breathing room
The history of the South End, as you might of guessed, isn’t written down. It isn’t much of an oral history either … at least til the Band came along. The history of the South End is back in the woods where you’ll find an old hunting shack covered in vines or a homestead with only the privy left intact and a patch of daffodils gone wild. It’s down at Mabana beach where the old Mosquito Fleet wharf is nothin but pilings now or the schoolhouse is a vacation cottage. It’s a mound of dirt up by the neighbors’ barn where cows were loaded or it’s a rusty tin shed where machinery was stored and fixed. It’s a skid road thru a cut in the bluff where the old growth was slid to the beach. It’s a cluster of cabins that once was a resort nobody remembers.
It’s a chunk of blacktop runnin along the bluff – or down the bluff – that used to be the old south end highway. It’s an orchard grown old and lichened and nothin left around it for a homestead. It’s a tree girdled around 50 yr old barbed wire. It’s stumps back in the nettles with the springboard notch still showin. And burnt cedar snags from the great fire of the 1880’s. It’s a Studebaker still driving the blackberry backroads.
There’s clues and hints and a few folks who vaguely remember. Sometimes you’ll find a scratchy photo. Or an old Stanwood News article. The truth is, the history’s gone to rot and rust and ruin. Some folks think that’s a shame. But I’m not one of them.
The South End was a place to start over. America was that way once. History, you think about it, has a way of setting up expectations. Rules. What you can and can’t do. The South End felt like to this old sodbuster, a place to let go of the past, not worship it. We’re all just newcomers here, pioneers in our own minds, and I hope we’ll leave some breathing room for the imaginations of the NEXT immigrants.
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