Vashon punches above its weight

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Our front page this week has been a long time coming.

It marks major milestones for two ambitious, multiyear projects: the unveiling of Singer, the gray whale skeleton now suspended at Vashon Center for the Arts, and the ceremonial opening of the Seattle Indian Health Board’s Thunderbird Treatment Center.

Neither project arrived fully formed. Both required years of planning, problem-solving, fundraising and collaboration. And both show, as always, that Vashon punches above its weight.

I was a Beachcomber intern in the fall of 2024, when Singer’s bones were being recovered and cleaned and the public conversation surrounding the future Thunderbird center was gathering momentum.

It is remarkable to now see those ideas made physical.

Singer, a 39.5-foot adult male gray whale, washed ashore on Vashon in April 2024. Since then, his remains have become the center of an extraordinary collaboration involving the Vashon Nature Center, Vashon Center for the Arts, Vashon High School students, artists, scientists and more than 100 community volunteers.

Students studied, measured and illustrated his bones. Volunteers cleaned and cataloged them. More than 160 bones were digitally scanned. Artists and fabricators devised ways to replace missing pieces, support the skeleton and give it movement.

Now Singer hangs above the VCA atrium — not merely as a museum specimen, but as a work of art, a scientific resource and a warning about the pressures facing gray whales and the waters they depend upon.

The Thunderbird Treatment Center has followed a very different path, but its opening represents another enormous undertaking.

The Seattle Indian Health Board has transformed the former nursing home at Sunrise Ridge into a 92-bed residential treatment facility that will serve people seeking recovery from substance use disorders. The center will call its clients “relatives,” a word that reflects its culturally grounded approach to care.

Saturday’s ceremony did not mark the immediate arrival of those relatives; the center expects to begin serving clients later this summer or in early fall. But the ribbon-cutting brought the project another important step closer to fulfilling its purpose.

It also brought together tribal members and leaders from around the state, elected officials and Vashon residents to celebrate something that will have an impact far beyond the island.

There is something especially meaningful about watching these projects unfold through the pages of a community newspaper.

Local news is often necessarily immediate. We report on meetings, emergencies, elections, performances and decisions as they happen. But the stories that shape a community rarely begin and end within a single news cycle. They develop through dozens of meetings, setbacks, revisions, volunteer workdays and incremental victories.

A newspaper has the privilege of documenting those small steps — and, occasionally, of being there when they finally amount to something visible.

For me, these two stories are also a reminder of how much can change in less than two years. When I first arrived at The Beachcomber, I was learning how to report on Vashon while these projects were still taking shape. Now, as editor, I have had the chance to see them reach milestones that once felt distant.

Singer will hang at VCA for the next five years. Thunderbird will soon welcome its first relatives. Both will continue to generate new stories, questions and challenges.

But this week, it is worth pausing to recognize how far they have come — and the many people whose persistence carried them here.

— Aspen Anderson, Editor