Worrying

The All Point Bulletin for August came to our mail box yesterday and we were unusually taken by the letters section.  Among the usual thanks for whatever happened recently, there was a long (and edited for length) letter which urged the end of anonymous complaints and particularly the unspecified ones against the writer; a letter from someone who thinks that yard waste burning should be conducted during the dry season (when its prohibited) when the yard waste is completely dry rather than in the other 10 months of the year when it rains and the yard waste is damp, at best; and a worrying letter (third letter from the top) from a sort of anonymous Californian (is Mary Beth a first and last name or just a first and thus anonymous name?) who, although loving Point Roberts, discovered worrisome aspects of life here when she and her husband went house shopping.

Like so many Californians, she came to visit, was enchanted by what she saw, went real estate shopping, and discovered that Point Roberts was not just like California!  Such a disappointment.  Of course, since she already lives in Santa Cruz County (Corallitos), she could just stay there and admire it.  But something about Point Roberts drew her to its heart.  What she hated, though, was the dampness that leads to mold in houses, and the failure to build to code, and, most worrisome, "we noticed that many of these homes had overflowing septic systems and could visibly see the runoff down the streets."  This 'many' was many of the twelve homes that a real estate agent showed them. (Good work, real estate agent!)  I've lived here for about 16 years and I think the last time I saw septic runoff in the streets, I was visiting Bangkok.  But, perhaps Mrs. Beth, whose husband is a building contractor who recognizes mold when he sees it and identifies it on the spot as 'toxic mold,' is more observant or sensitive than I am, given those sixteen years of living in such a slum.

Mrs. Beth finally comes to the conclusion that virtually the whole place needs to be condemned and torn down.  There are times when I think that I have some sense of what kind of world I am living in, what my fellow Americans are thinking and doing, but reading Mrs. Beth's letter just stunned me.  That she had the time to write and warn us and to urge us to destroy the Community Center and our houses!  To worry about us so, and not least when she could be worrying about global warming or about the reduced phytoplankton levels that could end in our having less oxygen to breathe. On the other hand, if we have to breathe less, would that reduce our need to worry about the toxic mold?

It's always a pleasure to welcome the summer tourists, no?

Change of Scene

The first weekend in June: that’s when all the tourists/summer visitors usually are noticeably with us. And it was pretty noticeable today. The International Market had lots of people, even at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, and they were buying lots of food. Planning to stay awhile, or at least eat a lot while here. The roadsides were almost cluttered with folks out for a walk, a jog, a run, a stroll, and they were all wearing shorts and sleeveless tops, or a little less. One lady in a bikini top.

The air last night and tonight smelled of barbecued meats. This is summer, indeed. And for inexplicable reasons, the sunny weather has continued, though the temperatures have dropped some. But three weeks without rain at this time of year is strange indeed. A Seattle meteorologist reported a very unusual red/orange sunset earlier this week. Our neighbor reported awakening last night at 1:15 a.m. just in time to see the moon fairly low in the sky, in the south, transiting a red/orange sky. If it weren’t such lovely weather, you might think we were getting messages of end times. But probably, we are just giddy with summer after our long, cold winter and spring, and giddier yet with all these people bouncing around us on bicycles and horses and in sandals and bathing suits. They’re all so talkative! I get to thinking through the winter that I’m living among the kind of people that Garrison Keillor describes as inhabiting Lake Wobegon: taciturn Norwegians (or, in our case, Icelanders).

When I went to the market, I was wearing a long-sleeved silk shirt covered by a jacket. This is to demonstrate, I guess, that I am an actual resident and not a fly-by-night, good-time-Charlie visitor in a bathing suit. Nevertheless, we barbecued a little chicken.

Well-Crafted Work

This is the weekend of Sechelt's Hackett Park Craft Fair, sponsored by the Sunshine Coast Arts Council. We have been going to the Fair for as long as we have been here and have watched it grow and change, ever better in its presentation. There have been very few years when the weekend had rain or drizzle but as far as I can remember it has never been cancelled for bad weather and today was full-blue-sky. It is held in a park in Sechelt, is juried, and features maybe 60-70 different booths of many wonders. It has no food to speak of, unlike some craft fairs and any county or state fair in historical memory. In this way, it keeps its focus on the art of craft, which seems appropriate for something sponsored by an arts council as opposed to a good times council.

I did a quick Google on the history of craft fairs and came up with very little. Few of the individual craft fairs list their dates of origin, but those that do seem to come from the mid-70’s. I certainly remember no craft fair in Idaho in the early 50’s, or in upstate New York in the late 50’s, or in California in the early 60’s. I do know from personal experience that, as an aspect of the great hippy movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s involving dropping out, there was a sudden and new interest in craft of various sorts including beading, jewelry making, stained glass, decorative pieces generally, and hand-made clothing. I would guess that the first, albeit small, craft fair I ever saw was in the late 60’s in Los Angeles and involved those kinds of goods. In some ways, the 60’s craft fair seems to have been an outgrowth of head shops, those odd little places that sold marijuana paraphernalia.

Whatever their origins (and I imagine there was a history before the 60’s, but that it was an interrupted one), they are big deals nowadays. My visiting children had last week attended a big craft fair in Sebastopol, California, and now were here for the big craft fair in Sechelt, B.C. They were in a position to tell me that the crafts here in B.C. were superior in quality to the crafts there in CA, but that the food in CA was definitely vastly superior to that of the B.C. event. So, there is one piece of data, I guess.

Because the Sunshine Coast is increasingly about tourists, we have more than one craft fair each year but no more than one craft fair each week. Last week was Sechelt’s 5th Annual Arts and Craft event, not to be confused with this week’s even longer ago annual event. There are several more during the summer, and there are many of them in the fall and around Christmas. No shortage of crafts here. And, apparently, no shortage of customers for crafts or, I’d guess, they’d stop holding the fairs.

I wish (and this is a frequent wish about all kinds of phenomena) that I’d taken notes all along about the kinds of things that are sold at the Hackett Park Craft Fair so I could systematically trace the changes over time. I do know that there used to be several hat sellers and this year there were none; that there used to be a lot more sellers of clothing more generally than was the case this year; that potters are regulars but that each year they seem to be a different group of potters; and that jewelry sellers are always numerous. I think there were fewer wood workers in this year’s fair than has previously been the case, and I know that there were many more sellers of items that are intended as decorative features for gardens than ever before. So I would guess that we have now moved on from adorning ourselves (except for jewelry) to adorning our gardens.

This year’s Best of Show award (at least from my family) goes to Douglas Walker, who is from Black Creek, B.C. He is a former photographer who, in his 50’s, ended that career and went on to become a maker of metal/water sculptures. His metal sculptures are fountains, but they are made largely of recycled metal pieces, such as trombones or flutes, e.g. In some pieces, the pump actually moves a visible wheel that somehow then causes all the water to flow beautifully. These pieces are large (2 or 3 feet high at a minimum) and exquisite. They start at around $400, as I recall, and the largest one he had on display was $2,200. His web site shows many more of the fountains than he had in his booth and they are well worth seeing. Walker has been doing this work for only a few years and, he said, has been very successful so far. He manages to be one of the lucky few crafters whose work is not only endlessly interesting to the crafter him/herself, but is also so remarkable that the fair attenders are willing to pay substantial amounts for the pleasure of having his work in their own life.

The essence of a successful craft fair lies in its ability to show you something not only well-made, interesting and beautiful, but also surprising. Mr. Walker’s fountains certainly filled that bill for me. A very good day!