Osler's Razor

I went to Bellingham, Washington this past weekend. It’s not a big tourist destination, though there are plenty of reasons it should be: A beautiful harbor features ferry service to Alaska, the town sits in a spectacular natural setting, and just to the east lies 10,000 foot Mt. Baker, which features glacial skiing and some of the country’s best snowboarding runs.

I went there to see a garden, up near the woods where some railroad tracks had been pulled up years ago. It isn’t a famous garden, or one you might even notice as you drove by, but I had to see if it was still there.

My grandparents moved to Bellingham in the 1950’s, and bought a house on the shores of Lake Whatcom. They came from Pennsylvania, where my grandfather had failed as a farmer as a young man, taking over an uncle’s farm and trying to support his family after the death of his father. When the crops didn’t come up, he worked as a telegraph operator, learned accounting through a correspondence course, and served in the Army through World War II. He moved with his family to Bellingham for a job, leaving behind almost everything and everyone that he knew. Once there, he and my grandmother dug deep roots quickly. They and their friends started the museum, worked to build up the college (Western Washington) into a University, and took over the ski area on Mt. Baker when it faltered. He went into accounting in the town, and his firm (Metcalf Hodges) is still there.

I lived with these grandparents for a bit when I was 16 years old—I got a job driving a tractor harvesting peas on the nearby farms around the smaller towns of Lynden and Ferndale. Taken out of my little suburban high school world, I saw exactly the way in which my grandparents were good, decent, hardworking people. When I talk about honesty, engagement, and humility in class, it is often their lives I think of.

Later, when I was in law school and after the death of my grandmother, I went up to Bellingham to visit my grandfather, who was suffering from Parkinson’s, and who passed away a few years later. That weekend, it was just the two of us, and he took me to a few events held that weekend which were honoring him—at the museum, at the college—for the role he had played in the community. Before I left on Sunday afternoon, I felt the need to say something about what I had heard people saying, to echo their compliments. I told him in an awkward-grandchild type of way that I was proud of him. He waved that off, saying that he just did what you were supposed to do. But then he said “let me show you what I really am proud of.”

That’s when he took me back through the huge pines to the garden. The space he had blocked out with old railroad ties wasn’t big, and I didn’t see any flowers or fruit on the plants. He stuck a spade into the earth and pulled up a potato. He handed that potato to me, still covered with the rain forest dirt that comes from the death of a thousand ferns. “I can do that,” he said, in a way that was both proud and sorrowful.

I suppose that it mattered because there once was a mother he could not support, when the spade had yielded nothing, sixty-some years before. That through the depression and the war and the struggle to come back and the children and the move to the other side of the world, that moment had been waiting.

That’s why I went to Bellingham. And there is still a garden.