A Southside Ramble: Samish Way to Bellingham Bay

This is the fourth in an ongoing series in which inveterate saunterer Alan Rhodes “records random perambulations through various Bellingham neighborhoods, blending completely subjective observations with highly opinionated commentary on just about everything.” He can be reached at writealan@aol.com.

Saunter #4

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

Leaving home after breakfast on a warm summer morning, I decide to break my usual custom of driving to a random spot to begin my saunter. Today I start from the doorstep of my house in the Samish neighborhood, walking down a gravel road that takes me to Mill Avenue. Which way? Looking downhill to the west I see the distant bay dotted with white sails on this dazzling day. Its pull is irresistible, so I amble off toward the water.

Crossing Samish Way I walk through the lower section of the Samish neighborhood, an eclectic mix, ranging from organic abodes with compost piles and relaxed lawn care, to manicured, upscale homes, and a little bit of everything in between. When walking I usually greet everyone I encounter, but I stay silent now while passing a woman doing Tai Chi in her driveway. She seems so focused on her ancient art that I don’t want to disturb her. That focus is probably part of the reason she’s doing Tai Chi, and it’s certainly part of the reason I saunter: to be totally present, to avoid what writer Elizabeth Gilbert describes as a state in which “we march through our lives as mere sleepwalkers, blinded, deafened and senseless, robotically existing in sterilized surroundings that numb the mind, weaken the body, and atrophy the soul.”

I leave the Samish neighborhood, crossing under I-5 onto Old Fairhaven Parkway. Spotting a sign that welcomes me to the Happy Valley Neighborhood, I decide to wander here a while, so I cut across the parking lot of the Pavilion grocery store. This was once a lovely wooded area, which the neighbors desperately wanted to keep that way. The Albertson’s corporation, ignoring residents’ protests, leveled the trees and built a store. Undoubtedly some genus in a corporate boardroom said, “They’ll get over it.” They didn’t. People stayed away and the store soon shut down. I like that part of the story. Albertson’s left an empty building behind, so folks were happy when Brown & Cole eventually took it over. But trees were better.

Leaving the parking lot, I head west on Cowgill, imagining what a cow with gills would look like. The street deadends at a section of trail through Happy Valley Park, which carries me over Connelly Creek and into Bellingham Cohousing, a settlement designed for collaborative living, a place that draws people with a love of community and a belief in shared resources. To live here you should be willing to dedicate 20 hours a month to committee meetings, meal planning and group projects. There are abundant social activities, optional shared meals, and decisions are made by consensus.

It’s inviting here on this summer day, with bicycles on front porches and flower gardens by every door. Herbs grow in well-tended plots and children play on the swings. One part of me is drawn to the sense of community inherent in the cohousing concept, but I’m probably too solitary and cranky to fit in, afraid I’d be the cohousing grouch who exasperates everyone and becomes the object of a petition for eviction.

I like the concept anyway, if only in theory, and if I could go back in time to the 1840s, I’d want to spend some time with Nathaniel Hawthorne and his transcendentalist buddies at Brook Farm, their communal experiment near Boston. But they probably wouldn’t like me either, and would ask Hawthorne to draft a petition to expel me. Hawthorne himself left after only a short time, discovering an aversion to physical labor. Brook Farm’s loss; American literature’s gain.

Exiting the cohousing complex, I walk west on Donovan, and as I pass the South End Mobile Estates, I feel a twinge of sadness, remembering a deceased friend who lived here, an elderly Quaker lady who was devoted to pacifism, social action, daily writing and the music of the Beatles. When I visited her on her deathbed, she pressed me for a critique of one of her recent manuscripts. Only a few days left to live, and she wanted to talk about writing and ideas! Incongruous as it seems, recalling this gentle Quaker octogenarian reminds me of a line from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” “The only people for me,” says Kerouac, “are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved...the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles.”

I walk among the mobile homes, looking for the place she once lived, but it’s been too long and I can’t find it. I see that the adjacent street is called Happy Court, and I just have to walk down a street called Happy Court that’s in Happy Valley. How happy can you get? The only person I see here this morning is a woman yelling at her dog. Neither of them looks happy. This is very disillusioning, and I hope that they live on another street.

From this point on I lose my sense of time, as my saunter takes on a typical pattern of agreeably inefficient meandering—uphill, downhill, through alleys, backtracking, crisscrossing—and my notes become the usual disorganized jumble.

I encounter sections of Wilson Street at least twice. On one stretch I discover the southside’s best playground set. In a front yard someone has constructed what I assume is an apparatus for kids, a massive structure following the design of a sailing ship. There are decks, bars to swing on, a mast with a precarious looking ladder leading to a high crow’s nest. This looks like an enticement that offers any kid a dozen ways to break an arm: an irresistible place to play on a summer day.

