the garden was a refuge from the strangeness of the world. Now the garden seems to be echoing that strangeness with its own strangeness. It is comforting that the one zucchini plant I have grown has overcome everything else in my small vegetable garden area and is producing squash as if it was the last chance it would ever have to produce squash. Which is to say that it is acting like a normal zucchini.

And the neighbors, with their exquisitely organized and cared for garden, are bringing us exquisitely arranged platters of their excess vegetables. This is also normal for this time of year.

And, finally, the County is reported to be considering new zoning for rural areas like Pt. Roberts (well, there is really no rural area quite like Pt. Roberts, but rural areas more generally). The new and stunning proposal would permit, outside of the ‘downtown’ core, only one house per 10 acres. This is likely to be very unhappy news for all those with large landholdings (and there are quite a few such areas and landholders here) who were planning to get rich either more or again by building a lot of houses once there was somebody in the world interested in buying a house. But more cheerful news for those of us like, say, those who live on my street, where a sign just went up that an 8-acre plot of currently forested land is now being made available to the masses in the form of 8 lots.

So, if we can just get enough rest, we’ll be looking forward to the new year. I hope.

Orphans of the Storm

Everyone has his own private myth, of course, but I am coming to believe that perhaps towns, too, can have a personal myth: the story of how it came to be and why it its life is as it is. This is not about history or facts, of course, but about myth…the symbolic truth. It is the inner spiritual truth that explains all outward facts and signs.

I have never before lived in a small town that seemed to have a personal myth, but I can easily imagine that it is true of towns in the South; indeed, the whole South (as in the Confederacy) has a personal mythology that people often use to explain everything that happens there. But of that, I know nothing, personally. Of Point Roberts, perhaps more.

Here is what I think the Point Roberts myth is, at least what it is for some people. We—the residents of Point Roberts--are the children of royalty who abandoned us long ago, but who left us with many family resources. However, because we were thus made orphans, we were put rudely into a rude guardianship, and our guardian took charge of not only us but of many of our resources. Like orphans everywhere, we are badly treated: our roads are not plowed, our streets are not maintained, our ditches are not cleaned quickly enough, our water is mishandled, and our cruel guardian takes our money from us and instead of using it all to provide for our needs, uses it for its own nefarious needs.

We hope that someday, our royal parents will come back and set things right. But if, as is possible, our royal parents are now dead or—worse—imprisoned by our fearsome guardian, then we may have to rescue ourselves by developing an economic plan so stunning that we will be able to demonstrate once and for all that we are able to stand on our own, that we are the equal to (or even better than) our guardian, much more powerful, able, mano a mano, to win our freedom. And our economic development will be so stunning that we will be able to buy and sell our former guardian, and we will incorporate and no longer send our money or the Canadians' money away.

Suffice to say that I have recently been to another community meeting in which we sit around the campfire on a dark and stormy night and re-tell the oft heard tales of the cruel County. These tales focus primarily on the County’s never-ending desire to take from us our money in the form of taxes and to refuse to give us back, in kind, exactly the same amount of money. Thus does the cruel County demonstrate not only its cruelty but its failure to understand American democratic values (those who have a lot should pay a lot, but then they should get it all back so they won’t feel they’ve been treated unfairly).

And in addition, I am told, the County is refusing to repair the boat ramp in Lighthouse Park, which would mean that no longer would there be anywhere here to launch boats. End times? First Whalen’s Park disappears and now the boat ramp.

Spring Dreams

Leaving the Sunshine Coast required us to leave the snow behind. Well, we did it, and I’m hoping to have that be the end of winter. Down in Pt. Roberts, it’s definitely more like spring than winter, but not a lot more. There are alpine primroses blooming in the garden and purple and yellow crocuses just starting to open. The daffodils have big buds. All the bushes are showing green buds and the hydrangeas actually have a few leaves out here and there. (Our house is in a primarily shady area because surrounded by tall trees, so it would be even more marked in the sunnier areas.) The community flower beds on the main street, Tyee, are showing little colored crocuses, though they are mostly pale lavender so not very showy.

