Lily Point Calling Blog

There is so much happening in the world today that we often miss important things as they pass by us in our daily lives. Sometimes these things are tied to feelings that get buried deep inside us and cause us discomfort without us knowing why.

Years go by and then suddenly we see something again, and then we hear a song that brings that feeling to the surface and exposes our need to deal with it. Even at this juncture we can see and feel for a brief moment just what it is we have missed, but if that feeling has something negative and personally upsetting tied to it, then we often will try to push it back inside and not deal with it.

It’s often hard to identify just what takes these feelings and pushes them into our thoughts until we realize we have to take action. Typically it takes a sequence of events to all come together at once and then we know inside that it can’t be denied any longer.

In the early 90’s Big Audio Dynamite recorded a song, Innocent Child

“Live for yourself today and tomorrow, look after your health, forget all your sorrows
I wish I could have seen you, you could run wild, I would have liked to known you as an Innocent Child.

Its never too late, for you to do, you don’t have to wait for the sun to come through, I wish I could have seen you, and you could run wild, I would have liked to known you as an innocent child, innocent child”

When I heard this song awhile back it started digging deep into my past and chipping away at my reluctance to face the feelings that have been denied all these years. A few weeks ago I witnessed a scene that not only brought me to terms with what those denied feelings were, but also gave me a view of my childhood and showed me in real time just what I had missed all those years ago.

I was sitting on my deck in South Beach and looking out across the Georgia Straight to Orcas island, looking at the cloud formations, just relaxing and enjoying the day. The tide was out, so that meant there was a sand bar that went out about 60 yards. The sand bar stretches along the shore for over a mile and is quite popular for people to go walking on and for kids to play, make sand castles, move around their little plastic toys. It was a scene that is played out everyday, and has been that way forever. Yes even back in the 60’s when I was that kid out there doing the exact thing.

It was what happened next that disrupted my day and brought those buried feelings to the surface and made me have to deal with them once again. There was a man and his two little kids on the sandbar busily playing with their beach toys, totally focused with what was right in front of them. A little girl about 7 years old has a little plastic truck and she is pushing it around in her little imaginary world. Her dad is busy watching her little brother who is only 2 or 3 years old.

Flying down the shore from Lily Point comes an adult Bald Eagle about 50 feet above the ground. When the eagle about reaches the little girl playing on the sand bar, it sees a fish in the shallows and starts to circle. The sun is high in the sky and the 7 foot wing span of the eagle casts a large shadow on the ground. The shadow passes in front of the little girl several times before getting her attention. She looks up in awe and stares at the eagle circling above her.

The eagle lands on a big rock about 10 feet past the outer edge of the sandbar facing back towards the little girl. The little girl is transfixed by the eagle and starts walking straight towards it. She gets within 30 feet then 20 feet and amazingly the eagle stays perched on the rock. Typically eagles will fly away once you get within 40-50 yards of them, but this was a little girl, and the eagle was not frightened by her behavior.

The girl kept walking and when she got within 10 feet of the eagle, she started to walk sideways as her own fear and instinct kicked in. She stopped and just stared at the eagle and finally the eagle had seen enough of the little girl and flew off. The little girl stood there for a moment, and then the spell was broken and she turned and ran to her father and said, “did you see that, did you see that?!!”

So now I was left there to deal with the feelings that this little scene had brought to the surface. You see, even though I spent many summers on the same exact sandbar playing and running wild, and like many kids I was fascinated by flight and intrigued by the pictures of raptors I’d see in magazines and books. The image of the eagle is everywhere, on money, on flags, in mythology. I never could understand why I’d never seen an eagle. I read about what their perfect habitat was like, and I looked at Lily Point and thought, this is exactly like the description, but there were no eagles? Why? Because from 1917 to 1952 the state of Alaska paid a bounty for people to shoot eagles.

Okay so how does that relate to a beach in Point Roberts? Well the fishermen who worked in Alaska would spend the winter months down in northern Washington. Because the bounty was paid to those who brought in a pair of eagle talons, the fishermen would shoot the eagles in Washington, throw their talons into a bucket, and then turn them in for money in the spring when they returned to Alaska.

Because Point Roberts was a well known eagle habitat it didn’t take long for eagles to be exterminated from the entire region. So by the time my mother was born in 1924 the eagles were gone, and she never saw them during her childhood and much of her adult life.

