A Sweet and Sour Saunter: An August Ambulation from Lake Whatcom to City Center

This is the fifth installment in an ongoing series in which inveterate saunterer Alan Rhodes “records random perambulations through various neighborhoods, blending completely subjective observations with highly opinionated commentary on just about everything.” When he is not out sauntering, he is a columnist for the “Cascadia Weekly” and appears regularly on “The Chuckanut Radio Hour,” KMRE 102.3 FM.

Saunter #5

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

“It’s a beautiful morning,” my wife says. “I suspect you’ll go off sauntering somewhere.”

“You betcha,” I answer, obsessed as I am these days by the rhetorical style of Sarah Palin, “and since you’re going to be driving by Lake Whatcom this morning, if you’ll drop me off I’ll start there.”

So here I am, off on another morning of idle perambulation and peripatetic musing, starting from Bloedel Donovan Park on this already warm summer morning. A newcomer to Bellingham once asked me who Bloedel Donovan was. As a collector of names, I was so entertained by “Bloedel” as a first name possibility that I assigned it to a neighborhood cat whose actual name I didn’t know. He seemed willing enough to answer to Bloedel.

The real Bloedel – J. H. Bloedel – and his buddy J.J. Donovan were hauling logs out of the Lake Whatcom area back at the end of the 19th century. Later they teamed up with Peter Larson, set up a sawmill at the lake, and became the largest lumber shippers in the Northwest. Larson died early on, but Bloedel and Donovan established other logging operations throughout this part of the country. By the 1940s, however, timber supplies were getting pretty thin around here, so in 1946 the various holdings were liquidated. Bloedel, now an old-timer, and his wife Mina donated the site of the Lake Whatcom lumber mill to the City of Bellingham for a park.

It’s too bad all the watershed land didn’t get donated back then, because as I walk out to the edge of the lake and take a look around I am struck by a dismal epiphany: human beings must be the stupidest species on the planet. Almost every inch of shoreline is violated by houses, driveways and vehicles. Houses crawl up the hillsides and roads lace the watershed. In the middle of it all sits Lake Whatcom, our only drinking water source, looking like a deliberate catch-basin for the slough of suburban sprawl.

An informational sign at the lake’s edge offers such infuriatingly obvious tips as “Limit Pesticide Use,” and “Scoop the Poop.” OK, those are good things to do, but no matter how careful we are, pesticides and dog poop are going to go into the lake, along with motor oil, tire rubber, fertilizers and all the detritus of development – all of it flowing into a reservoir that we’ve been watching deteriorate for decades. There are really only two things that should surround a reservoir: native vegetation and a fence.

OK, OK, calm down. Walking is supposed to be relaxing, even spiritual in its best moments, and here I am getting all pissed off first thing in the day.

I cross Electric Avenue and walk into Whatcom Falls Park. It’s my favorite city park, but I haven’t been here for a while. I stop at Scudder Pond, lingering to enjoy the silence and the morning sunshine on my face. In 1987, Vita Armitage (is that a great name, or what?) donated this property to the North Cascades Audubon Society in honor of her father O.C. Scudder (another cool name). Today the pond is a stop on the Washington Birding Trail.

Suddenly a red-winged blackbird, invisible in the foliage just a moment ago, magically appears with a gurgling squawk, a flap of its wings and a flash of flamboyant red. I pull out my notebook and in one of my very infrequent moments of inspiration, dash off one of my even more infrequent haiku poems.

Man, I nailed that sucker in seventeen syllables on the first try. I’m hot today! That should hold me for another decade or so.

I seem to have shaken off my irritation over the willful destruction of our watershed, and my rather sour attitude that the human species is too dumb to live, so I relax into a morning stroll through the park. I pass Derby Pond, where a mallard family paddles over: mom and pop and half dozen kids, all covetously eyeing the granola bar I’m munching. As I watch them circling in the water, I’m reminded of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Wild Swans at Coole.” Every year the swans appear, and while the speaker is aging and his life has apparently taken a turn for the worse, the swans are eternally youthful and beautiful.

Passing other strollers, joggers, dog-tenders and kids on bicycles, I come to the most beautiful manmade creation in Whatcom County: the bridge at Whatcom Falls, a fairyland structure that rose from the nightmare of the Great Depression, built between 1937 and 1940 with funds from FDR’s Public Works Administration that put people back to work and put food back on their tables.

“I’m lucky enough to have known a great president,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. “That was Franklin Roosevelt. He was rich himself, and his class considered him a traitor.” Herbert Hoover, in thrall to the laissez faire paradigm and the mythical magic of the marketplace, had taken a cautious, hands-off approach as the economy disintegrated before his eyes. Roosevelt, in contrast, shed his conservative tendencies and listened to his most progressive and radical advisors. Government and citizens began working together and a great nation began its recovery. Which ghost is whispering in Barack Obama’s ear now, the timorous Hoover or the visionary FDR? Too much the former, I fear.

