After 13 years, it’s still a beautiful Rock and a lovely Hard Place
Published 1:30 am Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Dear readers, this is my final Rockin’ a Hard Place column for the Whidbey News-Times and South Whidbey Record. I will still write an occasional feature story, but this column has now had its run.
It began as a monthly column in the gone but not forgotten Whidbey Examiner in August 2013, then moved to the News-Times and Record in 2016. I have had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for the column. I was always looking for things that make our lives on the Rock different or even unusual.
Herewith some examples of what I turned up:
August 2013: One of things I like best about living on the Rock is that there is so little yelling here. Conversations seem so cordial, civil and polite. We do value courtesy, quiet and our peace of mind, thank you very much. And you’ll rarely hear people bellow about Navy jet noise, except for maybe when a jet’s directly overhead and you can’t be heard otherwise.
January 2014: It’s been a tough year for peace and goodwill on Whidbey Island. We Rock dwellers, usually so blissful and content, have become stranded at the intersection of Jets=Jobs and Jets=Deafness, hung up by the nexus of Tourists=Dollars and Tourists=Crowding, tangled in the Gordian knot of Taxed Too Much versus Not Enough Services.
April 2015: When we tell a neighbor we are headed “off-island,” it may draw a disapproving scowl or anguished expression. The hearer interprets it to mean that the Rock dweller is sneaking off to America to do something unsustainable, non-local, ungreen, climate-degrading, selfish, materialistic, etc. Things like buying double-ply toilet paper at Costco, or eating fast food from a drive-through, or loading up on cheap California wine at Trader Joe’s, or lusting after stuff we don’t need at an outlet mall.
March 2016: Although we love to disagree with each other on the Rock, something’s happened in the past several months about which no sentient human can disagree. This has been a wet, sloppy, muddy-boot winter. The disagreement then becomes just how wet it’s been. Worst rainy season ever? Not as bad as the winter of (fill in the blank)? Typical Whidbey winter? Couldn’t care less because we just got back from two months in Arizona?
November 2017: I know it sounds a bit Pollyanna-ish, but living here on the Rock does make me think it’s Thanksgiving every day. How could you not be offering thanks all the time to the creator responsible for all these tall trees, blue seas, clean air, rural vistas, historic stuff, sun-moon-and-stars, and decent, civil people (well, except when they’re snarking on Facebook)?
March 2018: The first weekend in March I toiled as a volunteer over a hot grill, cooking and selling “prairie dogs” at the annual Coupeville MusselFest to raise money for the Island County Historical Museum. I admit that selling polish sausage at a shellfish event would seem the antithesis of carrying coals to Newcastle. But despite that irony, it was an amazing opportunity to watch how a horde of locals and visitors set aside their differences (and they are many) to mingle, drink, eat and enjoy a beautiful moment together on our Rock.
October 2019: A Coupeville real estate agent and noted woman-about-town (Janet Burchfield) is worried when her sweet-smell-of-success BMW keeps sputtering. Who’s she gonna call? Marty! Marty, of course, is Marty Robinett, owner of Coupeville Auto Repair and known throughout the area as Central Whidbey’s last full-service mechanic. He has operated his shop since 1998 in an historic building on Coveland Street that originally opened in 1930 as Whidbey’s Pontiac dealership. (The Ford dealership, its fierce competitor, was a block away on Front Street.)
April 2020: We Rock Dwellers are of an independent stripe in how we do most things. That holds true, I have discovered, for how we pass time while social distancing to avoid COVID-19. America may be binge-watching “The Tiger King,” watching NFL “greatest games” reruns and eating frozen pizza. But on Whidbey we’re doing other, much more interesting stuff. For example, this week my spouse and I flipped our California king mattress end-to-end – quite a strenuous cardio effort for aging muscles. The manufacturer recommends doing this once a year. We hadn’t done it in the six years we’ve owned it. From beneath it, we vacuumed an amazing amount of dog hair and what may have been the dust of several generations of my Swedish relatives.
January 2021: Coupeville United Methodist Church, built in 1893 and home to several generations of Central Whidbey farm families, has installed a new “remembrance window” in honor of a very special woman we lost a year ago: Phyllis Sherman. She was born on a local farm, went to school in Coupeville, married local farmer Al Sherman and raised four daughters on Ebey’s Prairie.
May 2022: There’s a business on Whidbey Island that has been in the same location since it was founded in 1917. What’s more, it’s had just two owners in the past 100 years, and this year its current owner is about to celebrate his 50th anniversary in charge. It’s Prairie Center Market in Coupeville, and Ken Hofkamp and a couple of partners bought it in 1972 from the Picard family, who had owned it since 1921. Ken was just 24 years old when he became Central Whidbey’s chief grocer.
May 2023; I confess that before I blessedly emigrated to the Rock 14 years ago I was not much of a gardener. Too busy with career and city life. But, like so many fellow emigres I have met here, I quickly learned to grow tomatoes, zucchini, potatoes, beets and so much more. I even learned to can what I don’t eat fresh. I consider all this a right of passage entitling me to be called a Rock dweller, along side the generations of farmers and others who have been here all their lives.
September 2024: Francis LeSourd and his wife Mary Ellen had four children. In 1892, they commissioned Howard Lovejoy, the Coupeville community’s best-known architect, to build them a family home on their farmland, facing Ebey Road and looking up toward Sunnyside Cemetery. It was a suitable Victorian home for a prosperous family, with a wrap-around porch and steep gabled roof. And now, 132 years later, that historic home, beautifully restored, is once again owned by descendants of Francis and Mary LeSourd.
April 2025: We Rock dwellers share many things in common: Our love of open spaces, hiking trails, forests, farms and beaches. And more than half of us also share this: We need septic systems at our homes to take care of our … ahem …personal waste. Only urban Rock dwellers in Oak Harbor, Coupeville and Langley have city-provided sewer systems. The rest of us have one or more tanks in the backyard that need to be pumped and serviced every so often. For Oak Harbor native Keith Jordan, that has presented a great business opportunity. He is hard at work to become, as he says, “#1 in the #2 business.” A little more than four years ago, he founded Dirty Deeds Septic to service all of Whidbey.
March 2026: The Island County Historical Museum recently opened an exhibit, including a lovely documentary film, that pays tribute to a woman who really ought to be better known than she is in Central Whidbey, with maybe a statue or a building named for her. She was Jimmie Jean Cook, and she spent years carefully identifying and preserving the historic elements of the Penn Cove area and laying the groundwork for creation of the Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve in 1978. In 1973, she published a well-loved book full of all that history, entitled “A Particular Friend, Penn’s Cove” that is still available at local bookstores and online.
So, there you have a lot of words I wrote over the past 13 years. Loved writing them!
Harry Anderson is a retired journalist who worked for the Los Angeles Times and now lives on Central Whidbey.
