The Unusual Tourist

There is a kind of whale called a ‘false killer whale.’ The naming seems to me highly unjust, implying as it does, that the whale is engaged in some attempt at deception. In fact, it is just a tropical waters whale that looks a lot like a killer whale. It lacks the distinctive white saddle, which is pretty much of a giveaway, I’d think, but perhaps the namers were distracted from that fact because they were observing from, say, underwater.

In any case, we have one of them, sort of. Apparently, they sometimes swim up this far in the summer, but then they go back when the chill begins. Our false orca (or killer whale, same thing), it is thought, swam up with her pod and then, for some reason, she became separated from them, they went south, and she (probably after seeing Point Roberts) decided to stay.

In this part of her run, she is known as Wilma, and I was lucky enough to cross her path some 5-6 years ago. Our neighbor’s son had recently moved over to one of the Gulf Islands and he sped over one sunny afternoon in his outboard motor boat and offered us a little ride.

Now I am not a fan of actually being either in or on the ocean unless I am wearing scuba gear. The reason for this is that I can’t swim, and the reason for that is I have some kind of strange malformation of the nasal passages that leads water to rush up into nose and down into my lungs the minute my head goes under water. I used to think it was that I had an unrestrainable compulsiosn to inhale when i put my head in the water but recently General Mike McConnell, the head of one of our vast Intelligence Organizations, reported in a discussion of waterboarding and why he didn’t want to have it happen to him (although okay to have it happen to others), that he had the same problem as I, and he said it was a malformation. So I’ll go with that as to the cause: I mean, he’s Mr. General Intelligence, so he should know what his water problem is.

So, the opportunity to go out in a little boat without my scuba gear didn’t immediately appeal, but it was a nice offer and I get weary of explaining to people that I don’t swim and I don’t like going to places where I might get the opportunity to be in water that is deeper than me, and the neighbors and Ed were all excited by it, so I shut my mouth and got into the boat. I believe I may have been the only person in the boat actually wearing a life jacket (why would this be? Is this not just rudimentary good sense? Well, I don’t know, they all can actually swim, are Olympic champions for all I know, so I am not a good judge of it, I supppose).

We got in the boat, we motored (Slap! Slap!) down past the Tswwaasen Ferry Terminal and eventually turned back. As we came by the terminal, Wilma (who until that moment I'd never heard of) caught our wake and begin to swim along side of us. She would suddenly surface (Right! No white saddle patch.) and then she’d disappear and the next thing she’d be on the other side of the boat, having gone underneath us. It was an amazing and terrifying experience for me: not so much simultaneously as in turns. I would see her and be amazed; she would disappear and I would be terrified as I imagined her misjudging exactly where she and we were. For about 15-20 minutes we had this back and forth and up and down, and then she bid us farewell as we got up to the entrance to the marina on Point Roberts.

There were other sightings of Wilma that summer and it was said that she hung around the ferry terminal to ride passing boats’ wakes. Just saying ‘Hi!’ to those of us who were traveling these waters with her. Just looking for a friend. Maybe she found one with a compass and went south because I haven’t heard about her being around over the last couple of years. The last sighting I found on the Net was in 2005. So maybe Wilma was just a tourist who decided not to stay. In my memory though, I see her all the time.

Second or Third Thoughts

The Point Roberts monthly newspaper features a very lively ‘Letters to the Editor’ section. It is here that one first turns to find out the real news of the Point over the past month. Although there are a number of frequent-flyer letter writers, two of them rise to a class of their own...sort of Platinum+. Both are men and both can frequently be encountered at local meetings of note. I last saw John LeSow at a Voters’ Association meeting where he came to obsess about water quality, although that was not actually on the meeting’s agenda. Water quality is monitored here by Vancouver, B.C., which supplies the water (i.e., we are getting the same water that they get up in Vancouver) and by the state of Washington, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and John LeSow, all of which have their own, if not always the same, standards.

