Birding Showcase soars, Smelt Derby sunk

The Chamber of Commerce’s Director Heather Carter again delivered a successful La Conner Birding Showcase in Maple Hall in January. Vendors had brisk sales and environmental organizations shared information and concerns about matters great and small. A talk on raptors in the region keynoted the day.

The past three years Carter has delivered on bringing people to town in the dead of winter for a day of inside birding bonding and then eating and shopping in town. Carter is succeeding admirably at bringing shoppers into town and deserves praise for creating and growing an increasingly successful winter event. But her constituency is the town’s tourist businesses. It is great that local birders help fill Maple Hall for the year’s talk and that local shops and artists fill tables and sell their wares there. By the numbers, however, it is not a day in which the community’s citizens, the townspeople, gather to celebrate or share among ourselves.

Thankfully, Amy Green has aligned the Quilt Museum Birds of a Fiber, opening that show to offer an activity for local families.

By comparison, take Edison’s last-Sunday-in-February Chicken Parade, all 15 minutes of it. It is completely homegrown, from the northeast end, where Main Street becomes Mactaggart Avenue on through Cains Court to where it turns into Farm to Market Road on the southwest side. The locals have an all-day blast. That community’s businesses probably have their best sales day all year. Who knows how many parties and barbeques take place?

The Chicken Parade is all Edison all the time. Just like the La Conner Smelt Derby used to be.

Used to be. There will not be a 55th Annual La Conner Rotary Club Smelt Derby Family Festival and Smelt Run.

The Smelt Derby has finally gone extinct, expired and a stake put through its heart after years of declining participation and few funds raised for the La Conner Rotary, the sponsors, organizers and collectors for raising monies for the many good deeds they do, primarily for children, throughout the year.

After 54 years and countless smelt, herring and all kinds of odd objects measured, too-many-to-count pancakes flipped and served, how many thousands of runners parading through the town’s streets and, most importantly all those parents and their children with their lines in the water jigging for smelt, the Derby is no more. Last fall Rotary members had a reflective self-examination. The turnout of kids and their parents and the fundraising have all been shrinking precariously, as drastically reduced in numbers as the hardly-any-smelt in the channel, a result of the Moore-Clark hatchery fish-food processing plant closing in 1992 and ending the smelt’s food source.

There is still the Kiwanis Club of La Conner’s annual November Chowder on the Channel. The town’s citizens head to the elementary school gym to slurp chowder and vote for which local restaurant will get the trophy for best chowder. Come December it will be your kids who are sitting on our Santa’s lap while parents eat pancakes at the La Conner Rotary Club’s pancake breakfast.

Powered by the community’s legendary volunteer corps, these local events bring out local people and raise money for local causes. We are doing the same with the now annual Tiny Tree Festival, created to build a bigger library.

How do we, the citizens of greater La Conner, bring the best of the past and the present intro a shared, local, organic fun event future? It is not for this paper to say, or merely lament, either. The possibilities are as limitless as the ideas folks generate.

Here is one: What about a La Conner pet parade, led by our very own dogs and cats, at least, with Noelle Stanback and her hen Lucy as annual parade marshal, at least till Noelle goes off to college?

That would create a hometown event that would have us looking forward to the next one for years to come. – ken stern