When Eric Fiore and his fellow Whatcom Community College student ambassadors put their minds to something, they clearly commit.

The group of nine volunteers – alongside 10 English as a Second Language (ESLA) students and one Service-Learning student – have spent the last two months planning and constructing a 12-foot Orca-themed float, which will represent the college in this year’s Ski to Sea Blossom Time Grand Parade.

Whatcom Community College (WCC) students have marched in the parade for the past couple of years, but to have a float is a first.

And what a float it is.

On a recent visit to a storage unit where the crew has been hard at work, WCC students Eric Fiore and Bri Martin painted finishing touches to components of the float, which will be assembled on site just before the parade’s start.

Matthew Santos is the Student Life Coordinator at WCC and an advisor to the student ambassadors.

“Eric wanted to take on what I thought was a very ambitious project,” says Santos, watching them work. “I’ve been extremely impressed.”

The process began March 24, when Fiore began writing a proposal to WCC student government, requesting funding for the project, which includes sending a team to participate in the race.

“It started with an idea from Eric,” Santos says. “And the other student ambassadors were like, ‘Let’s do it.’”

“Right after our first meeting, we started talking about where we would build the float,” Santos continues. “Eric walked right over here [to Cordata Self Storage] and said, ‘Hey, do you guys have an extra space we can use?’ And they were gracious enough to say sure.”

People in the community have donated most of the materials and other necessities to create the float.

The next hurdle proved a bit bigger. Fiore – the de facto ringleader of the project’s design and construction phase – had never built a float. And the 48-year-old student had only the blurriest memories of long-ago childhood papier mâché projects.

“It was a matter of researching it,” Fiore says. “For me, the most important thing was that it was proportionate, that the size was right – and that it really popped.”

It’s clear the float will do exactly that. How could a 12-foot breaching Orca whale, complete with cresting waves and a Mount Baker background, not wow the Ski to Sea parade crowd?

Fiore estimates that he’s put in 80 hours so far, working on the float’s construction.

“I think Eric has been living here, pretty much,” Santos says with a laugh.

“The design is really simple, but a lot of work has gone into it,” Fiore admits. “I’ve never in my life sculpted anything, so that was a first for me.”

Fiore took on much of the Orca’s sculpting – though he’s quick to say other students helped. Student volunteers then papier mâchéd and painted the float’s components.

“What’s most impressive about this project are the students who are working outside their comfort zone,” says Santos. “A lot of them – myself included – never worked with chicken wire before. So to try and make an orca whale out of chicken wire was crazy.”

“Bri has been incredible,” Fiore says, nodding to the young woman painting glitter onto the Mount Baker facade. “And Jake, another ambassador who’s not here today, has also been so great, showing up on weekends.”

Bri Martin is a Bellingham High School graduate and a Running Start student at WCC.

“Bri’s going to the University of Washington in the fall; she’s got all these things going on – all of the students do,” says Fiore. “So for them to give up free time to do this has been awesome.”

Fiore attended college in Oregon in the 1990s, before leaving to start a family and a business. He’s now a full-time WCC transfer student, as well as a math center tutor, student ambassador, and member of the student senate.

“I’ve come back to school because no one else in my family has graduated from college,” Fiore says. “I have three kids and three grandkids, and I want them to say, ‘If my dad, my grandpa can do it at 48, then we can do it, too.’

Fiore and his crew hope to have many WCC students walking alongside them and the float in Saturday’s parade.

“We’re trying to get many of the different clubs on campus involved,” Fiore says.

“Because we’re such a diverse community college, the theme of our parade float is diversity,” Fiore continues. “We have international students from 26 different countries this quarter; we’re trying to represent them with our float.”

The float is also meant to celebrate sustainability. “As much as we could, all the material we’ve used are environmentally safe, including the paints, which was a challenge,” Fiore says.

Fiore has seen plenty of past Ski to Sea floats, has taken part in previous parades, and thinks the crowds lining Cornwall have never seen anything quite like what WCC is bringing this year.

But he also wants to make a different kind of impression on the young kids watching the float roll by.

“Hopefully we’ll send a message to really young people in the community, who can look forward to going to Whatcom Community College, instead of maybe a four-year school and paying all that money for tuition the first two years,” Fiore says. “It’s important that we start to recruit these really young people and get them involved.”

Fiore knows about involvement, school pride, and working hard – as do his fellow student ambassadors.

“It’s so many people being so imaginative and ambitious,” Santos says. “The tenacity that’s been put into this project is just amazing.”

There’s no plan yet for what happens to the gargantuan Orca after the parade, but Fiore would like to see it stick around.

“I suggested that we take and hang it from the ceiling in Syre Center,” he says. “I’d hate to see it just go away. It would be nice if something happened with it.”

Watch for the Whatcom Community College float – in the number 13 position – at this year’s Ski to Sea Blossom Time Parade, taking place Saturday, May 24 at noon. The parade begins at the corner of Alabama and Cornwall, progresses south into downtown, and ends at North State and York. Learn more about the parade here and the Ski to Sea race here.

By Stacee Sledge

“I used to live in the red house on the corner,” says Christen Mattix, nodding to a vibrant cottage-style home across from her perch on a bench at the intersection of 16th and Taylor Streets in Bellingham’s South Hill neighborhood. “I would often sit here and just soak in the gorgeous view of the water.”

Today Mattix is knitting on that same bench; something she’s been doing since May of 2012. Not such an unusual sight – until you realize she’s slowly creating a long, inky-blue rope of yarn that stretches down off her lap, past her feet, into and across the street, and disappearing out of sight down the steep hill that ultimately ends, more than six blocks later, in Bellingham Bay.

