Well, in 2014, I spent Australia Day in Australia, will probably spend the 4th in the US, and on July 1, spent Canada Day in Sidney and Victoria, Canada. Does our common parent country, the UK, have a UK Day, or are all these days just a kind of "we got away from you" gesture that would make no sense in England?
On Canada Day, we went over to Vancouver Island, BC from Orcas on my parents' yacht. Now that sounds super-snooty: the Laurel Lee is actually more of a sweet, teakwood and brass campa van on water. It is an "Eagle 32" which has the slight look of a green and white tug. There is a sitting room-kitchen, a pilot house and a cabin with ensuite. We tugged our way over on a calm, sunny day, reaching Sidney Port along with other Canadians and Americans. We put our little courtesy Canadian flag up, above our larger American one, and went through a very polite customs process with a very eager-to-help young man who had just started his job.
Sidney Port Marina was full: Like on Australia Day, I was looking at something cultural from the outside. I think Canadians see us as their 'more powerful neighbors' and they have always struck me as slightly more European, with their reserve and muted colors. They tooted their yacht horns politely and clapped golf-course claps for the fireworks; they had a 'make your own boat' race and they all stood gently, quietly smiling and jumping in surprise when the fire truck tooted its horn for the start of the race--even after the polite warning from the emcee. Worlds, worlds away from Lander where the only warning given is to "Get off the street if you don't wanna be sprayed by the fire hoses at the end of the parade," where we still have rocket shells on our roof at Cross St. I leave them there for fun.
Sidney, BC, like other San Juan Islands, has a marina-world, which is an alternate universe that has its own protocols and cultural mores, but nevertheless, has a more Canadian feel. It was quiet. Even the hoods who pulled up in their overly powerful, faded-red speedboat were polite and quiet.
Like Aussies and Kiwis, Americans and Canadians can hear the slight difference in accent. I bet few others can. There is a little of the Scottish expression left in Canadian English. Eh?
Like Aussies and Kiwis, Cannies have dollar and two-dollar coins. Canadians had the great idea to call their dollars "loonies" for the loon on the coin, and of course, the two-dollar coin is a "twoonie." Maybe Aussies could call theirs "funnies" and "twunnies" for the funnel web spiders. Kiwis could call theirs "hobbities" and "twobbities."
Victoria, though, has widened my view of Canada. It has the beautiful-and I mean beautiful--castle-like structures of Ottawa, but these aren't lost in some city sprawl or depressing weather...the castles reign over a sparkling port where we saw the biggest private sailboat I have ever seen. The thing was probably 150 feet long and the mast soared into the air to about three stories high. What on earth do you need that thing for? Despite that disgusting excess, the city seemed planned with humanity in mind, and whimsy. They had plants shaped like Orca whales, a little white, weedy flower the spouting water. Cuteness.
I had some delightful moments with my dad, working mentally on his book, someday to come out, What Not to Wear or Dressing for Dummies. We saw some teenage girls who made shirts with red hands right on the front and I hope--and hope not--that you can picture it for yourself. We said, "That's an example of what you will someday be ashamed to have worn. Anywhere." We all have these skeletons. On the other hand, there was a very sweet older couple who were dressed in a classic, muted way amidst the sea of red and white t-shirts and red maple-leaf hats. The only clue they were celebrating was the man's shoelaces tucked neatly into the holes of his dress shoes: bright red. They obviously had loved each other for a lifetime. Wealth.
Back at the marina, our boat was on the small side. There's some major money bags out there, and they seem to congregate on marina docks, with their fine china and Provencal tablecloths be-decking their portable table next to their sleek ship with tinted portholes and shiny blue and white paint.
Part of these San Juan islands is now a playground for yachts and wealthy people who have summer homes. The man who owned one private rental dock on Orcas owns a whole island: Speiden Island. It was once owned by another rich person who decided (dumb) to make it a private hunting ground, and (dumber) brought in lions and tigers. Of course the deer and everything that could swam off the island, and the neighboring island people protested the presence of large predatory cats that belong in their native habitats in Africa...and the abuse of the poor things. If you see Speiden, you'll know it was really more like firing squad exercise than a hunt. Dumbest.
But weird, or apple pie American, or muted Canadian, wealth is part of the islands now. It is no longer a frontier, culturally, no longer a bereft outpost on the ends of the earth. Where taverns once stood, Marmalade Tart Boutique tantalizes teenagers with complex outfits. I wondered about this title for a clothing store, by the way. Is it a sly, subtle pun for Jam Slut Clothes, or what?
Helene Glidden, who lived on Patos in the early 20th century, or Ed Lavender, might not recognize it all now. But there it is...things change.
I think the poor-to-rich spectrum is relative. I mean, if you are kind of lower middle-class in the US or Canada, with the same possessions and salary, you'd be considered rich in parts of India. If you are rich in Australia, you'd probably be considered rich anywhere except London or maybe even Sydney. Sydney can drain you dry in a matter of hours...$148 for a 'family savings pass' to the zoo; $38.00 high tea per person at the middling-quality Tea Room at the QVB; I won't even talk about rents. It all made us feel seriously crazy sometimes. London might be worse. The Empress Hotel in Victoria was the worst, though: $59 per person for afternoon tea.
