By Mike Ivaska
What does it mean to be “from” somewhere?
Do the places we are from still exist? If so, in what sense? And if not, should it matter?
Like any good, self-respecting longtime Islander, I have been known to wax philosophic about the way Vashon “used to be.” Even as I sat to write this article in my favorite coffee shop (Cafe Luna, of course!), another patron and I began discussing the history of businesses on the Island – including the relatively long history of the coffee shop itself.
And as our conversation trailed off, I was forced to laugh at myself. Why does all this “how Vashon used to be” matter to me? Why are we longtime Islanders like this?
I was recently sent a brief article that argued geography has four dimensions – length, width, height, and time. The author was trying to argue that places also have times. For himself, an expat, the America he was born in no longer exists. It existed, and it exists in his memory. But the present geographical region wherein he was born and once lived is now a different place. The name is the same, but the reality has changed, having succumbed to that unstoppable fourth dimension.
The author, I’m sure, was making social or political commentary, though it was not explicit in the piece. But he did get me thinking. Was he right? It was a rhetorical argument, of course. He knew that when we speak of geography, we speak of places and not times. Just because a place has changed, that doesn’t mean it’s not still that place in some sense. If I paint my house, it doesn’t stop being the building where I live.
In his book, “The Land,” Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggeman explores the ambiguity of place in the Bible. A loss of place is first of all tragedy. Think Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden. The promise of place grants us hope. Think elderly Sarah and Abraham wandering through the Promised Land. But the possession of place is a mixed blessing. What begins as excitement can devolve into apathy. What begins as gratitude can devolve into selfishness. In the language of the Bible and of faith, what begins as a blessing can devolve into temptation and sin.
Over the decades I have lived on Vashon Island, my emotions have run the gamut. I remember the childhood excitement when my family first moved here. I had never lived somewhere so beautiful and wild. Going through my teen years, Vashon was both the place that defined me and the place I swore I would one day leave and never return. In my young adult years “in the city,” it was the town I yearned for and longed to return to. And in the decades I have been back, it is the town I have come to grumble about as it’s changed.
In biblical terms, the Island has been my Garden of Eden, my Egypt of slavery (the teen years!), the Promised Land of my wandering, and the ambiguously treated (by me) place of abode. My temptation and sin, perhaps, have been to live as though this place has been mine.
So, do the changes Vashon’s gone through mean that this Island is now some other place?
Well, for starters, the Vashon of my memories is partly a myth. It glows with the golden light of selective memory. And if change and new faces means a place is no longer that place, then my own family’s arrival to the Island forty years ago means we destroyed Vashon for someone else, too.
Having said that, of course, there really have been some beautiful things about Island living that are no longer true. Or, perhaps, they are no longer true for me. The quiet refuge experienced by others feels loud and busy to me. Familiar names and faces are gone. The businesses have changed. The cost of living is high. But I deny, contrary to that article my brother sent me, that time has completely erased the place that I love. The fourth dimension has done its work, but place is still place. Home is still home.
One of the ways I have learned to experience Vashon again is to see it through the eyes of those who are experiencing it for the first time. True, for some our Island is merely a product. A thing to be bought and consumed. But for others, it’s the paradise I once knew – and continue to know in my better moments, when I quiet my own soul just enough.
Above all, I have been gifted to experience this place through my child.
I still remember, in one of my grumpier seasons of thought about the Island, driving through town with my family. I was being, quietly to myself, the grouchy middle-aged man I’ve sometimes become.
“This place has changed.”
“That restaurant is gone.”
“I liked it more when things were like __.”
But as we approached the main intersection, going past some of the new places to eat and seeing some more and less familiar faces walking around, my daughter spoke from the back seat.
“I love Vashon,” she said.
And I realized, she was getting to see for herself – for her own generation, in its own iteration – the Vashon that I’ve always loved.
