Once upon a time there was a little town by a big ocean. It was a wise little town. Long ago it had looked at its dunes and beaches, its big trees, its marsh where the red-wing blackbirds sang, its little streets and little grey shingle shops and houses, and said: This is all good. My people like me, my visitors like me, and I like me. This is what I am and this is what I want to be.
Busy people kept coming to the little town and scolding it. You are foolish, they said. You don’t understand progress. You don’t even have neon! There are no corporations here! We will bring you golden arches and make you rich!
No, thank you, said the wise little town. My people own my shops. People come to me because they like those shops, and because at night my streets glimmer very softly in the dark.
But busy people kept coming to the town and scolding it. Look at you! they said. All these little funky shingle houses! You should be ashamed. You need immense houses.
What for? asked the town.
For rich people, said the busy people. People like us. We cannot live in funky cottages with gardens. Let us tear these down and build many immense houses, surrounded by immense rocks, and then everyone will see you are a town of rich people and admire you immensely.
I see, said the little town, and it thought about this. It thought long and hard. It had no objection to rich people. Rich people had done it a lot of good, over the years. But then, so had not-rich people.
My people, thought the little town, whether they are artists or cleaning maids in motels, whether they work or are retired, whether they live here or come here whenever they can, all have a big love for me, a big love for the grey houses, the quiet streets, the great beach, the marsh where the blackbirds sing. My houses are little, but my people are big. I wonder if making the houses bigger might make the people smaller? And how will immense houses fit my little, quiet streets? Do I want to be rich, or do I want to be what I am? Do I want to be admired, or do I want to be loved?
The sea of course paid no attention to such foolish questions, and the blackbirds had nothing useful to say. All the little town could do was ask itself, and hope that it was wise enough to find the answer to its question. It was not a little question, and the answer would not be a small one, either.
— This piece of writing was read by the author in 2002, shortly after the spring equinox, at the Surfsand Resort Ballroom in Cannon Beach. It was first printed with Ursula’s permission in the winter of 2003, inked into the pages of a funky local newsletter called the Cannon Beach Citizen (which preceded a newspaper of the same name). Some of the same folks reprinted it here.
O’ dear.
I love Mrs Le Guin’s books and writings -and I love and have lived in Cannon Beach but my response to this might come out a little differently thus.
“As the little town grew but ostensibly remained the same -at least to most visitors-, it became a little complacent and even kinda self-important in it’s determination to stay corporate-free and a catchment area for creative individuals from all directions.
So it let a lot of people who worked for powerful corporations in the big cities start buying the small, funky, shake houses, guided by those who sold them it’s small coastal-friendly shelters, open art galleries and souvenir shops by the multiple square yard, boutiquize the one pub that formerly hosted -on a barely safe, beer-stained floor- spontaneous jam sessions, to the point that many of the original inhabitants who made it what it was, couldn’t afford to live there any more, even most of those who worked at City Hall, the little town’s nuts, bolts and lubricant.
So the little town became rich in spite of itself and it’s self-awareness and morés.
It used some of it’s wealth well -an innovative and much-hailed eco-friendly wastewater treatment plant that sent the increasingly absent inhabitant’s and increasingly present and numerous visitor’s organic by-products to the big, uncaring but omnipresent sea, supported the visual arts, music and letters, a museum and community arts program.
But it seemed to have been organically separated from it’s “funky”, moss-drenched, fish-scale-like, gnarled and spray-blasted distant and recent past, and was providing a fleetingly ephemeral home for those who are able to live anywhere, bless the little town with their absence but increasing exert their econo-political influence.
The little town still has no Yellow Arches, Southern Colonel motifs nor Neon faux-food signs but it has been quietly usurped by the rather predictable and uniformly-behavioral people that own these chains and many other monopolist behemoths as well as their senior sheeple -but much has been lost in the transition.”
I hope that the little town isn’t gettin’ too smooth around it’s edges.
But there’s always the venerable “Wavecrest” currently in good and caring, fun and friendly hands for those who, like Narnia, care to seek or stumble on it for a true taste of timeless, unostentatious hospitality and down-to earth comfort of a community kind that was the little town’s essence.