So there's the spectrum of poor-rich that changes depending on where you are: but there is a common, global understanding of 'rich' which you can find in ancient cultures like Afghanistan, that I think holds true even with the shifting spectrum. The sarwatman is the rich man, and he is the man who has enough to get what he wants, to live in his own world, a world that doesn't have the same limits or even laws. In Afghanistan, the poor always resent the rich for this reason, this seemingly super-human ability to create an alternate universe, almost a place in which the punishment of Adam ('you shall bring food out of the ground by the sweat of your brow') is overcome.
Every community has the sarwatman, on their relative spectrum, and Orcas is no exception. One of these was a man named Robert Moran, a Seattle shipbuilder who did, in the beginning, sweat for his success, but by the time he came to Orcas, he was fully capable of building a retreat, Rosario, that still holds the mystique of one man's realized vision of how he'd like to live. "Rosario" is named after "Rosario Strait", named by the Spanish explorers here in centuries past. The name comes from "rosarius," the Latin for rosary. There's this lovely, albeit mostly unknown, and forgotten tradition of Catholic culture here. Does a name retain its power when the meaning has been forgotten?
Orcas is shaped like a pair of lungs, or a moth in partial flight. Between the two lungs is East Sound, a long, thin body of water that almost splits the lungs in two. Along the east side of East Sound sits "Rosario's" (as it is called by locals), a beautiful white mansion like a queen on a green throne, her sightless eyes watching the water. She was built around 1905, when Mr. Moran was told he had one year to live (I think he died in 1943, so Orcas must have cured him).
Moran was a Seattle industrial shipbuilder, and the mansion, now a resort but kept almost in original condition, has the feel of a ship: the wood is rich--and impossibly thick--teak; the chairs on the porch look more like heavy, beautiful, deck chairs, and even the glass in some of the windows is more appropriate to a ship's portholes; brass dominates, and the place feels as if it could survive a hurricane; the roof is completely copper, heavy stuff. I bet Moran used extra ship parts and stuff he got from Seattle as a Big Guy on the Scene.
And, a side note: Moran's Seattle, that of the late 1800s and early 1900s, still exists--but underground. Seattle built the new downtown dock area on top of the old one, and you can still take 'underground Seattle' tours and see parts of the old city that Moran knew.
Anyway: Driving out of Eastsound (the town) and through the forest, circling up around Mt. Constitution, you make a right next to the fancy "Rosario" sign. Down, down you go, through flower-studded meadows, along a road that has the red madrona trees bowing over you. The circular drive comes into view, with the old Seattle city lamps standing guard, chained together with battleship-grade chains. It is like entering another world, like entering the imagination of someone who had enough money to make it physical.
Mr. Moran's fabulous organ room and theatre is still operational; the manager of Rosario's has done the organ show almost every Saturday for fifteen years, and he maintains the freshness of a first show, inexplicably. You watch a twenties film version of The Phantom of the Opera while he plays the music, as it would have been done in Moran's day. Around the house, and in the library amongst leather and gilt-bound versions of The Modern Economics of Seabed Organizations, you can still see traces of a man who must have had a will of iron and a drive like a steam train, a man who relished wealth and the beautiful things he could surround himself with because of it.
Moran, like Ed Lavender, owned a lot of Orcas Island. He got his water the Roman way: carefully engineered aqueducts from Cascade Lake, halfway up Mt. Constitution. After a chance meeting with the naturalist John Muir (of California fame) he felt called to donate much of his property on Orcas to: us. Moran State Park is the result, with Cascade and places to jump off rocks, fish, hike, and boat. I have watched our kids go from swimmer diapers on the sand trying out the water with their arms straight up into my hands for safety, to jumping off the little ledge into the shallows after they learned to swim, to swinging fifty feet into the air from a strong old pine tree and dropping twenty into the dark water below, screaming all the while.
Mr. Moran built two twin homes near Rosario's to accomodate his children. Apparently the two wives (daughters or daughters-in-law) were jealous of each other and so Mr. Moran built their homes exactly the same, so there would be no fighting. This makes me wonder about how we are, when we have so much and yet it isn't good enough. The twin houses on the hill have always seemed to me a monument to The Stupidity of Envy Especially if You've Got Way More Than You Need. Maybe I'll sneak a plaque up there sometime.
Mr. Moran got old, and sold to another millionaire who bought the place because he needed somewhere to stash his eccentric wife. Apparently, she is well-remembered in Orcas, maybe because she fits, somehow, that off-the-edge stereotype: She would ride her motorbike into Eastsound daily, in her pajamas, and was a kind of hippie girl...but I imagine Rosario's to have been, for her, a kind of gilded asylum--which the sarwatman can also make, unfortunately, for himself and others.
Somewhere in time after the Eccentric Lady, the place became a resort; it has a marina, it's own electrical plant (Moran liked to be self-sufficient), a two great pools, a snack shop, a pretty good restaurant, and a spa underneath the house, where Moran had built an original spa with Roman-style baths and a bowling alley.
