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.

Have All the Workers Gone?

My conversation with the real estate agent on the Sunshine Coast also included a foray into the rental market. I wasn’t interested in renting anything, on either end of a rental transaction, but I was interested in why there suddenly were so many rentals on the market and thought he might have some knowledgeable insight into that question.

To my surprise, he thinks that it largely represents renters leaving the Coast. That is, the rental market here is always tight because there aren’t a lot of rental units, and the ones that are here are quickly re-rented by word of mouth, so you never see them in the papers. But, he adds, workers on the Sunshine Coast are here largely to work to the needs of the retiree population. That is, as in Point Roberts, retirees are the main population driver here on the Coast. The workers come to serve the retirees’ needs, whether those be for new houses, remodeling of houses, landscaping, yardwork, or general house maintenance, as well as non-house, personal needs. When the retirees begin to take a major hit with their investment portfolios, they stop their discretionary spending. Won’t remodel the bathroom just now, or redecorate the living room, or build that little shop out back, or build a water feature in the garden, buy new shoes, etcetera.

When they stop that, the jobs that all the renters were occupying begin to slow down, dry up, or just end. And so the worker/renters move on to someplace else where jobs are more plentiful. Nice to live on the Coast, but it’s possible to live elsewhere. So they pick up and leave, but now there’s not that ready supply of renters to fill their shoes. And rental units begin to be advertised in droves in the papers.

Down south in Vancouver, of course, there’s still a lot of spending going on for the Olympics (they just announced another $700 million need for security, after last month’s $700 million need for finishing the Olympic Village, which latter the Vancouver City Council took on). But construction down there is beginning to slow too, with yesterday the announcement of the end of a planned skyscraper-hotel-shopping complex on Georgia St. Instead of 40+ stories decorating the city, it will be decorated with a big hole in the ground on one of its main streets. And of course, whatever needs to be done for the Olympics will be done a year from now. So, I guess renters move on from there, too, eventually.

So, does this tell me anything about Point Roberts? Probably not, since I’m not sure there’s a large pool of workers/renters serving that retiree population—that is, a large enough pool that one would notice a change if one is one of the retirees rather than one of the workers.

And also, we awoke to about 2-3 inches of snow on the ground this morning. Cold awakenings all around us.

Starting to Say Goodbye

We met today with a real estate agent about selling our house up here in British Columbia. We bought it almost 20 years ago, and we have had a wonderful time living here, even if only part time, but even as all good things must come to an end, so must our transiting back and forth between countries. My simplest way of explaining this is getting out while the getting is good, by which I mean while we still can manage to do it with our wits and bodies reasonably unimpaired and with both of us still here to participate. Another way to put it is that maintaining multiple properties is getting to be too much of a chore. But however it is put, it needs to be put, and thus the meeting.

The agent we called is the same guy who was our agent when we bought the house: he was then in his forties and we were in our fifties; now he is in his sixties and we in our seventies. That’s the nature of time and arithmetic, I guess, but we had not seen one another for maybe 16 years, so it was surprising to find (to our eyes) that he was just as he was then; and he kindly offered us the same assessment. And then we got down to business.

You can pretty much tell how the economy is up here by how carefully, how gently he approached us. Clearly, he is used to having to deliver bad news to people. The kind of bad news that is phrased like, “I know you could have sold your house for a zillion dollars last year, but this year, maybe a trillion less, in any case a lot less. It’s a very bad market right now and we just don’t see it getting better for awhile.” We were not, of course, surprised to hear this, but apparently many people are as he brought us a lot of paper to demonstrate how prices were falling in B.C. generally.

Not being able to get an argument from us about how bad things are (he assured us he’d been through four ups and four downs…but then how much longer do we any of us have to see any more of that roller coast ride?), we progressed to introducing him (again) to the house. Walking around in it, explaining all the things we loved about it—both its inherent qualities and things we had changed to make it even more wonderful (at least to us)—I was struck by how much I admired it as a house, how much I had enjoyed living here, how much I still anticipate, each return trip, seeing the great opening to light that one experiences when entering the house…like walking into the sky through a tree. And also how willing I was to let it go. It has always seemed to me a house that owns itself and that I had been lucky enough to travel with for awhile. Time now to find its next traveling partners. Somewhere out there, some terrifically lucky family are eating dinner without a clue as to what an amazing house is right there in their future. This year, next year, I guess we'll meet them.

Room to Let

I am the kind of person who, if you put a cereal box in front of me, will dutifully read all the text on the cereal box, even though I don’t eat cereal and don’t have any need for whatever passes for information on the cereal box. Similarly, put a newspaper in front of me and I dutifully read it all, page after page, even if I’m only visiting in the town that produces the newspaper. Needless to say, when it comes to local papers, I even read all the ads in the classified section as if somewhere in there the secret life of the town will surprisingly be revealed.

And now and then, it is. Up here on the Sunshine Coast, we get a newspaper every week, so it is somewhat puzzling that I get anything done besides reading the paper, except that it isn’t very long. A front section with local news, an abbreviated ‘culture/events’ section, and an even more abbreviated sports section, where I can follow the travails of the Gibsons' Pigs. And in there with the sports are a few pages of classified ads. In the past few years, the ads have burgeoned, mostly because everyone living here appeared to have decided to sell his/her house. Except that in the spring, there’s always a lot of real estate for sale because it is, after all, a tourist economy for the most part (logging, a little fishing, and providing for the short-term and long-term tourists are about it).

