Adrift in the Columbia Neighborhood on a Summer Day

Saunter # 2

It is a great art to saunter. — Henry David Thoreau

This is the second in an ongoing chronicle of saunters around some of Bellingham’s more interesting neighborhoods, augmented by, as I noted in the first piece, “highly opinionated commentary on everything.”

When Vladimir Nabakov lectured to his Cornell students on James Joyce’s Ulysses, he drew a map of Dublin on the chalkboard, then traced the one-day travels of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom around that city. If I had to trace the path of my recent saunter around the Columbia neighborhood, the map would be obliterated beneath a dense, confusing web of black lines. On a day in late summer I wandered into this sweet urban sanctuary and pleasantly lost track of time as I circled, crisscrossed, spiraled and backtracked away an entire day. It was aimless and unproductive; in other words, time well spent. A perfect saunter.

My saunter begins, as always, when I abandon my car in a random spot selected by whim. I’ve picked the Fountain District this time, and as I lock the car it occurs to me that I’ve never looked closely at the fountain here in the small square at Broadway and Meridian. Well, the fountain’s not much to look at, sort of a concrete tub with a pipe squirting up a stubby column of water.

Next to it is a small monument commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Land Ordinance of 1785, passed after a committee chaired by Thomas Jefferson presented to congress a method for surveying the vast public domain. This is the Willamette Meridian marker, and from here it’s straight north to the Canadian border. In the 1890s the Guide Meridian was a road of wooden planks, an upscale alternative to the dirt roads around town.

The first concrete roads didn’t get here until 1907. Interstate-5 came through in the 1960s, and I’m not convinced it added much to the quality of our lives. We’ve started removing dams for the survival of salmon, so how about removing freeways for the survival of human sanity? Wonder if I could run for congress on that platform? That, along with my programs for the abolition of television and the switching of the military budget with the national parks budget, should ensure an easy victory.

From here I walk north on Meridian, poking into shops along the way. In the Asia Oriental Market, little red lanterns illuminate a Buddhist shrine at the back of the store and the narrow, crowded aisles bulge with exotic offerings. What should I buy this morning? Boiled lotus seed? Extract of pandan leaves? Canned rambutan? I settle for a bag of Indonesian ginger candy that ignites my tongue as I step out of the cool, dark store onto the sidewalk.

Nearby is Fountain Drug. A hundred years ago the original Fountain Drug was almost adjacent to this building, which dates back to mid-twentieth century and has been owned by the Deets family since that time. Mary Deets tells me that the independent drugstore has become largely extinct. (But isn’t independent everything becoming largely extinct?) Fountain Drug has survived by filling the niche for certain consumer groups, such as chefs looking for specialty cookware, and Hummel collectors coming from as far as Canada to buy these odd, squatty little figures.

And then there’s the toy department downstairs. It’s hard to go through it without regressing to the age of nine. What treasures: a miracle fish that squirms in your hand, tiny capsules that turn to prehistoric creatures when submerged in water, handblasters, plastic spaghetti crawling with disgusting worms, a windup bear that does back flips, a bag of fake blood slime.

As I continue along the sidewalk, I’m struck by the contrast between the Guide here, and what it becomes just a few miles up the road around Bellis Fair. Here it’s part of a neighborhood; farther north it becomes a morass of sprawl, crass commercialism, clotted traffic and quick tempers—the sort of place that makes one question whether the appearance of the human species on earth was really such a good thing.

These thoughts propel me to quieter surroundings (two miles from Bellis Fair is too close for me) so I stroll into the nearby residential streets of the Columbia neighborhood, the second oldest in Bellingham (after the lettered streets neighborhood), dating back to the 1880s. The majority of the houses here are between 50 and 100 years old. Some of the smaller houses to the north were occupied once by coal miners, who worked in the mine near Squalicum Creek.

Street names read like the index of a Bellingham history book. There’s Eldridge Avenue, bordering the neighborhood along the bay. Bellingham pioneer Edward Eldridge was, among other things, a county commissioner, customs collector, treasurer, auditor, judge, territorial legislator, speaker of the house, delegate to the territorial constitutional convention and outspoken crusader for women’s rights. So, what have I accomplished lately?

