CATEGORY: PORT TOWNSEND
PHOTO: WALTER DILL HIGHSCHOOL GRADUATION

I met Walter Dill about a year after I moved to Port Townsend.  He was in his early twenties, fresh out of college, and he had just moved to town.  He was an artist.  He looked me up because he had discovered that I was doing a landscape design for a local retirement home, The Kah Tai Care Center.  It was situated on the Kah Tai Lagoon, a small lake that was formed when the highway leading into town was put across the mouth of a shallow bay.  The landscape I was working on was between the care center and the Lagoon, a lovely site that offered many possibilities.
 
Walter wanted to work with me.  He said that he was not interested in money but in helping with the design.  He was deep into some kind of cosmology or sacred geometry, and wanted to incorporate one of his cosmic designs into the landscape.  When I asked what design he thought was appropriate, I found he was not concerned with people in wheelchairs and how they would negotiate slopes and curves, or if they wanted to walk or wheel themselves beside the water; his concern was pattern.  My impression was that he was really interested in how the final design would look from outer space.  I wondered if his design was intended as a signal to extraterrestrials or if, perhaps he had been the designer of Versailles in a former life.  I finally had to tell him that I needed to do the design myself.

That would have been the end of our friendship except that Walter told me he had also heard that I knew how to dance and wanted to know if I would teach him.  I was glad to teach him what I knew which wasn’t really all that much.  I taught him to waltz and foxtrot.  I taught him the two-step and the basic swing dance step.  But he wanted to learn more.  I said that I had heard there were free Scandinavian folk dance lessons in Poulsbo once a week.

So we started going to Poulsbo on Monday nights.  Gradually others from Port Townsend started going with us.  It was so much fun!  No one smoked.  No one drank.  It didn’t matter if you had a partner or not.  Everybody danced with everybody.  There were partner dances, mixer dances, pattern dances, circle dances.  We learned to do the Schottish and both slow and fast polkas.  We learned the Hambo and the Pols.  We both loved it, and could hardly wait for Monday to come.  I continued until I left Port Townsend 25 years later, but Walter only went for a couple of years and then he wanted to expand his dance horizons, so he moved to Seattle and enrolled at a professional dance studio at which he then became an instructor.  

Walter was a unique personality.  He was totally hooked on symbolism and metaphor.  When he thought he was eating too much, he did a painting that had the word EAT written in a hundred different ways so it looked like a Mark Tobey.  When he moved from an apartment into one of Port Townsend’s old houses he discovered that the telephone number of the phone that had been left in the house spelled D-I-L-L.  It was as if he had been zapped with a cattle prod.  He was staggered.  He was dizzy with euphoria.  He managed to get the telephone company to let him keep the number.  At that house he also dug a ditch that spelled POETRY in writing.  The metaphor was “I dig poetry.”  On his 40^th birthday he had a WD40 party.

After he moved to Seattle, he met Nancyanna, a fellow dancer, and they were married.  Together they opened their own dance studio.  They were amazingly successful.  They had a very relaxed, non dogmatic way of teaching dance.  They encouraged improvisation and innovation.  Their theme was that dancing should be fun.  What a droll idea!  The students loved them and they soon had a huge following.  During this time Walter came back to Port Townsend often and held dance workshops in one of the buildings at Fort Warden.

He and Nancyanna bought a lovely home north of Seattle and had two daughters.  Then Nancyanna contracted MS, a disease that is seemingly inherent among the Pennsylvania Dutch which was her heritage.  Her personality changed.  She had anger issues.  Sadly, Walter got a divorce and raised their girls by himself.  He sold the business and moved to Alaska where he again taught dancing.  The last I heard was that he had moved back to Port Townsend and Nancyanna was in the Kah Tai Care Center there, a sad irony.   The last time I saw him was at my 75^th birthday party.  He taught the whole assemblage how to do the Familia Waltz, a simple Scandinavian mixer dance.

We have lost touch since then, but he was one of my best friends for many years.