| Epilogue |
Senuty's potted plants existed in a place built around capitalism. In this respect they were no different from the park. Like Senuty’s flowers, Cornwall Park was inextricably linked to the larger place of Bellingham and the capitalist ideology that shaped it. Capitalism led to the construction of places along Squalicum Creek that, for all their apparent differences, were largely the same. The ratio of machine to garden was what distinguished the park from the mine. Surrounded by the glittering trappings of industrialism, flowers at the mine stood out glaringly. Less than a quarter of a mile away flowers seemed so natural that sculpted beds of them were used to disguise the park’s connection to Bellingham. Capitalism, as the shafts of the mine and the trails of the park showed, led to physical restructurings of places that shared principle, if not outward form. Capitalism was integral to the construction of Cornwall Park and the Bellingham Coal Mines. We cannot ignore the degree to which the culture of capitalism connected these places or the degree to which it shaped them in very similar ways. Nor can we ignore the different ways in which groups in Bellingham interpreted that culture at these places. The very ways that capitalism structured divergent experiences along Squalicum Creek suggests cosmologies within and across classes. The boosters’ linked cosmologies of postcards and dead fish, for example, made sense to workers in the mine, who simultaneously celebrated Senuty’s sparkling machinery and its ability to alter place. But the divergent claims illustrated by the strike point to different understandings of the mine and these cosmologies based on differing constructions and perspectives of place. So, too, do the various claims made on Cornwall Park. Whether structured around work or play, these claims point to variant interpretations of capitalism leading to multiple and potentially competing constructions of place.
In Bellingham there is no coal mine to see now. In the mid-1950s, rendered outmoded by cheap alternative fuels, it closed for the final time. Auctioneers sold its machinery, and salvagers disassembled its buildings. When everything saleable was gone, workers backfilled the main entry. The mine, once heralded as one of the legs of the city’s prosperity, was no longer a landscape of human interaction. A paved-over place, an Albertson's and a shopping mall, now stand on the mine’s entrance. In many ways it is a place transformed. Cornwall Park still exists. In the early 1980s the park board closed the boosters’ road which locals had appropriated as a shortcut through town. The spindly trees of the 1920s photographs have grown. So has Bellingham. The town and Interstate 5 now completely surround the park. If the park board were to suggest selling camping spaces in the park today, there would be a public outcry. Bellingham is a city proud of its green spaces, and Cornwall Park is, in the words of a present day booster publication, "a northwest park through and through, populated mainly by large firs, hemlocks and cedars": a place of wilderness in spite of its constant manicuring. 90 It seems feasible to view such changes as a triumph of the postcard constructions. Certainly many people in the Pacific Northwest do. Especially along its metropolitan western edge, the region is popularly associated with a connection to the outdoors.91 Booster publications no longer include pictures of dead fish and fallen logs. They focus instead on the area’s scenic beauty and recreational possibilities. Airplane manufacturing, software development and coffee purveying have replaced the dead fish nature of the mine in the region’s popular imagination. These industries, largely disconnected from actual physical places, have led to different cultures of capitalism. This transition, however, has not slowed the commodification of nature. Economic and social changes have led to a re-conceptualization of rural areas as tourist destinations. In many ways the postcard scenes that boosters intended Cornwall Park to contain now encompass much of what they once saw as the town’s hinterland. The garden has not grown separate from the machine. Capitalism still shapes our understanding of and interaction with the physical world. Stories of growth much like those the boosters told still inform our actions. The demands such stories and the markets to which they refer make on places and people may no longer be as patently obvious in modern day Bellingham as they were along Squalicum Creek in the early twentieth century. They are no less real. Despite an image to the contrary, we in the Northwest do not enjoy an especially benevolent relationship with the physical and human world around us. From the gas we pump and the groceries we buy to the stories we tell about who we are and where we belong, we, like those in the Bellingham of eighty years ago, reconstruct places. That we no longer see many of these places cannot permanently separate us from them. The Bellingham Coal Mines may have gone somewhere else, but it still underlies the city and the region. If we want to gain a meaningful understanding of our relationship to one another and to places, either in the past or the present, we have to put down the images of dead fish and postcards and look beyond the pictures of the moonscape mine and the sculpted park that opened this paper. We should look instead at Senuty’s flowers and ask what informed such pictures, how they were and are connected, and what flowerpots we ourselves tend.
90. Quote is drawn from Glen Berry, "Cornwall Park," a page from Kulshan.com, an online booster organ funded in part by the City of Bellingham. http://whatcom.kulshan.com/Washington/Whatcom/Bellingham/Outdoors/Cornwall_Park.htm Return 91. See, for example, the vision of place that The New York Times reporter Timothy Egan put forward in his 1990 book, The Good Rain. In a celebration of "time and terrain," Egan enunciated the arrival of the "Pacific Century," in which the area, capitalizing on its scenery, would provide tourists the opportunity to "see a land not far removed from its cradle." Beyond the bombastic and booster-like nature of this prediction and much of the work, this vision of place is one that disconnects landscape from past and present inhabitants in a disturbing fashion. Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 251-4. Return
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