That rope – a “stream,” as Mattix calls it – currently reaches nearly four blocks down the hill.

Mattix, an artist who has taught at Western Washington University, is knitting this stream down to the bay – a project that has entwined her with the community.

Though Mattix began the project two years ago, it started in her mind long before that.

“One day I was just sitting here and this idea just popped into my mind of a blue knit line that went all the way to the water,” she says.

The idea pestered her for months. “I didn’t want to do it,” she admits. “I was like, ‘they’re going to think I’m crazy!’”

“I would wake up in the morning with this thought already presenting itself,” she says. “Or I would be sitting in a meeting and the thought would come. My mind wouldn’t be on it at all, and suddenly it would appear.”

Mattix journaled about the project for a long time, thinking it through, and as decisions were made, it became a reality.

First she chose very long, vintage knitting needles. “I liked the old school needles,” says Mattix, whose grandmother taught her to knit when she was seven years old.

She then chose an acrylic yarn that has proven resilient as it sheds dirt and rain well and stands up to being driven over by passing cars. She also landed on just the right shade of blue, which she wanted to match the color of the water on its best day.

Now, two years later, you’ll find Mattix in her familiar spot for at least an hour every day – rain or shine – during what has become her knitting season, between roughly May and November.

“I come and most days I stretch the rope down as far as it will go,” she says of her routine. “I put my needles down on the bench and then I unwind it. That takes about 20 minutes, and then I climb back up the hill and I sit and I knit.”

The length of the stream varies from day to day.

“It seems to shrink, and then get longer,” says Mattix, whose theory is that the knitted rope gets a lot of torque in it from cars driving over it and from the way Mattix works. “Every time I turn my needles around, I put another spiral into it, so it gets really tightly coiled.”

Twice she’s taken her knitting up to a really high tower and let it go, watching the spiral spin free.

During 30 minutes of sitting alongside Mattix on a recent sunny morning, three people stopped by to talk and numerous folks waved and smiled from passing cars and trucks.

“That’s one of the joys,” Mattix says of the project, “the interaction with other people, folks driving by.”

A young man wearing a Western Washington University t-shirt stops, pulls off his headphones, and politely asks what she’s doing.

“I’m knitting a stream down to the bay,” she says, smiling as she continues to work.

“I saw it; it goes pretty far. That’s impressive,” he says. “Is that your goal, to go for distance?”

“It’s more about the process and the poetry of it,” Mattix says.

The young man tells her about knitting a scarf when he was younger and how meditative he found it to be.

“That’s what I like about it, too,” says Mattix.

They talk for a short time longer, and then the young man continues on his way.

The soft clicking of Mattix’s silver knitting needles makes a soft, rhythmic background music as we talk.

Mattix is a full-time artist during the week and an overnight caregiver on weekends. She’s also started a business selling cards and prints. “I sell my cards at the Community Food Co-op downtown and my prints at the Whatcom Museum Store at the Whatcom Museum Lightcatcher.”

“I paint, knit, do video art. I’ve done sculpture,” she says. “This is kind of a performance piece if you want to get technical about it.”

Mattix finds Bellingham ideal for artists. “I moved here from Seattle and I was just so ready to be done with the traffic jams and the noise of the freeway,” she says. “This is such a peaceful place and there’s so much beauty here. You can go anywhere and get inspiration.”

It’s also a supportive environment. “People are excited about creativity here,” she says. Whenever she completes the knitting project, she’d like to have a street party and invite all the South Hill neighbors who have watched the knitted rope slowly inch its way toward the bay.

Mattix now has an apartment downtown and bikes to her knitting spot every day. At the end of each session, she winds up the rope on an old garden hose reel and stores it at a nearby house.

“I have to say that my favorite people are the regulars I see almost every day,” says Mattix.

Just then, an older woman makes her way up the hill toward us. “Good morning,” Mattix calls out to her.

The woman stops and asks questions in a lilting British accent, intrigued by what she sees. She and Mattix talk for a couple of minutes about the project.

“How do you make it?” the woman asks.

“I’m just knitting straight across,” Mattix answers. “Do you knit?”

“I have in the past,” the woman says, and then pauses. “I don’t know how you came up with that idea!”

“I don’t either!” says Mattix, and we all laugh.

“I told a friend of mine that an artist is the servant of the work,” Mattix says. “This idea came to me like a gift and it said, ‘Do it.’ So I did!”

The woman wishes us well and continues on her walk.

Mattix loves the social interaction that comes with this project.

“I’m definitely an introvert and was way too reclusive before this project started,” she says. “This has really broken me out of that. Walking around downtown, I want to say hi to people; I don’t to want to just be in my shell.”

Mattix can only guess how much longer the project will continue.

“It’s a daunting thought,” she says. “It’s time to uncoil the line and see where it is. It’s looking like another season, but I can’t be sure.”

However long it takes to complete, Mattix believes that the time frame will be perfect. “I have to trust that,” she says. One of the things she realized early on in the project is that it’s really about surrendering and letting go and accepting that time takes time.

“I’m hoping to befriend time through this project,” she says with a laugh. “If I can only befriend time, it will be worth it.”

Thinking about this stream that has slowly wended its way down the hill over these last couple of years, it’s impossible not to imagine that moment when it finally reaches the lip of the bay.

“Some people say it’s like a giant fuse,” Mattix says, “and it’s going to suck the water up the hill.”

Learn more about Mattix and read about her daily experience with the project on her blog. Peruse and purchase her artwork at the downtown Community Food Co-op, the Lightcatcher Museum gift shop, or at her online shop, Connections Made Visible.