This morning, the owners of undeveloped acreage several hundred yards from us decided that their property had way too many trees on it and brought in the machines to get rid of all those undesired trees. About a year ago, when the water situation was dire, the owner of the property put in a well as part of some kind of development plans, so I guess his plans are continuing, financial disaster all around us or not. He has hopes, I guess.

The local paper tells us that there are giant plans afoot to turn The Cannery into a Wickeninnish type of resort. The Cannery is over on the west side, on ocean-front property. The owner of that piece built it some 20 years or so ago with plans for it to become a wonderful Point Roberts institution. It had a restaurant and a bar and a dance place, as I understand it (this was before our time here). However, The Cannery has been dead empty for all the 14, 15 years we’ve been here, so I have assumed it to be another case of dreams going to die. It's not an abandoned house, but it's at least an abandoned dream. (The photo above of The Cannery was taken last summer.)

New dreams now arising there, though, with a hotel, spa, bakery, restaurant, and organic garden all planned. It depends, first of all, on getting various kinds of zoning cleared up with the county (never an easy task), and second on attracting a clientele. There’s this great conviction that there are rich people who would are just longing to come to Point Roberts if only there were someplace for them to stay once they got here.

I’m dubious about this, largely because Pt. Roberts isn’t dramatic enough for rich people. Too small, too confined, too ordinary, in a sense. The Wickeninnish Inn is located on the west/ocean side of Vancouver Island, in an old and established area. The area is dramatic. The hotel is built on the rocks of the beach, and the storms from the ocean bring these crashing waves right up to rooms. The waves whip up dramatically for your entertainment. When the storms stop, you can walk for miles down a gorgeous, long, flat beach with ocean forever around you. And there’s a lovely little town with all kinds of native art and other little shops: it’s like Carmel, kind of. By contrast, here in Point Roberts, we don’t have those kind of storms because we’re not facing the open ocean, we've got a narrow, flat, short beach, and the view from The Cannery is of a lot of islands, of the marina to the south and of the B.C. Ferry terminal to the north. It doesn’t feel wild, dramatic, historic, or romantic in the way that Tofino does. And the town is pretty minimal.

But, people will have dreams. And good luck with them. I hope that the people with dreams also have financing. One does wonder whether the smart money is putting its money on developing fancy resorts right now. That Saudi Prince who sank $20 billion (or something like that) in Citigroup last fall might be wanting a cool and rainy spot to put up his feet and think about his losses. And he’s probably still got a few billion around looking for a home.

Protecting the Land

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those Falling Leaves

‘The falling leaves drift by my window...’ Don’t they just? September is here, the mornings are already cold, and the vine maples have been turning red in the woods for almost a month. ‘Autumn Leaves,’ this most romantic of American songs, however, turns out to be this most romantic of French songs. Words originally written by Jacques Prevert, lyrics by Joseph Kosma (both French), with the English lyrics to the credit of Johnny Mercer. The French lyrics don’t seem to be about autumn, so at least it is the most romantic of American lyrics about the seasons. In any case, when those falling leaves drift by my window, I don’t much think about the sun-burned summer I am leaving or how much I miss you, whoever you happen to be. That is because I am the steward (or the co-steward) of five or six big-leaf maple trees. Also sometimes called ‘dinner-plate maples because the leaves are the size of dinner plates. And they really are. So, if you are the custodian of five or six big leaf maples, you are the owner of bales of autumn leaves. And there is no romance in trying to figure out what to do with them.

This morning, I got up and swept several hundred of them off the deck--remember the phrase 'the size of dinner plates'; by noon, several hundred more had taken their place and we haven’t even begun to deal with the bulk of them; 90% are still on the trees. I raked today’s allotment up just now and stuffed two big garbage bags tightly: today’s autumn leaves. I store them back by the compost, but we are now collecting this year’s leaves and I haven’t yet finished with composting last year’s leaves. This is because there are just too many leaves. Several of the trees are in the woods and those leaves I don’t touch. It is only those on the deck, in the cleared areas around the house, in the near garden beds where autumn’s leaves will not protect the flowers over the winter but will protect the slugs who will then eat the flowers in the spring as they come up, right before I rake the leaves out of the bed. Thus, they have to be raked in the fall.

