Once upon a time in the 1970s, a group of artists, writers and artisans made a place for themselves on the north fork of the Skagit River known as Fishtown.
They lived in abandoned gillnetters' shacks, lived off the land and the river and did their work.
Fishtown has passed into Northwest legend, the lost domain where, for the better part of a decade, art and life were one.
It's taken years to organize, but a Fishtown retrospective, "You Can't Get There From Here," has finally come together. The exhibit, featuring artwork, poems, photos and broadsides, opened with a reception Saturday, Sept. 8, 6-8 p.m. at Kobo at Higo gallery, 604 S. Jackson St., and runs through Oct. 3. Kobo at Higo is the sister gallery of Kobo Capitol Hill at 814 E. Roy St.
Seattle resident Steve Herold, book publisher, former bookstore owner, calligrapher, writer, poet, Irish dancer and the last man arrested in Seattle for selling "Lady Chatterley's Lover," was one of Fishtown's leading citizens.
Herold has produced an 80-page book, "Where the River Ends," to accompany the retrospective he helped organize.
"It was a child of the times - the idea that people should work together," Herold, 66, said of Fishtown.
The Vietnam War was on. American society suffered division at the dinner table and in the streets. But rather than living out a '70s, counterculture Camelot, Fishtown's denizens looked to ancient models for inspiration: the Asian poets and calligraphers and Zen fools who would have felt at home in the Skagit Valley landscape.
Fishtown never made the hippie trail. Hard work was required to even find the place. The Fishtown folk, like subsistence pioneers, honored the work ethic. They chopped wood, hauled water from a nearby well and grew their own food.
Nine independent cabins were warmed and lit by woodstoves, kerosene and candles. There were no phones. La Conner, not yet a tourist trap, lay within walking or hitchhiking distance. The timeless rituals of dailiness informed Fishtown's art.
"One year I lived on $350," Herold said. "We learned that you could do things simply without real loss of quality of life."
As writer Bruce Brown wrote of the place: "Here time runs on the tides (you go upriver on the flood, and come back down on the ebb), the seasons and the salmon, much as it did in the days before the white man came to this country."
Besides Herold, other prominent Fishtown citizens included artist Charles Krafft, poet and Chinese-language translator Paul Hansen and the late poet Robert Sund.
"Silence and isolation are incredibly powerful things," Herold noted. In creating their art, "We balanced that," he said.
Some of the art hanging on Kobo's walls has been out of sight for decades.
"We wanted to make this stuff available," Herold said of the images culled for the show. "Much of it has been hidden in museums."
The Fishtown artists eventually dispersed, leaving a legacy of cooperation - whether writing poems on the same topic or repairing a 60-foot boardwalk - and a formidable standard of artistic integrity.
Leave it to Sund to supply one bit of Fishtown wisdom:
What do you learn
on the river?
Free boots
always leak.
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