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The Caring Communityby Arthur S. Langlie

There is something in the human spirit that has an affinity for the land.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the land in Kitsap County was remote, mostlyunsettled, with few homes and gardens for sustenance. Travel was by small boat, row

boat, canoe, or steamer. The idea of living in Kitsap County and commuting to Seattle orany other urban area on a daily basis was unthinkable.

When the little steamers began to appear on Puget Sound, the possibility of escape from

cities began to be seriously considered. Tiny communities with screened porches -suitable for summer months only - began to appear at Agate Pass, Fletcher Bay, Port

Madison, Keyport, Poulsbo and wherever else a steamer could dock.

Those communities fed the human desire to escape - if only briefly - from city life and toallow a return to the land and rural life.

Part of this escape was attributable to the great mystery of the American West and the

plains, mountains, forests and inland waters of the Pacific Northwest. Real estatepromoters saw the value of promoting "a piece of ground of your own" and the operators

of the mosquito fleet saw the opportunity and necessity, of generating freight andpassenger traffic.

When I came to Indianola in 1936, at the advent of my 6th summer, Indianola was a land

far away and a place for the generation of a small boy's dreams. In the four summers thatfollowed, Indianola became that magical playground which had no boundaries for an

active boy.

My visits to Indianola in the forties and fifties, I perceived that Indianola had not changedmuch, if at all. But that was because of the narrowness of my perceptions and my

insensitivity to the onslaught of time. For instance, the first steamboat I ever loved, Hyak,was burned for her scrap metal at Richmond Beach. The car ferries came up from San

Francisco in 1935 and the Indianola pier was widened to two lanes to accommodateautomobile traffic. With cars came the asphalting of roads. A lot of my boyhood had

quietly slipped away without me having noticed. The steamers didn't come to Indianolaanymore, and then the ferries didn't either. The screened porches began to disappear as

the summer homes became year around homes and were remodeled for fall, winter andspring.

One of my great icons, Amos Pickrell, died and gone was his magnificent sense of

humor, timing and his impish wit.

Still, there were some things that remained the same. There were still the openings underthe clubhouse where some of us remembered Herbie Cross would arrest us and "put us in

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jail." There were still the apple trees that could be raided by small boys in season withimpunity. Most of the fathers in the early June got ready for the fishing derbies and hoped

to win a two-horse Evinrude, or a pair of wading boots, or a tackle box. I took scary tripsto Point No Point with my Dad and was terrified when one of the Princess liners came by

and threw a wake that was at least six feet high (which seemed to me to be twenty feet

high) in those days.

Still the Loughery boys would come down the road in phalanx with their broad shoulders

and huge arms, honed from working in the saw mills and bucking logs. We wadedbarefoot in Indianola Creek and Kitsap Creek and caught pogies in Kerr-Mason jars.

In the sixties, now thirty years or better, my perceptions being much sharper and mature

and my views of Indianola more extensive, I noticed that our "dock" had dramaticallydeteriorated. The second car lane was gone. The planking was seriously rotted. The

railings were loose, the pilings were broken or missing.

The magic of the spit at Miller Bay was disappearing with development. The stapleoutboard motor - the Johnson 5 horse, the Evinrude 3 and a half and for the boys we

looked down on - the Waterwitch - were being replaced with 25 horsepower Johnsonsand more.

Good wood to build rafts was hard to find; most of it had gone into beach fires and logs

were getting scarcer on Puget Sound and didn't seem to be able to escape from booms aseasily as the did before.

The "gold mine" that some of my friends and I used to work at the clay bank had

seriously eroded away by winter storms. The clubhouse had acquired a fire truck whichlived in a specially constructed garage, destroying what had been a more balanced

architecture. Suddenly, like dandelions, street signs began to spring up, saying wordssuch as stop, yield, no parking, and fire lane.

By the 1970s and 80s, I became aware that Indianola was fast becoming a commuter

town - there was a daily exodus of smell automobiles. My vision of the fathers coming upthe dock in platoons having disembarked from Hyak or Kehloken was no more.

Was the Indianola of my childhood gone forever? Were all those days of mid-century

forever lost, never relived again? Would Indianola never again be "far away" and neveragain a place of refuge? Or just a suburb or a satellite from the I-5 corridor.

Shortly after the Agate Pass bridge was completed, the last ferry left the pier at Indianola.

It was the end of an era. A delegation of seniors from Indianola had gone to Olympia tocomplain to Governor Langlie about termination of ferry service to Seattle. He listened

patiently and at the end of the meeting said that he understood their irritation, but that inyears to come the people of Indianola would be grateful. I sided with the delegation from

Indianola because I loved the boats. My father had a longer view, and time has provedhim right.