Close to Eldridge Avenue is Roeder Avenue, named for Henry Roeder, legendary figure of early Bellingham and operator of the town’s first sawmill. Here in the middle of the Columbia neighborhood, Roeder’s wife Elizabeth gets her own street, as does their son Victor. Utter Street takes its name from William Utter, who helped Roeder set up the sawmill, went on to become a leading citizen and politician, and had the great nickname “Captain Billy.”

These folks were important in founding and establishing what was to become Bellingham, but I’ll avoid referring to them by the customary term “settler.” The Lummi, Samish, Semiahmoo and Nooksack tribes, who had already been here for a good long time, probably thought the place was settled just fine before a bunch of pasty-faced meddlers showed up.

Throughout the neighborhood, plaques on houses identify the original inhabitants. On just one short section of Utter Street I pass plaques for the McTaggart Home, 1898; C.S. Teal Home, 1906; Warren Home, 1907; Alexander Home, 1909; Grant Home, 1909; and Smith Home, 1904.

As I spend much of the morning strolling these streets, I’m struck by how many other people are walking about. The mailman here has a walking route, and I watch him as he spots a neighborhood dog, who has slipped out of his backyard. He calls him by name, points to a gate, and the lackadaisical pooch lopes on in.

There are mothers out for morning strolls with their small children, lots of them. I chat with Wendy, a young mother whose daughter Lilah is dressed as a fairy princess this morning, just because it seems like a good thing to do, and whose infant son is being wheeled in an elegant red and black perambulator while their dog Dharma ambles alongside. Wendy expresses the same attitude that I hear from everybody I stop and talk to in the Columbia neighborhood: they don’t just like living here, they love it with something approaching religious reverence.

“It’s wonderful here,” Wendy says. “I can walk everywhere, and I know everybody I run into. There are lots of kids and young families like us, lots of casual get-togethers. There is a sense of community here that I was longing for.”

Farther on a young woman in her twenties is coming my way, moving with the abstract and relaxed gait of a fellow saunterer. As she passes me she says, apropos of nothing, “You see a lot when you travel on foot.” It’s the remark of a dedicated saunterer for sure, and the truth of her observation is proven just seconds later when I come across the best alley in Bellingham.

Just off Elizabeth Park, in the alley that runs between Park and Elizabeth Streets, the neighbors have gotten together and created a little urban gem: an artsy alley. There are flowers everywhere, in the ground along fences, in window boxes on garages, in planters and pots. There are murals painted on garages, makeshift sculptures, tiki torches, beach chairs, fake windows on fences, garden ornaments, mobiles, a pink plastic monkey and a whimsical vegetable garden consisting of canned vegetables sticking halfway out of the ground. I chat with a neighbor at his back gate who thinks it would be a great social movement if this spread, so that every summer every alley in Bellingham would be a festive place. It’s a nice image, and one I’ll draw upon when I start fretting about the Stepford-like sterility of the new developments spreading out from America’s cities.

Lunchtime. I sit on a bench in Elizabeth Park, munch a sandwich from my backpack, and read an article in a recent Harper’s magazine about Colorado Springs, the American mecca of the Christian right. Colorado Springs evangelicals, of which there are legions, are as rigid in their lifestyles as they are in their theology and politics. They shun older neighborhoods, gravitating instead to new suburbs, deliberately seeking distance from their neighbors. They avoid downtown stores and ethnic cafes, preferring the big box stores and franchise restaurants along the highway where everything is tidy and familiar and standardized. The colors and textures of life are confusing; diversity is to be avoided. Decorating an alley would be...unsettling.

As I resume walking, I hear sounds from childhood, the beautiful music of a hot summer day: the rinky-tink tune of an ice cream truck. Neighborhood kids appear from all directions, and I line up with them for a Drumstick cone, which I slurp contentedly as I wile away much of the afternoon in these residential streets whose names nostalgically invoke small-town America of another era: Monroe and Madison, Spruce and Cherry. A peculiar custom these days is to destroy an area, then name it for what we’ve destroyed: cut down the woods and name the development “Wildwood,” or drive away the herons and call the place “Blue Heron Estates.”

