Thanks for this. It drives me nuts, that people can draw conclusions out of thin air, and they claim they are 'following the science'. I won't name any specific president who has done this. Progressives will think I'm talking about Trump. MAGA's will think I'm talking about Obama and Biden. Only research provides anything resembling the truth.
I took my family's antique dining pendant to that shop in La Conner. The new-ish owner is a relic, and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't mind me saying so. He moved from Seattle.
I am as good an armchair statistician as I am evolution theorist. First, I'd like to verify that Lopez deputies weren't slow in submitting their event reports.
Lopez is susceptible to cult behavior. It has smelled funny for decades, according to visiting high-school sports teams. Good sheepdog trials, though--and horse-drawn timber operations.
I got stuck an extra few hours on Vashon earlier this year because one of the ferries back to Seattle was canceled. I thought I'd just take the next ferry but it filled up too quickly and had to wait for the next one. Apparently sailing cancellations have been, or were, an issue within the past year or so with WSDOT's ferry system.
Sure, somewhere, the DOT has a record of all the sailings over this time period, where they went, and with the number canceled.
Unfortunately, local media provides little useful context, opting to use for a percentage comparison which can be misleading.
See:
"Recently, the Washington State Legislature authorized a ferry crew-hiring spree, which seems to be helping. During the slow winter months of this year, canceled sailings were down 60% compared to last summer."
Yep. This definitely did happen. We have talked to several, including a captain who was nearing retirement, but said--fuck it, I'm out. And apparently--my details are vague--there are highly technical jobs, engineering jobs I think, which require extensive training, and every single boat must have one such person on it at every time, and for some reason this group of people were more likely than average to refuse the shots. So a bunch of them got fired and--oopsie!--you can't just hire new engineers off the street. It takes years to get them trained. So we very often have ferries that are cancelled at the last minute due to "staffing issues," and at least sometimes, that is downstream of governor Inslee's remarkable decision to fire the dirty and unvaccinated employees who had expertise that he can't replace (and apparently he won't hire them back).
The Washington State ferry system is famously understaffed (see next comment, to which I can add several anecdotal reports), and is in urgent need of new boats as well. I was looking forward to making a trip I've made several times before we lived here--the international ferry between Friday Harbor and Sidney, a northern suburb of Victoria, on Vancouver Island. That route was canceled during Covid--for your safety!--and shortly after we moved up, everyone was informed that there is no chance of getting that ferry route back until Spring of...2030. Twenty fucking thirty. Inslee, our reprehensibly incompetent governor, is behind some of this. He, of course, blames the unvaccinated.
None of that was what I was going to say here, however. What I was going to say is that the San Juan Island routes are--like the Port Townsend - Whidbey Island route--unusual in not just allowing, but nearly requiring, reservations. In the Summer months, you even need a reservation to get off of San Juan on that earliest morning ferry, at 5:35am--and reservations are challenging to get, given the ancient website that tends to crash or hang at inopportune times. All of that said, what I learned, after sharing some of what I wrote here with some friends who live in the islands, is that Lopez apparently doesn't allow reservations in the east bound direction--that is, to get back to the mainland. Apparently people have been stuck trying to get off island--off of Lopez--and have no guarantee because you can't make a reservation and whether or not there is space depends to some degree on what the ferry workers on San Juan do with the boat when they've got it. So it is possible that the high number of people whom I saw on the ferry that morning were simply taking the one boat that was most likely to accommodate their attempt to get to the mainland.
Well, that's cute, maybe for smaller vessels that travel shorter distances and carry only passengers, bicyclists, and motorcyclists. But for transporting all the motor vehicles and the goods and services these remote areas require? Dream on.
Ugh, I miss living in the West Coast (former CA resident now in CO trying to warn people here) but the governance in that area is grossly incompetent to beyond criminal levels. I will ever forgive what demons such as Inslee, Brown, and Newsom did to those states, not to mention Canada. The only part of the West Coast that stayed sane during the whole COVID debacle starts with the word "Baja."
