9/11 and 9/15: Here They Come Again

This year, for the first time, the country doesn’t seem to be obsessing about the 9/11 anniversary, although Obama did note today that Al Quaeda is still hanging around.  Whacked almost a year ago (September 15, when Lehman Bros. declared bankruptcy) by the threat of the economy disappearing, we seem less frightened by terrorism than by bankruptcies and foreclosures of one sort or another.

A streak of good weather here this weekend will make it seem a little bit more summery—in summer, we don’t have to think too much about 9/11 or 9/15--but the news on my street is that two of our eating establishments are closing, which doesn’t bode well for the local economic front, such as it is.  We had five restaurants and now we have three, apparently, and only 1 of the 3 routinely provide evening meals.  Although that might change for either or both of the survivors, I suppose, given the vacuum.

Hardly a year ago that we were fussing about the proposed housing development next to Lily Point Reserve where Stanton Northwest Properties was aiming to build a hundred homes of the million dollar each variety so that 100 ROTUS families would be able to participate in the oceanside paradise that is us.  The newspaper reported last month that that development is on hold.  A rather more dire sign is that when you call the main (and only) phone number listed on Stanton Northwest Properties’ website, as I did today, I was informed by a recording that this number is no longer functioning and I was not given some other number to try.

On the other hand, the County has approved permits for yet another 100 house development around the Point Roberts Golf Course.  These developers appear to be moving somewhat cautiously, talking about building only a few houses to begin with, presumably in order to find out if there is a market for paradise yet. 

In the fifteen years we’ve been here, the massive housing development is a constantly looming event, but like an antic pirate ship in a Gilbert and Sullivan comedy, it only looms, it never attacks.  Perhaps just an important engine of the plot line, although the story, ultimately, goes somewhere else.  It's just not yet clear, though,  whether this is going to be a tragedy or a comedy.  Forty-one of fifty-one economists, it is reported today, have announced that we are out of the recession.  But for the moment, it’s not apparent up here.

One-Click Shopping on Hold

A friend today was regaling us with her tale of misadventures with Amazon.com and her credit card. She concluded—and summarized--this shaggy dog of a story in a despairing tone: “And now, I have no One-Click Shopping!” Perhaps the story of all of us, all over the world. We have run into a loss of our one-click shopping. And now what?

On one of the internet groups I belong to where you trade artist trading cards, the members were all announcing that they’re never going to buy any more art supplies, that they have enough to last them until their deaths, that all they are dealing in nowadays is real needs, not just wants. I felt like I had fallen into a group-therapy experience. Or maybe an AA meeting. There was a lot of confessing of bad behavior and promises never to do it again.

I look back at that long line of refrigerators at the local dump, all X-ed out (as if for execution as another friend noted), and wonder if they are there because of one-click shopping. Buying errors? “What was I thinking? How could I have bought a harvest gold/avacado refrigerator?” How indeed. Or are they all lined up there awaiting disposal because they failed to be sufficiently energy efficient for those who need to save the earth? How many new refrigerators could Point Roberts possibly need in, say, any given year? Surely not that many (the picture includes only half of the death row group).

This is all a very mysterious time, I think. I can’t at all make out whether we are all watching the end of the world as we know it, or a movie of the end of the world as we know it. Does our collective (Western) future hold the ocean at my doorstep, an ocean currently a half mile and 180 feet away from and below me? Or gasoline at $50/gallon? Or food riots? Or is it just that everyone will have to give up their private gym memberships and instead walk briskly around the block where the rest of us can look at them when they feel a need for movement? Cook something when they feel hungry rather than ordering out or going out to restaurants? What’s really there at the fork in the road ahead, just over the top of that hill? Can't see yet.

It is clear that there is a big up-tick in rentals here on the Point since Christmas; most of them long-term, not just before summer stuff. Many houses for sale at high prices, but the realtors are urging that people make offers, strongly implying that owners will accept considerably less than the stated price. I guess we will all get to stay tuned for this.

Knitting

Daylight saving begins and leaves me surprised, as usual. It will be so light tonight at dinner time that I will not even believe it is time to cook dinner. However, even though daylight savings time has arrived, presumably because we have entered the vernal season, it does not feel like the vernal season. It feels still like winter and, yesterday, we were treated to high winds and a little snow, followed by hard sunshine and temperatures in the high thirties. Today, it is even colder, but we are spared the snow.