The other of these epistolary compulsives is Ron Calder, and I use both their names only because they put themselves forward in a public way so often that I don’t take it they are much concerned about privacy as far as politics goes, anyway. Both John and Ron are of a libertarian bent and perhaps of the Libertarian Party itself. There were a suspiciously large number of RON PAUL signs nailed to all the power poles right before the recent primary and presidential caucus and an absolute absence of signs for anyone else.

Point Roberts is largely a Democratic Party stronghold, but the Republicans here in the 2000 primary voted for Allan Keyes, and the great majority of the admittedly small number of Republican caucus votes this year—15, as I recall--went for Ron Paul. If asked, I would certainly have no hesitation in concluding that the boys both voted for George Bush in the 2000 presidential general election. As to 2004...well, hard to know. Certainly by 2004, a lot of Libertarians had begun to be very restless, although it’s hard to imagine they might take their restlessness over to la table of that Frenchy John Kerry.

But now we know about Ron Calder, anyway. The March paper features an eloquent letter from Mr. Calder in which he refers to 'bottom-of-the-barrel' Michael Chertoff as 'Head of Hopeless Insecurity,' notes the parallels to Nazism in a country run by “Grand Fuhrer George’,’ and uses such phrases as ‘out of control,’ ‘scary,’ and ‘one more year of lunacy.’ Ron is pretty upset about how things are going. He wants the Patriot Act repealed, he wants his rights back, he remembers the days ‘when America was truly the land of the Free.’ Back in the days of Bill Clinton????

Well, it goes right to my heart to see someone like Ron as pissed off with this administration as I am. Yes, Ron! Yes, Brother! We are all in this together. But then he notes that he voted for George Bush not only in 2000, but also in 2004, acknowledging that he made ‘the same mistake twice.’ You surely did, Ron. The first vote we can understand; lots of people were surprised at what the U.S. got with Bush regardless of whether they did or did not vote for him, although I was not one of those surprised (she said proudly). But the second vote???

We hold this to be self-evident: that anyone who voted for George Bush twice has given us indisputable evidence that he or she doesn’t have the discernment or judgment or just mother wit of anyone that we would really be interested in listening to. Somehow, I think that Mr. Calder will keep talking anyway, whether we are listening or not.

Of Contracts, Canned Fish, and High Hopes

In the early 1900’s, a ruling came down in Alaska Packers Association vs. Domenico, a case which one studies in contracts class in law school. As I understand it (and I’m not a lawyer so you don't want to have too much hang on this analysis), the principle of the ruling is that if one person agrees to do something and then later on decides he doesn’t want to do it unless he receives some further consideration, the additional consideration, if agreed to, has no legal status. In this particular case, the crew members agreed to man a ship to Alaska and there to fish for salmon. They were to be paid $50 for the ship work and two cents per fish for every salmon they caught. But once in Alaska, they argued that the equipment for doing the fishing was inadequate and thus they refused to fish, since those two-cent-apiece fish had been their main financial gain in this project. They were, however, willing to pursue the fishing if the original price of $50 for being seamen was increased to $100. A member of the Packers’ Association accepted this deal. Of course, the men were in some remote part of Alaska and there were no alternative seamen to hire to take the company’s ship back or indeed to catch the company some fish.

And this all became a major principle of contract law. You agree to something and if it seems a bad idea after awhile, you are stuck with what you agreed to. Surely it would be very good if someone intervened to elevate your situation, but there is no moral or legal obligation to do so. A case of ‘contractor beware,’ I would think.

And why are we talking about this? Well, largely because I live two blocks from APA Road, and a mile or so from the grounds of the Alaska Packers Association (APA) cannery. Point Roberts: a part of legal history. Another case involving the Alaska Packers Association dealt with whether local Indian tribes, under claims of treaty rights, could prohibit the APA from fishing in the waters of Point Roberts. That decision, rendered in the 1880’s, concluded that the Indians couldn’t do anything about the APA fishing. Why are we not surprised by this decision?

