My wife and I spent the weekend in Bellingham, strolling around eating double chocolate chip cookies dusted with sea salt from Tony’s Coffee. Since reuniting at the dock of the Alaska Ferry several years ago upon my return from a trip north, we have made the occasional sojourn to this part of our state to reacquaint ourselves with its charm and take in the surroundings.

One of the coolest things ever is The Spark Museum of Electrical Invention. The place is chock full of examples of devices covering the history of experimentation with electromagnetism. There are practical appliances as well, including a working Theremin with which one may tinker. (I put a Theremin on my Christmas list after we got home.) Topping off the visit is a nine foot tall Tesla Coil that is given demonstrations throughout the day. Nine feet! The thing is amazing. Anyone with even a modest interest in gadgets needs to stop whatever they are doing and make a trek to the museum.

The farmers market in Bellingham has been named one of the top ten in the West by Sunset Magazine. We wandered around its stalls, people‐watching, really, more than keen on picking up organic kale and beeswax. Our own neighborhood has a high walkability score, and I am avid about inviting life into the streets, but while the Bellingham market is colorful and a fine bellwether for the quality of life in the community, I confess my having lived for years three blocks from Pike Place Market in Seattle helped dim my enthusiasm for staying long this day. A bit of serendipity from wandering off came when we discovered that the Bellingham market is just down the street from the first brick building erected in Washington Territory, which remains today rooted to the spot where it was built, in 1858, at 1308 E Street.

Around the corner from the T. G. Richards and Company Store is the Bellingham Railway Museum. My impression of the museum is that it began as someone’s model railroad occupying a spare bedroom, eventually ending up on the losing side of a familiar ultimatum, whereupon it was moved to rented commercial space and evolved into its current form as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. It is dominated by an extensive G‐scale model layout and features photos taken from the history of railroads in the region. Most interesting to me, however, was the time spent chatting with one of the docents, whose depth of knowledge about that local history and the manner with which he declaimed it marked him as another of those people whose lives of quiet obscurity often cheat us of occasion to celebrate being members of the same species as those so extraordinary.

Both of us are drawn to the sea, and our hotel room overlooking Bellingham Bay was no further from the shore than the sloop swinging at anchor within the throw of a stone, so we had a base of operations from which to make forays into town that could not have been more satisfactory. Given the history of our region, I was not surprised to learn that, according to my well‐thumbed copy of Place Names of Washington,¹ Bellingham Bay is named after a man who never saw the place.

Sir William Bellingham had charge of organizing provisions for Captain George Vancouver’s expedition, which sailed into the bay in 1792, while Sir William was presumably drinking tea at home. Vancouver was exploring one of the islands in the vicinity when Master Joseph Whidbey discovered and explored the bay. From Vancouver’s journal: The broken part of the coast that Mr. Whidbey had been employed in examining, was found to extend but a few miles to the northward of the spot where his former researches had ended; forming altogether an extensive bay, which I have distinguished as Bellingham’s Bay.² Vancouver named or lent his name to many features of our landscape; unlike many entries in his journal describing the inspiration for the place names he bestowed, Vancouver did not make plain the source of his inspiration here, but it is probable that Sir William was one of the last officials Vancouver had dealt with before weighing anchor in England, and so while the captain is not clear, it does seem likely that historians have correctly deduced the namesake.

There is some additional evidence in the cartographic realm as to whom Vancouver meant to honor. It was his custom to designate a point at the entrance to a bay using the first name of the honoree: William Point is the name given to the northern tip of Samish Island at the southern entrance to Bellingham Bay.* (The USGS calls it William Point. Locals call it Point William.)

Today, one may visit Bellingham Castle in County Louth, which was Sir William’s ancestral home. As for ourselves, we were drawn to take a stroll along the Taylor Street Dock as the sun eased its way over our shoulders and headed toward the Pacific. There we were left to speculate as to the nature of a strange feature of the landscape that appears to be an outcropping of rock, with odd lumps and sharp creases that belie the story of erosive action the imagination wants to tell itself about stone confronting the tides. I have not since found a conclusive source describing its composition (some claim slag), but did learn that it once acted as a pedestal for a bit of guerilla art I wish I could have seen, chiefly because, in an interview with the Cascadia Weekly, the anonymous artist describes it all so perfectly.

In Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Bellingham is intentionally destroyed by the nuclear blasts used to launch a Project Orion vehicle sent to battle the Fithp in orbit around Earth. While reading the story, I felt it seemed a shame to reduce such a pretty town to a smoldering refuse pile and wondered in passing how Bellingham was chosen by the authors as the site for such destruction. Some time later, I read a perhaps apocryphal tale recounting how Niven once had a bad experience at a convention in Bellingham and, when plotting the story of Footfall, decided Bellingham was a good place to be incinerated for the salvation of humankind. For myself, I trust that, until the next ice age smothers the Pacific Northwest, Bellingham will remain unscathed, easing the way for yet more of our sentimental journeys.

*This designation appears on the charts Vancouver drafted but not in his journal.