Tag Archives: Friday Harbor

April 26, 2022 · 5:55 pm

What We Lost

Spring Street, Friday Harbor WA

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

It was the only time I ever remember dreading going into town, Friday Harbor, on San Juan Island. County seat to San Juan County, and a major commercial center of the San Juan Island archipelago. Still, it’s a small town. Centered on Spring Street, steps up from the waterfront, the ferry terminal, the Marina, and Fairweather Park where carvings honor the island’s Northwest Coast Indian heritage. And where musicians play in summer.

There was no music now. On April 7th a fire blazed in the night, and although the fire had been extinguished for a couple of days, that block on Spring Street was still sectioned off with emergency vehicles and yellow tape. The fire had caused extensive damage to six iconic historic buildings—some a total loss–two buildings dating back to the 1880’s.

Standing across the street and up a block, I hated to look. It hurt to look then and it hurts to think about it now. The agony of seeing what isn’t there anymore. I hadn’t yet fathomed the interior loss and the loss of livelihoods: a popular tavern, a coffee shop, a real estate office, and a kayaking tour company. Furthermore all of these buildings had had other incarnations through the ages: hotels, grocers, saloon, barbershop, and a silent movie house among them. 

Standing there, I was feeling it architecturally in that moment. My first thought was how can this ever be rebuilt without looking like Disneyland? Like Whistler? As Sandy Strehlou, Historic Preservation Coordinator for the town of Friday Harbor said, “The impact on the historical district is irreplaceable.” 

Later I determined that the fire in Friday Harbor was causing something not unlike PTSD in me, triggering memories of the town where I had grown up. A small town in northern Connecticut, Suffield prided itself on its Historic District running the 2 ½ mile length through the center of town. 18th and 19th century homes lined North and South Main Street, with the town center and a village green. A Town Hall, Masonic Lodge, bank, fire station, a grocer, pharmacy, luncheonette, and various shops comprised the old town center. I always thought the center comfortable with itself. Everything much as you would expect if this were a predictable story, or a stage set for a play. Every bit as archetypal then as Friday Harbor, my western town now. 

The old town center on Main Street, Suffield CT

And then the most incongruous thing happened—entirely off-plot. These were going away to school years for me, so I wasn’t paying close attention. It seemed to me that on one visit home the town center was there, as always, and on the next visit it was not. It was almost like the center disappeared.

In Friday Harbor a rogue arsonist torched the town on April 7th. In Suffield Connecticut, the town center was demolished by committee in the 1960’s. Bulldozers and wrecking balls right through the heart of the town. I will never understand how it happened.

A suburban shopping center was then constructed in its stead, off the site–not in The Historical District. “Suffield Village” is how they refer to it. Some entries are from the outside, some inside, like a small mall. Initially it tried to hold the businesses from town, but now it’s mostly offices and a lot of empty spaces. As a friend in Suffield notes, “Businesses failed and the building went into some disrepair. It’s just not anything special.” All the parking in the world, and no one wants to go there. (Name a nice town that doesn’t have a parking problem). 

The original Suffield Town Center had good bones and charm. It was nothing that fresh paint, new awnings, parking meters, and love wouldn’t fix.  

Islanders know this with every ounce of their being. Love for Friday Harbor has been overwhelming. It’s been shared a lot lately but I cannot think of a better way to close than with this ode to Herb’s Tavern, lost in the fire. It was written by Greg Hertel, a retired science teacher on San Juan Island:

It was just an old tavern in an old building…

But it was where I had my first meal when I arrived on island on a late August afternoon to take a job teaching here in 1974

It was where my wife and I went to many dances and shared many a beer with friends

It was where we listened to The Ducks when they would come over here to play

It was the blue-collar meeting place for the construction crews, the boat crews

It was where many college papers were written by students who had rowed over from the (UW) Marine Labs. We met a woman in Zion Park one summer and when we said that we were from Friday Harbor she said that she wrote most of her master’s thesis at Herbs

It was the first place where many kids would have their first adult drink on their 21st birthday

It was where boaters who weren’t yacht club members would meet

It was never high class… and proud of it

It was my image of what a workingman’s bar should be like. The staff was down to earth, friendly

It was where the food was not gourmet but always OK and the portions were real

It was where the commercial fishermen would meet and eat before heading out to the Salmon Banks on those summers when drunken gill netters ruled the streets

It was the place that Realtors would rush by with their customers on their way to more upscale restaurants

It was the place where kids working multiple jobs could afford to meet and eat out

It was the location of many hookups, meetups and even some breakups

It was never on anyone’s 4-star list but always on everyone’s “meet you there” list

It was an old bar in an old building… and it was the heart of the town. 