In honor of the reality—as opposed to this vernal fantasy--I was reading today about the bankruptcy of Iceland. It is not clear to me how a country becomes bankrupt (as opposed to a business or a person), nor what it is like when that happens. Presumably, the article on the topic in this week’s New Yorker is going to explain it to me. Alas, after an hour’s work on my part, I am informed as to how the banks all failed (pretty much the same as here), but not quite clear on how Iceland itself failed. (The New Yorker article may not be available on the net without a subscription.) (Update: Vanity Fair also has an article about Iceland's state of affairs, which is available without subscription. )

What I do discover, however, is how at least some Icelanders feel about living in a bankrupt country. Some, of course, are furious, and go out and march about with signs and demand that heads roll. Oh, where is the guillotine when you need one? But others, and in this I recognize some sparks of myself, think it is all for the best. They think that Iceland’s recent spree of easy money risked the loss of their basic character. Now, they can go back to being the kind of people we know, here in Point Roberts, are basic Icelandic stock. (Those of you from Away will recall that Point Roberts was originally settled (after the Native Americans/First Nations, of course) by Icelandic farmers who came here by way of Vancouver Island. The old families were Magnussons and Thorsteinsons and I suppose some Olafsdottirs, but I’ve never heard any ‘dottirs’ names in my local history reading.)

Says the New Yorker writer, as if it explains all, ‘there is talk of knitting.’ Ah, now we are talking business, character business. Icelanders are going back to knitting. I suppose that would be the ‘dottirs’ who are doing that, whereas the Icelandic men will be going back to their boats, where they engage in the partner word, ‘knotting.’ The New Yorker writer speaks of knitting here with some level of contempt, I fear, but also some level of understanding that knitting is the most basic of home-like things, a bed-rock of character activity.

In the days before steam engines and gas motors, girls and women of all ages, knit socks for their family, and knit socks to sell to others. It was like butter and egg money, the socks money. And hard earned in the way of time, since knitting a pair of the simplest kind of adult socks is something that takes about 8-10 hours, at least, even for an experienced knitter. I doubt if anybody paid a lot for women’s work, but they paid enough so that socks were not a disposable commodity as they are now. Folk had few pairs and when they wore out, people (again, mostly women) knew how to darn them. And they were darned regularly because they were valuable.

Valuing that which is basic to our lives: what a good idea! Perhaps that is what the Icelandic people are talking about as the something that they want to go back to. Sounds good to me, especially since I am myself a knitter. And a darner of socks, on occasion, as well. Perhaps with our Icelandic connections, Point Roberts could become the knitting capital of the newly bankrupt/newly restoring world. Perhaps that could be our economic development plan. We could have a slogan, ‘The community that knits together, fits together.’

A limiting factor, of course, is that we have no sheep. Goats, chickens, cattle, horses, burros: but no sheep. So, getting sheep could be the first step in launching both our economic development plans as well as our character restoration goals.

(Sterling Bank got down to penny stock territory this week, where it joined CitiGroup.)

Change, Plus Change

We were at a Point Roberts party this weekend when I had a brief conversation with someone I had just met who told me that, although he now lived in Vancouver, he used to live in Point Roberts.

“What a loss,” I said, extending my sympathies, as it were.
He didn’t seem so sure although he acknowledged that “it was a nice house.”
“Where was it?” I asked.
“Down by the boondocks,” he responded.
“Well, the whole place is pretty much the boondocks,” I countered, asking for something more precise.
“No, The Boondocks,” he explained, making it clear that it was a place name, not a description.
“Where was that?” I asked.
“Down at the foot of South Beach.”
“But I live near South Beach…and there’s nothing named that there. Or at least not for the past fourteen years.”
“God! Has it been that long?” And we went on to talk about what had replaced The Boondocks, specifically a restaurant named the South Beach House, run by Max and Diane who, apparently, also ran The Boondocks.

I’ve never heard of The Boondocks. Although I’ve eaten a dozen times or more at the South Beach House, and have talked some to Max and Diane and their grown children as well, nobody has ever mentioned The Boondocks. And that’s not because it wasn’t a wonderful place, as this fellow assured me it was, but because life in Point Roberts is very transitory. People, and places, come and go. Well that’s true anyplace, of course, but here it is the more notable because there are so few people, so few places. And the places do occasionally come but mostly they seem to go. Since we’ve been here, The Breakers (a bar beloved by apparently everyone in Vancouver) has gone, as has Blackberries clothing store, the prom dress shop, The Secret Garden (tourist gifts), The Roof House Restaurant, and the Maple Beach general store. What has come includes a kind of dollar store called McFrugals, and The Big Maple Studio and Gallery which has mostly hand-made goods of various sorts, and the Café Cappana. What has come AND gone includes The White House (a thrift/recycle place), Christie’s (interior décor), the Maple Beach Restaurant, Sunflowers (another craft gallery), and Brewster’s Restaurant. So just add The Boondocks and all the other places that gave it up before I got here to that list.