One of the many things that gives this neighborhood its special character is that every house is different from its neighbors. No sprawling subdivisions here, where you can have your choice of three designs repeated hundreds of times. On one short stretch of Kulshan Street I pass an imposing Craftsman home, a 1950s futuristic house, a 1960s ranch style, a 1920s bungalow, a Victorian and a couple of places that defy classification, including one at the corner of Kulshan and Connecticut that looks as if the architect couldn’t decide whether he/she was designing a barn or a church.

On Connecticut I come to a house I lived in for a short time 10 years ago, so I knock on the door and introduce myself to Stacee, who lives there now. She has just gotten her baby settled into his nap, so we sit down for a chat. She and her husband moved here two years ago from the Midwest, found this neighborhood and consider themselves blessed. Her husband can bike to work, she takes her son to the park every day and the neighbors are open and friendly. She loves the sound of kids playing in front yards on summer evenings. We worry together about the soaring price of houses here. The neighborhood has always been a favorite of young families, but houses that sold for under $100,000 not long ago, now sell for $400,000. What will young families do?

It’s a complex issue, but the one thing I do know is that simply building more and more and more houses won’t solve it. If that were the answer, Southern California would be one of the cheapest housing markets in the country. So would Phoenix, which lets housing sprawl out into the desert in every direction, and still has housing prices that increased by 47 percent last year.

I say goodbye to Stacee and continue on. Over on North Street, I come across a second great find of the day. I have already seen Bellingham’s best alley, and now I see Bellingham’s best front yard. Instead of grass, the entire yard is a lush and verdant vegetable garden. A sign says “Food, not Lawns,” and since I think that the water-wasting, chemical-craving grass lawn is one of the dumber inventions of humankind, I have to talk to whoever lives here.

Lee First, a wetlands biologist, turns over a patch of rich, dark ground while we talk. When she lived near Olympia, she farmed her four acres. She shares my disdain for lawns, and when she moved to a small urban lot in Bellingham, she converted every possible inch of land to agriculture. In Lee’s yard you move along the narrowest of pathways through potatoes, tomatoes, squash, strawberries, peas, onions, pumpkins, raspberries, carrots and green beans, to name just a few. There is plenty for her needs, and plenty to give away. I leave with a gift of fresh basil, and start thinking about penne with pesto for dinner tonight.

I move on through one of those still summer afternoons that suggests that time has come to a stop. I have fallen into a lazy trance, traveling in slow motion, sometimes coming a second or third time on places I’ve already walked, discovering something new each time. The images and sensations blur together: luscious blackberries hanging over a fence...wind chimes...tree houses...rows of corn growing by the sidewalk...a jar of sun tea on a fence post...a rope and tire swing...a Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solo from an upstairs room...Tibetan prayer flags over an entrance gate...a poster in a window at Columbia Elementary School that says “Peace is Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.”

I’ve been walking for hours, so I figure it’s time to start moving back in the general direction of my car. I find myself on a commercial stretch of Elm Street, where I take time to wander in and out of local businesses, talking with the proprietors: Vic, an Italian barber of 47 years experience who lives in a house behind his one-chair shop; Sung, a soft-spoken Vietnamese lady behind the counter in Giffords Market; Andy, an affable Fijian who manages the Lion’s Inn Motel and lives on the premises with his family.

Andy and I sit in the gazebo on the motel lawn and talk. Since the motel is old, a bit faded and has rooms starting at $34.95, I had it pegged for a low-income residential motel. I’m totally wrong. It’s a family motel, popular with vacationers. Guests come from all over the U.S. and Canada and there’s a large repeat business. The children of people who once stayed here now come back as adults with their own families. People like the residential location, neighborhood ambiance and reasonable prices. I look into a room and it’s bright, cheerful, freshly redecorated and sparkling clean.

It’s late afternoon so before going home I stroll over to the Bean Blossom on Broadway for an Americano. Neighborhood people are coming in for coffee and conversation. I shuffle through my disjointed, chaotic notes, trying to make sense of them. As I’m thumbing through my notebook, I come across a quote from psychologist Mary Pipher that I wrote down a couple of years ago.

Our world is often referred to as a global village, but it could perhaps be more accurately described as a global strip mall. It’s tawdry, impersonal and dull. Globalization means we all live in one ugly company town. Many of us are trying to find a way back to a place called home.

People in the Columbia neighborhood are among the fortunate ones who seem to have been more successful than many at finding that place. That special place called home. §