Getting Around

I've had more than my share of moving across borders over the past 18 years when we have managed to live pretty full lives, simultaneously, in both the U.S. and in Canada by spending two weeks of each month in each place (with the excess going to the U.S.).  We've skipped right across bi-coastal to bi-national.  At this point, however, it's grown a little wearisome, and medical circumstances make it imperative that we get ourselves back to the U.S. on a full-time basis.  (And, as a matter of fact, that may make posting a little irregular on the blog, although I'll try to maintain some stability, in every sense of the word.)

However, there are more possibilities for travel than i had considered, possibilities much more onerous, I'd guess.  Point Roberts has a marina where I rarely go because I don't have much interest in boats, although they do have many beauties of which I am an insufficient observer.  When we went to see the pygmy-angora goats arrive a couple of weeks ago, I looked around at the Marina with a somewhat more interested eye.  There are a lot of boats there.  They surely don't all belong to full-time residents of Point Roberts; my guess is that Canadians keep them there for one reason or another.  Lower fees, lower taxes, who knows.  In any case, the marina pretty much has all its slips filled.  As of last week, anyway, there were only 8 available out of what looks like several hundreds.  (The marina's website has much information, but not including the number of slips available.)

In addition to the boats and the chandlery, and the restaurant, and the service facilities, the marina currently has two other features.  On is a small herd of highland cattle (which were also shipped in, like the goats, but on a somewhat larger boat) and the other is a two-story, 82-foot long barge/house boat that would appear to be something like a small-ish hotel.  The houseboat has been here and there for many years apparently and was, I am told, most recently shipped in to us in Pt. Roberts from Salt Spring Island.  But it is now for sale to anyone who would like to cruise around from country to country with all their closest friends.  All it would take is the friends and some way to move the houseboat (it didn't really seem self-propelling, and i guess if it's a barge you'd actually need a tug-boat to move it, but what do I know about boats?).  And then, you'd also need about $1.8+ million dollars. (The color picture above: that's the barge/houseboat, even though it just looks like a house.)

And then you would have the opportunity to live bi-, tri-, quatralaterally nationally.  Personally, I wouldn't recommend it, but then, everyone has his or her own level of tolerance for complexity.

(Sorry that two of the pictures turned out to be in b/w.  My photo program occasionally has the need to do this and when I discovered it, I wasn't well situated to retake the pics.)

Holy Cow!

One of the very nice features of the post-60’s world is the reintroduction of folk art into our lives. I’ve written previously about Patrick Amiot of Sebastopol, California (June 15, 2008), who has peopled that area with wondrously fantastic metal sculptures, and about Axil Stenzel of Roberts Creek, B.C. (June 23, 2008), who has peopled his yard with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of strange metal beings. Those who make the trek down the I-5 to California from up here have doubtless seen Ralph Starritt’s rusty cow sculpture to the east of the highway near Yreka in an endless stubble field. It is a life-size cow of welded sheet metal named ‘MooDonna,’ and it’s been in that field for well over a decade.

Down in Sebastopol, Patrick Amiot also has a semi-realistic metal cow sculpture (in addition to his fantasy creatures) that lives in a field populated by real Holsteins. According to the San Francisco Examiner, ‘At dusk, the live cows congregate around the artwork and use it as a scratching post, frequently moving it a few feet a day. Amiot has worried that they might knock over his creation. Which would probably be a first: a cow-tipping with cows as the perpetrators.’

If you google ‘metal cow sculptures,’ you will find that there a lot of them in the U.K., so it’s not just a U.S. thing. But now, Point Roberts has joined all these other excellent towns in having its own metal cow sculpture. [Correction: A reader points out that this cow (referred to as a 'lawn cow') is more likely to be fiberglass or resin than metal.] On the south side of Benson Road, just before you get to the admirable Aydon Wellness Clinic, there is DREWHENGE, where the homeowner and patenter of some kind of interlocking blocks has interlocked them to create an impressively large arch over his entranceway. On the large, grassy field that constitutes Drewhenge’s front yard, stands the cow in the photo above. You can’t always see the cow right from the road as you drive by because the cow moves around. Not under its own momentum, of course: it's a metal sculpture. Nevertheless, one can only hope that, someday, the Drewhenge cow meets up with the Point Roberts’ Marina's cows. I have, of course, no real understanding of why the marina has cattle, but maybe they’re folk art, too, even though they do move on their own and are eventually headed for an abattoir.