It was July 4th, 1978. I was 23 years old and I was standing on the grass just above the beach. We were having a family reunion and it was late morning and the sun was high in the sky. I was looking down at the ground, and something caught my attention. A huge shadow about 10 feet across and a few feet wide was moving towards me and it took me a few seconds to realize that this was something I’d never seen before. Just before the shadow reached me I looked up, and there was an adult bald eagle 20 feet above my head looking right down on me.

I could describe how it made me feel, but I found a passage from Ken Kesey’s book, Demon Box, that just nails it… “Stand in this spotlight, feel these eyes pass over you. You never forget it. You are suddenly changed, lifted, singled out, elevated and alone. Self consciousness and irresolution melt in the beams blast. Grace and power surge in to take their place.”

I can honestly say that nothing has ever caused such a reaction and made me feel what that eagle did on that day. When I saw that little girl have the same experience it brought that day in 1978 flooding back into my mind.

We are fortunate that the eagles have come back. We need to learn how to respect them so this time they will stay in our lives. Seeing an eagle can make your day and so can seeing the gleam in the eyes of an innocent child that gets excited by the experience.

Like an innocent child the eagles need our protection from those who only think of themselves and their needs. Don’t sacrifice the gift. Don’t let your child grow up without experiencing an eagle. It is a regret that will last a lifetime.

“Most people know that the environment is in trouble, the destruction of natural things that once destroyed will not grow back. The powers that be roll on – and over – everything. Praying won’t help and only the Indians seemed to have things in balance. But they were in the way of “progress,” too, and so were stomped on and marginalized as “not realistic” – meaning “not profitable”. How can you convince people that survival, honoring and protecting the Earth, must come before commerce? There’s a war on – and Wall St. is handing out the blindfolds” — Stan Ridgway

One of the inspirations for writing this blog has always been my desire to talk about things in a new light.  I’ve had to admit to myself that I’ve overlooked things right in front of me, and missed a lot of important information or didn’t see the significance of what was off my personal radar.

When I see car commercials that are still selling horsepower or Chinese government censors that are blacking out the news that Liu Xiaobo on Friday won the Nobel Peace Prize, it just goes to show how old habits die hard, and when money or power is involved, stifling information is a strategy used time and time again because it works more often than not.

I remember a Dasani (Coca Cola) water ad last summer touting that the bottle was 100% recyclable, but overlooked was that fact that less than 20% of the bottles actually get recycled. The well informed may also know that Coca Cola sells the Dasani brand in Africa, priced at 30 cents more per bottle than a Coke, because they know the locals need drinking water more than a Coke.

Between the Internet and the flood of documentaries available on Netflix, it is now easier to get information than at any other time in history. There are still purveyors of misinformation, but the truth can be discovered with a little more effort.

The surprising thing I’ve found is that mining information from the past often produces better results then absorbing the current news. The news cycle has evolved into sound bytes that keep everyone as uninformed as the ad men like it. One major clue to the media’s success of keeping us distracted came from John Stewart when he showed how the last eight U.S. presidents all said, “we need to become energy independent,” when in fact we were heading in the opposite direction.

Recently I discovered some very intriguing information just by monitoring eagle nests in Point Roberts. I received a call from a friend who told me that the eagles had just built a new nest below Cliff Drive. When I went to investigate I was able to verify the nest’s location and heard that the pair had previously been on the Canadian side of the border. By crossing south across Roosevelt Road they were now on U.S. territory.

The question came to mind, “Why was a street in Point Roberts named  Roosevelt?” Clearly, the road that runs the length of the border between the two countries was an important road back in the day and should hold some significance.

Shortly thereafter I read an article in Vanity Fair about President Theodore Roosevelt, with excerpts from Douglas Brinkley’s New York Times bestseller, The Wilderness Warrior. The article begins with how Teddy Roosevelt (T.R.) developed a Thoreauvian “back to nature” aesthetic and started a progressive movement towards land management and wildlife protection.

Without T.R. and his executive orders we would not now have such sacred places as Mount Olympus, Crater Lake, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite Valley, and Devils Tower. President Roosevelt set aside 230 million acres of  land between 1901 and 1909.

He championed something that is very dear the to the hearts of many Pacific Northwest residents, “the craving to be alone with nature.” As Brinkley points out, “T.R. believed every American needed to get acquainted with mountains and deserts, rivers and seas; one ethereal experience with nature, he insisted, made the world whole and God’s omnipotence indisputable.”