There is this strange abundance at this time of year. It’s not only the apples and plums, but also maple leaves. And you can add to that hydrangea flowers and dried lunaria pods. Point Roberts seems to be the perfect environment for both of them. The hydrangeas come in all colors and I can change their color by fooling with the soil chemistry or just by planting them somewhere else in the yard. All of the dozen or so hydrangeas in my yard are offspring of one hydrangea; new ones are made by sticking a cut stalk in the ground in August. That’s it.

Lunaria (often called ‘silver dollar plants’) put out these gorgeous seed pods in the fall after providing excellent purple flowers with dark green leaves in the early spring, flowers that provide a wonderful contrast to tulips and daffodils. Each circular, silver pod carries 3 or 4 seeds with twenty to a hundred pods on each stalk. My experience suggests that every single seed will grow into yet another lunaria plant, anxious to provide in alternate years more enormous stalks of silver dollar seed pods and seeds.

People are always talking about developing the economic base of Point Roberts, but the only thing they seem to be able to come up with to achieve this reasonable goal is to build more houses. My suggestion is that we take some of Point Roberts’ absolutely most abundant resources and figure out how to develop them economically instead: apples, plums, dried maple leaves, hydrangea blossoms, and lunaria pods. There may be a few other things like this (starfish? sand dollars?), but we could just start with the obvious ones and work out from there.

Longings

The folks at lilypoint.org have included among their other site features a survey about what we’d like to see in Point Roberts that isn’t currently here (doesn’t include ‘Gated Beach Club Development’ as one of the choices, I’m afraid). It’s hard to know what to make of any survey, even those with highly respected methodological designs, but a loose internet survey such as this? Who knows who is responding? Awhile back, some folks from the Point Roberts Community Association were designing a survey which included some similar questions, including (my favorite), ‘Was the survey taker interested in fine dining at Point Roberts?’ I mean, I suppose I’m interested in fine dining anywhere, including in my own dining room, but do I think that Point Roberts in general or the Community Association ought to be responding to that interest (we can scarcely call it a need)? Well hardly. Or that my days would longer or happier if it did?

So I don’t know why those kinds of questions come to peoples’ minds. They seem to me like the questions philosophers pose to college students: ‘If it snows in summer, would it be winter?’ Or, ‘If your mother were a bicycle, could you ride her?” If everyone would like, say, a movie theater in Point Roberts, could we go to the movies? Will everyone being interested in a movie theater’s appearance lead a movie chain to appear here? Or to some otherwise secret entrepreneur among our 1600 residents rising to the occasion of meeting our desires or vague interests? Unlikely.

But more than that, I am somewhat puzzled by the very idea of people even asking the question, ‘What does Point Roberts need?’ I would think that Point Roberts already has what it needs and if it doesn’t, why do people move here? With the expectation that their arrival will occasion the creation of answers to their unmet needs?

I grew up in a small Idaho town and I certainly thought that what it needed was to have me not living there, but I can’t imagine what it could have incorporated that would have made me want to stay. I lived most of my adult life in Los Angeles, which pretty much has everything one could think of, but the one thing it doesn’t have—rain—was not possible, even in the land of a million entrepreneurs per square mile. So, I left for the love of rain and greenery.

Here’s what the lilypoint.org website guys (who are much younger than me and this may be the answer to all my questions) suggest as possible Point Roberts’ current needs:

Pharmacy
Doctor's Office
Restaurants that Deliver (eg; Pizza)
A Bridge to Bellingham
Car & Passenger Ferry to Bellingham
Passenger Only Ferry to Bellingham
Movie Theater
Fast Food Chain
Trader Joe's
Farmer's Market
Sewer System

Alas, they do not offer the survey taker that answer most needed for all surveys: ‘None of the Above.’ The possibility that Point Roberts is fine just as it is, with all its quirks, its strange weather, its staggering limitations, and it’s beautiful location does not seem to be one of the choices.