On another section of Wilson I find a row of five little houses that are just plain odd looking, but that’s not a pejorative term; I’m quite fond of odd: odd people, odd remarks, odd ideas, odd dwellings. These peculiar domiciles look like storage sheds built in a Tudor style, something that might have been created in the 17th century if Shakespeare had decided to invest some of his theater profits in affordable housing.

The houses of Happy Valley cover the spectrum of price and architectural style, and come in all shapes, sizes and colors, something for everyone. The neighborhood is dotted with vegetable gardens and swing sets, porch furniture and plastic wading pools. It’s a livable neighborhood with an ambiance of authenticity, quite the opposite of the modern suburb that Lewis Mumford was already lamenting a half-century ago when he despaired over “the multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste.” For Mumford, the cookie-cutter subdivisions sprawling across America symbolized a lifestyle he found alarming, as these soulless tracts filled with people “of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television programs, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.”

The neighborhood is bustling on this Saturday morning: kids playing on the sidewalk, people mowing lawns and weeding gardens, students sipping coffee from takeout cups and tossing a Frisbee on their front lawn. With all this activity, it’s amusing to recall that when the city streetcar company ran a Happy Valley Line out here in 1909, conductors called this part of town the “Lonesome Hole,” since there wasn’t much out this way except fields, trees and a few indolent cows enjoying the solitude.

On 23rd Street I run into a friend who’s packing his truck with tree trimmings for Clean Green, and I stop to talk. It’s one of those lazy summer mornings that invites dawdling, a day when neighbors lean on rakes and exchange idle conversation that is little more than pleasant ritual: “It seems like summer just got here, but the days are already getting shorter ... . You going to the Boulevard Park Concert tonight?...Those damn deer got my green beans again.”

When I ask my friend what he likes about living in Happy Valley, he lists the diversity of houses and people; the neighborhood old-timers who know the local lore; the rural feeling of many of the streets; and the uppity, activist neighborhood association. He notes only one negative: the not infrequent confrontations between university students and permanent residents. If you’re getting up at 6 a.m. for work, you’re not likely to appreciate a drunken bash next door that breaks up at five.

Weaving my way gradually down toward Fairhaven, I cut through an alley where I see a woman hanging laundry on a backyard clothesline, reminding me of a segment on “The Daily Show” that righteously ridiculed a gated community that had ordinances forbidding lawn ornaments, yard signs, clotheslines, basketball hoops and a host of other human touches that give a neighborhood character.

Such prohibitions bring out the worst in me, and were I, for some unfathomable reason, to move into that neighborhood, I would have to put a statue of Che Guevara in the flower garden, stick an “Impeach Bush” sign in the lawn and run the Venezuelan flag up the pole.

As I pass the Firehouse, one of my favorite performance venues in town, I can almost hear John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” which I experienced here last winter in a concert by the Julian MacDonough Quartet, an evening far more satisfying than most I’ve spent at the Mount Baker Theater, with its high ticket prices, commercialized offerings and muddy acoustics. Among the things I love about this town are its venues for local talent: original plays at the Idiom, Sunday jazz at the Lucia Douglas Gallery, clubs with homegrown bands, summer concerts in the parks.

Coming into Fairhaven, I sit down at Tony’s with a latte, a cookie the size of a hubcap and a handful of local publications from the freebie rack. Tony’s still has much of the feeling of old Fairhaven, before the recent growth explosion, the slower, simpler Fairhaven that I preferred. In the hour I’m here, I chat with a city council member, a rock musician, a storeowner, an anti-war activist, a window washer, a university professor and an amiable local anarchist.

Leaving Tony’s I walk along Harris Avenue toward the bay. Not so long ago Fairhaven was an agreeable though mildly scroungy section of town with a relaxed, bohemian disposition and a resident population of hirsute hippies. Now it’s fashionable, expensive and overbuilt. Surely, somewhere between Fairhaven’s former life as Bellingham’s Haight-Ashbury, and its current incarnation as the Capital of Yuppiedom, there must have been a sane balance point that we failed to achieve.

Back at the turn of the last century Fairhaven was a rip-roaring waterfront town, where booze flowed and brothels sizzled. Among the few remaining traces of Fairhaven’s wild past are historical plaques along the sidewalks. One of these near the entrance to Mannino’s restaurant reads “Location of town pillory, 1890.” Though not a proponent of cruel and unusual punishment, I would favor reinstituting the town pillory, specifically for the crime of building, or aiding and abetting the building of another condominium in Fairhaven.

As I’m mentally grousing about Fairhaven “condofication,” what should rear up before me but Harris Square, a gargantuan condo and retail complex occupying an entire city block. My god, this thing is grotesque, a massive, ungainly hulk that looks like it was modeled after a 1950s public housing project. There’s a strange, out-of-place turret on one corner of the building. Looking up at this dark tower I say, louder than I had intended, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.” A nearby tourist gives me a worried look. Maybe he’s never read the Grimm Brothers’ story of the long-haired Rapunzel who was imprisoned in a tower. Or maybe he thinks I’m crazy. Or both. I fight back the urge to say, “That’s a coded message I just got on the radio receiver the CIA implanted in my brain.” But he is already eyeing me warily and moving away.