My family has a cabin on Lopez - on Swifts Bay. Last year the owner of a neighboring house had paid a couple to do a remodel to increase its value as a vacation rental. We had family guests staying there one time when we were back in Seattle. They reported that the remodel couple had a big fight (likely drinking) and their dog had killed a neighbor's dog in the middle of the night. The Sheriff was called. My guests were very disturbed and I myself recalled hearing him berating her one afternoon a few weeks before. Later I tracked down the owner of the house and told him what happened and that he had to do something about that couple. This year some more reliable workers finished the job.
Part of my diagnosis: The issues of the mainland, especially issues of class are impinging more on Lopez, perhaps because it is not as affluent as the other islands and is closer to the mainland, ferry-wise.
Very interesting--thank you for sharing this story. I wonder if people can disappear more easily into such jobs on Lopez, precisely because it's even less densely populated than San Juan and Orcas, and so might attract people who want to stay under the radar. But then this seems like arm-waving to me, as I could make the opposite argument just as well: people with behavioral issues or criminal records would be more likely to go to San Juan or Orcas because there would be more opportunity to engage in nefarious activities on islands with more people.
I too have wondered about the impact of the relative proximity to the mainland, ferry-wise, but then I think: how can this really make any difference at all? The big hassle and most of the financial cost of the ferry is just getting on it in the first place--if you're lucky enough to have been trying to get on one for which there was a reservation, and which is actually going to run.
About 6 months after this incident I was waiting in line for a ferry from Anacortes to Lopez. A man in the next car said that he had been on stand-by since early morning. Turned out he was from a local, working-class Lopez family. When I told him about the incident, he said that he'd been there - he had been deputized by the Sheriff and called to join the investigation (he must have been in something like a volunteer fire department). He also told me that such incidents, though not common, had been increasing in recent years.
BTW, I am a national leader among Unitarian Universalist dissidents to the toxic woke identity politics of recent years. It's hit several Puget Sound area churches very hard and now they've gone off the rails on "gender affirming care" for young teens, especially teen girls with sudden-onset gender dysphoria, falsely claiming that the Cass report has been debunked. I can tell you what happened at our 2024 GA when I got up to question the pseudo-science that WPATH has been pushing.
I can't wait to hear the end of this story. My cynical mind jumped immediately to (1) The CCP has invaded, (2) Someone declared Lopez to be a Sanctuary Island and it's filling up with illegal immigrants, (3) Trudeau has started to export Canada's "safe injuection/inhalation sites," or (4) Bill Gates or some other gagillionaire has bought the island and imported temporary labor (legal or illegal) to build whatever safehouse retreat he's plotting.
Haha, I'm right there with ya, sista. Definitely biased and suspect of the "affordable housing" aspect. Not a very good scientist, I'm afraid, but chock full of intuition 😂
This was, for me certainly, an instructive exercise in objectivity and in an apparently basic statistical analytic tool, especially since Chi-square has been seen lurking in various corners of the podverse lately. (And it sounds sexier than most such because of various cultural associations ;-). Much appreciated.
But to bring forward and emphasize a single hypothesis and then claim it is not your intention to do so is hard to reconcile with a claim to objectivity. Do I sense a circling of the wagons around the campfire in the old San Juans?
I'm hoping you will follow through with this incomplete Lopez Island story with appropriate attempts at falsifications. Every small, isolated community, like mine of the North Olympic Peninsula, that has come to rely strongly on the 'outside'--and which is being 'invaded' by the outside--has become a microcosm of the country at large. And these communities are possibly the ones most able to find human solutions to the looming future, though not necessarily those most likely to find 'solutions' of some other sort.
I highly recommend "Overdiagnosed" by Dr Welch. He is a practicing physician and epidemiologist at Dartmouth. He digs deep into the numbers to help decide whether pharmaceutical intervention or medical testing truly make sense.
Heather, Love your stuff. But weren't you inspired to visit Lopez and figure out why? Spent many years living on Pearl Island (not far from Roche Harbor) -- know this all well. Have been gone for a while. But I think had I noticed this I would have taken a trip to Lopez to see if I could ferret out what was happening.
Hope you do just to finish the mystery tale. Meanwhile, your conclusions about statistics and their abuse are spot on and this presentation makes it make sense to some who otherwise would glaze over.
