Sun Days on Orcas | Island youth need a hangout place

||| SUN DAYS ON ORCAS by EDEE KULPER |||

We need to think long and hard as a community about providing the youth of this island with a place to have innocent fun together. I can’t tell you how many times my husband and I have talked about living elsewhere purely for the sake of our kids having things to do as they get older other than resorting to technology on rainy days.

Raising young ones here is a delightful fairytale, tiptoeing through the wet, drippy woods on explorations and overturning endless rocks at the beach to collect little crabs. Kids who grow up here don’t realize how good they have it. But once they are in their tweens and teens, unless they have a natural affinity for hiking or cold-water Wim Hof-style swimming, there is little to do that they haven’t already done a thousand times. Sure, I’m happy with walking the same route every single day. But I’m okay with being boring – I’m 48.

Sure, kids have homework, sports, chores, and family time. But that’s not enough during the winter. When every single weekend is rainy and a kid who isn’t interested in being on the basketball team is finished folding their laundry and doing their dishes, what next? As a parent, I’m not interested in having our kids’ friends over just to play video games. Once kids have grown out of playing with toys and building LEGOs together, reality sinks in quickly – unless they have certain projects to work on that span large amounts of time, what do they do in the meantime?

We as adults have our fun writing books and plays, working on cars, quilting, managing organizations, you name it. Thankfully, our older son can’t stand being idle and always made the best of things by working on science kits and dreaming up endless science projects of his own from scratch. But what if that’s not the norm but the exception? And working on projects still doesn’t fill the social fun gap that kids (and adults) need to fill by hanging out together somewhere besides their living room. If I know this to be true, I know that almost every other parent out there must get what I’m talking about.

The seasons are starting to change, and the sun is out this week, but it doesn’t mean it will stay. And we will have the dark season upon us again before we know it after a summer of extroverted lake swimming and bridge jumping. If we don’t collectively think about this issue as a community, we are ignoring a huge elephant in the room. When almost every Saturday from November to March kids awaken to rain and gloom, going outside isn’t an option most of them consider anymore. Especially when a laptop or iPhone is within reach. After four to six months of being inside, even when the sun does finally start to come out, I see how the indoor technology habits stick with a lot of non-sporty kids. Adults, too. That inertia and those neural pathways are strong.

I walked on Eastsound Beach and Crescent Beach three separate times yesterday because it was so beautiful and sunshine-y. I passed two teenage kids. Two. Where are the rest of them? I’d be willing to bet at least 50 percent of them were still at home on screens. Maybe it’s closer to 98 percent. When you spend your “fun time” on screens, other normal things in life like hanging out at the beach when the sun finally comes out can seem boring in comparison. Especially if you’ve done them since you were a toddler. The crazier thing is I didn’t even see many local adults. At times, I was the only local on an almost-empty beach aside from a visiting family or group of couples. It was downright odd.

Kids can’t go anywhere to do something different unless it’s an all-day trip to the mainland. (Again, adults are in the same boat too.) And escaping the gloom is out of the question unless you have a rich aunt who can fly you to California for the weekend. Who has that?

Island kids flock to the library not because all of them want to read but because it provides one of the only indoor spaces where all kids are welcome. Go there someday after 3:30 and see. It’s great. Thank you library! But it’s limited by space. And the activities aside from hanging out together are either book-reading or gaming. (I’m not knocking you, library. You’re providing a space these kids desperately need.)

My husband and I were out walking a few weeks ago and sat down on the new Windermere bench in the sunshine. We happened to notice in the window that the Lower Tavern is for sale. How awesome would it be if a place like that was a youth hangout, where kids of all ages could go to play pool, sing karaoke, eat pizza and burgers, and be with friends? A place that’s not just a restaurant but a true hangout where ADULTS had to order at the back kitchen door if they wanted take-out. I know some can’t fathom the idea of a bar with taps transforming into a place for kids to go. What a travesty and loss of money, you may say. I say, what a travesty that we haven’t come up with anything at all for kids, and all we have for adults after 5 o’clock is places to drink alcohol together. A stupid cultural norm, in my opinion.

When I was growing up, my little out-of-the-way town converted a place on the main drag into a youth center, and we flocked to it. It was open from 3:30 to 9, and it attracted all types of kids. We watched movies, played pool, talked, worked on crafts we brought, etc. Many of us had plenty of homework and did every sport offered, but we still needed a place to go to hang out with each other, and that supplied a place for our need.

I have a friend who dreams about turning the old sushi house across and up from Ace Hardware into a youth hangout. It just sits there vacant, year after year. How ideal it would be if utilized well for island kids. Wherever the location, something like this desperately needs to happen. While including food options is a nice perk, it doesn’t even have to be that formal. The place just has to have a warm, welcoming, enjoyable feel to it on the inside and some donors or organizations that are willing to fund it. Orcas is filled with people who volunteer to do things, and a rotating schedule of volunteers could keep things in working order.

Could this be a project that middle and high school students collaborate on? Or a major all-senior project that has funding from somewhere? Some kids here are super proactive. I wonder if any of them feel the way I and other adults do about this.

We offer bars in every town for adults to get drunk together. We leave kids in little, out-of-the-way towns such as ours with even fewer options. Is that the best we’ve got?

Let me know if you have any ideas. Perhaps we should have an in-person community discussion on this topic and start doing something about it.