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Tag: Whatcom County

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Libraries and the Homeless

As a trustee of a rural library system, homeless people in libraries is a problem I think about frequently and I can’t say I have anywhere near a complete answer.

Please note that I write here as an individual, not for the board of which I am a member nor for the library itself.

My thoughts go to first principles. Why does a community have public libraries? What good do libraries do the community? How do homeless people fit into the bigger picture of libraries?

The public library as free entertainment

What is the role of the contemporary public library? Free public entertainment? Public libraries certainly do that; the library circulates a lot of fiction, entertaining non-fiction, music, and videos. However, a library also has more serious roles.

Source of useful information

When I wander the library system’s reading rooms, I see most seats taken by students young and old in serious study. Some use the library as a study hall for their high school, college, and other classes. Many use the library’s reference works, which range from books on theology and philosophy to tax manuals and instructions for overhauling farm equipment. I once noticed a person taking notes on pickling cabbage. Yet others are using library computers and network connections. Utilitarian non-fiction is a big part of the library’s circulation. Acquisitions librarians say they can’t order enough cookbooks or books on managing small farms to meet patron’s requests.

Public libraries and education

Well, then, is the purpose of the public library to provide access to useful information? Certainly, but it goes beyond that. Our system has agreements with school districts in our county to provide services directly in the schools. The library system can provide the schools with a wider range of books and other materials than each school district can offer individually. The system’s collection is a public resource that is shared by both schools and the general public. In addition, the system has highly trained and specialized youth and children’s librarians who help teachers with class room projects and offer programs used by home schoolers and private schools.

Community anchors

Often, I hear of public libraries as “community anchors.” Our county’s branches are certainly community gathering places where citizens meet and exchange ideas. Each branch hosts at least one monthly book club. Branches have genealogy, quilting, and writer’s groups. They support the county literacy council in offering individual and group literacy classes and English as a second language classes. They provide archives for artifacts of local history such as old newspapers, letters, and photographs and they help connect people with local history experts and other resources.

The problem of the homeless

Are homeless people a problem? Yes. Our rural system does not struggle as much as urban libraries, but every month yields a handful of incidents that are related to homeless issues. The homeless can be loud, smelly, harassing, and scary. They have been known to use library facilities to view pornography. Staff have found drug paraphernalia. Not just for the homeless, and not an issue yet, but if the opioid crisis continues, I foresee a day when the library starts stocking and training staff to administer Narcan nasal spray. However, to add perspective, I have noticed more gripes from library staff over parents who drop off unsupervised children and treat the library as a free daycare center than I hear about homeless problems.

How we deal with the homeless

The problem is real. A basic tenet of our library policies is that any activity or person interfering with other patrons’ legitimate use of library services will be stopped. That stricture binds in every direction. Homeless persons have as much right to library services as the most affluent contributor to the library foundation. When any person, homeless or not, raises a ruckus— if only by smelling bad, sleeping in a needed chair, or other disruptive conduct— the library staff is trained to take steps, all the way up to calling the police and having the miscreant forcibly ejected and banned from the premises. Their training is to focus on the disruption, not who is disrupting. I have not experienced it, but I believe (and hope) the staff would “trespass” even a library trustee who made trouble in a branch.

As an aside, in keeping with modern library best practices, conversation that does not bother other patrons is not banned. The staff tries to keep teenagers herded together in areas that do not bother the rest of the folks, but non-disruptive talking, warbling, singing, hijinks, and other furfural are all tolerated if not encouraged.

Are these policies enough? No. I repeat, I speak for myself, but the library’s role is to provide services; community anchorage is an important element in those services. Homeless members of the community are still community members and the library anchors them as well as everyone else. By providing promoting useful knowledge and information, the library is contributing to the general prosperity of our county and helping our residents to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. By contributing to the quality of our school system and giving our citizens materials and places for study, the library also contributes to the health of our community. This helps decrease the incidence of homelessness and aids those already homeless in their efforts to surmount their plight. At present, our library doesn’t have any specific programs for homeless, although homeless can and do avail themselves of literacy classes and other self-help programs.

Homelessness probably cannot ever be completely solved. The poor will always be with us, if only because the most prosperous community will always have a least prosperous member. The social service agencies are the vanguard against homelessness, but public libraries can contribute opportunities for every community member to advance in the struggle to thrive and prosper.

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A Man, a Cigar, and a Plymouth

A pear tree planted by Gottlieb Waschke.

I posted this item almost ten years ago and has been one of the most read items in the Vine Maple Studio. I edited it lightly for this repost. I should note that this story is constructed entirely from hazy memories that have passed through several hands. I would not take it as entirely historical.

My great grandfather, Gottlieb Waschke, like most men in the  early 20th century, smoked cigars, but he was not good at driving automobiles.

He had a nickel silver match case with a cigar end clipper and an engraving of a stag on the front. My grandmother said he brought the case from Germany.

After he married off six daughters and more or less established four sons, he bought a Plymouth and drove it around some, but he never learned to drive well. A man with six married daughters was under no  compulsion to drive any better than he felt like, and the state had not gotten around to traffic laws or requiring driving licenses. In photographs, Great Grandpa resembled his fellow Prussian, Otto von Bismarck. My father remembered him as stubborn with unshakable self-confidence, even arrogance. Those traits could not have been mellowed by his success with managing family affairs.

Dad rode with Grossvater in his Plymouth a few times. He overheard the old man muttering “Recht, recht,” and “Links, links” (German for “right, right” and “left, left”) when he wanted the car to turn, as if he were driving his German speaking team of horses. Dad, who was not more than six or seven at the time, said he wanted to laugh, but did not dare.

