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I went to Vancouver, Canada Thursday to preview “Cabin Fever,” now open at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Read the article on page five. It was the most different day I have had in the Pacific Northwest since I moved here. The $44 (Canadian) parking fee was the least of it. There were all those people out on the streets downtown. It seemed that more were on one block than in all of La Conner. And all of them were walking. The very noticeable demographics of the population jumped out: all sexes, ages and colors and different clothing styles and lan...
This is an election year, for newly turned 18 year olds and the rest of us older than 18. Besides political offices, constitutional and charter amendments will be on the ballot, if each collects the required signatures. That’s the reason they are called “initiatives.” In this state, relatively late to join the union, 1889, the constitutional founders took their fellow citizens seriously, respecting them, and did not “in any way limit the initiative and referendum powers reserved by the people.” That is the sole sentence of the first section a...
My wife and I have recently returned from a vacation in Europe where we stayed in Martinsthal, a village in the German Rheingau near Wiesbaden. The village’s population is approximately sixteen hundred. It is surrounded by vineyards and a church consecrated in the 13th century. The Rheingau is one of the important wine growing regions of Germany emphasized by a village of this size having five vintners who produce the local “Wildsau” wines. Beside the stream running thorough the village is a small park with a playground and small covered event...
This Memorial Day I am thinking of one American citizen in particular: Bob Nixon. Nixon was 67 when he died in March. He lived in Anacortes, was retired, a lawyer, married, white and middle class. He was also probably depressed. And he was a gun owner. He is now a suicide victim. Nixon was from a prominent family. He was class president at Vanderbilt University. His father and brother are doctors. His wife had no idea that he was stockpiling a small arsenal. He owned six guns. In 2016, 38,551 Americans died from guns. Almost 60 percent were...
The Skagit River Poetry Festival was nigh, and so the volunteers came, fluttering in, silently, unsung, no trumpets, just a steady trudging from one venue to another. They planted signs of poetry, literally, and an occasional feather left in a room, randomly. It was a different spring migration, this one biennially, with a flock of odd ducks, not in any birder’s book, attracting a different breed of tourists. Poems started popping up, opening like mid-spring flowers, around town last Wednesday, as volunteers started digging into their tasks. T...
Last week art, ceremony and truth telling were ongoing in our little town. Significant voices spoke on both sides of the Swinomish Channel. On the Reservation Thursday the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community welcomed everyone to a luncheon feast and then their Canoe Family, elders and four chosen youth led the gathering down to the water for the Blessing of the Fleet and the First Salmon Ceremony. In Maple Hall, students and audiences gathered Thursday through Saturday as poets seeped into La Conner’s reality. Friday it was students in w...
Walking up Valentine Road past Pleasant Ridge cemetery in the evening last week offered a great view of Venus to the northwest. Always the brightest planet, it is particularly distinct in the clear, blue black May sky. Heading south around the curve, it is Jupiter, a bit yellower but almost as bright, hanging proudly in the southeastern sky. These wonderfully clear spring nights, what a gift they are for stargazing. Is that what our farm neighbors are thinking as they slowly head west across their fields? Their tractors power the brightest...
Thursday, the 17th, you can make your mouth happy, your spouse or partner happy, the owners of one of five of your favorite La Conner restaurants and chefs happy and in the process do a fleeting good deed for poor people. See the ad on this issue’s back page. Find a restaurant participating, eat out and take a BITE for Skagit. It is a small way to do a little bit of good. So go. Eat out. Take a BITE for Skagit is an annual May Foodie Fundraiser benefiting Community Action of Skagit County’s Skagit Food Bank Distribution Center. It is org...
The second annual La Conner guitar festival starts Friday. Producers Shirley Makela and husband Brent McElroy over 1,300 guitar and music enthusiasts to fill the Town’s halls for workshops and concerts and restaurant spaces for cabarets. Lodging spaces will be full. They are up from 1,000 last year. Congratulations guitar enthusiasts. Way to go, Shirley and Brent. We are two weeks out from the 10th biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival. Like the guitar festival, it brings enthusiasts from around the country to La Conner. Similarly, it has a h...
Years before moving to La Conner, I remember my first reaction upon seeing the wood-sided building painted blue with white trim on Morris, signed “La Conner Regional Library.” What a statement about quality of life here, I thought, to have a library in a small community, a safe place that is open to everyone for exploring, learning, reading, discovery and inspiration. Not only was La Conner home to three unique museums, but it had a library located near the entrance to town, close to the schools, easy to walk to and on a bus line! What I did...
Mayor Ramon Hayes is hoping for more festivals in La Conner. This month his dream is fulfilled: we end this week with a second annual guitar festival and the next week with the 10th biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival. Maybe Mayor Hayes wishes for two festivals every off-season month. That is one good, solid view of the future. Tim Bruce’s vision of poetry in the schools and a festival for all of us has been realized. Nothing is more primal to humans than music. Our first songs came from poetry. More art in all of our lives more of the t...
April, weather wise, left the western Skagit Valley as it sometimes does: overcast, cool, rain overnight Sunday and dripping into Monday morning. Monday, was in fact perfectly average: the morning temperature started at 50 degrees F at WSU’s Mount Vernon weather station. My phone app says temperatures hit 60 degrees F around 5 p.m. This April it rained 20 days, including the last three. In 2017 it also rained about 20 days, though total rainfall was about three inches against the nearly five inches this year. This April was cooler, though h...