But maybe this is all, really, just in the nature of humans or of Americans or of Westerners, or of people under the age of 70. Most of the people I know here think Point Roberts is a wonderful place: that’s why they are here. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from thinking about how they could change it to make it a little more like where they came from. But if Point Roberts were an urban metropolis—with Trader Joe’s, fine dining, and movie theaters--would we live in an isolated, peninsular exclave of amazing beauty?

In a Nutshell

This week, it seemed like fall had come early. Since Sunday, it has been grey, very rainy, and unseasonably cold. Everyone with a wood stove is staring at the woodstove grumpily, thinking it is way too early to have to start having a fire. And then, most of us march outdoors to bring in some wood to start a fire because someone in the house keeps talking about how cold it is. But then, this afternoon, the rain and grey and cold disappeared and it was a summer afternoon again. This is life in a nutshell, here, as far as weather goes. Never quite what you expect or have in mind, even when it’s the same every year. Reliably, come April, say, I start to point out that it’s really pretty cold this spring. But that’s always true. This is a place with a long, cold spring. This is not, say, Pennsylvania.

Because it’s the end days of the month, the monthly paper is now in our mailbox, telling us what happened last month. I always think of September as the real beginning of the year because of school starting, even though I haven’t been in school or had anyone in the house who was in school for many a year. The September All Point Bulletin is pretty wonderful this year, looking more forward than backward as it should at the beginning of the year, and--another nutshell--contains what I suspect is a fine compendium of everything we’ll be obsessing about for the next twelve months, when we’re not obsessing about the weather.

Article after article reminds us of what we’re not through arguing about and what we’re just starting to argue about. There’s the cell phone tower that some folks are still fighting against, though they seem to be on the losing end of the fight. And there's the curbside recycling problem which is more of a draw at the moment but looks to have a lot of life left in the dispute. There’s an argument between the Parks Board and the Seniors Group over who gets some money that didn’t get spent for what it was allocated for, a dispute in its very initial phase. We’re revisiting the need to keep boats from chasing the orcas off the coastline of Point Roberts. The Voters’ Association is trying to become an active group again by collecting up-to-the-minute news on all the ‘hot button’ items that all the other groups are already arguing about. And, finally, the Taxpayers’/Property Owners’ Association is re-emerging from its semi-dormant state in order to oppose the fabulous Stanton Northwest ‘Beach Club’ development and its 100+ million dollar houses.

I can hardly wait for fall to start, all things considered. The ‘Beach Club’ development, I suspect, will generate the most energy. One speaker at the Voters’ Association commented that Stanton Northwest’s publicity brochures about this fabulous development indicated that Stanton Northwest doesn’t have a clue about what it’s like to live in Point Roberts. “Picturesque,’ says the brochure; ‘at once, convenient and isolated.’ Convenient to what, I can’t imagine. To the border, I guess.

It's too late to help them with their brochures, but what I’m thinking for a fall and winter plan is this: I get Stanton Northwest to hire me as someone who can meet with their clients to explain to them exactly what it’s like to live in Point Roberts, so that said clients will be able to give genuine informed consent to their million dollar purchases. I’ll start with telling them about the really long, cold spring, and then work up to the September All Point Bulletin. That effort alone ought to be enough to stop the ‘Beach Club’ in its tracks.

Barbarians

Just a brief post tonight. First, to send you to a new website, lilypoint.org, where you can read more about what is going to become a dominant topic in the life of Point Roberts: The Stanton Development. That, and a poem.

This is the kind of development that shows up everywhere. And those who are most affected but are not going to be making (or potentially making) money from it are likely to be very unhappy about it. Nevertheless, it is hard to stop developments of this kind if there is sufficient money behind them. Which is not to say that there is bribery or chicanery of any kind...just that money does tend to make the world go round when it comes to property development.