The cannery has its own local history, of which I know only a little. It was a big cannery (I’ve seen pictures of it) and lots of fish were packed here. And I probably ate salmon from those cans because fresh salmon was not an item in our household in Idaho in the 1940’s, but canned salmon surely was. You put crackers and egg and canned salmon together with some onion, fried it, and that was a salmon cake. There must have been a sizable number of jobs in Point Roberts at that point. Chinese laborers were brought in to do some of the work in the canneries, and at least one such Chinese laborer, Ah Fat, lived in Point Roberts for several decades. The cannery caught fire in the 1960’s, and now there are scant ruins including, according to a friend ‘the rusted hull of a pressure canning machine left lying [on the beach].’

Except that The Cannery is still with us. At some point after the APA cannery burned down, someone constructed a new cannery building that included a restaurant and a dance floor. This was in the days before British Columbia allowed liquor sales on Sunday, and what sounds like all of Vancouver came to the Point for Sunday Drinking. A friend recalls going to The Cannery once when Woody Herman was playing right here in Point Roberts. (Herman and his band toured almost until Herman’s death when he was in his 80’s because the IRS was after him for back taxes. )

Then The Cannery was remodeled in the 80’s and it was set to become a fantastic resort kind of place. (There is a remodeled actual APA cannery over the real border to the U.S. in Blaine that is a successful resort, I am told.) The outside of our Point Roberts remodeled buildings were painted bright yellow and it is still the most cheerful looking place on the Point. But it has long been empty, another abandoned house or at least buildings. And the point of all this story? Virtually every new person to Point Roberts begins to think about how The Cannery could be revived, made the center of Point life, made an economic engine. A neighbor of mine, I hear, has been working for the past three years to turn it into a fabulous resort restaurant, and only a few days ago, I heard somebody proposing that it be used to provide free living space for young artists from Seattle who would come up here and produce fantastic work and show us….well, show us something.

My own hope is that the return of The Cannery might lure the salmon back. But it’s possible that the salmons’ contract can’t be renegotiated without really offering them something quite a bit better than they were offered before (whick was to end up in a can). Although, like the Indians and the APA workers, they might lose the case if they tried to have an improved offer enforced.

Point Roberts Recidivism

It would be unlikely, if you just came upon Point Roberts yourself, to find that you had an old friend living here, too. The law of averages just seem way too strong for that. And, indeed, we didn’t ever see a soul we knew when we came here 13 years ago. And then, one day, Ed got an email from one of his closest friends at Cal Tech, an educational experience that came to a conclusion in 1956. A college pal who had been one of the wedding party at Ed’s wedding (or maybe the other way round), sent a message to report that he had been reading some kind of Cal Tech alumna phosphorescence and had noticed that Ed Park had left RAND and was now living in Point Roberts, WA. Interestingly enough, the old friend noted, he and his wife had recently bought a house in Point Roberts. So there they were: two old Cal Tech boys living in one of if not the only one of America’s most remote communities that isn’t in Alaska.

The couple had been living in Seattle, doing engineering work, and when the retirement date came, they drifted up here because their daughter had met a guy who lived here and they had come up to visit her and were charmed by the unusualness of the locale and the low prices. Next thing, it’s another house for them. Unlike us, they settled in on the ocean front facing the rising sun. One of his first tasks was to take a picture of the sunrise every morning. I, of course, have never seen a sunrise here and not only because I’m such a slug-a-bed. We live in the middle of that aforementioned woods and the disc as well as the rays of the sun are pretty much obscured for us. I’m just glad I can tell that it’s light.

The old friend loaned me a series of sunrise pictures and I had a good time trying to find a way to make a quilt that was like any one of those pictures. Not all that successful, but the learning was worth the try. And we went to the movies with them now and then and had dinner together. The usual. I accompanied him to a couple of community group meetings as he made the inevitable and largely unsuccessful attempt to become community-ized. But he and his wife were as pleased with their arrangments here as we were and they settled in to remodeling, gardening, and teaching computers to seniors (of which he was one), as well as the rest of what passes for life’s small amusements here.