I cross the bridge and walk along one of the park’s trails. There are few visible signs remaining of the devastating explosion of June 10, 1999. Whatcom Creek was flowing with more than water that day. More than 200,000 gallons of gas from a rupture in the Olympic Pipeline were percolating through the creek which, at 3:30 p.m., exploded. The blast rocked the town, blackened the park and killed three children. Astonishingly, there were no federal regulations requiring pipeline inspections. We have enacted such regulations since then. One of our national characteristics seems to be a dubious talent for responding after the fact.

As I continue my stroll through the park, I come alongside a fellow walking a geriatric golden retriever and we chat for awhile. He moved here from California years ago, as did I, from places where developers have had the run of things, and where we watched, year after year, deserts, forests, shorelines and orange groves fall before the bulldozers. We talk about how impressed and delighted we were upon moving here and discovering the wisdom of both citizens and city government in setting aside lands for parks, trails and open spaces.

He says, “When I saw how willing people were to tax themselves in order to preserve green places, I knew I’d landed in the right place.”

As we approach the park’s edge, we can hear the muffled roar of traffic from nearby streets, so it is a joy to have this green corridor. The man’s dog becomes preoccupied with a nearby rabbit, so I continue on as the fellow argues with his pooch about its dietary inclinations.

Leaving the park, I step onto the grounds of the Bayview Cemetery. My predilection for the history of the everyday draws me to the old gravestones. I poke about for a while, reading inscriptions.

There’s a space on the tombstone for Anna’s husband, “Charles J., 1884 –” but his death date is missing. Where is Charles? What happened? Did they meet again? Both cynics and romantics could weave intriguing tales from those missing four digits on this mossy headstone.

Andrew J. Anderson 1853 – 1925

You must have been born under lucky stars, Andrew. You were too young to have fought in the Civil War, too old to have fought in World War I, and you spent your twilight years in an era of great prosperity and were gone before it all came tumbling down in 1929. I picture the Bellingham Andrew would have known: dirt streets, wooden sidewalks, horse-drawn vegetable carts and a sky so dark at night that the stars must have seemed within reach.

I tombstone-browse for a while, then leave the cemetery, cross noisy Woburn Street, and pick up the Whatcom Creek Trail heading toward downtown. The trail is blazing with wildflowers this morning, as well as Oregon grape and nootka rose. It’s somewhat magical, to move through the city in this green hallway.

Just before the trail crosses Racine Street I stop for a moment to admire a dramatic and colorful totem pole. There is no sign, plaque or information board of any kind to explain when the pole was carved and who carved it. I pull out my cell phone to call the Parks and Recreation Department to ask about it, then laugh at myself and put the phone away. Why did I bring a cell phone on a saunter? I saunter to get away from telephones, computers and all the other electronic distractions of modern life. If they had cell phones in Henry David Thoreau’s day and someone had given him one, he would have chucked it into Walden Pond first thing. Beside all that, it’s kind of fun having this mysterious totem pole appear with no explanation. Einstein said, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” and who am I to argue?

Iowa Street is a bit jolting when I step onto it from the trail. VOLVO, DODGE, BUICK, KIA, SUBARU, HONDA – a jumble of huge, garish signs standing like monuments to our long national obsession with the automobile, our peculiar preference for propelling ourselves around by ones and twos encased in large metal pods, and our insatiable need for more and more oil, with all the planetary destruction and international conflict that goes with it. The street, lined with auto dealerships on both sides, might be the third least appealing thoroughfare in Bellingham, bested only by the horrors of the Guide-Meridian near Bellis Fair Mall, or the area around Sunset Square.

It suddenly occurs to me that it’s almost noon and my stomach is growling, so I wander over to Diamond Jim’s on State Street. I love this place because the food is great, you can get breakfast all day, and I’ve never seen anybody in here who looks like a tourist. It has that old-time Bellingham feeling. The waitress who takes my order is cheerfulness personified and her body, in shorts and tank top, is a walking gallery of the art of tattooing.

Before long I’m working seriously on a plate of eggs, pancakes the size of bicycle tires, and nonstop cups of coffee. I look around at the customers: a couple of aging biker guys in black leather and graying pony tails, a table of garden club ladies, a mixture of small business owners and hardhats. Next to me is a convocation of cheerfully crabby right-wing codgers who are cataloging the multiple ways in which Barack Obama is ruining America. While I’ve been fretting that Obama is too cautious and conservative, these old boys see him as Lenin incarnate. They are saying radiantly silly things – straight off Limbaugh’s morning broadcast, no doubt – but are having so much fun that I can hardly manage to get irritated.

“Did you know he’s a radical Muslim?” I call over. “He was educated in a socialist madrasa run by a terrorist, and his wife Michelle is a card-carrying member of the Black Panthers.”