Orcas, thus, has another side to it than the off-the-edge hippie types: it is the people who've been pretty smart with their money, like our friends who were in the automotive parts industry and some successful writers and artists: the writer of Jonathan Livingston Seagull lives on Orcas. In the last fifteen years or so, the retired population has grown tremendously, and many people here are very blessed to be able to summer here, like the Morans once did. These people are why I love going to the second-hand shops in Orcas. You can find some amazing stuff.
I don't sense a huge resentment problem here, though, between the rich and poor on Orcas. Marx would have failed here, most likely. My guess is that the lack of resentment is partly due to the gratitude one so easily feels here, in the natural beauty: everyone on Orcas, maybe besides some imbalanced teenagers (is that redundant?), is in a way, in a group of few who somehow, can live here. My friend, Karen, dreamed for years of moving back to her childhood home, and has finally done it. The gratitude pours out of her about this. She is not a sarwatman, but feels like one.
There are the genuinely poor, and I find that there seems to be a strong movement on the island to help people have homes, like the Opal housing for islanders. I did meet a lady once who was on the verge of homelessness. She was old, and I met her at the Island Market. As I talked to her, she mentioned friends on the island who were ready to help her out at a moment's notice. Long-time locals seem to have a strong network: sometimes I get the sense that there is a deep undercurrent-desire to keep the old-timer, local population on-island, to not let Orcas become just a sarwatman fantasy-land, an inaccessible place for regular people.
There is another universal spectrum, though, a poor-rich spectrum, that does not measure wealth kept in property, but about something else. It is the wealth Socrates was searching for, and the Buddha (the prince leaving his palace is a compelling response to the material spectrum of poor and rich), and the Sufis, kings and queens and common people who have left everything behind in search for a kind of wealth. It is the quest that the Rich Young Man in Christ's parable could not complete, because he was so attached to his sarwatman status. Giving away everything meant, in first-century Palestine (which was much more like modern Afghanistan), that he would cease to have any power at all and become one of the helpless ones in an often brutal culture. I imagine it is why Christ says immediately after "sell all you have" that the young man should "come follow me." The implication of becoming a follower, a receiver, was clear--and the next, clear step was to choose who to follow. The young man did not know it is the greatest of power, to give it away--and follow Christ.
This kind of wealth, and freedom, the alternate universe, is called the Kingdom of God, and it cuts across material spectrums. And for some reason, I think of this every time we pass under the "Moran State Park" arch on the way into Cascade Lake. I do have to admit that I can't resist tweaking it and calling it "Moron State Park" even though, manifestly in a sarwatman sense, Robert Moran was not a moron...and he did the give-away part.
Sometimes, I think, you can see these lessons in physical form in the animal kingdom of Orcas Island, a kind of natural book here about God's call to freedom. The eagle at first seems like the sarwatman. The Native Americans seem to have thought this, because the eagle is usually at the top of totem poles, like the one Don Gerard has on his lawn. We've seen our local eagle spy an otter on the beach, who has just caught a fish. With his size and strength, the eagle just takes the fish, and the otter just steps aside; the eagle has got the equipment, and he doesn't. The eagle lives by pure power. So, the otter just trundles back to the sea to make another attempt. Otters do seem to have a much easier time catching fish, though, so maybe they are the real power behind the throne. Okay, over-thinking again. But the eagles, we discovered when we found their nest in a crooked pine tree above PS Point, are trying to feed two eaglets. The dark, solid-brown things are three times larger than crows. They stand on the side of the nest and practice flying, flapping their enormous wings and hopping on their oddly human-looking calves, hungrily looking for their parents to bring them fish and Don's crab bait. The eagles are just fighting hard to just feed their teenagers, which, for them, like our friends with lots of boys, is no joke.
The little sparrows are the poor. They have this beautiful freedom, though. They fly through the dusky-rose air at sunset, bobbing and weaving to catch mosquitos and small flies: but being weak birds, they are prey to so much around them.
A few days ago, though, we saw the physical manifestation of real wealth: a whole pod of Orca whales swam past our house, their huge, shiny black bodies slicing the water with elegance. They are so graceful that they look like they are going slowly, as their fins make a rainbow-shaped movement through the air: but they are going about twenty-five miles an hour, especially when they dive down and shoot through the water like bullets. The forty or so of them are free, totally free. They live by the grace of God, in their element, searching for the food and family He has written into their hearts. One of them danced out of the waves and slapped the water with it's tail. They speak to each other, call out to the little ones, and it all looks like play and delight in the elements around them.
It is their wealth, a wealth in a kind of freedom to be, simply what they were called to be, without attachment to anything that would turn them, warp them, from that end. They are unconsciously humble. Think what wealth is conscious humility, then, a humility born of love, with a proper end.
Then my dad told me what his fellow-boat-friend said: "Man, Ken, it drives me crazy that I have to dump my boat sewage so far out in the Strait...I mean, think about what a single whale lets out in one dump."
That totally ruined all the elegance for me. Everybody poops: It is the great leveler.
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