He is particularly chagrined at the Chamber of Commerce's smarmy-farmy revisionism. "Either deliberately or through ignorance, they've never capitalized on the internationally renowned artists who shaped the psychological contours of the town," he says. "Tugboat towns are a dime a dozen. That this was an intersection of art and fishing and farming is what's interesting and unusual and singular to this community." Yet aside from the "surprisingly good" Museum of Northwest Art, and a few good galleries, "Art is out of the equation."
Across the street from the museum and definitely in the equation is the Thomas Kinkade "signature gallery," a top-selling store that is part of a California chain. It sells pricey original paintings of hyperrealistic views of Carmel, New England, Paris, or "canvas lithographs" with textured reproductions of the artist's "actual brush strokes."
Alice Wheeler
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The Tulip hordes are better managed than in the past. "The haphazard, unstructured mishmash we were living with," says Everton, "was getting worse every year, and we needed to create some sort of order." The Festival Committee responded by spreading events to other towns, providing shuttle buses and parking. The by-product, of course, was even more commercial involvement. The Town Council gives $2,000 a year to the Tulip Committee, and Bob Raymond and the Livables don't like it, "nor the fact that the Town [Council] gives the Chamber of Commerce $25,000 each year from hotel/motel money to support . . . efforts to attract more people." The Tulip Festival is run by neighboring Mount Vernon, who stole the county seat from LaConner in 1884. Some people are still mad about the theft and view the festival as an evil insinuated upon them by the old enemy.
Council member O'Donnell is a former mayor and a number-cruncher who charges through LaConner town politics astride a loose but well-primed cannon. A real estate agent who sides with the Livables, he argues that if you subtract extra costs for police, firefighters, signage, and trash removal from the April sales-tax spike in income, it's only a break-even proposition for the town. He did the math once and found that if each resident gave the town $2.37, "we'd not have to have the Tulip Festival at all."
Many would pay in a minute, but it wouldn't work. Geographically, LaConner is in the direct path of the tourist tsunami no matter what Mount Vernon does. Most accept this inevitability; for some, tourism's worth the trade-off. Jacques Brunischold, a teacher at the high school says, "We have nice restaurants, my kids can find summer work. To me, that's better than a town where the dogs run free but is otherwise dead."
Mild damnation can be heard in the faint praise of publisher Fred Owens, who writes the idiosyncratic and intermittent newspaper the Puget Sound Mail. "Tulip time," he says, "looks pretty good compared to the war in Yugoslavia."
Everybody agrees on one thing, though: There are seasons to life in the Skagit and the bloomin' hell of tulip time is but one. Kris Molesworth, Northwest Bookfest director, thinks a lot about the lives of tulips while commuting to Seattle from her Skagit home. Her favorite part is midsummer, when they dig up the bulbs to let them ripen on top of the dirt in potato sacks. "The effect of hundreds of lumpy sacks," she says, "arranged in rows, casting long shadows from the late summer sun, is remarkable, quiet, and mysterious, unlike the blooming season."
Tom Robbins sums it up: "Tulips don't offend people; people offend people."