I live on Lopez full time and have shared your article with several local friends. The feedback has been interesting: 1. We all agree that there is real lunacy on our little island (we have the highest rate of Covid vaccinations in the state AND we probably have the highest rate of people STILL driving solo in their cars while wearing masks in July 2024)… don’t get me started on what it was like during the height of covid madness… 2. The divide between the have-a-lots, the have-somes, and those barely scraping by while living in the woods and surviving off of local NGO assistance is very very wide and very very obvious. The MHI (median household income) on this island is half of the county average, and yes, we have a large number of affordable housing units that allow many people to have stable and decent homes. The local economy wouldn’t be possible without this housing component. We also have a fairly large (undocumented?) immigrant population that brings diversity to the community and is served by many NGOs as well. Is it the source of this crime spike? I doubt it - most work hard and just want to raise their children in a safe place.
Some friends read the police blotter and point to two unstable older individuals who are becoming more and more egregious in their accusations and paranoia, perhaps they are the cause of many of the reports? Not sure, but we do have a lot of “old” liberals who live here, one of whom commented on the 4th of July parade that all of the red, white, and blue made Lopez look too “Trumpy” and that’s not who we are (insert eye-roll here). I haven’t counted, but would guess that there are more Pride, Ukrainian, and Palestinian flags then there are Old Glories here. Accordingly, people are very sensitive to all sorts of slights
And 3. The summer ferry schedule only has two Lopez-only boats that depart the island every day. Other boats stop and load a certain amount of vehicles (quotas vary) but you may have been seeing one of those unload. We do not currently have a reservation system for leaving the island due to the lack of room at the ferry landing for holding lanes - you just plan ahead for getting off and learn to pack a good book and snacks for your ferry wait, proximity to the mainland be damned.
Some people still call Lopez the “friendly” isle, but it does have a dark underbelly. It’s a small group of people, some of whom believe they are the educated white saviors who will keep Lopez “safe and special.” Meanwhile, we have high rates of teen pregnancy, even higher rates of transgender students, high dropout rates at the small underfunded public school, and meth labs in the woods. Safe and special alright. Covid divided this small community even further and there remains a barely perceptible film of distrust between many individuals as most organizations, and even San Juan county, required proof of vax to be employed or even to volunteer.
None of these observations are scientific, of course, just what someone who has lived here for a bit has seen and has heard. That said, it’s beautiful! Orcas, eagles, delicious local food, pastoral landscapes, etc etc etc. It just sometimes stinks too.
The fighting clams must be at it again! I wish I could share with you a photo of the tattered, much-loved, 50-year-old t-shirt that I can't bear to part with. It commemorates the (nonexistent) "University of Lopez Island," and its (also nonexistent) sports team, the "Fighting Clams," whose motto ("cum grano salis," Latin for "with a grain of salt") is emblazoned over a depiction of a very cross-looking clam with its fist raised in the air. My late father-in-law was a geophysicist who spent a great deal of time with various other academics from other fields, passing the time on research vessels along the Oregon and Washington coasts. They got the t-shirts made to add a little humor to the tedium. And my late husband wore it with supremely ironic edgelord aplomb when he caught my eye at UofO ca 1983.
Your musings about these fascinating clues, and the caution with which we must weigh them, reminds me of that world of wonder and late-night discussions, which is now sadly lost to me except when my in-box fills with these lovely essays. Keep it up, cum grano salis, and hold on to those dear to you while you can!
@Heather You know your audience! I chuckled audibly when I read, "...wait, don’t leave, this is good stuff, I promise...".
Thanks for this. It drives me nuts, that people can draw conclusions out of thin air, and they claim they are 'following the science'. I won't name any specific president who has done this. Progressives will think I'm talking about Trump. MAGA's will think I'm talking about Obama and Biden. Only research provides anything resembling the truth.
You can embed Excel files in a Substack post by simple drag-and-drop.
https://cm27874.substack.com/p/european-births-q1-2024-update
Thank you!
And (sort of ) write mathematical equations in LATEX
"This was, for me, an instructive exercise in objectivity and in an apparently basic statistical analytic tool." Great teaching. Thank you, Heather.