In addition, there is an element of NIMBYism about it all. If people need million dollar houses at the beach, they should go to some other beach. OUR beach is too precious for such living. Even though there are plenty of million dollar houses that have been built in the last decade on or in sight of our Boundary Bay or our Georgia Strait. Not a hundred, certainly, but maybe fifty. And if fifty, why not a hundred?

If they ask me, I'll vote no. But so far, I'm not at all sure that I could defend that position. It can't be enough just to say that I don't like it, don't think it is change for the better, or even to say that this will somehow destroy the environment when all that went before may have been equally dubious. More to learn as we go. And now for the poem:

Waiting for the Barbarians
By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), translated by Edmund Keeley

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Dark Futures

Point Roberts is such a puzzling phenomenon that it is hard not to think about alternative futures for it. My most frequent dark vision is that the U.S. government will apply the powers of eminent domain to the whole place and turn it into Guantanamo II: The Sequel. All those people on the watch list will need a place to be watched more closely, I imagine. Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind (and it is Ray Bradbury’s 88th birthday today. Happy Birthday, Ray!).

Today, however, I was contemplating what the Sunshine Coast has become with all the development that has gone on here in the past decade. And it occurred to me that ten years from now, that’s what Point Roberts could be like, too. The Stanton Properties development (that 100 residence ‘Beach Club’ I mentioned on August 8) could be the beginning. I hear there are plans for another big development on the golf course, and yet another one at the marina. Next thing you know, Point Roberts, too, will be having non-stop summer festival events, no available parking spots, and a need for traffic lights.

All that seems very unlikely to me, though. The difficulties of getting in and out of Point Roberts are really too great, at least right now, to make that kind of development very likely. If banks and other big lenders are going to exercise some much-advised real-estate lending restraint, it seems unlikely that they would rush to populate Point Roberts with more unsold houses, even if it is a beautiful place.

No, I have a new dark vision for the future of Point Roberts, partially inspired by the giddy press excitement about McCain and his many houses. I’m thinking this: one of those trillionaires that are floating around the new globalized world and investing heavily in the U.S. (because we no longer have any money of our own to invest in the U.S.) could breeze in any day now and with pocket change buy, first, The International Marketplace and all four service stations. After buying them, he could just close them down. Then T.J.’s and The Reef would come into his portfolio, and they, too, would go away, along with their clientele. The same with the hardware store, the liquor store, and the remaining handful of small tourist shops and eating places. Six months later, after a winter of the residents having to go somewhere else to obtain everything, the trillionaire’s agents would be knocking on doors, offering a pleasant price for every residential property.

Six months after that, the trillionaire would own all 4.9-square-miles of Point Roberts, now a lovely gated-estate protected on the north by the U.S. and Canadian border people, and on the other three sides by the U.S. Coast Guard. The billionaire and his many guests could come and go by helicopter, thereby never having to fool with that border nonsense. Ed says the whole thing could be achieved with well under a billion dollars.

About ten years ago, there were rumors that Bill Gates was going to buy a big piece of Point Roberts to put a Microsoft campus in. Didn’t happen, but surely there are other billionaires out there, looking for a nice vacation home to add to their housing collection. It would be an extraordinary and rare Northwest project, an exciting opportunity to get in not only from the ground up but from all the ground up, and perfect timing for the investor who wants to be not only the end user but also the only user. Excellent location, steps to the ocean, the sky, and another country.

Storm Developing

Some years ago in Point Roberts, there were plans for a big golf course on the bluffs at the south eastern end of the peninsula. Several hundred acres were to be involved and I think there were also to be houses along the fairways. This was back before 9/11, I am pretty sure; back when we first came here. But the plan for this all fell apart for some reason. Later, a different 18-hole golf course was built up on the northwest side of the peninsula and, I suppose, everyone breathed a sigh of relief because surely we wouldn’t have two golf courses inflicted upon us. That completed golf course had its problems: it immediately adjoined the heron rookery, one of the largest on the West Coast. A lot of negotiation resulted in a special building schedule to keep the developers from irritating the herons during the nesting season. The developers followed the rules, but within two years of completion, the herons up and left anyway. Not actual partners to the negotiation, they were apparently irritated by some other part of the deal. So now we have the golf course but we don’t have the rookery. Unintended, if foreseeable, consequences.

