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Like loons calling across the water, like Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," the Swinomish Canoe Family hushed the crowd of 150 people as they sang and drummed a blessing prayer, the chorus meandering its way from the majestic totem outside into the La Conner Swinomish Library Saturday afternoon. The building felt just a little more hallowed. And crowded. Whew! There were a lot of people there. The pole, made from a 400-year old western red cedar, carved by Kevin Paul and assisted by his son-in-law...
Olga has continued to provide email updates. She lives in eastern Ukraine. In mid-April no fierce battles were around her. She told me the sirens were less often as Russia concentrated on other areas. “I feel kind of weird because we have regions that suffered way more than we have – mass graves, people tortured and killed house to house, women and children raped, often by groups, animals tortured… . “… children or parents missing and probably never will be found. “In Kharkiv region in the city of Izum there’s a mass grave with over 445 civi...
Olga is offering a glimpse into life in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022. The article last week left Olga at work in Ivano-Frankvisk in West Ukraine. She had just read on social media that Kiev was being bombed. Her dad and brother had left there an hour before to join her 340 miles further west. Olga has asked her family’s last name not be printed for security reasons. Twenty years ago Olga had received a scholarship to study in the U.S. There she met Steve and Jan Paul of Shelter Bay. These quotes and summaries are from e...
This article is taken from edited emails received from Olga in Ukraine to Jan Paul of Shelter Bay. Jan has known Olga for twenty years. For security reasons we are not using Olga’s or her family’s last name. Olga became friends with Steve and Jan Paul of Shelter Bay after winning a scholarship to study in the U.S. for one year. She did not live with the Pauls but visited often and stayed in contact with them through the years. They connected. Olga writes: “Before war there were two kinds of people – those who thought it possible and those w...
Listening to Javier Zamora sing one of his poems at Maple Hall to a Meringue beat during this month’s Skagit River Poetry Festival, you would be surprised to learn he had traveled more than 3,000 miles on foot, by bus and boat, across rivers, deserts, through barbed fences to reunite with his parents. At nine years old. Solito. Alone. Two months of travel, abandoned by his “coyote,” held at gunpoint by a farmer while gulping water from a hose after crossing the Sonora desert, peeing orange, living in cages, his backpack of clean clothes, tooth...
Early morning fog and mist lent a magical twist Thursday to streams of students hauling books from the old to the new La Conner Swinomish Library. The rumble of wheels along Morris Street from carts packed with books began three days of magic – the spell of the written word. Though not part of the Skagit River Poetry Festival itself, it seemed a fitting start. The festival, canceled twice due to COVID-19, brought in dozens of poets from as far away as Argentina and Scotland, hundreds of s...
Linda Clark presented an incomplete narrative of her advocating for and intervening “on behalf of two dogs in town” in 2014 in her guest column “Why I challenged the sale of Hedlin Field” in the Oct. 13 Weekly News. Skagit County Superior Court, Skagit County Sheriff’s Office and Washington state appeals court documents offer a detailed, official record showing that in January 2015 she was arrested, went to trial that October and was convicted on two counts, burglary in the second degree, a class B felony, and taking/injuring/killing pets, a g...
Fire broke out in the La Conner Brewery’s pizza oven around noon Saturday. Within minutes the La Conner Hook and Ladder Department were at the scene, entering the building from First Street and climbing on the roof from Second Street. Fire Chief Josh Morrison said his crew had to “Figure out where the chimney was hot then we had to go to extinguish where it was hot. They were able to snuff out the fire from the top as well as the bottom of the chimney.” Morrison reported “just minor damage,...
“I took him to lunch and said, ‘call this lady,’” recalled Chamberlain’s daughter, Becky. “She said ‘we are going to Japan.’” The American Defenders of Bataan and Corrigedor, a memorial society, had contacted Becky with the invitation. “There were ten of us on this trip.” Said Becky. Chamberlain was the only living U.S. POW among surviving relatives of six other POWs to make the trip. “The only thing they could give him were the dates of his capture and his liberation,” said Becky. There are no surviving Japanese men or guards from that camp....
“When I first heard about returning to Japan, I wanted to say two prayers. The first – to forgive the Japanese for the way the POWs were treated; the second – to pray for my friends who suffered and died there. The starvation, long hours of working in the mines, the beatings and other sufferings were just plain unimaginable. All of these memories were brought back to life as I stood in front of the Hosokura mine for the first time in seventy years. As I prayed my entire body shook an...
La Conner, flooded with poets and students from eight area school districts, hosted the 10th Biennial Skagit Valley Poetry Festival last weekend. The Poets Table Soiree kicked off the event Thursday night at Maple Hall with appetizers, wine and dinner. Random Acts of Food catered it. Hot Damn Scandal broke into song at the elementary school gym – musical poetry – singing their “outlaw ballads, dirty jazz, circus freak outs, shanty-rags, string band funk, lonesome heart-breakers a...
