What makes Vashon unique? The answer to that short but loaded question is teased out in the engaging narrative of Bruce Haluman’s new book, “A Brief History of Vashon Island.”
The island historian will read and discuss his second book in a trilogy about Vashon’s history at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 12, at the Heritage Museum. A second reading will be held at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 26, at Vashon Bookshop.
It is said that historians wear many hats — those of storyteller, researcher, anthropologist, psychologist, detective and scholar among others. Writing about history means they must gather the enormous expanse of information they’ve collected, examine it and then distill it down to key events and people. It is like a huge funnel, Haulman explained in a recent interview, and it’s about trying to decide what to leave out rather than what to keep in.
“I develop a time line to include a certain level of detail, but those are just factoids,” he said. “I look for the patterns, past the factoids, to the interpretive. As a public community historian writing for the community, I try to step back and ask why something happened the way it did and how it led to Vashon becoming this or that.”
In the book’s preface, Haulman writes that “the concept of being an islander is a concept based on a collective existence and location that people share. (Islanders) describe themselves as distinct, and it is this story of self-identification that creates the island’s history.”
Beginning with the eight permanent village sites of the Native Americans later known as the S’Homamish, Haulman’s historical narrative moves on to the dispersal of the S’Homamish with the arrival of Europeans between 1792 to 1893; the first Euro-American settlements from 1865 to 1893; the founding of Vashon 1983 to 1920; the hard times of the depression and world wars between 1920 to 1945; when Vashon became a united island community from 1945 to 1980; and concludes with the chapter heading, “A New Vashon: 1980-2015.
Despite a seven-page bibliography and decades of collecting stories and facts about Vashon, Haulman does not get lost in the trees of details. He sees the forest, the larger picture of the island’s history, in which five enduring patterns emerge to characterize Vashon: Vashon Island Exceptionalism; Isolation versus Dependence; Resource to Service Economy; Leadership and Consolidation. The patterns, he writes, are what form much of the community that marks a history defined largely by change.
Writing history, Haulman said, is what we do with our own life — we retell the story to make sense of it. His book is a story of a place in which Aristotle’s narrative arc of a beginning, middle and end does not readily apply because “as a historian, you can only tell the story of who you are now. The story of what makes Vashon unique will go on. We are a piece of a longer story, and we are only telling part of it.”
