The sign was clear. Do not pick the tulips. Do not remove tulip petals from the field. Do not walk between the rows. Of course plenty of people did all of these things.
This weekend the sun was out and there was no rain. The wife and I ended up in acres of tulips of all colors—red, orange, yellow, many shades of purple, tulips with round edges, sharp edges, smooth petals and rough. Tulips of all varieties and yellow and white daffodils thrown in for good measure, all blooming or waiting to bloom in raised rows for acre after acre. This was Tulip Town in Mount Vernon, WA.
It’s an annual pilgrimage of sorts for folks in western Washington. Every spring families and photographers pile into cars and make the drive from who knows how far to see the tulips and to take pictures in the rows it’s clearly marked to stay out of.
On our way there we waded through traffic downtown, stopped to walk through the street fair with the dogs to eat deep-fried cheese curds and marvel at home-wrought art and home-wrought not-art people sold up at booths for block after block. We left downtown to find our way through country roads lined with quaint houses, fields of tall grass and blooming daffodils to Tulip Town. We paid our five dollars admission and joined the pilgrims.
I’m not convinced the five dollars each was well spent. For those truly into flowers, yard art or collectible junk, this may well have been a kind of paradise. Perhaps it would have been better if we could have brought the dogs in with us. They like crowds and kids plenty, but signs on the way in made clear they were not allowed for liability purposes. It was amusing to see families trip over each other to go deep into the rows of tulips while loved ones positioned them from the road with indecipherable hand signals. It was tragically funny when a father getting ready to take a picture of his daughter, her squatted down and framed by bursting orange tulips, told her, “don’t smile like that.” She quickly closed her mouth. Something about her teeth, we gathered.
As the trolley-tractor trundled by, crowds hurried toward the tulips from a lot at the back of the field. They’d found parking just outside Tulip Town proper, and there was no admission booth to pay their way through. They’d been there before, I thought, then watched huge kites on the field next to us lift higher and higher then fall as the wind gave way to calm.
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