Roosevelt’s view has now in many ways come full circle from a century ago. T.R. viewed all humans as active or passive participants in conservation, because through the consumption of food we are in effect still predators. “Non-hunters, he believed, risked damaging the circle of life because of their failure to recognize the genuine role humans play as a species.”  This is a belief that proved to be unfortunately prophetic.

Douglas Brinkley also pointed out that “to Roosevelt, the case for preservation was so obvious that the very concept of debate was almost criminal. This incomparable chasm [Grand Canyon] was the exclusive property of the U.S. government, to be care taken for future generations — a birthright like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.”

Roosevelt teamed up with John Muir and shared in speaking out in California against real estate speculators, logging companies, and mining syndicates, and so was able to save the western United States from the fate of the east. Only four of the hundreds of national parks and national forests established in the country were located east of the Mississippi River, because the eastern forests had already been decimated.

Roosevelt was able to see the connection with nature because he made a consistent effort to be out in the wilderness. “Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs, there can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the canyon of the Colorado, the canyon of the Yellowstone, the three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with their majestic beauty unmarred.”

So by the eagle pair crossing to the south side of Roosevelt Road they were able to bring forward an ally from the distant past. The eagles sparked a small dose of inspiration and brought to our little hamlet of Point Roberts the same attitude towards preservation that was successful over a century ago, and they ignited the desire to save Lily Point in the same manner as was done with other national treasures. It was Black Elk who emerged from a dream at eight years old and said, “The sacred ground is everywhere, it’s right in front of you.”

After reading the article, I still didn’t know why the early settlers of Point Roberts named such a prominent road after Teddy Roosevelt, but shortly thereafter, during the effort to save Lily Point, some of us looked into the little known history of Point Roberts. Weeks later an e-mail came my way with a diary of one of the original Icelandic settlers. At this point another piece of the missing puzzle came into view.

Our country is now going through a painful recession that is forcing millions of people out of their homes. Back in the early days of the 20th century the Icelandic immigrant settlers of Point Roberts were called squatters, for they just showed up and built houses with no title to the land. On several occasions State officials considered throwing the settlers off the land — land that these poor immigrants had built up from nothing and that now supplied food to workers in the cannery and fishing operations.

The immigrants were desperate and so sent off a letter to Washington D.C. that would end up on the desk of none other then Teddy Roosevelt. The settlers pleaded to the President to grant them homestead rights and save them from being thrown off the land they now called home. Roosevelt sent a representative to investigate what was going on in Point Roberts.

The representative arrived at the Point with expectations of finding a bunch of misfits and poachers. Instead, he went back to Washington with glowing reports of how the settlers had built homes and were running successful farming operations with a strong sense of community. The report was enough for T.R. to grant them homestead rights, and the community of Point Roberts survived the first threat to their life and livelihood.

So grateful were the settlers that they crafted a sheepskin rug and sent it to Roosevelt, where it was placed in one of the White House guest rooms. These days, it is hard to imagine that the community of Point Roberts would be able to reach out to the President of the United States with the hope to save their land. Today, the word “hope” gets more chewed up and tattered than the big fish tied to the side of the boat in Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

Even though Teddy Roosevelt was a visionary president, all the things that he feared and tried to stop from happening would get swallowed up in a century of constant wars and the harvesting of natural resources to pay for them. Just read the following excerpt and see how America turned a blind eye.

“Roosevelt was a conservation visionary, aware of the pitfalls of hyper-industrialization, fearful that speed-logging, blast rock mining, overgrazing, reckless hunting, oil drilling, population growth, and all types of pollution would leave the planet in biological peril. ‘The natural resources of our country’ President Roosevelt warned Congress, the Supreme Court, and the State Governors at a conservation conference he called to session, ‘are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.’ Wildlife protection and forest preservation were a moral imperative, insisted Roosevelt.”

We are said to have lost the connection to wildlife. The math is pretty clear on this. When Roosevelt was president 80 percent of the population lived on farms, compared to now when 90 percent of the population lives in cities. When you live in a place like Point Roberts it’s easy to see nature and to connect to it. If you’ve lived there for over 50 years, it’s also easy to see all that we have lost.