Skagit County Community Emergency Response Team Training begins in January. How prepared are you for a major earthquake or a fire such as the one that ravaged Ventura, Sonoma and Napa Counties this year, with only minutes for many to escape their homes? Emergency response training classes will be held on six Tuesdays and one Saturday beginning Jan. 9 at Shelter Bay Clubhouse, 1000 Shoshone Drive, La Conner. Classes will cover disaster preparedness, fire suppression, disaster psychology, medical operations, terrorism and light search and...
Two hundred people sang, prayed and rallied at March Point, marching for an “Oil Free Salish Sea” Saturday, Oct. 7, a cold, rainy day. “This is to open people’s hearts, eyes, and spirit – to break from fossil fuels,” said Ronald Day from Swinomish, one of the organizers of the event. The scent of cedar, sage, sweet grass, and tobacco gently fanned with an Eagle feather mingled with the sounds of fuel-thirsty traffic on Highway 20. Environmentalists, activists, Greenpeace, kayaktivi...
This lush, alluvial plain we call home, the Skagit Valley, is the site of the 19th Festival of Family Farms this weekend. A dozen farms are participating. Cows, blueberries, shellfish, pumpkins, apples, alpacas, cheese, gardening demonstrations, and flowers – it couldn’t be more diverse. But they have one thing in common: they are farms; farms run by families. Each year, rain or shine, more and more people line up for hayrides, harvesting, music, food, animal exhibits, and more. They a...
Omega-3 essential fatty acids, antibiotics, obesity – are these boring subjects? Maybe not. Three hundred thousand fish, escaping confinement, jumped into the Salish Sea from human-built pens August 19 and sent me on an Internet surfing orgy – only to find there is hot debate over the health benefits of wild fish over farmed fish. Farmed fish are over half of the fish consumed by humans worldwide. Putting more than a million fish in an enclosed pen is analogous to “industrial” chicken farms, containing massive, windowless she...
“You’ll never need another penicillin shot or an anti-biotic the rest of your life – just eat a farmed fish, ”Marcia Dale says. Dale has been “hanging gear” for locals as well as Bristol Bay commercial fishermen for decades and is an avid consumer of wild salmon. And she makes a mean smoked fish. Her sentiments, angry, raging, were echoed over and over by both non-native and native fishermen, sports fishermen and foodies alike since Cooke American’s fish farm near Cypress Island brok...
Julie and Sherry Lennartz weren’t even teenagers when their father, Gene, bought the La Conner Pub & Eatery, called “The Tavern” by locals. Known as Gentlemen Gene, he was an engineer with Boeing when that company had problems in the early 1970s. He moved his family to La Conner, where his wife’s family, the Moores, lived. Grandfather Milo Moore was the Mayor of La Conner as well as the head of the Washington State Department of Fisheries. Earlier, he worked for the United Nations in fisheries i...
The La Conner School Garden now provides more than 30 elementary age kids with an after school Gardening and Cooking Enrichment Class. They spend one afternoon a week of planting, pulling weeds, harvesting and then prepare wholesome food for themselves. Left unattended eight years ago, the overgrown school garden was resurrected by a group of motivated volunteers supported by the La Conner Elementary School PTSA, the La Conner School District, Insight Tree Care, Ace Hardware Anacortes,...
“Cuba is broken,” Gloria says. “Familias’ broken. How will our children take care of us in our old age when they live in America or Europe? We were so hopeful with Obama. Now we are uncertain. I am very frightened.” My taxi is late. I’m headed to Vinales, land of tobacco, Cuban cigars, coffee beans, banana trees and limestone mountains. Gloria, my host in Havana, and I take the opportunity to visit while we wait sitting on her patio in the warm Cuban sun. She tells me how frightened she is for...
ave Viñales land of mojotes — lush emerald-green limestone hills jutting up out of the earth shaped like giant cigars — for Cienfuegos, a seaside town, 337 kilometers to the southeast on Cuba’s Caribbean shores. I step into early morning sunshine, and there is Ibey at my door. She doesn’t generally rise this early, but here she is, tears in her eyes and babbling in Spanish. I catch the word “Fidel” and ask her to repeat. Slowly. The second time I catch the word “muerte,” which...
If you appreciate art, if you are an artist, heck, if you like salsa dancing or tacos, you need to swing by the Museum of Northwest Art by Sunday The current exhibit on the main floor, “Beyond Aztlán,” showcases works of Mexican and Chicano Artists who live in the Pacific Northwest. The show ends Sunday, June 12, so don’t dawdle. It’s worth it. I swung through the museum to take a peek. Then, when I got home, I Goggled “Aztlán” and fell into a rabbit hole. Aztlá...
Maureen Harlan, who was a counselor at La Conner High School, instituted the first organized student exchange between La Conner and Denmark 30 years ago. We scooted our students to Denmark while a dozen kids from Denmark invaded our somewhat prudish, to them, town of La Conner, bringing with them European values and spunky kidishness to open our horizons. While he was in Denmark, La Conner 10th-grader Abe McDonald’s mother, Joreen, died. Abe returned to La Conner for her funeral and then went r...
