The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back 40 years ago the tulip fields of Skagit Valley looked like a Mondrian abstract, geometrically colorful grids laid out with Mt. Baker in the background, a photographer’s wetdream. A few folks rolled up from the cities, braving the weather and us locals, but not so many the farmers took notice. Like a lot of innocent beauty in this world, the Chamber of Commerce decided to, well, what we refer to today as ‘monetize’ those candy colored flowers. Organize, advertise, centralize — monetize! The town’s surrounding the fertile fields in the Skagit floodplain joined forces, hoping the next flood would be human.

Fast forward a few years and picture rural roads gridlocked with urbanites in cars, tour buses, on bicycles, all stopping to take foolproof colorful photos of glorious fields of tulips in perfect rows of reds and yellows, purples and pinks, with weathered barns leaning toward the Cascades. Traffic came to a halt, the highway off the interstate would be backed up like a concert crowd in an amphitheater or a football game downtown. The farmers couldn’t get a tractor or a truck through, residents couldn’t get out of their driveway, schoolbuses became prisons of trapped kids who wouldn’t get home until dark.

Success! Well, for the Chambers of Commerce and the restaurants and the art galleries and the nurseries. I drove through the fields yesterday thinking it was too early for the mobs. I got home today. There are a few fields glowing in technicolor but mostly the Big Growers have consolidated the fields near their gift/retail/tourist shops. The sightseers, searching desperately for a potty stop, mob the towns of La Conner, Conway and Mt. Vernon. You can buy 3 tulips for $10 there. You can eat at a café or a restaurant with a life-saving bathroom. You can spend the day in our very own Holland complete with faux windmills.

What you can’t do is see those old fields lost to memory where colors stretched for acres between the 20 foot high dikes that held back the Skagit. Now they only corral the tourists. And the predominant color is green.

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