21 Comments

Filed under Arson, Fire, redevelopment

Tagged as , , , , ,

September 29, 2020 · 7:46 pm

A Candle in the Dark

 

photo by Paul Mayer

 

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

 

We all lost a giant in Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18. On San Juan Island, The League of Women Voters held an evening vigil on the courthouse lawn in Friday Harbor. As I write these words I realize how quaint that sounds, and how quaint it was indeed. An island, like a microcosm, in a state that refers to Washington D.C. as “the other Washington.” But if D.C. is white marble and power, we are green and cooperative. If D.C. is many, we are few. And if they’re dressed in suits and heels, we live in comfortable clothes and comfortable shoes. Otherwise we’re just the same.

I had the privilege of riding to the vigil with my neighbors, Susan and Michael Martin, who recently moved onto the island from D.C., where they’d been annual season ticket holders at Washington National Opera. There they were seated near the Ginsburgs, enjoying what they called “a nodding relationship” with the other couple. Susan spoke at our vigil on island. Carrying low voltage candle lights in the dark, we all stood around her in a circle. Susan’s stories humanized Ruth for us as a woman who valued her family, friends, and the arts—especially opera.

“When I am at the opera I get totally carried away,” Ruth said. It’s a delightful thought, that this extraordinarily intelligent, disciplined, and practiced woman had her moments like that at the opera.

Soon other stories flowed forth of RBG’s impact on all our lives. One woman in the circle had served in the military “when you were discharged if it was discovered you were pregnant.” Many women remembered having to get their husbands’ signatures for a credit card, even to a department store. And another who stated that up until 1974, women had to leave the Foreign Service if they married. In the end, we all sang “We Shall Overcome” through our masks, before going off into the night.

Perhaps most poignant and seared into my memory for eternity, is Saul Loeb’s photograph (The Atlantic) of all the former clerks attired in black standing at attention, socially distanced, on the steps of The Supreme Court to meet the casket when the Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States came to lie in repose.

