The Wooden Boat Festival, the Race to Alaska and Seventy48 are the most recent event cancellations of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These events have been added to a laundry list of summertime cancellations, including THING music festival, the Rhododendron Festival, the Rhody Run 12k race, Raker’s Car Show, the Wearable Art Show and Centrum’s Fiddle Tunes, Acoustic Blues Festival, Jazz Port Townsend and Voice Works.
“I feel like as a community we’ve organized ourselves by default around these festivals,” said Jake Beattie, director of the Northwest Maritime Center. “Beginning with Rhody in a couple weeks and then all throughout the summer, ending with Wooden Boat and Film Festival. It’s going to be profound how not having these will affect us as a community.”
The cancellation of cultural events is an interconnected web of loss, said City of Port Townsend Mayor Michelle Sandoval.
It starts with the loss of tourist traffic, visitors who come for the widely known and celebrated events who patronize shops, restaurants and hotels and fill streets with excitement and activity.
For example, Wooden Boat Festival is the Northwest Maritime Center’s founding event. Its economic impacts extend throughout the community. That weekend, hotel rooms are fully booked within a 30-mile radius of Port Townsend, bars and restaurants are packed throughout the day and into the night, and downtown stores see parades of visitors walking by.
The loss of that festival, compounded with the long list of other summer cancellations, translates directly into decreased revenue for businesses and local governments, meaning laid-off employees and less money for special projects and programs.
But it also affects the sense of community.
“Wooden Boat Festival and wooden boats do make Port Townsend Port Townsend for some,” Beattie said. “For others, it’s Centrum’s events or even Concerts on the Dock. It’s mostly about coming together as people. What’s Port Townsend for if we don’t have that? We’re going to have to figure that out. We have no other option.”
Found in the fervor of the Rhody Grande Parade, the bustling Saturday Farmers Market and the funky boomer dance moves on the Pourhouse porch, Port Townsend’s culture is what makes the community unique.
“What makes Port Townsend so incredible is the combination of small-town life with arts and culture,” Sandoval said “We live like a big city when it comes to our cultural events.”
Today the streets and restaurants are empty, most kitchens are staffed with one cook doing sporadic take-out orders, and there is no certainty of when daily life might return to normal.
Danny Milholland of Thunderball Productions, which puts on the Rhododendron Festival Cake Picnic and the “Old School” Fourth of July celebration said he thinks there is no doubt Port Townsend’s events create a sense of community and it’s going to be challenging to overcome, but the love within the community will carry us through.
Denise Winter, executive artistic director of Key City Public Theater, said it might not even be possible to gauge how the loss of connections might impact the culture of the community until people come back together.
What she has noticed, however, is an increased sense of collaboration. COVID-19 has forced people to find new and deeper ways to connect with each other, she said, and that has manifested itself in myriad working groups, from making masks to giving cash payments to affected families.
One thing many people in Jefferson County and across the world are turning to for a continued sense of connectedness is the internet. Virtual programs and events attempt to keep a sense of solidarity alive, but that can only go so far, Sandoval said.
“People are forever creative, and that’s what’s great about the arts,” she said. “But we need to recognize that this is going to be a tough year. Life will not be the same without the joy that arts brings us.”
Winter said her organization has offered some online programming for its patrons, but she sees what they do, offering live theater, as an experience that inherently cannot be translated virtually.
Milholland said his company is creating a virtual-event season for the summer he hopes people will support and engage with. One upcoming event he’s working on is something for Rhody Fest weekend; he said more details about that will come out soon. But he agreed that some things cannot be translated virtually.
“There’s no substitute for physical connection,” he said.
Sandoval said she hopes the city can soon host a second economic development conference similar to the one held for small businesses but for arts and cultural nonprofits.
“We need to protect them because that is what our town is built on,” she said. “People think that government should not fund the arts and yet we see how absolutely essential they are to our humanity.”
For Milholland and Beattie, work has already begun on 2021’s events.
“Next year is going to be all the more epic,” Milholland said. “People are going to be so ready to come together.”