Further west on Harris, at the edge of Padden Creek Lagoon, stands a pole, with the words “May Peace Prevail on Earth” in four languages. Ironically, within a few feet of this testament to peace lies an historical plaque identifying this spot.

Chinese deadline, no Chinese allowed beyond this point, 1878-1903

I can’t recall a single minority group in America that has not at some time in history been the victim of discrimination, and around the turn of the 20th century the Chinese were a focal point of much popular bigotry. Brought to Fairhaven as cannery workers, they were restricted to segregated bunkhouses near the cannery, and denied free access to the town. In 1905 a machine was invented that automated the fish-gutting process, putting many Chinese out of work. In a triumph of offensive language, the machine was called the “Iron Chink.”

One has to wonder, if the Whatcom Minutemen had been around here a hundred years ago, would these paunchy paladins have plopped themselves down in lawn chairs to scan the landscape with their binoculars, determined to do their patriotic part in keeping the Chinese on their side of the line?

There are historical plaques all along Harris Avenue that carry one back to Fairhaven’s rambunctious frontier past:

Policeman Phil DeFries shot at 23 times, 1899-1905

Huge freight wagon disappeared beneath quicksand here, 1890

Site of Sam Low’s opium den, 1904

I picture someone reading a plaque here 100 years from now that says,

Distraught over the gentrification of Fairhaven, Alan Rhodes threw himself under the wheels of a passing Lexus, 2006.

I walk to the Bellingham Cruise Terminal, southernmost stop on the Alaska State Ferry Line. Ambling along the dock around the terminal, I read the historical signs that recapture bustling, busy days on this waterfront. This site, now a gateway to Alaskan vacations, once housed one of the busiest salmon canneries in the world.

As I continue on to Marine Park, the sidewalk is filling up with people out for a walk, some with that slightly faded, unfashionable look that identifies old-time Bellinghamsters, but many others wearing brightly colored new leisure clothes that mark them as tourists or newcomers.

“Enjoying your vacation,” I say to a middle-aged couple I pass. They smile and say they’re having a lovely time, but look puzzled over how I’ve spotted them as tourists, unaware that their matching windbreakers are a dead giveaway.

At Marine Park I sit in the warm sand, munch on a granola bar, feel the sun, smell the sea air and feel blessed to simply be alive in such a beautiful place.

Crossing the railroad tracks, I cut around the Wastewater Treatment Plant, where an extensive shoreline restoration project is going on around the Post Point Lagoon. I walk past the grove of trees that is home to the only heron colony within the city, a treasure we almost lost to the chainsaws of a developer who wanted to cut what he euphemistically called “view corridors” for upscale condos. A grassroots citizen rebellion persuaded city council to stop this, and the herons were saved.

Two herons come soaring in for a landing while I’m standing here. With impossibly wide wingspans, loud cries that fill the sky, and long legs stretched out behind them, they look majestic and prehistoric.

“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” said Thoreau, and if we had lost this thin slice of wildness sandwiched between the treatment plant and a residential street, we would be all the poorer for it.

From here the trail takes me through the off-leash dog walking area. Being an obsessive saunterer, I have passed through every conceivable type of dog habitat, meeting half the pooches in Bellingham. The most important thing I have learned from my many canine encounters is this: huge, scary-looking dogs are usually good-natured. The dogs to watch out for are nervous little designer dogs who have been over-bred into homicidal lunacy and, like canine Hannibal Lecters, are waiting for an opportunity to bite your face off.

Exiting the doggy playground onto 4th Street, I pick up the Interurban Trail to work my way homeward. Although I’m close to houses and busy streets, I’m sheltered by a magical green corridor. I do a little birding as I stroll, and try to polish my woefully inadequate native plant identification skills.

Our trails and parks are the crown jewels of the city, an essential part of what makes the town so livable. Recently we wisely passed our third greenways levy to create new green spaces and care for the ones we already have. I can think of no better use of tax dollars.

At 24th Street I exit the trail, walk out to Old Fairhaven Parkway and start the uphill stretch back home.

I’ve walked several miles today, so when I get back to the house it feels good to sit on the deck, slip off my shoes and look out over where I’ve been. My feet are tired but my mind is alive. I recall the woman I passed early this morning, the one doing Tai Chi, and how focused she was on her choreographed flow through space. I sip a cup of tea and muse a bit more about the importance of focus, of being present, and of how much you experience when walking leisurely through life, rather than passively watching a blurred world flash past a car window.

I recall a story about the Buddha who, following his enlightenment, radiated an aura so palpable that people could almost touch the glow. §

“Are you a god?” they asked.
“No,” the Buddha answered.
“Are you a prophet?”
“No.”
“A saint?”
“No.”
“What are you then?”
The Buddha smiled and said, “I am awake.”