Of course, there are lots of places that were here before we got here and will probably be here after we leave. Perhaps the most likely of those stayers to keep on staying is The Liberty Wine Shop, a purveyor of fine wines, a place I never even remember is here, probably because I am not a consumer of fine wines. I was reading an article in the New York Times today about some guy whose house was ‘under water’ (meaning it was now worth less than he owed on it) and he was talking about how he was holding tight right now. However, he said, there were limits: he was not about to give up his $24 bottle of Petit Surrah. Well, I just stand astounded and astonished. But that’s why The Liberty Wine Shop will probably always be here in Point Roberts.

I have less tolerance for change than I used to, of course, because I’m an old person. I think that we all have in our genes only so much ability to cope with change and by one’s 8th decade, the ability is likely to be running low. So, I’d like the places that are here to hang on for awhile in order to outlast the comings and goings of the current people, especially me. The old timers talk about Ben’s Store as if it had closed a few weeks ago, not a few decades ago and doubtless if I last another ten years, I’ll not only be talking about Brewster’s the way that fellow was talking about The Boondocks, but also talking to people who don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, la plus ca change, etc.

Grey Sky. .

…and an empty sea. There’s almost always a ship, a sailboat, a barge, a something out in the Strait of Georgia when I walk down there, but not today. Everybody’s home thinking about the future, maybe. This summer, the number of cruise ships going by, both in Point Roberts, out of Seattle, and in Roberts Creek, out of Vancouver, has been impressive. Some of them look as if they could easily be hauling small towns around…2,000 passengers, at least. That could be an interesting community activity, I suppose.

I’ve never been on a cruise. It seems kind of self-indulgent to me, I guess, or it requires me to be more indolent than I am comfortable being. It also doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that people like me do, despite the fact that I have many friends, who are indeed in many ways like me, and who go on cruises and have good times. But I doubt if I would. Jackie O goes on cruises, the Astors go on cruises, movie stars (say, Fred Astaire) in highly romantic movies go on cruises. The military also goes on cruises, of a sort. All things being equal, I’d rather work in the garden. Of course, by next year, maybe nobody will be going on cruises, maybe everybody will be working in their garden whether they want to or not.

I was looking at an old cook book of my mother’s the other day, one that I fancy she received as a wedding present since it dates from then. What can it have been like to have started out a new life as the Great Depression was just beginning but the direction was clear? Of course, she probably didn’t know it was the Great Depression at the time, just bad economic times. Her parents lost all their money in that great crash, but she and my father didn’t have any money, so they didn’t have anything to lose, and they both had jobs, although she quit hers shortly afterwards.

But the thing about the cookbook is this: Although, first published in 1930 (with 1931, 1933 editions), it was written in the 1920’s, when everyone was flying high, when people who never before had had money had suddenly become people with a lot of money, people who had big houses and went on cruises and gave dinner parties. About 50 pages of this relatively small book are devoted to explaining how to handle servants and how to entertain guests at meals: what the servants wear and when they change attire (butlers wear different attire before and after dinner, e.g.). A great deal of advice is provided on how many different pieces of silver are to be arranged at each plate, what kinds of foods go together for an ‘informal meal’ as opposed to a ‘formal meal.’ What to serve at a formal tea, and where to serve it. And on. In addition, there is a special section on how infants and children are to be introduced to food.

Clearly, this book is intended to bring people up to speed in some higher social class than they started out, to make them feel more confidence in their new position. Maybe going on cruises is like that, designed to make people feel better about having enough money to go on a cruise. My guess is that the cookbook’s instructions would have just made them feel more intimidated, and maybe a cruise as well, but then I’m not so interested in cruises or dinner parties. I mean, look at the Astors: did it do them any good? At least, not after the first part.