But the eagles again have a lesson to teach us — that what we have destroyed is not beyond repair and there is still time to heal the wounds of our ways. For me, I’ve learned that becoming curious about something as simple as a street sign can lead to new vistas that were never seen before. Also, by understanding eagles and watching how they live in the world, I have seen a view of nature that never developed in my suburban education.

When we were only several hundred thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks, later someone built an iron spring, set clockwork running, then someone imagined grid lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines to find the soul. Bells of clock towers stitched the seekers’ dreams together, so we’ve always been on our way to this new place, that is no place really, it is real. It’s our nature to represent, we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps, and if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment territory of our maps with the land spread out before us; never mind, we’ve always been on our way to a new place, but it’s no place really, but it is real… — William Gibson

Long before the Industrial Revolution and many centuries before the advent of electricity and man’s total removal from using his own senses to navigate and survive the seas, there came a simple instrument in a box, the compass. The compass removed the need to feel for the weather and the motion of the waves in order to navigate, and turned man into a machine, simply following a hypothetical line on a map. A revolutionary mindset was born — a straight line is the best course to follow towards all destinations — and it disengaged our senses from seeing otherwise.

In 1791, King George, still stinging from the American Revolution, and on the heels of the French Revolution, sent Captain George Vancouver on a grand mission and the thinly veiled glory of following in the wake of his idol, Captain Cook. For Captain Vancouver that glory was severely muted, for his true accomplishment wasn’t in discovering the Northwest Passage, the mythical route that had eluded expeditions for centuries, but rather to confirm that it did not exist. But Captain Vancouver had to sail for over a year around Africa, Australia, and the South Pacific before he would enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca. His ships crossed the globe in rigid lines for an English king who still viewed the ocean as his vast chessboard of empire.

Aboard the ships Discovery and Chatham, the latter which served as the command ship of the failed war with America, Captain Vancouver had all the Crown’s tools — compass, quadrant, and chronometer — to transform the globe into intersecting lines to chart the course towards progress.

Also in the shadow of Captain Vancouver’s journey was the not too distant mutiny on the Bounty. As the shores of England got farther and farther away, the pull of straight line military protocols weakened and morale became more fragile.  On the shores of Hawaii and Tahiti the Captain lost his true command and the respect of his officers and men when he denied them shore leave, this when most of those on board had signed up for the journey to experience the grass skirted paradise. He then had a young teenager named Thomas Pitt, who was the cousin of Thomas Payne, lashed on trivial charges to show his power of rank, and to cover his own insecurity and lack of standing in the ruling class.

Captain Vancouver’s training and technology also ran into trouble as the expedition traversed through the maze of islands and channels. “The night was dark and rainy, and the winds so light and variable that by the influence of the tides we were driven about as if we were blindfolded in this labyrinth.” Captain Vancouver’s mechanical navigation, based on the stars and the sun, were rendered useless by the constant cloud cover of the climate. This was in contrast to the natives, who used only their senses and experience to identify nine different stages of the tides that enabled them to navigate and tell the time of day in any type of weather.

Native navigators were also expert in using voice radar, like the dolphins and orcas they observed, by letting the canoe drift in silence as they called out into the fog.  The returning echo told them the distance to shore or if they were passing a bluff or meadow, and enabled them to travel in zero visibility.

Such was the coming collision of cultures as the mechanical Captains of Naval Ships sailed into the same waters as cedar canoes and the primitive world of sensory navigation. One culture read the time of day from a clock, the other from the changing of the tides. One culture needed their machines to work with the stars or sun to navigate, the other needed only to see the water in front of them.

The natives lived harmoniously with nature, on the extreme edge of the forest, in small numbers that barely made a ripple in the water, and now came the portents of the unforgiving machine of capitalism that would eventually totally invade their environment with a pervasive force that cleared the way with axes and chainsaws, installed railways and telephone wires, paved it with asphalt, damned the rivers, and built banks, office towers, ports, suburbs, and strip malls. All that is left of the land as Captain Vancouver discovered it can only be found in his journal.

“The surface of the land was perfectly smooth, and the country before us exhibited every thing that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view. As we had no reason to imagine that this country had ever been indebted for any of its decorations to the hand of man, I could not believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture.”

— George Vancouver

Captain Vancouver’s map making may have been the mission of his command, but more importantly, it was the Crown’s prerequisite for empire building. In the coming months he’d draw on his knowledge of a thousand names, and perpetuate the established ritual of colonial possession that required giving an English name to every mountain, bay, promontory, pass, and river. It was the privilege of the Captain to bestow the names of his friends and midshipmen on the land that he explored — Whidbey, Puget, Baker, Johnstone, Roberts.