I took my family's antique dining pendant to that shop in La Conner. The new-ish owner is a relic, and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't mind me saying so. He moved from Seattle.
I am as good an armchair statistician as I am evolution theorist. First, I'd like to verify that Lopez deputies weren't slow in submitting their event reports.
Lopez is susceptible to cult behavior. It has smelled funny for decades, according to visiting high-school sports teams. Good sheepdog trials, though--and horse-drawn timber operations.
!!! What do you mean by, Lopez "has smelled funny for decades"?
I think Professor Fenton would approve of this piece.
Regarding the a potential ferry rabbit hole:
I got stuck an extra few hours on Vashon earlier this year because one of the ferries back to Seattle was canceled. I thought I'd just take the next ferry but it filled up too quickly and had to wait for the next one. Apparently sailing cancellations have been, or were, an issue within the past year or so with WSDOT's ferry system.
Sure, somewhere, the DOT has a record of all the sailings over this time period, where they went, and with the number canceled.
Unfortunately, local media provides little useful context, opting to use for a percentage comparison which can be misleading.
See:
"Recently, the Washington State Legislature authorized a ferry crew-hiring spree, which seems to be helping. During the slow winter months of this year, canceled sailings were down 60% compared to last summer."
https://www.kuow.org/stories/the-toll-of-washington-state-s-broken-ferry-system
Perhaps of interest here:
https://mynorthwest.com/3193738/wsdot-has-largest-segment-of-state-employees-to-leave-over-vaccine-mandate/#// "The state reports that 132 ferry service employees have lost their jobs, and 121 of them were fired for refusing to get vaccinated. Eight retired instead of getting the shot..." Oct 20, 2021
Yep. This definitely did happen. We have talked to several, including a captain who was nearing retirement, but said--fuck it, I'm out. And apparently--my details are vague--there are highly technical jobs, engineering jobs I think, which require extensive training, and every single boat must have one such person on it at every time, and for some reason this group of people were more likely than average to refuse the shots. So a bunch of them got fired and--oopsie!--you can't just hire new engineers off the street. It takes years to get them trained. So we very often have ferries that are cancelled at the last minute due to "staffing issues," and at least sometimes, that is downstream of governor Inslee's remarkable decision to fire the dirty and unvaccinated employees who had expertise that he can't replace (and apparently he won't hire them back).
The Washington State ferry system is famously understaffed (see next comment, to which I can add several anecdotal reports), and is in urgent need of new boats as well. I was looking forward to making a trip I've made several times before we lived here--the international ferry between Friday Harbor and Sidney, a northern suburb of Victoria, on Vancouver Island. That route was canceled during Covid--for your safety!--and shortly after we moved up, everyone was informed that there is no chance of getting that ferry route back until Spring of...2030. Twenty fucking thirty. Inslee, our reprehensibly incompetent governor, is behind some of this. He, of course, blames the unvaccinated.
None of that was what I was going to say here, however. What I was going to say is that the San Juan Island routes are--like the Port Townsend - Whidbey Island route--unusual in not just allowing, but nearly requiring, reservations. In the Summer months, you even need a reservation to get off of San Juan on that earliest morning ferry, at 5:35am--and reservations are challenging to get, given the ancient website that tends to crash or hang at inopportune times. All of that said, what I learned, after sharing some of what I wrote here with some friends who live in the islands, is that Lopez apparently doesn't allow reservations in the east bound direction--that is, to get back to the mainland. Apparently people have been stuck trying to get off island--off of Lopez--and have no guarantee because you can't make a reservation and whether or not there is space depends to some degree on what the ferry workers on San Juan do with the boat when they've got it. So it is possible that the high number of people whom I saw on the ferry that morning were simply taking the one boat that was most likely to accommodate their attempt to get to the mainland.
Speaking of new boats, the DOT want to electrify the fleet:
https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/major-projects/ferry-system-electrification
Well, that's cute, maybe for smaller vessels that travel shorter distances and carry only passengers, bicyclists, and motorcyclists. But for transporting all the motor vehicles and the goods and services these remote areas require? Dream on.
