Tiny Towns on a Drizzly Summer Day

 I keep to my old pharmacist in Sumas because 1. The man is professional, kind and knows his shit, and 2. He saved my husband's life not once, but twice.  Both times from fatal drug interactions. (When you live in the ass end of nowhere, your town doesn't attract those A students from Harvard Med.) 

Anyway, this gives me a chance to get out of Bellingham and back out into the wilds of Whatcom County. And man, is it wild out that way lately!  Due to an unusually chilly, rainy Spring and early Summer, the plant life is coming up tall, green and rank.  It's like driving through the Willamette Valley, and it smells glorious, unless someone is spreading manure.  Then not so much.

Feed corn foreground, random farm being encroached upon by blackberries center, a metric shit-ton of mountains and foothills rear.  Mt. Baker was hiding in the clouds, but it's there. Really.

Here we are way out in the middle of nowhere, and here are some cows.  Nice.

   I got way down in the weeds to nab this picture of super chunky baby corn so you'd better appreciate it.

   The nearest little town to Sumas (that still stands) is a 'twinned' town:  Everson/Nooksack.  We have a lot of twinned towns in Washington and I have no idea why.  I've been told that the E-N split came about because of an unpopular property tax.  The people decided that rather than get over themselves, they'd just that divided the town along the main street. Everything North became Nooksack, everything South, Everson. Each side paid the tax of their choice. I would have chosen to pay no tax whatsoever, myself, but this all happened way back in the 1800's when people were drunk a lot of the time.

This is the main street of Nooksack:

Yup. That's it.  Two blocks. A molasses company (of all random things) and a coffee hut on the right, and two blocks of old, old cement and brick storefronts on the left. They have an elected mayor and city council and baby and all. 

Yeah, all the roads out here look like this, and most are worse.  It's because everything in this end of the Fraser River Valley floodplain floats on a thick layer of clay, and the ground shifts enormously. They dribble a little hot tar on the cracks all year long and hope for the best.

This ^^^ is Rodreguez Auto, where we used to take all our business.  Did they run fast and loose?  Yes. 'Cash only' got you all the favors.  You did not ask why. They did not tell you.

Notice how the building is leaning out toward the road.  This road and this town are sinking, is why. 

Out here where you don't go nark on your neighbors to Code Enforcement, how you deal with subsidence is up to you. When the foundations and floors of these places rot out, they just lift the buildings up, build a new foundation atop the old one, and lower the building down on that, or, like Rodreguiz, build four steps down from the sidewalk to the floor inside.  The tan building on the far left has four layers of foundations, like stripes going along the lower walls inside - and each layer is below grade. Presently it sits on a row of dry-laid cinderblocks covered in a skim coat of pool cement on the outside so as not to attract attention.

See the hint of aquamarine to the right?  That is...

The mighty Three Flavors Restaurant of which legends sing   

Now listen - I'm serious here.  Only cool people can know about this place, OK? so don't go spreading it around.  This is the BEST restaurant in the county. I do not exaggerate nor do I lie.  Nobody knows about this place unless they live in a six-mile radius.  And the owners work at keeping it this way too.  See the sign in the window that says 'restaurant'? It's because people kept driving past the flat sign, thinking it was the kitchen of a taco wagon. They don't even advertise in the papers. I mean look at the size of this town and you tell me if you'd expect to find fine freakin' dining here.  But here it is - and not a single sunflower, a scrap of chintz or an overpainted rooster statue will you find within. I know, right?   

Of note is the fact that these are the only three wooden buildings left in the 'downtown' area.  Two of them, center and right, are true, back-in-the-day Old West False Front jobs, but the tall parts got sheared off years back by storms, and since false fronts serve no purpose anyway, they weren't worth re-erecting I guess.  There used to be floating wooden sidewalks out front too until the highway department made them take them out (they'd break loose and float out into the middle of the road during floods.)

Now let's travel three blocks down and visit Everson, which also has it's own Mayor, city council, and baby and all, because that'll show those Nooksack bastards!

Boom, here we are in front of the oldest building in town that isn't a farm, barn or outbuilding. 

People still refer to this as the 'new' city hall, and...

...they still refer to this as the 'new' police station.

