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.