About Bellingham: Happy Valley

July 20, 2025

Carol and I lived in that farmhouse near Ferndale until the summer of 1972, when after spending a month on a trip to London and Paris we moved into Bellingham in time for the start of autumn quarter at Huxley College. Before leaving Ferndale though, let's stop to admire a set of photos from there that just resurfaced when I found them in this post written just before we flew down to Tucson in January:

Here I am in Ferndale with Dona, our pup of the moment. Until seeing this shot I'd forgotten about the black slouch hat, my all time favorite.

And here I am again, a wanna be writer modeling the finest in men's wear. I always did favor plaids for some reason.

This might my favorite photo of Carol, riding a bike for what I think is the first time in her life.

And, let's stop to appreciate this work from Woody Guthrie's songbook. I stumbled across this when I read a brief biography of his life while looking for one of his songs to include in an earlier post. It was news to me to learn that early in his life his landlord was one of the more infamous figures of the day and a seminal figure in the misery we find ourselves living through today.

Happy Valley

OK. Let's move to town now. This is a strange, confusing time to write about because I just did so recently, and at great length. Our life in Happy Valley and my experience at Huxley were the focus of one of those four hour long stream of consciousness rambles that I spewed out at the heights of my mania but which were lost because I failed to get them uploaded to the website. I'll spare you an attempt to reproduce anything in the spirit of the original text, but I'm including a fair amount of detail because it gives context to our upcoming stay.

I don't remember now how this idea came up, but from Ferndale we moved in with Alan and Larry, roommates sharing a small house in Happy Valley while they completed their studies. Larry was a business major at the college, while Alan studied music. Alan was a close friend of my friend Dennis from the Army, so that is undoubtedly the connection that brought us in closer to school. Dona didn't move into town with us, so I assume she was left behind to live with our neighbor Ted.

I remember those nine months as one of the best periods of my life, an almost idyllic time when our lives were full of a sense of purpose and excitement. Happy Valley itself was a big part of that. A small neighborhood just inland from historic Fairhaven, at the time is had a quite rustic character, filled with small single family homes surrounded by woods and vegetable gardens. It was an easy walk in one direction to Fairhaven and the waterfront, and an easy walk in the other direction to the college. It has evolved significantly over the last half century of course, but it still is one of the most appealing neighborhoods in Bellingham - and lucky us, we found an AirBnB available there for our upcoming stay.

And the living situation was idyllic too. Carol and I were both interested in communal living at the time, and living with Alan and Larry was something of an experiment. Every time I think back on that experience it brings a smile to my face - especially when remembering the morning ritual when we would come down from our upstairs bedroom and I'd team up with Alan to flip sourdough pancakes created from the starter that Alan had maintained for several years. Our challenge was to produce pancakes with 'amusing shapes', as Alan called them. A few normally round-shaped ones slipped through, but most had one or more appendages and looked like humans or farm animals or even dinosaurs.

After the breakfast ritual we would get on with our lives. Carol headed off to her job as a service rep for Ma Bell, while the three of us made our way on foot to the nearby college. On my walk up to Huxley I would often meet another Huxley student partway there and walk the rest of the way together with him and led by his poor German shepherd, its mouth full of teeth broken from chasing the rocks his master would kick up the trail in front of him.

Huxley College at the time consisted of a half dozen 'cluster colleges', each one specializing in a course of studies that was equivalent to declaring a major. I was enrolled in Environmental Engineering, but others included Environmental Law, Environmental Studies, Ecology, and others I can't recall the names of at the moment. Environmental Engineering was the smallest of the lot, with only six of us in the first year class. Classes were held in a portable, and most of them were taught by two professors: Dr Albers, a jaundiced man on a kidney machine taught us about air pollution technology, and our water pollution professor was a younger man whose name I can't bring back now but I remember best for teaching me the brutal game of handball.

It was a unique period of life, and even though so much has changed since then I'm really looking forward to spending next month in the same neighborhood and triggering old memories.

Oh, and one last thing: Huxley College doesn't exist any more. Named for Thomas Henry Huxley (not for his grandsons Aldous and Julian, my error). Thomas Huxley was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and a fierce advocate for Darwin's views on evolution; and unfortunately for him was a man of his times. His views on race, gender, eugenics and the descent of man no longer find favor in our current climate, and so the college was renamed four years ago to the College of the Environment:

The Western Washington University Board of Trustees voted Thursday, Dec. 9, to remove the “Huxley” name from what will now be known as the College of the Environment, the school announced in a letter to the community Friday. The vote followed a recommendation to remove the name submitted by the Legacy Review Task Force in June, after the task force found Thomas Henry Huxley’s “views about natural racial and gender inequalities, the role of these hierarchical views in the application of Darwin’s theory of evolution to humans, and the development of scientific racism more generally” conflicted with the university’s mission and commitment to inclusion.

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	3
Comment on this entry	Comment	1

Karen PoretOn “re-naming” of colleges..My late cousin was a graduate of Colorado Women’s College, in Denver, Colorado. Unfortunately, when she received her diploma it said “Temple Buell College”, as he was a philanthropist who donated money in 1967..the same year she graduated from the school. 🙄
Reply to this comment
5 days ago