Are you noticing a theme of poured concrete?  It's because this used to be big timber country.  The fire hazard wasn't so much up in the nearby woods as it was in the enormous timber yards that covered this end of the valley  - and also the astounding number of timber buildings, from houses to one room cabins.  The fires would start in the Autumn and hopscotch from cabin to cabin, sweeping across this whole end of the valley (unless you had a good pump and were near a creek, which explains the few survivors from that time.) Imagine if you had a business, how sick you'd get of rebuilding shit every November.  Because this was very prosperous country - until after WWII - smart businessmen built in cast as soon as the money came in from the first insurance settlement. Most of these cement buildings have been built back many times over the years, starting from an empty, charred concrete box. Yup. 

Here is a shot of the old Main Street of Everson:

Six blocks of businesses, about 2/3 of them occupied.   

And here is a shot of what people with too much at stake to sell out are still engaged in doing, going on nearly two years after the big flood:

We're still in downtown.  This place is in the middle of an old creek channel that was re-routed in the late 1800's by the Canadians (it's just behind me.) This house had endured decades of mild flooding, but after this last big one, they've raised the sills ten feet off the ground and built a 'flow through' foundation.  I guess if ya gotta stay, ya gotta plan for the future.  These folks own the little nine-hole golf course behind - note the faded sign - and a lot of land around town.  They've cast their lot.  I can't say this is a bad decision either. Adapt, migrate or die, man.  

Right next door we have this place.

This place was flooded FIVE FEET DEEP for over a week. See that stripe below the big windows?  That's where the siding is still missing - the current tore the boards off.  Once those waters went down, the owners just scraped out the mud, gave it a fresh coat of paint, and moved back in - the same thing that most people in Sumas, Nooksack and Everson have done. This is a Sears house too, so it was built between 1910 and 1940.  It's been flooded out many, many times since it's been built. Imagine what's going on inside those walls, and under those floors. Imagine what's been growing in that old horsehair lath and plaster behind the wallpaper.

Here we are in downtown Sumas, 2023.  In the very center of this picture you can see a pointy evergreen tree sticking up above that red car.  Everything beyond that point is Canada.  There are a few odd collections of towers and grey circles in the background - that's all microwave shit for border security, and the tall pole with the box on top to your left is a spy cam. Roughly five city blocks (about 15 Sumas city blocks coming in at 118,500 square feet per. You're welcome.) of businesses and homes, about 3/4 of which are occupied, which is a freakin'  miracle.  Now for the parade of New Foundations:

Four feet high

Three feet high

Four feet high, with flood debris in the foreground

Six feet high with flood debris and fill in foreground

Three feet high    

I have about ten more pictures but one assumes your ass gets the point. Depending on what little pothole you live it, or how long you intend to live in Sumas, those new foundations run from three to seven feet high.  Yes I hollered at people and asked.

Ever run into Old West town names like "Unsolved Murder Corners" or "Incest Corners" and wondered what the hell they meant by 'corners' and why there were so many little towns with the same name?  Well, here's one.

"Corners" means it's on a four-way intersection. Welcome to Hinote's Corners.

I've heard that this was a place where walking trails crossed and the different NA bands would gather and trade.   After awhile some dude named Hinote bought a farm near here, and the locals got together and chased out the Red Man so Manifest Destiny could play out. Hinotes has grown a surprising amount over the past twenty years and now has the potential to be a town, but for now it's just a tiny, two-block cluster of random small businesses.

When people say Hinotes Corner this gas station is usually what they mean. For ages this was the only business here. 

Nowadays, this is the Mexican gas station. Right behind me is the white gas station, because that's the way shit is out here.  The Mexican gas station put their donkey planter right out front too, so everyone gets it, and there it is by the white door.  They have a minimart and sell ice, propane (and propane accessories) vapes, bongs, hotcase, firewood, bait and a whole wonderland of Mexican and Hindi tchotkes.  They also have a restaurant kitchen for their taco wagon business on the side of the building:

They do nothing but bank money all day long.  

How does the other gas station stay in business?  They have local contracts. They fix Dakotas, Range Rovers and Cadillacs.  They sell a little gas too, but good luck rousting a jockey if you get out of your car and you aren't the right color.  You're expected to know what that donkey planter means.  No shit.

I could have gone into this in greater depth with better pictures but I didn't so suffer. Well...nah, I should be humble. I'm still getting used to taking pix with this camera and I must have dropped it about 50 times and taken all the images of my fingers and the side of the car and it was a huge mess.  I promise I'll do better next time!