And then, two years ago in the winter, an unfortunately high tide combined with a villainously vigorous wind from east, and the next thing you know, the friends’ newly remodeled ground floor and garage found itself in a matter of minutes with five feet of sea water. Many of those at the peninsula edges were similarly discomfited and while misery may love company, it certainly doesn’t make it any less miserable. Ed helped them clean things up and out and they pretty much restored their living arrangements over several months, including half a dozen new appliances that had received more salt than was consistent with further function. We thought the worst was over for them, but then we heard from another friend that their house was for sale and they were moving to New Mexico, a state with no known ocean front and perhaps inadequate water for drinking, let alone flooding. And in a few weeks, they packed up and disappeared from America’s strangest little place.

That was about 18 months ago. Yesterday, Ed received an email from that old friend. They are looking to move back to Point Roberts, buy a little place where they’d spend part of the year or maybe more than that. He was writing because he had heard there was a house for sale on our little cul de sac of a street (a street with 10 houses, counting both sides), and a street that lies almost at the center point of the Point. Not only a center point, we are also a high point. So maybe they’ll come back and give us another try. We inquired around about the house, only to find that the basement of the house had flooded this winter: leaking water heater? High ground water? Don’t know. Ed reported the finding to his friend who concluded that it sounded like nothing a sump pump couldn’t fix.

What a place! The Department of Homeland Security at the border and acts of God in our basement...and still we keep coming back.

The Community Marches On...Or Not

There’s some stirring on the community level here in Point Roberts. That is to say, there is, once again, some group of folks who think we need more community than we’ve already got. Every time there’s a new batch of newcomers, a small number peel themselves off to join in an effort to reinvigorate the Point. Or perhaps to invigorate it for the first time in their sense of community politics. Their usual conclusion is that they need to pump up some old organization that has gone derelict. A year later, the effort is largely abandoned and the group in question returns to its semi-dormant state, with regular meetings attended by a couple of people. I myself have attended a few meetings of several of these organizations during such an invigorating process. Hasn’t worked yet as far as I can see. Largely this is because, I think, that such groups as do exist are largely at cross purposes with one another or are entirely indifferent to one another. It's like a chess game where either nobody wants to take a turn or two people want to move simultaneously, each to block the other.

This time, it is the organizations themselves that are taking the lead, or at least some of them. And therein lies the rub. There are a million organizations on the Point, depending upon how you define ‘organization.’ There’s the Chamber of Commerce, which requires only a very small chamber to meet since there is so little variety of commerce, and there is the Voters’ Association (people who can vote and may or may not own property), and the Property Owners’ Association (the reverse), and the Contractors’ Association, and the Parks and Recreation Board (which may or may not be an organization, depending...). And there’s the Wellness Clinic Board (not to mention the patients of the clinic), and the Volunteer Fire Department; the Quilters Group, the Book Club, the Library employees, the Walking Group, the owners/riders of Icelandic Ponies, Members of the Lutheran Church, a small dance band, the Historical Society, the golf course employees, the Food Bank, the Emergency Preparedness Committee, the group that reads to small children at the library on Tuesday evenings, the arts group that puts on an arts weekend in the summer, and six neighborhood associations, for starters. Well, you can see how this notion of community groups as representative members of the community could pretty easily get out of hand if you are thinking of them as a group.

But the ‘key organizations’ (as their presidents tend to refer to themselves) are thinking of getting together a little council that will meet to (and I quote) ‘prioritize problems in Point Roberts.’ They want to have action: this is not a group to just sit around and talk, they say; this is a group to produce solutions and to have deadlines. And who is to be on this council, I ask? Well, each group in the community can send a representative, they respond. I like to imagine this ‘democratically’ appointed group sitting around the table doing this prioritizing. Since I was at this meeting (largely as an interested observer), I continued to press a role for the quilters’ group as a community organization entitled to representation on this prioritizing group. Eventually, I think, they began to see that a representative from every community group might be something of a handful and might lead to more talk than action.