Economic Development

This is the land exit from Point Roberts, the Canadian border crossing you go through to the rest of everything. Not much of a line-up on this day. Past this little building that looks like a strip mall start-up, lies all of Vancouver--greater metro and city center--and, with a hard right turn, the ROTUS (rest of the U.S.). Point Roberts is not about shopping; it may be the only place in America that is not about shopping, so it may be worthy of your attention on that ground alone. Here’s the total shopping possibility: grocery store (1), hardware store (1), liquor store (1), gasoline stations (5), arts/crafts gift stores (2), plant nursery (1), very small liquidation store (1), 2 bars, 3 small eating places, and a ship’s chandlery at the marina. That’s it, I think. You won’t starve or be deprived of an evening’s scotch and soda, or be unable to hang your curtains, or honor someone’s birthday or drive yet another mile. On the other hand, it’s not much of a basis for an economy.

Some of the locals worry a great deal about the lack of an economy and therefore regularly talk about economic development and how the Point really needs a lot more of it. Recently, someone was talking about how great it would be to have a row of shops on Gulf Drive, little antique-y stores and the like. Such shops, they imply, would result in an economy because we’d have more Canadians, especially, spending more money down here, and thus the Point will have more ‘good jobs,’ as the politicians say, although retail clerking is not famously one of those lines of work that I’d describe as a good job. When they start walking (and talking) down this road, I always think of George the President telling us, after 9/11, to go out and buy things, eat at a nice restaurant, go to a Broadway play. Maybe we could move Broadway to Point Roberts? There’s room, still--next to Lily Point. And parking is just not a problem.

My preferred plan is to make Point Roberts Washington’s first wireless community, although I have no particular idea about how that would result in economic development. Alternatively, maybe it would be a good economic development plan to ensure that everybody in Point Roberts has a visual skill that could be paraded for the Canadian tourists (sort of like Williamsburg, Virginia, but without the costumes, although costumes wouldn’t hurt: we could all dress like Icelandic farmers in 1908). On the weekends, all the people with horses could drive small carts along the road; all the quilters could quilt in their front yards; maybe I’ll dye wool in a big, steaming vat; somebody could operate an apple press to make good use of the Point’s multitudinous orphan apples; a forge in someone’s front yard with small ironwork pieces being constructed for home and garden; dozens of people could make jewelry; others could chop firewood into kindling; free-range chickens could wander around; children could ride bicycles! Everyone could participate; everyone knows how to do something. Such a lot of fun. At least once, but then we might grow tired of being on display. And once probably won’t work for economic development.

Tsawwassen (the small Canadian town immediately over the border, which Point Roberts would look just like if it ever got developed) was once described (unkindly, ungraciously, ungenerously) by the National Geographic as ‘strip mall hell.’ That’s economic development you can believe in, my friends.

Well, if not Williamsburg, what else? What have we got here? Ocean, sky, big trees, beaches, four parks (!), a lot of undeveloped land (still!), and a sort of temperate climate. Instead of selling things at all those places, maybe we could just invite folks up (or down) and charge them for a rest cure. For shopping? Well, there’s always Vancouver and ROTUS and the internet.

Old News

I am a big fan of Harper’s magazine, not least because it costs only about $15/year to subscribe and because the company itself is not-for-profit (harpers.org on the net), but even more because its mission is to try to rectify the gross misrepresentations and misperceptions foisted onto the public by mainstream media. This morning, I picked up an issue of Harper’s and read awhile at breakfast: an essay by Wendell Berry, an essay by Lewis Lapham (its one-time editor) and an essay by Kevin Phillips (a one-time Republican). Lapham was explaining to me how disastrous the situation was in the credit markets/mortgage markets; Berry was telling me that Americans had to come to grips with the fact that there wasn’t going to be a quick, technological substitute for an oil-based economy, and Phillips was explaining to me how all the numbers that are constantly being spit out about the ‘economic fundamentals’ are basically fudged for improved public consumption and that the economy is actually in disaster status.

Well, yes, you might say. Plenty of mainstream media people writing about that this week. Of course, the Harper’s I was reading was published five months ago, was written more than five months ago, so what could possibly explain the fact that Lapham and Phillips, for example, already knew last May what Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson seem only to have discovered last week? What a burden it must be to be a Harper’s writer, to be stuck with being Cassandra for the 21st Century. I suppose the Bernanke-Paulson insistence that the world must be turned around under their direction this very afternoon is a function of their being so shocked at finding out what they found out this past week. Perhaps the single, most effective thing I could do to make the world a better place would be to send Mr. Bernanke, Mr. Paulson, Mr. Bush, and a few other Mr.’s subscriptions to Harper’s. Better yet, send them an audio copy so that they can listen to the articles while they do their morning exercises. That way, they’ll get a little lead time to plan their fabulous solutions to world-class problems.