The original golf course planned property, however, remains an issue. There are three pieces of it (roughly 100 acres each, I think): the first part is Lily Point, which is now a public park area. The second part appears to be the subject of negotiations for an additional park area, with big conservation groups actively involved. So things look good for maintaining those areas.

The third area, however, is more of a problem. There is now a plan before the county to create a gated community on that 100 acres: a private and gated “Beach Club,’ with about 100 residences, a ‘community center’ (in quotes because, of course, it wouldn’t be a center for the Point Roberts’ community, just for their community), and a swimming pool, and presumably an enormous amount of traffic increase down that narrow road that would bring those 100 families into town should they ever want to drop in to see how the other 95% lives. Emails have been flying about locally on this issue and clearly the air is growing thick with unhappiness.

Development rarely draws a lot of ‘Hurrahs!’ from local residents anywhere but, in the case of Point Roberts, everyone who lives here is a local resident with respect to any development that is planned. This development—unlike anything here on the Point--will, of course, be made possible by those recently discovered water connections (see July 30, 2008 post, below, ‘Mistake Were Made’). It’s not a done deal, of course. We are in a pretty bad time for selling a hundred high-end houses in a gated community inside another gated community and where access to the ROTUS is difficult at most times. It’s going to be a hard selling campaign: I mean it’s a Beach Club, but they’re high on the bluffs, way above the water: it’s more of an ‘Ocean View Club,’ at best. Nor will they be docking their boats at the bottom and thus never having to deal with the border for ingress and egress.

I don’t think it’s a project I’d be willing to invest in, but if nothing else, the past five or ten years have shown us that people are willing to sign bizarre pieces of paper if, thereby, they think they’re going to make money. The storm approaches.

Crossing Wide Waters

Last month, when some residents of Point Roberts offered some complaints about Whatcom County’s lack of generosity/financial fairness toward the Point—complaints published in the Bellingham Herald—the Bellingham readers of the Herald complained right back: ‘What did you think you were getting into when you moved to that beautiful but isolated place?’ The implication was that isolation explained everything lacking, and that beauty made up for everything lacking.

Today, I am in Roberts Creek, up on the Sunshine Coast, and the local paper is filled with complaints about ferry service, and the only way to get here is on the ferry because there is no continuous road up the West Coast of British Columbia. It would appear that the B.C. Ferry Corporation’s response to complaints about prices is pretty much, ‘What did you think you were getting into when you moved to that beautiful but isolated place?’

The ferry business is all about the price of oil nowadays and the Corporation wishes to increase the fares regularly on the basis of the rise in oil prices. Seems reasonable, but those in the beautiful but otherwise isolated place are of two minds, of course. Those who make the commute to Vancouver regularly pretty much did not have regular and multiple surcharges to the ferry fare (or unfare, as it appears) when they moved to this beautiful but isolated place. And many people who don’t make the commute regularly but depend upon tourists doing so are worried that the tourists won’t be willing to pay ever more to come to this beautiful but isolated place. What is to be done by a community when forces way beyond its control threaten its economic stability? Maybe it’s like the news of a bad diagnosis: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance? I’m not sure whether we’re at anger or depression, but we’ve gotten past denial, anyway.

I guess we will see in the next few years. Things will change because change is inevitable and although it is good for some people, it isn’t always good for everyone. Change has winners and losers. The Sunshine Coast has been rolling right along on a development boom for the past five years or so; housing prices have skyrocketed, development has boomed, traffic and commerce have both increased. All that was good for some people; but the ferry fare increases, not so good, perhaps for the same people and perhaps for different people. The increases in rental prices, not so good for the people who didn’t own property that appreciated dramatically. When we bought a house here 18 years ago, the highest rental price around (according to our real estate agent) was around $1,000 per month, but now, according to the local paper, it’s almost impossible to find anything for under $1200/month. People want to stay here, want to hold on to a life they had, but maybe they can’t do that anymore.

