Passports
I recently renewed my passport and got all the necessary documentation, photos, fingerprints, police records, everything … so I could enter the North End without sneaking across the borders. It’s not as difficult as sightseeing in North Korea, but then again, getting through those gated communities and roads closed to the public is no cakewalk in Pyongyang.
Most of the time we can drive the main road to the Plaza without inspection units or impromptu roadblocks. After all, they want our business. The Plaza is a strip mall that replaced the Hopkins family store awhile back, an iconic little mom and pop whose main draw was crab bait, mostly turkey and chicken parts crawling with E-coli and hopefully unsalable as edible food products. The new Plaza IGA still carries crab bait, a nostalgic nod to the glory days of a maritime North End. And the hardware store annex has crabpots and gear for the weekend Dungeness warrior. Down the mall there’s a good drugstore, a salon and the empty storefronts of a what were the upscale kitchen boutique, the old Copy This/Snail That and the video store before Netflix saved movie addicts that hellish trip of three or four miles. Or ten for folks by me. Many an entrepreneur has broken a bank account on the promise of ‘Camano’s HomeTown Store’, the Plaza’s motto. The SeaGas Art Gallery has been replaced by another real estate office, no doubt fueled by rental income from the ever morphing mall. But the gas station with its oil and lube bays and high priced convenience store waiting open-jawed seems to plug along year after year, a testament to the old motto for Camano : ‘The Island YouCan Drive to’. If you want to leave, you’ll need gas. And they’re the main station for most folks who neglected to fill up where prices were more competitive off island.
The North End, for all its chest pounding, might have higher real estate prices than us who live a day’s drive from the Reach of Rome, but when it comes to commerce, we’re pretty much all in the same leaky boat. We lost Tyee Store, but they’d already see Utsalady Store shuttered and razed. Terry’s Corner Commons took a run at being the next Gilmore Village, but now most of its commerce has gone the way of the galloping gooeducks.
Most of us down here wouldn’t need passports if we traveled off island by boat — the way the folks before us did. But to reach the fabled city in the sewage lagoon, the closest metropolis with fast food chains and even more ‘HomeTown’ businesses just over the new bridge that doesn’t charge a toll (at least not yet), we really haven’t got much choice. It is, after all, the ‘Island You Also Need to Drive Off of’.
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