Ugh, I miss living in the West Coast (former CA resident now in CO trying to warn people here) but the governance in that area is grossly incompetent to beyond criminal levels. I will ever forgive what demons such as Inslee, Brown, and Newsom did to those states, not to mention Canada. The only part of the West Coast that stayed sane during the whole COVID debacle starts with the word "Baja."
My family has a cabin on Lopez - on Swifts Bay. Last year the owner of a neighboring house had paid a couple to do a remodel to increase its value as a vacation rental. We had family guests staying there one time when we were back in Seattle. They reported that the remodel couple had a big fight (likely drinking) and their dog had killed a neighbor's dog in the middle of the night. The Sheriff was called. My guests were very disturbed and I myself recalled hearing him berating her one afternoon a few weeks before. Later I tracked down the owner of the house and told him what happened and that he had to do something about that couple. This year some more reliable workers finished the job.
Part of my diagnosis: The issues of the mainland, especially issues of class are impinging more on Lopez, perhaps because it is not as affluent as the other islands and is closer to the mainland, ferry-wise.
Very interesting--thank you for sharing this story. I wonder if people can disappear more easily into such jobs on Lopez, precisely because it's even less densely populated than San Juan and Orcas, and so might attract people who want to stay under the radar. But then this seems like arm-waving to me, as I could make the opposite argument just as well: people with behavioral issues or criminal records would be more likely to go to San Juan or Orcas because there would be more opportunity to engage in nefarious activities on islands with more people.
I too have wondered about the impact of the relative proximity to the mainland, ferry-wise, but then I think: how can this really make any difference at all? The big hassle and most of the financial cost of the ferry is just getting on it in the first place--if you're lucky enough to have been trying to get on one for which there was a reservation, and which is actually going to run.
About 6 months after this incident I was waiting in line for a ferry from Anacortes to Lopez. A man in the next car said that he had been on stand-by since early morning. Turned out he was from a local, working-class Lopez family. When I told him about the incident, he said that he'd been there - he had been deputized by the Sheriff and called to join the investigation (he must have been in something like a volunteer fire department). He also told me that such incidents, though not common, had been increasing in recent years.
BTW, I am a national leader among Unitarian Universalist dissidents to the toxic woke identity politics of recent years. It's hit several Puget Sound area churches very hard and now they've gone off the rails on "gender affirming care" for young teens, especially teen girls with sudden-onset gender dysphoria, falsely claiming that the Cass report has been debunked. I can tell you what happened at our 2024 GA when I got up to question the pseudo-science that WPATH has been pushing.
I can't wait to hear the end of this story. My cynical mind jumped immediately to (1) The CCP has invaded, (2) Someone declared Lopez to be a Sanctuary Island and it's filling up with illegal immigrants, (3) Trudeau has started to export Canada's "safe injuection/inhalation sites," or (4) Bill Gates or some other gagillionaire has bought the island and imported temporary labor (legal or illegal) to build whatever safehouse retreat he's plotting.
Haha, I'm right there with ya, sista. Definitely biased and suspect of the "affordable housing" aspect. Not a very good scientist, I'm afraid, but chock full of intuition 😂
Well, you kinda left us hanging there.
This was, for me certainly, an instructive exercise in objectivity and in an apparently basic statistical analytic tool, especially since Chi-square has been seen lurking in various corners of the podverse lately. (And it sounds sexier than most such because of various cultural associations ;-). Much appreciated.
But to bring forward and emphasize a single hypothesis and then claim it is not your intention to do so is hard to reconcile with a claim to objectivity. Do I sense a circling of the wagons around the campfire in the old San Juans?
I'm hoping you will follow through with this incomplete Lopez Island story with appropriate attempts at falsifications. Every small, isolated community, like mine of the North Olympic Peninsula, that has come to rely strongly on the 'outside'--and which is being 'invaded' by the outside--has become a microcosm of the country at large. And these communities are possibly the ones most able to find human solutions to the looming future, though not necessarily those most likely to find 'solutions' of some other sort.
I highly recommend "Overdiagnosed" by Dr Welch. He is a practicing physician and epidemiologist at Dartmouth. He digs deep into the numbers to help decide whether pharmaceutical intervention or medical testing truly make sense.