We have very probably crossed some wide waters in these past few years. And the fare has risen considerably, even in this isolated and beautiful place. It feels like a fortune from a Chinese fortune cookie: ‘A journey will offer benefits against you.’

Bearing Up and Out

We first washed up on the Sunshine Coast in the fall of 1989. There were about 25,000 people on the Coast at that time, spread out across a narrow 50-mile long strip of land from the ferry terminal at Langdale to the next ferry terminal at Earl’s Cove. When I first saw it, I thought it was British Columbia’s Malibu. And indeed it has proven to be. If global warming is going to to warm the land temperatures here as well as the ocean ones, it will be even more Malibu-like. It was beautiful, wild, quiet, sleepy, slow, and there was always someplace to park if you had to go somewhere, even as there were relatively few places to go to. One movie theater that reminded me of a small Grange Hall auditorium in a small Idaho town, and another that was like a weary, equity waiver theater in L.A. There were three big-enough grocery stores, and nothing remotely like a big box store. It really was small town, rural, out of the rush for nine months of the year, and then in the summer, it got a little jazzy what with the tourists coming in to spend a little time with nature.

I was pushing my cart around the local SuperValue market the other day when I ran into an old quilting friend whom I hadn’t seen for 4 or 5 years. Her 8-year-old is now a 13-year-old, the old job is now the new job, etc. Then she asked me whether I was as discouraged as she was by what was happening to the Coast. Like me, she lives kind of out of the way and as long as she stays home, she noted, it’s pretty much like it always was. But driving in to town forces you to see change on every street, every landmark.

The traffic is one change; another is the fact that you often can’t find a parking place; and a third is that we now have three big chain stores here that we didn’t use to have (London Drugs, Canadian Tire, and Easy Foods, the last of which is sort of WalMart like), and more trying to move in. We have a whole new mall, three or four Dollar Stores, and two Starbucks, and rather fewer small, local businesses. But the biggest change, of course, is the increased population—now 60,000 people--that drives the commercial expansion. And all those extra people are living in new housing.

Ed, who is a regular coastal kayaker, says that when he first started paddling up the coast, there were long stretches without houses, or at least without visible houses (meaning there possibly were small cottages hidden by the trees and bushes). But of recent years, it is just one big, new house after another smack on the beach as he heads north. I’ve been in a few of those houses, and they are like medium-sized palaces. Just down the street from us on the beach there is a house that my neighbor says has 8,000 sq. feet. It is a vacation house for some Vancouver executive. Numerous developments have been, and are being built, with still more—big ones, gated communities, walled communities--in the planning stage. The Coast is not what it once was, and I would be discouraged, like my friend, if I had ever imagined that I would stay here forever. But the changes do lead me to ask myself whether it is time to move on, as my friend is considering doing. It has more and more become a place that feels like it is driven by big money, by a fascination with excess, by the loss of any concept of enough.

There’s still wildlife aplenty around: bears, deer, raccoons, maybe cougars. We never used to see them much, but they’re getting a little more pushy as the wild land where they can avoid us is depleted. Although we’ve always had evidence of bears around, I’d never actually seen one until last spring when I walked out the kitchen door at noon and found one 20 feet away from me, strolling down the driveway. Quelle surprise! It’s been a big change for them, too, but where are the bears to move on to? Closer and closer to more and more people, they risk becoming problem bears. That designation will get them moved on, of course. On to the after life. Last decade’s attraction become today’s tiresome problem.

I suppose that if you invest in a half or three-quarter million dollar house, you probably are not going to be happy to find that it comes with bears at your barbeque or deer in your garden or racoons that mess with your garbage. Those kind of houses expect something a little more disciplined. Those houses didn’t come here for the wild, I suspect.