The Caring Community by Arthur S.

Langlie There is something in the human spirit that has an affinity for the land. In the early years of the twentieth century, the land in Kitsap County was remote, mostly unsettled, with few homes and gardens for sustenance. Travel was by small boat, row boat, canoe, or steamer. The idea of living in Kitsap County and commuting to Seattle or any other urban area on a daily basis was unthinkable. When the little steamers began to appear on Puget Sound, the possibility of escape from cities began to be seriously considered. Tiny communities with screened porches suitable for summer months only - began to appear at Agate Pass, Fletcher Bay, Port Madison, Keyport, Poulsbo and wherever else a steamer could dock. Those communities fed the human desire to escape - if only briefly - from city life and to allow a return to the land and rural life. Part of this escape was attributable to the great mystery of the American West and the plains, mountains, forests and inland waters of the Pacific Northwest. Real estate promoters saw the value of promoting "a piece of ground of your own" and the operators of the mosquito fleet saw the opportunity and necessity, of generating freight and passenger traffic. When I came to Indianola in 1936, at the advent of my 6th summer, Indianola was a land far away and a place for the generation of a small boy's dreams. In the four summers that followed, Indianola became that magical playground which had no boundaries for an active boy. My visits to Indianola in the forties and fifties, I perceived that Indianola had not changed much, if at all. But that was because of the narrowness of my perceptions and my insensitivity to the onslaught of time. For instance, the first steamboat I ever loved, Hyak, was burned for her scrap metal at Richmond Beach. The car ferries came up from San Francisco in 1935 and the Indianola pier was widened to two lanes to accommodate automobile traffic. With cars came the asphalting of roads. A lot of my boyhood had quietly slipped away without me having noticed. The steamers didn't come to Indianola anymore, and then the ferries didn't either. The screened porches began to disappear as the summer homes became year around homes and were remodeled for fall, winter and spring. One of my great icons, Amos Pickrell, died and gone was his magnificent sense of humor, timing and his impish wit. Still, there were some things that remained the same. There were still the openings under the clubhouse where some of us remembered Herbie Cross would arrest us and "put us in

jail." There were still the apple trees that could be raided by small boys in season with impunity. Most of the fathers in the early June got ready for the fishing derbies and hoped to win a two-horse Evinrude, or a pair of wading boots, or a tackle box. I took scary trips to Point No Point with my Dad and was terrified when one of the Princess liners came by and threw a wake that was at least six feet high (which seemed to me to be twenty feet high) in those days. Still the Loughery boys would come down the road in phalanx with their broad shoulders and huge arms, honed from working in the saw mills and bucking logs. We waded barefoot in Indianola Creek and Kitsap Creek and caught pogies in Kerr-Mason jars. In the sixties, now thirty years or better, my perceptions being much sharper and mature and my views of Indianola more extensive, I noticed that our "dock" had dramatically deteriorated. The second car lane was gone. The planking was seriously rotted. The railings were loose, the pilings were broken or missing. The magic of the spit at Miller Bay was disappearing with development. The staple outboard motor - the Johnson 5 horse, the Evinrude 3 and a half and for the boys we looked down on - the Waterwitch - were being replaced with 25 horsepower Johnsons and more. Good wood to build rafts was hard to find; most of it had gone into beach fires and logs were getting scarcer on Puget Sound and didn't seem to be able to escape from booms as easily as the did before. The "gold mine" that some of my friends and I used to work at the clay bank had seriously eroded away by winter storms. The clubhouse had acquired a fire truck which lived in a specially constructed garage, destroying what had been a more balanced architecture. Suddenly, like dandelions, street signs began to spring up, saying words such as stop, yield, no parking, and fire lane. By the 1970s and 80s, I became aware that Indianola was fast becoming a commuter town - there was a daily exodus of smell automobiles. My vision of the fathers coming up the dock in platoons having disembarked from Hyak or Kehloken was no more. Was the Indianola of my childhood gone forever? Were all those days of mid-century forever lost, never relived again? Would Indianola never again be "far away" and never again a place of refuge? Or just a suburb or a satellite from the I-5 corridor. Shortly after the Agate Pass bridge was completed, the last ferry left the pier at Indianola. It was the end of an era. A delegation of seniors from Indianola had gone to Olympia to complain to Governor Langlie about termination of ferry service to Seattle. He listened patiently and at the end of the meeting said that he understood their irritation, but that in years to come the people of Indianola would be grateful. I sided with the delegation from Indianola because I loved the boats. My father had a longer view, and time has proved him right.