John Schaefer, a family friend whom I have mentioned before, told me a story about my great grandfather’s driving. One sunny September Friday, when the farmers were in Bellingham shopping, paying bills and selling things, Great Grandpa decided to drive in to town. John Schaefer saw him in his Plymouth on the corner of State (then called Elk) and Holly, a busy spot in town. In its way, as busy as any intersection anywhere. Great Grandpa was stopped waiting for traffic. When traffic started, he popped the clutch and killed the engine. Horns started honking, and one driver, probably having just left one of the taverns that were everywhere before and after 1919, shook a fist menacingly.

John Schaefer was a self-professed no-good at that time, probably just out of one of the taverns himself, was watching from a safe vantage on a bench on the sidewalk, smoking a scant teaspoon of Bull Durham tobacco wrapped in wheat straw paper. John said Gottlieb gave his harassers less attention than he paid to the manure in his barn, took a six-married-daughters stretch, and searched his pockets for a cigar, which he eventually found. With great care, he used his nickel silver match case trimmer on the end of the cigar. The crowd gathered and more drunks got word that something was up. They began to creep out onto the street as Gottlieb trimmed his cigar exactly as he liked it, stopping to test the draw and admire his work.

John began to fix himself another smoke as Gottlieb lit a match. The first match blew out in the breeze before Gottlieb got it up to his cigar. In those days, before the landfills and regrades had leveled and tamed the marshy geography, Elk street was closer to the water than it is now and John said there were a few oysters to be picked up right in town. On a tough day, you could go out on the tide flats and gather a meal, and Jake at the Waterfront Tavern would let you eat it at the bar if you could afford one of Jake’s watery and short nickel beers.

All the old settlers, Gottlieb included, learned to go to the water when food was short, to treat the sulfurous stench of the tide flats as a comfort that could be relied on in hard times. Gottlieb no doubt smelled the tide flats of Bellingham Bay and took comfort as he calmly lit his cigar and took a few fragrant puffs, feeling satisfied that September afternoon.

The horns honked and a few more fists were raised, but John Schaefer pointed out that Gottlieb Waschke was known to have four sons and six sons-in-law, three or four of whom were always ready and eager to take offense, possessed fists like stones, and arms as hard and tough as a vine maple trunk. This thought kept the crowd in check as Gottlieb got a fire burning nicely in his cigar, started his Plymouth, and drove on.

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Logging the Farm

Like most of lowland Whatcom County, the farm was logged late in the nineteenth century. Those early loggers only cut the best timber, using axes and two man crosscut saws to fall the trees and ox teams to pull the logs over skid roads to the Nooksack River.

Fir stump supporting birch trees a century after logging.
Skid Roads

A skid road to the river at Ferndale ran along the south boundary of the farm, parallel to and a quarter mile north of the Smith Road. I don’t think there are any signs of the skid road left now. Skid roads were routes through the woods for hauling logs. Skids were laid across the road a couple feet apart and greased to make the logs slide easier. Ox teams dragged the logs over the skids. The oxen were slow, but they could pull harder and longer than horses and were less prone to injury.

Dad said they were still occasionally hauled logs on the skid road when he was small, which must have been around 1920 or a little earlier, since Dad was born in 1913. He said that his parents kept him away from the skid road because they did not want him to hear the teamsters swearing.

When I was a kid, Dad pointed out a few cedar logs, about four feet long and a foot in diameter that he said were skids on the old skid road. I looked for those old skids the other day, but they must have rotted away to oblivion.

My guess is that the skid road ended just down stream from the log jam that blocked the Nooksack at Ferndale until 1877. A skid road built after 1877 would have no particular reason to end below the jam, but I suspect that the skid road might have been that old, because logging of the lowlands east of Ferndale must have begun well before then. I have not yet found a map showing the skid roads, but I am still looking.

Logging Equipment

The productivity of the old logging shows must have been low compared to today’s chainsaws, bulldozers, and logging trucks. When the old time loggers cut down a tree, they had to choose the trees carefully. They would not touch the lowly vine maple.  The largest cedars and Douglas Firs were too large to handle, so they left them behind. They also passed by trees with too many limbs. They cut the trees ten or twelve feet above the ground to avoid sawing by hand through the thick part of the trunk.

Springboards

The old time loggers used what they called ‘springboards’. These were wooden boards reinforced with iron straps.

Remains of springboard notch in old fir stump. Fifty years ago, the notch was much more distinct.

The logger chopped a horizontal niche into the tree and stuck the end of the springboard into the niche, then stood on the spring board. If they were not past the swell of the trunk, they would chop another niche while balancing on the first spring-board. Using that technique, they could walk up a tree as high as they needed.

Falling Axes

When they had established their perch on the side of the tree, they chopped out the undercut. This was a notch, cut in about a quarter of the diameter of the tree, that would control the direction of the fall. Their tools were a cross cut saw, a double-bit falling ax, and aching muscles.

Falling axes were kept razor sharp. Chopping an undercut could take all day with a sharp ax and there was no time or strength to waste on a dull ax. John Schaefer, who worked in the logging camps, told me that he once saw a faller threaten to punch a swamper in the face when he started to sharpen the faller’s ax with a file. The faller maintained that his ax had to be sharpened on a stone and would be ruined by a file.

Triumph of the Logger

Falling a big fir could take days of chopping and sawing balanced on narrow spring-boards. When a tree finally fell, it must have been gratifying, a triumph of human will and patience over the massive passivity of nature.