May 1st was May Day, International Workers Day. As with so many things, the United States is virtually alone in not celebrating it officially, nationwide, as a holiday. Did you see those images from around the world on TV, of people marching joyfully in the streets holding flags and banners high? Perhaps only our elders recall a robust labor movement here. Bill Reynolds provides a local retrospective in this issue. La Conner Schools Superintendent Whitney Meissner offers her perspective on the work being done by teachers in classrooms across...
My grandfather, a father of four, was a teacher at Mount Vernon High School. Grandpa was able to buy a house and provide for his family on a teacher’s salary not so many years ago. Simply put: teachers today deserve to make a better wage. When my grandfather started teaching, public education wasn’t really for “all kids.” Students with disabilities could be excluded. High school students who struggled could drop out and find a low-skills/high wage job. Students who happened to have a skin color other than white were sent to separate schools...
May 1st was May Day, International Workers Day. As with so many things, the United States is virtually alone in not celebrating it officially, nationwide, as a holiday. Did you see images from around the world on TV, people marching joyfully in the streets holding flags and banners high? Perhaps only our elders recall a robust labor movement here. Bill Reynolds provides a local retrospective in this issue. La Conner Schools Superintendent Whitney Meissner offers her perspective on the work being done by teachers in classrooms across the state a...
National Poetry month ends Monday. In La Conner, lucky us: consider it spring training, the warm up for the Skagit River Poetry Festival arriving in three weeks, starting May 17. Full disclosure and transparency: I am on this Poetry Foundation’s board of directors. A poetry festival in La Conner. Actually, the 10th biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival. Starting in 2000, hardworking English teachers (primarily, with many other dedicated volunteers) have insisted upon bringing the nation’s and the region’s best poets to La Conner to read, discu...
I was 20 in April 1975, in San Francisco working as a houseman in a residential hotel for old people. If I read the news, it was one of the San Francisco dailies. The last American helicopter left Saigon April 30, 1975 as the city fell to the North Vietnamese. Those images are iconic. The greatest nation on earth lost to a rag tag army of peasants wearing funny hats and sandals. The clearest, strongest message I received from the news media, after the war news of battles and deaths, was that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt. Corrupt...
Poetry is a vital part of many communities in our state, and the art draws diverse audiences to the power of words, the power of expression and the power of introspection. I am confident in this claim because I attended or participated in over hundreds of gatherings involving poetry – open mics, magazine launches, school celebrations of spoken word (to name only a few). The Skagit River Poetry Festival is, of course, a glorious example of this enthusiasm for the art in Washington – probably our highest profile gathering of poets fro...
Are you feeling the impact of the increasing polarization and incivility in our country? Has it influenced relationships with friends, family or co-workers here in our Valley? I know that my fellow Skagitonians are people who would absolutely come to my aid if my family or neighborhood were to experience a crisis or disaster. And yet, it can be challenging to have “certain conversations” with some of these same people who hold perspectives that differ from mine. What is it about disasters that can bring us together – and yet solving mor...
Here it is, halfway through national poetry month and I have read only one poem and have not written any. Of course, neither have I drawn or painted anything or played any music or created any art of any sort. While I, like all of us, have art in my soul, the distance between thinking and realizing artistic expression is vast. I am certain I would be a more complex, thoughtful, feeling, compassionate and insightful person if I cultivated the habit of reading poetry and scratching out even a draft poem a day. Limericks are the lowest hanging...
Earth Day might be the most informal of our nation’s holidays. This weekend Future Fest is on in Anacortes. Special days are times to reflect on the work of our fore-parents, those that have gone before, taking chances and making stands for our own good, today. The success of the environmental movement rests in the hard work of people insisting on the primacy and permanence of place – their homes, their communities, their hills, their shores, their fishing grounds – in going toe-to-toe against the established order and saying NO, ov...
Sunday started National library week. How cool is that? This is its 60th anniversary. “It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation’s libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support,” as the American Library Association website states. Here is a shout out to two specific libraries: The La Conner School District’s and the La Conner Regional Library. This year’s theme is “Libraries Lead.” Our library – your library – means to lead us into the 21st century by leading us into a new building, with construc...
I am 63, but at every age I have not been the sharpest knife in the drawer. But of all the things I don’t get, sequential texting is the most confounding. Why do people do it? Why do they do it all the time? Someday I will lead a movement against sequential texting. Talk about marching to your own drummer. Am I the only one who thinks that 10 texts in 10 minutes between two people is the most overblown thing since Twiggy’s pixie? One simple example suffices: Let’s go to a movie. OK. Which one? What time? Let’s meet for dinner first. OK. Whe...
Heather Carter, La Conner Chamber of Commerce executive director, hit a grand slam home run in January in bringing a world-renowned expert on owls to speak. Paul Bannick filled Maple Hall for his hour-long show, sharing the wonder and importance of owls in our world, and stressing that in saving habitat for owls, we will save ourselves. Restaurants and rooms in La Conner were also full, a boon to merchants in mid-winter. Carter took the prize for turning plans for the first ever “Birds of Winter: a Skagit Valley Experience,” into an economic su...
He was a poet, this Minnesota senator so bold, And long a politician before war got in his way. What to do but march off alone into the dark and cold? That acerbic wit fit his Irish heritage mold. His words a sword, a mighty dragon he did slay. And yet he was a poet and thus inclined to be bold. Slushing through New Hampshire’s snow, he sold Enough people to vote for the words he had no choice but to say. Thank god he marched off alone into that dark winter’s cold. Alone, recall, he faced LBJ; he Irish and so truth to power told, Showing tha...
