Ice Cream and Vashon Island

I wrote to my coworkers, earlier this week, the following message:

When I was a growing up on Vashon Island we had two stoplights but only one fast-food, chain restaurant – and they didn’t even serve food, just shakes and sundaes and cones and so on. Mountains of soft-serve ice-cream. When Peanut Buster Parfaits went on sale, oh my!

Friday, November 10 is my birthday. I’d like to invite you to join me in reliving those days with a celebratory trip to Dairy Queen on Broadway and Mineral. Meet in the lobby at 3:00. Won’t take long. We’ll descend on them like an overgrown Little-League team. Won’t it be fun? Put this on your calendar.

* * *

Several of them asked me about Vashon Island. Here’s my favorite description from Betty MacDonald in Onions in the Stew, circa 1955. A few things have changed with the times, but much is still the same. We moved away many years ago, but the years on Vashon were a formative time for me. Maybe this explains a few things!

"Our island, discovered in 1792 by Captain Vancouver and named Vashon after his friend Admiral James Vashon, is medium-sized as island go, being approximately fifteen miles from shoulder to calf and five miles around the hips. It is the intense green of chopped parsley, plump and curvy, reposes in the icy waters of Puget Sound, runs north and south between the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, and is more or less accessible to each by ferryboat.

"On the map Vashon Island looks somewhat like a peacock and somewhat like a buzzard. Which depends on the end you choose for the head and how long you have been trapped here. The climate, about ten degrees warmer and wetter than Seattle and vicinity, is ideal for primroses, currants, rhododendrons, strawberries, mildew, and people with dry skin who like to read. The population is around five thousand people and an uncounted number of sniveling cowards who move back to the city for the winter.

"Everything on Vashon Island grows with insane vigor and you have the distinct feeling, as you leave the dock and start up the main highway, that you should have hired a native guide or at least brought along a machete…

"From the water Vashon looks like a stout gentleman taking a Sunday nap under a woolly dark green afghan. The afghan, obviously homemade, is fringed on the edges, occasionally lumpy, eked out with odds and ends of paler and darker wools, but very ample so that it falls in thick folds to the water. Against this vast greenness, houses scattered along the shore appear small and forlorn, like discarded paper boxes floated in on the tide. The few hillside houses look half smothered and defeated, like frail invalids in the clutches of a huge feather bed.

"…Vashon was once, and perhaps still is, a Mecca for the more vigorously religious… As Vashon still retains a pungent frontier atmosphere the over-all effect is faintly ridiculous – like a man sitting in the parlor in his undershirt, drinking beer and reading the Bible."