And from somewhere, friend and contemporary Gloria Steinem cried, “I thought she was immortal.”

~~~

In the forest Mother trees are the largest trees, passing their legacy on by nurturing others. Reaching with deep roots, Mother trees draw water to help support and shape younger shallow-rooted trees. Moving carbon and mineral nutrients to one another, and even communicating with each other—signaling dangers such as droughts, disease, and insect attacks through fungal networks–Mother trees insure regeneration.

The maternal instinct of trees was brought to light by Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. “These discoveries,” she writes in The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben, “have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system.”

In other words, for interspecies tree communities to thrive in the forest it isn’t ‘survival of the fittest,’ but rather interdependence. “To reach enormousness, they depend on a complicated web of relationships, alliances and kinship networks,” writes Richard Grant (“Do Trees Talk to Each Other?” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2018).

As a litigator fighting for equal protection for men and women, RBG modeled herself after Thurgood Marshall in his struggle for civil rights in our country. Mentors for the ages, both. At 5’1” Chief Justice Ginsburg stood like a Mother tree in our time, leaving a legacy to shape future generations.

It isn’t always about today; it’s about tomorrow.

Famous for her dissents, RBG explained “Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.’ But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.” (in an interview with Nina Totenburg, National Public Radio, May 2, 2002)

In the forest, even injured and fallen trees bring life to others.

 

8 Comments

Filed under legacy, Mother trees

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 27, 2018 · 7:02 pm

March for Our Lives: Truth to Power

photo by Paul Mayer

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

This past year, I am always marching in one Washington or another. Most recently, in The March for Our Lives in Friday Harbor, Washington, March 24. Large or small, here or there, they are all important.

Friday Harbor Mayor Farhad Ghatan welcomed over six hundred islanders of all ages before turning everything over to the Middle and High School students standing like a chorus in bright orange tee shirts on the courthouse steps. This was, after all, their event, their cause, and their day. A bright blue sky was behind them.

“To those who think we will not change the world: Just watch us.”

 It’s been six weeks since the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the Never Again movement that grew from it shows no signs of stopping. Instead, it only grows.

“What if our lives were more important than the rights of guns?”

When the Columbine High School shooting occurred in 1999 I planted columbine in my garden as a memorial. I’d thought the shooting a horrendous, one-time occurrence. We all wanted to believe that. Instead our country went to the dark side, again and again and again. Even the NRA itself went dark.

“What if the gov’t stopped taking money from the NRA?”

“We have grown up with this problem. We knew this stuff. It’s not like a new, fresh horrible thing that’s happening, it’s been preexisting even before we entered the world,” explains Jaclyn Corin, president of the Junior class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Joining forces with her classmates at Never Again, Corin found herself within a few short weeks talking one-on-one to state representatives and addressing the state legislature in Tallahassee, Florida. Advocacy, for her, has been part of the coping process.

Never Again broke the stigma that had hindered gun control activists in our country for decades. When it seemed impossible. When gun sales and gun fatalities were spiking, yet legislation was blocked. As we grew cynical and perhaps hardened, here came these kids—many of whom are too young to vote.

Never Again seized the moment and broke right through–reinvigorating every generation and swaying the public. (A Gallup poll of March 1 found 67% of Americans say the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made stricter. This is the highest in any Gallup survey since 1993).

Student led and focused like a laser, they are the movement with a crowd that was bred online. Never Again is all about voices, votes, and policy change. In Friday Harbor, The League of Women Voters hosted a table to register voters during the march. This happened everywhere.

Our future is speaking and our future can’t get here fast enough. If I were a college or university I would recruit the founders of Never Again right out of High School. They are the wind of change and they are moving mountains.

 

 

6 Comments

Filed under students

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 3, 2017 · 5:29 pm

The Ocean is Rising and So Are We

 

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

I don’t need to tell you how many people turned out in pouring rain for The March for Science, April 22nd in Washington DC. And for The Climate March one week later, with over 200,000 participants, along with tens of thousands in 370 sister marches throughout the country.

Marches are happening with increasing frequency everywhere. It’s getting so you can’t sit them out.

We were in DC for The March for Science, and home on San Juan Island for The Climate March. From one Washington to another.

Azalea blossoms were out in full force in DC, as cherry blossoms lingered. In the islands, Orca whales are in migration, following the salmon who are returning to the rivers where they were born. And hummingbirds returning from their vast migration to our feeders.

Nature needs to know we are with her, that we have her back.

On Saturday April 29th we gathered at noon in the upper parking lot of the courthouse in Friday Harbor. Liquid sunshine then too. Bearing hand-painted signs, wearing handmade costumes, pushing babies in strollers, and toting dogs on leash. One person wore a teepee construction around him. Essentially it was a microcosm of all we had seen, and all the camaraderie we had experienced in DC the week before. One country, coast to coast. Or so it seems.

If there is one good thing to come out of oppressive regimes, it is this: The Resistance.

Who are they, in fact, who do sit this out?

In the run up to the election, I had wanted to write an open letter to my Republican relatives, as well as a few friends I’ve probably lost by now. But I must have mulled over it too much, for I never did. Now of course I wish I had. I would like to hear from you.

Tell me, what did you not see coming with Trump? What were you thinking?

 

 

 

 