But, with no way to discern who should have a representative on this mythical council, the meeting was adjourned with a plan to invite anyone who thinks they represent a community group to the next meeting, a month from now. Such a plan certainly offers a strange possibility of legitimacy, but I’m not sure of the direction that this legitimacy would take. In any case, the Point Roberts Quilters Group, with 12 active members, will be represented by me.

Roots and Rootlessness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Woods These Are I'm Pretty Sure I Know

When we moved to Point Roberts, we bought a little house on a little lot and the lot had a few big trees on it here and there and a few little garden areas and a bunch of lawn. But that was twelve or so years ago, and over that time, we found ourselves buying the surrounding little lots one at a time, until we eventually acquired six of them, about a half acre that includes the house we live in, trees, another house that Ed has been remodeling for the past three years, and a workshop for me in which to do my quilting. Up in Canada, we have two acres of woods and one house, but the difference between two acres of woods in Canada and maybe a quarter acre of woods in Washington (subtracting the lawn-like areas which are flat but have no grass and thus are not really lawns, the ever-expanding gardens, and the three buildings from that larger ½ acre) is substantial.

The difference lies largely in the fact that two acres of trees is a forest that takes care of itself and ¼ acre of trees is land that requires a lot of maintenance. I conducted a survey of our trees today and here is what we have:

2 alders, 4 large maples and 4 small maples, 12 red cedars, 2 laurels, 1 dogwood, 31 Douglas firs, 1 grand fir, 3 willows, 1 pecan, 5 Italian plums, 2 bartlett pears, 1 walnut, 1 fig, 1 Queen Anne cherry, 4 apples, 1 arbutus, and 2 poplars. Fruit trees are not, by nature all that big, although this cherry is a large tree: our ladders do not go high enough to pick up at the top of it. But the rest of these trees range from very big to enormous. I couldn’t begin to put my arms halfway around any of the Douglas firs or cedars, e.g. They are tall enough that bald eagles consider nesting in them each spring. They are a lot of wood, but not a forest. They are more like a park.

Maintenance for a park includes, each spring, gathering up and causing to go away hundreds of branches that break off during winter storms, as well as the occasional tree that comes down (two last year, but none this past winter). The branches are mostly from the Douglas fir trees, but the cedars, alders, and maples also contribute to this general mess. If you cut the wood up to size, you can burn the wood in your fireplace or wood stove. However, we don’t have either of those. So we can find somebody with a chain saw who wants the wood and is willing to come by, cut it, and cart it off, but most people have their own wood mess for those purposes. Or we can pay somebody about $125/hour to chip it up (which we did last year, but we still have 2/3 of those wood chips in piles waiting for me to cart them to somewhere else). We can burn it ourselves in a 1-2 day extravaganza, during which time we make our major contribution to global warming. Or we can carry it back into the far reaches of the park where it will make its own contribution to global warming by decomposing, but over a longer time than 1-2 days. What to do?

The other major maintenance of trees has to do with leaves. A tree in your yard provides you with enough leaves in the fall to rake up. Eight maples, two alders, a dogwood, and a bunch of fruit trees provides you with way more leaves than you are going to be raking up, not least because it is November when they fall and it is raining all the time. So you think about the advantages of letting the leaves remain on the ground all winter where they can provide a little insulation for the plants and bushes in the cold, and where they will do a little composting of their own. But spring comes (as it has come this week), and all those leaves are still there and they’re still wet and they haven’t composted one whit and all the slugs are eating the little plants that they are covering. And when that happens, you know it’s really time to rake the leaves and start the serious composting. So this week has been a week of raking when it’s not raining and carting leaves off to the back of the woods where they will go bit by bit into the composter until the next crop of leaves starts to fall.

These woods are mine, and they sure require a lot of work.