A wee bit of context may be in order.
Jennifer and I were at the Surfsand Resort Ballroom, eleven Springs ago, when Ursula read this piece during a signing event for her book “Searoad.” There was a raging debate at that time over the proliferation of huge houses on small residential lots. Nature was being squashed under fat boxes, McMansions replacing cottages as the norm. Ursula drew up a deep creative view of what was happening, and her voice reverberated in our hearts.
Today the squashing habit continues with the spread of big box commerce on the coast. There is still reason to affirm — amid such displacement — that small is beautiful. What remains of funky local life is worth preserving.
Beloved thanks to Ursula for allowing her words to be published here and in Hipfish.
Ursula, I love the way you leave the ending up in the air. How a town evolves is not a little question or answer. It is the answer posing more questions, which beget more answers, ad infinitum. The discussion can be raucous and loud at times, and very quiet at others.
What is important, which Watt and Brian elude to, is that the little town is connected to the wider world, and in particular to the Upper Left Edge of Oregon. The questions and answers reverberate in the surrounding communities, making the discussion even more raucous and profound.
I wish the little town all the best in its evolution. It has inspired not only you, but many others, to write lovingly of it, and to live in and visit it. I’ll be there today to get some inspiration myself.
Let the discussion continue!
Two and a half years ago, after 30 years of separation, I returned to the lands where I grew up as a young lad. For three decades I had been haunted, sometimes nightly, by a siren-like beckoning to return to that place. Dreams so real that I would eventually awaken, disturbed and confused at my new surroundings, hearing the failing sounds of a night cuckoo or western magpie replaced by a modern alarm clock.
Fixed in a mental image drafted over the first 15 years of my life, Perth Western Australia had so many wild areas to explore and enjoy. In 2010, I witnessed that it has now succumbed into a neon and concrete cacophony of commercial bilge. Sure, there are preserved areas of tranquility, but they are more like tiny caged creatures shivering in frightened terror while harboring in small corners amid the clanking grandeur of human occupation.
“No,” said the town. For in wisdom, it learned from the mistakes of others that there is more than one type of riches…
Dear Ms Le Guin:
Thank you for your article that speaks to my heart. Eight years ago my husband and I bought a 800 sq ft beach cabin from a woman named Evelyn, that was 87 years young. Evelyn told us her main concern in selling was that somebody would tear down her beloved cabin, and build a huge house. I assured her I’d never tear down her cabin, and the size and 1950s charm was why we wanted it. I truly feel honored to be the one maintaining this place. Thank you for your article that will be shared with our beach guests. See you at GET LIT.
Debbie Gardiner
Thanks Ursula,
“Cottage … garden … sea … blackbirds.”
Stirred gently — a happiness reminder.
Thank you, Ursula, for the beautiful salute to small towns engaged in the noble struggle to maintain their integrity and soul.
I grew up dividing my time between a small town in the Endless Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania, part of the Appalachian chain, and New York City. The guardians of the little town were exquisite maples with fissured bark and stained-glass leaves, mountains worn to supple curves by millennia, and pocket lakes that the valleys clutched like fingers wrapped around nuggets of amber. Then there were the smaller sentinels: the grasses with their crowns of silky seed-stars, cabbage butterflies flitting, goldfinches turning sunlight to song.
Over the years, wealthy people from New York City and New Jersey purchased lots around the lake where my brother and I lived out the scruffy glory of our childhood. They erected monstrosities my brother (who still lives there) calls trailer homes for the rich: vast in size but cookie-cutter in their design and chintzy in their materials. Palatial motorized barges made stately cruises around a lake too small for them. The new residents insisted on poisoning the water lilies that supposedly made the lake too mucky for wading. Our town, and especially this lakeside community, gave away its heart.
I’m sure the endemic poverty of the area drove folks to sell their homes, eventually producing an exclusive community where they could no longer afford to live. Still, the town’s heart transplant–cardboard or Styrofoam replacing earth and trees–grieves me.