So the rigid linear path towards progress was forced on the native people and natural lands to conform to the dictates of empire, and it didn’t matter that natives had lived there for 9,000 years, centuries before the time of Achilles and the Trojan wars.  Once the competing empires came back and occupied the land, it didn’t matter what existed there; it was the empire’s asset and resource to be sold, and if some creature or native got in the way or was deemed competition to the resource, like eagles, bears, or wolves, then the empire required them to be destroyed.

What is lost from our past is the perspective of what we have become. Before colonization the salmon outnumbered the native population by a thousand to one, but today there are more people in Washington state than there are salmon. Salmon was able to take the worst impacts from nature over millions of years, but after over a century of colonization and the side effects from the Industrial Revolution, a third of the salmon runs are now extinct and the remaining runs often only number 10% of their historic populations.

Salmon populations are the key to the health and vitality of the entire region. Trees found next to salmon bearing streams and rivers grow three times as fast as trees not exposed to the nutrients that salmon provide. The salmon feed the bears, eagles, otters and all the 200 species that depend on salmon survival. Nature’s checks and balances have been lost or disrupted by humans’ destruction of the salmon populations.

So what else is lost in our mechanical following of straight lines? The lines on the globe transformed into property lines on the land that ignored land forms, environments, and natural features. This same mechanical thinking is found in Joseph Conrad’s novel, “Typhoon”, and attributed to the character, Thomas McWhirr.  It tells of a simple minded grocer’s son who captains a ship straight through the eye of a hurricane, a captain that refuses to change course and deviate from the charted path because he has a schedule to keep and a engine in which to power through.

Today we find our land being developed by the same simple-minded captains, who site homes and factories and farms for maximum profit within the straight lines of their properties. It’s a world view that must focus on profit and it doesn’t matter if wildlife, wetland, or critical habitat is destroyed. They don’t see nature any more than McWhirr saw the hurricane, as they have a schedule to keep and a bottom line to consider.

The cruelest line of all that evolved out of the competing empires was the 49th parallel — a simple line that once established ensured that not only would we continue to blindly navigate through a lost country, with the lost use of our senses, but that through the specter of competition would chew up the environment in just 150 years.

Captain Vancouver’s compass and chronometer has evolved into the modern world of media, where we depend on TVs, smart phones, computers, and satellites to see the world we used to live in. As William Gibson said,

“The media-ated world has become a lost country and it’s a world we can’t find our way back to.  The media-ated world is now the world, we are that which perceives a media-ated reality. I don’t think it’s possible to know what we’ve lost, there is a pervasive sense of loss, and a pervasive sense of excitement at what we seem to be gaining and those two feelings seem to go together, they are parts of the same feeling. But the future is not knowable, we used to be told it was, it was coming and it was planned, and grownups were making decisions.”

When Captain Vancouver’s great ships arrived at Nootka Sound, one of the local natives came on board and marveled at its size and technology. He asked if he could sail back to England and meet the great King George that was responsible for sending this amazing ship. He happened to come on board the day that Captain Vancouver was disciplining another sailor with the lash. A mere 12 lashes were enough to turn one’s back into hamburger and scar a person for life. So the Captain’s call for 24 lashes created quite a grisly scene. The young native was so shocked by the display that he quickly left the ship and abandoned any notion of traveling back to England. Soon the word spread up and down the coast and no native ever set foot on a ship again.

All that is left of Captain Vancouver’s mission are the names that he left behind, and the legacy that he was the first white man to discover that Vancouver Island was in fact an island and not part of the mainland. Captain Vancouver didn’t have long to revel in the glory of his discoveries, as his rigid ways quickly came back to confront him. Back on the streets of London in 1798, he was confronted by Thomas Pitt, the young man he had so mercilessly flogged on the voyage. Without his rank, without his ship, and without the Crown behind him, the sickly Captain was no match for the athletic Thomas Pitt. In the quick flurry of rage and revenge heaped upon Vancouver, he soon laid bleeding on the cobblestones. The Londoners stood by as silently as the crew had that observed Thomas Pitt being whipped so many months before. Captain Vancouver would never recover from his wounds and died soon thereafter.