There were several things I already knew before I read these articles (even the first time, last May: this morning’s read was a re-read: I forget so easily, you know?), and one of these was about the Consumer Price Index. They’re always telling us that it hasn’t gone up very much, even though it seems to me and everyone I know that things seem to be going up quite a lot: house prices, food, clothing, gas. If it doesn’t go up much, of course, then we are not suffering from inflation. Well, maybe, maybe not. Some years back, they stopped including the price of buying a house in the ‘Consumer Price Index’ (the CPI). Instead of what it actually was costing to buy a house (you remember that housing bubble?), they substituted what you could rent the house for if instead of buying it, you rented it to yourself or to someone else. That immediately lowered the Consumer Price Index substantially. You can imagine that those three-bedroom houses on tiny lots in L.A. that were selling for $1 million are not drawing $10,000 a month in rent. If you can pay $10k/month for rent, you’d buy.

Then, a decade later, they decided that there was no reason to include the costs of food and energy in the CPI because they were always going up (and occasionally going down), so now we get the ‘Core Consumer Price Index,’ and you can imagine what the former CPI would look like in 2008, a year in which we have seen enormous increases in both food and oil, increases that don’t look like they’re going to be reversed any time soon, if ever. We can be comforted by knowing that, according to the CCPI, there’s not much inflation to worry about. Unless you are a Harper’s reader, anyway. Or unless you’ve recently put gas in your car or bought groceries.

In a time of inflation, interest rates go up; but at the moment, they are not up; they are way down. Interest on Treasuries is virtually non-existent. And that is the nature of the upside down economic world we’re in. Maybe time to re-read Alice in Wonderland.

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.

Getting and Spending

We are all economists now. It astonishes me how all the news—radio, print, internet, magazines, telegrams, whatever—assume that we are deeply interested in and follow closely the stock market, the jobless numbers, the GDP, and all that. In the olden days, when economics really was the dismal science, we left all that to the economists. In the public sector, they did what they did to keep things more or less humming along. There was a business cycle when things were good and a lot of engineers were being hired, and then there would come along the part of the cycle when things were bad and all the engineers lost their jobs. The market went up, the market went down. But people like me (the middle class) really didn’t pay all that much attention to it.

But just start the sentence, “The economy …” and everybody now has a dozen ways to finish the sentence. We act as if we knew what the 'economy’ is, or was, or might be. This month’s issue of Harper’s (and let me confess that if Harper’s were a church, I would join it) has an extremely helpful article on what we talk about when we talk about the economy. It is by Jonathan Rowe and is titled ‘Our Phony Economy.’ You might be able to read it here, but it might be available under subscription only.

In any case, what Rowe is talking about is what the economy is and what the economy isn’t, and when he said all this (in March), he was actually talking to some subset of the U.S. Congress. One reason to care about this is because of the rebate checks currently being sent out to most U.S. taxpayers to make up for the fact that the housing market has collapsed and there’s the credit crunch and all that. We have become, in the last fifty years or so, nothing more than a nation of consumers. No longer are we freedom-loving Americans, or wild and crazy Americans, or an independent and hopeful people, or a resourceful and inventive people, or any of that stuff. We are just a nation of spenders, and when times get hard, when the engineers lose their jobs, our job is not to knuckle down, to help one another through the difficulties, to cut back, to scrimp and save, etc. No, our job is to spend some more and if the hard times we are going through make it difficult to spend some more, than the government will send you some money (which it, of course, doesn’t actually have but is borrowing from the Chinese, who are getting tired of lending to us) and they will tell you to spend it on whatever you desire.

What is wrong with this picture? How can the economy improve from almost random spending? Will we be better off for spending our rebates on additional driving, buying gas that will go to oil companies and Middle Eastern treasuries? Or on vacations or casino gambling or pricey handbags or any of the things we buy? There are people who really may need this money and I expect they’ll be spending it on food and heating oil and gas to get to work. But a large chunk of the recipients are in no such need and the cash that is coming to them might be better sent to their local food banks (who have had substantial increases in numbers of people who are asking for help right at the time that food prices are going up significantly). Or they ought to put it in the bank for their children and grandchildren who will, of course, be the ones who have to repay the money when the Treasury Notes come due. No, that’s no good: it has to be spent now. For the good of the economy. For the good of the country, we could at least spend it on something worthy of spending. I vote for the Food Bank.