“Damn right,” answers a rangy, 70-something guy in a baseball cap with an American flag insignia, “and he’s not even a U.S. citizen.” He gives me a thumbs up.

When I leave Diamond Jim’s I remember that I need a package of wood screws, so I sidetrack over to Hardware Sales. Of all the local businesses, this is probably my favorite. I’ve always suspected that the interior of Hardware Sales was designed by Daedalus shortly after he completed work on the labyrinth for King Minos of Crete – the baffling maze that no one could escape. An interesting psychological study could be conducted by comparing two groups of people: those who can find their way around Hardware Sales and those who can’t. A more detailed study would require subsets based on proficiency, from those who become anxious and despondent when confronting the twisting warrens of the store, to those who navigate them with ease, and the various grades of competence in between. I operate at about a 65 percent skill level, so I am able to execute my search for wood screws with a minimum of missed turns, false starts and unnecessary switchbacks. I could, of course, ask one of the many employees scurrying around, but my pride and guyhood prevent it.

From here I decide to saunter downtown, so I cut over on Ohio Street, passing Bellingham High School. FDR’s legacy is in this magnificent building, just as it was in the Whatcom Falls Bridge I crossed earlier today. Built in 1938 with generous help from the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, it’s a stately old structure from an era when buildings had dignity and were constructed to last forever.

As I cross Cornwall Avenue, I spot Cosmic Comics on the other side of the street, and I realize I’ve never been in there, even though it’s been at this present location for nine years. I go in and browse around and am happy to see that many of the comic book superheroes of my youth are still with us, including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. I chat with the owner, T.J. Tipton, who tells me that the youngest customers start at around six years old and the oldest are in their 70s. Most of the comics sell for $2.99 to $3.99, quite a jump from the 10 cents of my childhood. T. J. produces a 1954 issue of “Batman Comics” from beneath the counter. It has the 10 cent cover price, but is selling for $50.

“I don’t see any Western comics,” I say. “Are they completely out of fashion?”

“I’m afraid so,” he answers. “The Lone Ranger is still around, but all the others are gone.”

No more Red Ryder, I muse. No more Lash LaRue or Durango Kid. You can’t go home again.

I take one last look around, observing that many of the contemporary covers would have been way too sexy for my mother to have allowed in the house. Jungle Girl’s extravagant cleavage would never have made it past the front door.

Since I’m close to downtown, it seems like a good time to pick up a few things I need. A sauntering purist might not combine shopping with a saunter, but I’m not an absolutist practitioner. I do most of my shopping downtown anyway, or in Fairhaven, since I only like to patronize local business, and a trip to the mall is very high on my list of disagreeable pastimes, coming in just below French-kissing Dick Cheney.

I buy a new pair of Chaco’s at Hiltons (we saunterers go through shoes fast), a dozen bagels at the Bagelry (not bad for goyishe bagels), and some organic celery and tomatoes on sale at the Community Food Co-op (a business model that needs to be more widely emulated).

From there I go over to the library to look around, and on the DVD shelf I spot a copy of the Fellini film “Armarcord,” which I’ve never seen. I love Fellini; how could I not have seen this?

I walk over to Michael’s Books to browse through the free boxes on the sidewalk and pick up a copy of Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.” It’s been more than 40 years since I read it, so maybe it’s time for a reread. My backpack is now heavy and bulging, I’ve already walked eight miles today, and it’s all uphill to my house, so I decide to catch a bus home. I buy an Americano to go at the Black Drop and walk over to the bus terminal on Railroad Avenue. A dozen or so street kids are hanging around outside Everyday Music. They look very much like extras from the movie “Mad Max,” but seem genial enough.

“Sup, Dude?” a multi-pierced lounger asks as I pass.

“Just enjoying this beautiful day,” I reply.

He nods approval. “S’cool.”

I stop for a moment and admire the new sculpture near the bus station. Anthony Howe’s wind-driven “Axiom Dyno Trilobyte” whirls and spins in the afternoon breeze, sunlight sparkling from every moving surface. I’m quite mesmerized by it and get a crick in my neck from staring up too long. Everyone I’ve talked to likes it, in contrast to the city’s epic faux pas art purchase, “The Sentinel” over on the corner of Bay and Holly, an odd creation that looks like a giant Moroccan dildo stabbed into the sidewalk. Its great value seems to be an ability to garner wisecracks from passers-by.

I board the bus and take my copy of “A Tale of Two Cities” from my backpack as we pull out of the station. The novel opens with Dickens’ most famous sentence, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” After chronicling both the glories and the failings of the year 1775, Dickens concludes that it wasn’t that much different from his own day. And the description probably applies to our day as well, or any day for that matter. I lay the book aside, sit back, sip my strong dark coffee and watch the town roll by. §