In a tourist/seasonal visitor economy, like the Sunshine Coast as well as Point Roberts, there’s always a lot of real estate for sale but rarely much real estate for rent. Frequently, the rentals section up here was barely a column, and particularly spare were rentals in Roberts Creek, where we live. This is equally true of Point Roberts. But in this week’s paper, I find that rentals have suddenly expanded into a couple of pages, with Roberts Creek alone getting an entire column. Stranger yet, several of the ads mentioned that what was being rented was one floor of the house--not like a guest suite, but just a floor. I’d never seen that before. Some of the ads were for short-term rental (which is to say off season/not the summer/early fall), but mostly they were regular leases.

There’s a secret in there somewhere. I don’t know whether it means that financially-pressed folks are reduced to renting out floors of their house to make their house payments, that people who were in the flipping business got stuck with houses that can’t be sold and now need to be rented, or that the seasonal visitors (those with second houses here) are having second thoughts. In any case, it sounds as if it isn’t good news unless you are somebody looking to rent. And in Point Roberts? Well, we’ll see what it looks like there after the first of March.

Canada Looks at Obama

And apparently Canadians are very pleased with what they saw, although they seemed to be just as pleased before they even saw him. When I talk with Canadians, it appears to me that Obama, unlike the former holder of the U.S. presidency, is highly regarded, but largely because he isn’t the former holder, etc. It’s more that they like him for who he isn’t rather than for who he is. From my American perspective, who he is remains to be seen. Nevertheless, on the CBC yesterday, people were talking about him as if he were a visiting rock star, with one person pointing out that Canada’s leaders don’t have ‘that kind of appeal,’ whatever ‘that kind of appeal’ might be. The Vancouver Sun proclaimed that “excitement in Ottawa around the presidential visit could not have been greater had the guest of honour been Mick Jagger, the Queen or Santa Claus.” Gee whiz! I am thinking that all three of those are pretty old people. How would he compare with the Pope? (Another old guy. Are there no younger famous people to whom he can be compared?)

He met alone with Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, for about a half hour, a fact much remarked upon by U.S. news. But he also met, alone, with Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the opposition and possibly the next Prime Minister, for about a half hour. My guess was that neither of them thought he was much of a rock star, but then I found this quote from Ignatieff: “I've been lucky in my life to meet famous people and some people seem smaller when you meet them. [Obama] was just as big as you think he is. He is a very, very big presence.” Harper, sort of by contrast, said in a CBC interview that “Mr. Obama is an easy guy to like and an easy guy to get to know." (I wish I shared that feeling.) The CBC also reported that Harper and Obama got to talk about their hopes for their families and their countries. The news reader made it sound as if Harper was just a tad short of looking into Obama’s eyes and seeing his soul. So I guess he’s pretty rockstar to Canadian leaders, too.

The Globe and Mail (NYTimes equivalent in Canada) reported that there was considerable discussion between Harper and Obama about the border and its openness, or lack thereof. The Canadians think it’s a mess. Obama noted that bottlenecks need to be cleared up. But The G&M also reported that “Mr. Obama's Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, has ordered a review of security at the Canada-U.S. border – heightening Canadian concerns that U.S. security measures are clogging the flow of goods across the border.” (Globe and Mail, 2/21) I don’t know why that would heighten Canadian concerns. My hope is that Mr. Obama, on behalf of the U.S., shares those Canadian concerns. But we will see. We are busy writing our own letters to Ms. Napolitano on this subject.

Some Canadians were not happy that the border concerns arose solely in terms of economic issues. Lloyd Axworthy (former Liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs and current President of the U. of Winnipeg) commented: ”What concerned me was the talk of the border solely in economic terms. Granted, it is important. But we have had too many examples of how the security preoccupations have trumped the issue of civil liberties and rights. Under secret agreements signed after 9/11, there has been an abuse of fundamental rights and an erosion of Charter protections vis the Arar and Khadr cases, among many.” Happy that someone in politics is looking out for our civil rights! Wish it were someone in the U.S.

Canadians are also concerned about Afghanistan and global warming, but they didn’t get much from Obama on either. However, Harper and friends are going to DC next week to see if they can make more headway on Afghanistan with that new sun/star, rising and reigning to the south.

Looking for Bright Spots

One thing that writing the blog has made me do is focus on the stock prices of banks; not only the local ones but the big ones. And what I can’t for the life of me figure out is why there is all this concern about the shareholders being wiped out. At the current prices for all the banks, the shareholders have been almost entirely wiped out already and, presumably, they will not be much more disadvantaged by the next 5% loss. Well, I guess the thing is that they won’t be around to participate in the amazing rise in bank prices that we will be expecting once we’ve actually gone through all this. Whenever that time might come. Doesn’t look like it will be any time soon.

Anyway, by now, for those of you who are interested in following this with me, Sterling Bank is down to $1.43 (from a one-year high of $16.63, and today’s Sterling sales volume is almost 2 million shares, way above their average volume of sales, but below yesterday’s peak volume of 6 million); Banner Bank to $3.02 (from a one-year peak of $24.50, and a current volume of about twice its average); Citigroup to $2.88 (from a one-year high of $26.81, and with about half its average sales volume today; and Bank of America to $4.58 (from a one-year high of 42.45, and with only a slightly above-average sales volume today).

What that suggests is that the lack of confidence in the banks continues to deepen. However, Banner Bank gained a few cents today, rather than losing value. By contrast, both Citigroup and Bank of America were taking price percentage losses larger than Sterling’s. All three, however, were losing much more percentage-wise than the Dow or the S&P 500.

And outdoors, here on the beautiful Sunshine Coast of B.C., it is a very sunny day, but there are still, still, still considerable areas of snow leftover from the December snowstorm. But there are also, in our yard, little patches of crocuses smiling up, opening their little petals to the sun. Unlike the banks, these are bright spots in our lives. (The crocuses are a very small variety, barely 3 inches from ground to the tip of the bud.)