Good Night, and Good Eating

Edison, Wash., between Bellingham (the main town for the San Juans region) and Seattle, was at one time best known for being the home town of Edward R. Murrow, who is still remembered there:


It's a two-stop-sign town that, according to Murrow's biographer, Joseph Persico, was in Murrow's day little more than a logging camp. It doesn't look like much more today:


But it has now, strangely, become a foodie mecca even though it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, with a renowned bakery, a deli serving local cheeses and fine wines, and more:


A few miles north are the oyster beds of Samish Bay, along the famous Chuckanut Drive, the local equivalent of Big Sur:



Taylor's, a local shellfish farm, even offers for sale the local Olympia oyster, tiny but strongly flavored. Olympias nearly vanished decades ago due to pollution and overfishing, but dedicated locals are trying to bring them back.


Persico describes Edison as being, in the 1920s, the last frontier, close to the end of the earth, but even then not unsophisticated -- the high school that Murrow attended had a debate club and an orchestra, and the senior-year dramatic production that Murrow starred in was the operetta "The Belles of Beaujolais," not a choice many schools would make today.

But I suspect Murrow, as worldly as he became, would be surprised by what has become of his hometown today.