Heather, Love your stuff. But weren't you inspired to visit Lopez and figure out why? Spent many years living on Pearl Island (not far from Roche Harbor) -- know this all well. Have been gone for a while. But I think had I noticed this I would have taken a trip to Lopez to see if I could ferret out what was happening.
Hope you do just to finish the mystery tale. Meanwhile, your conclusions about statistics and their abuse are spot on and this presentation makes it make sense to some who otherwise would glaze over.
I live on Lopez full time and have shared your article with several local friends. The feedback has been interesting: 1. We all agree that there is real lunacy on our little island (we have the highest rate of Covid vaccinations in the state AND we probably have the highest rate of people STILL driving solo in their cars while wearing masks in July 2024)… don’t get me started on what it was like during the height of covid madness… 2. The divide between the have-a-lots, the have-somes, and those barely scraping by while living in the woods and surviving off of local NGO assistance is very very wide and very very obvious. The MHI (median household income) on this island is half of the county average, and yes, we have a large number of affordable housing units that allow many people to have stable and decent homes. The local economy wouldn’t be possible without this housing component. We also have a fairly large (undocumented?) immigrant population that brings diversity to the community and is served by many NGOs as well. Is it the source of this crime spike? I doubt it - most work hard and just want to raise their children in a safe place.
Some friends read the police blotter and point to two unstable older individuals who are becoming more and more egregious in their accusations and paranoia, perhaps they are the cause of many of the reports? Not sure, but we do have a lot of “old” liberals who live here, one of whom commented on the 4th of July parade that all of the red, white, and blue made Lopez look too “Trumpy” and that’s not who we are (insert eye-roll here). I haven’t counted, but would guess that there are more Pride, Ukrainian, and Palestinian flags then there are Old Glories here. Accordingly, people are very sensitive to all sorts of slights
And 3. The summer ferry schedule only has two Lopez-only boats that depart the island every day. Other boats stop and load a certain amount of vehicles (quotas vary) but you may have been seeing one of those unload. We do not currently have a reservation system for leaving the island due to the lack of room at the ferry landing for holding lanes - you just plan ahead for getting off and learn to pack a good book and snacks for your ferry wait, proximity to the mainland be damned.
Some people still call Lopez the “friendly” isle, but it does have a dark underbelly. It’s a small group of people, some of whom believe they are the educated white saviors who will keep Lopez “safe and special.” Meanwhile, we have high rates of teen pregnancy, even higher rates of transgender students, high dropout rates at the small underfunded public school, and meth labs in the woods. Safe and special alright. Covid divided this small community even further and there remains a barely perceptible film of distrust between many individuals as most organizations, and even San Juan county, required proof of vax to be employed or even to volunteer.
None of these observations are scientific, of course, just what someone who has lived here for a bit has seen and has heard. That said, it’s beautiful! Orcas, eagles, delicious local food, pastoral landscapes, etc etc etc. It just sometimes stinks too.
The fighting clams must be at it again! I wish I could share with you a photo of the tattered, much-loved, 50-year-old t-shirt that I can't bear to part with. It commemorates the (nonexistent) "University of Lopez Island," and its (also nonexistent) sports team, the "Fighting Clams," whose motto ("cum grano salis," Latin for "with a grain of salt") is emblazoned over a depiction of a very cross-looking clam with its fist raised in the air. My late father-in-law was a geophysicist who spent a great deal of time with various other academics from other fields, passing the time on research vessels along the Oregon and Washington coasts. They got the t-shirts made to add a little humor to the tedium. And my late husband wore it with supremely ironic edgelord aplomb when he caught my eye at UofO ca 1983.
Your musings about these fascinating clues, and the caution with which we must weigh them, reminds me of that world of wonder and late-night discussions, which is now sadly lost to me except when my in-box fills with these lovely essays. Keep it up, cum grano salis, and hold on to those dear to you while you can!
Thanks for the the image of your neck of the woods. Sounds lovey.
I have a lot of wild life around me too, but Minnesota's population of Orcas is quite low.
My favorite line was "I don't have an ending so it isn't a good story."
And to remind people of the wrong think sloppy statistics can get you into, I offer - 100% of people who eat lunch, die.
I love your "X therefore Y Principle". It just fits with today's culture.