4 Comments

Filed under The Resistance

Tagged as , , , , , ,

April 7, 2015 · 7:18 pm

One Million Mary Oliver Moments

Fiday Harbor Marina

Two postcards arrived in the mail this week that turned me around and blew me away. One, a black & white notification for renewal of our post office box. And the other, an illustrated reminder of the San Juan Artists’ Studio Tour, coming up June 6 & 7, an event we attended last year. Can it be we will have been here a year?

What started as a spontaneous decision, i.e. “Let’s move to the islands!” has taken a year to implement.

Our daughters are the adults now. They are working and commuting and making plans for the future. They are growing their careers, while we are growing spring salad greens and arugula. These are their globe-trotting days, while we are walking everywhere. Indeed, my husband is a trekker.

Now we are the ones mucking around in the waters and digging in the sand. Assembling Adirondack chairs like so many tinker toys, and building bonfires as if we were at camp. Taking all our cues from nature.

Talking to the attentive deer of the forest, assuring them they are safe. Going ecstatic over waterfowl. Gray  herons, gulls at play, soaring eagles. The slow turning of the seasons, the eruption of spring. The racket of crickets in tall grasses and frogs mating in marshes. The fox who congregate on the beach to yip at full moons, we are listening to you all. We see the sun come up each morning and wake each other if it’s particularly beautiful, and watch it set.

Standing Heron

One million Mary Oliver moments in each day, that is why I live here.

“Life doesn’t go in a straight line, it goes in a circle,” notes my father at 91 years of age.

Full circle is what I feel when the ferry arrives in port in Friday Harbor. Walk-on passengers move to the bow of the boat with their bags, bikes and children. Cars follow at a distance, driving at a pedestrian pace, climbing the shining village on the hill.

Refugees from the mainland.

11 Comments

Filed under nature

Tagged as , , ,

August 27, 2014 · 9:39 pm

Window Licking

 

TartThe French have a name for it, that is, for window shopping in pastry shops: Léche-vitrines, translation: “window licking.” Well, if I left my imprint on store front windows in Paris, they certainly made their imprint on me. For, ever since we returned home I have never stopped thinking about tarts.

We are boating now in British Columbia, heading out The Strait of Georgia toward Homfray Lodge in Desolation Sound. Before we left The San Juan Islands I ordered a tart pan from Williams Sonoma, and any day now our contractor will be receiving the package for me.

Sometimes we need to walk away and let go, particularly my husband who has been on the site of our remodel every day of the week, every week, since mid May. We’re in good hands here with him at the helm, and our brother-in-law, Tug Yourgrau, who has mastered navigation. The house is in capable hands with our contractor, and whatever gets accomplished will appear to me, when we get back, like magic.

I’ll be starting from scratch with my tarts. I saw them as paintings in Paris, and only knew how they tasted through others. But if baking is anything like other arts, it is probably hard to taste your own tarts anyway.

I intend to make tarts for breakfasts. Tarts for entertaining. Tarts for the neighbors who have put up with all the construction and allowed us use of their parking spaces for the many trucks involved. Tarts for any new friends I make on island. And if all goes well, a tart table at the weekly Farmers Market in Friday Harbor amongst other bakers, produce growers, purveyors of fresh pasta, lavender, sea salt, oysters, grass fed beef and lamb, as well as goat cheese makers.

I’m thinking that baking is for me because I’m a recipe follower. I never learned to cook at home. Growing up, I was the runner for whatever ingredients my mother was missing in whatever she was making. Seems I’d just hop off my Schwinn with one thing in the wicker basket, and she’d send me back to town for another.

Then when I went away to school, the feminist who ran the school assured us, “If you can read, you can cook.” So as the years went by, I bought a lot of cookbooks and made some beautiful meals by following recipes.

Somewhere along the line my husband took creative control of the kitchen, and I was almost back to the girl on the bicycle. I knew to stand out of the way. But if there’s one thing he doesn’t touch it’s the dessert.

So I am going to master tarts.

I’m thinking baking works with writing. One can’t wander far when it’s in the oven. And this is berry country. It all adds up.

7 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 16, 2014 · 5:26 pm

Where There’s Music

Cabinet 2 Nothing’s changed and yet everything is changing at our remodel on San Juan Island. We are still strung between homes and living on a boat in Friday Harbor. I commute to Seattle once a week to water plants, sweep walks, collect mail, and run my writing workshop. There, I sleep in my clothes because realtors have been known to come to the door for showings in the early and late hours. I try not to mess a thing while the house is on the market, but to leave it picture perfect. Not really home anymore.

It’s too silent.

And the job site is still just that, a job site. Not home either. If anything, Friday Harbor Marina is starting to feel like home. Ferries come and ferries go, and the rhythm of it all…. One day I’ll be looking back at this time with a certain nostalgia, that I know.

Life is simpler on a boat. It’s amazing how much stuff one doesn’t need. Just the book you are reading and the clothes you are wearing. The elbow-to-elbow closeness of neighbors sharing the same dock. Blinded by fog, and glowing in sunsets together.

The sway of the boats in currents and gentle rolling with waves. The symphonic sounds of wind whipping through halyards and mast stays (flutes). Hulls against rubber fenders (violins). Creaking of pilings against the dock (a cello). Humming of stays (clarinets). And sleeping in our berths on board boats that are talking to each other in the night.

Things are going up, however, at the house. Until now, I had to close my eyes to picture anything we had specified. Now, with the kitchen cabinets in, I can start to see with eyes wide open. How handsome they look in an expresso brown that’s nearly black, standing about like so many waiters in a cafe wearing white shirts and long, pressed black linen aprons over pants.

The kitchen was central to our plans; it’s only right that that go first. And as the materials go up, color and texture start to come in to play. Followed by music. One can almost hear it.

Café music.

Leave a comment

Filed under music

Tagged as , ,