||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

I asked an old friend, “How did emergency services find your house, before the whole county was 9-1-1-ed with street names and numerical addresses?”

“Well,” he said, “you could describe exactly where you were, road-by-road and turn-by-turn. But if that didn’t help, you could have someone run down to the end of your driveway to wait for the fire truck.”

“But suppose there wasn’t anybody to do that?” I asked. “What then?”

“Well, then the Fire Department would just have to call OPALCO. Starting early on, there were good county-maintained road maps for every island, and OPALCO knew where every one of their customers were on those maps. They could tell where you were located, according to the nearest electric-power distribution box, and according to the number on your electric meter.”

Pretty good house-by-house maps were a benefit visited on us Orcasians by the U.S. Census, which needed to know exactly where everybody lived, exactly how many people lived there, and a whole bunch of other exact information. By the time each decennial census was over, house-by-house maps had been generated, double checked, and printed up. County government, the Fire Department, and the Sheriff’s Office all had them. There might have been a copy at the Orcas Island Library, too. But 10 years is a long time between editions, and there were always lots of changes going on.

So I asked him, “And what did you do when people were coming to visit from off-island?”

“Well,” he said, “that brings us back to road-by-road and turn-by-turn directions. And, of course, there were a few road signs to go by, here and there. But at that time, we were living on Shaw Island, so when we were going to have visitors, we would go down to meet the ferry, and then just lead them back to our house by driving slowly in front of their car.”
Once I hosted some off-island friends of my own, who were coming down in a rented car from Vancouver, BC. I told them how to get to Anacortes, and where the ferry terminal was, and what to do when they got off of the ferry onto Orcas Island.

“Get off of the ferry, turn left at the top of the ramp, follow the double yellow line, and drive exactly six miles,” I told them. “Then turn right, and go up the hill to the first house on the right.”

They showed up at my house an hour late. I wasn’t too worried: How lost could they get on an island? But why were they so late, when the ferry had been right on time?

“We drove exactly six miles,” they said, “but the road we turned right onto went on and on, and didn’t go up a hill. So we went back to the main road and drove back and forth, thinking that we’d somehow missed the correct turn. Then we tried driving further than the six miles you’d told us. We saw the big map directory at the corner on the road. Since we knew that we were lost, we stopped to look at it. That map told us where your street was. But it wasn’t six miles from the ferry. By our car’s odometer, it was almost 10 miles!”

I went out to look at the odometer. It was a Canadian car, of course. It’s speedometer and its odometer read out in kilometers.


 

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