Islands of delight: a visit to Washington's San Juan Islands just might change your life

Sunset, August, 2002 by Lawrence Cheek

Normal satisfied well-balanced people visit the San Juan Islands all the time. But they don't usually decide to stay. If they do it's probably a mistake and they'll have to pay a pile of cash to ferry their worldly goods back to the mainland a few months or years later. The San Juanderers who come and stick are different. They are creative, ingenious. Self-reliant, romantic, iconoclastic unapologetically odd. And they would cheerfully embrace all these adjectives as compliments. * Everyone who craves to stay and carves out a way to do it has a story, usually a good one. Rhea Miller a two-term county commissioner thought she was coming for a three week visit. "When I got on the ferry to go home, I wept I knew then that this must be home." To scrape together a living, she chopped wood, cleaned houses, and cooked for six years.

Skip Snaith was tired of the crowded East Coast, so he came out with friends who were buying a large farm and tinkering with a strange scientific project. Since he didn't figure their project to pan out, he worked construction for three years, then developed a business building classic Aleutian skin-on-frame kayaks and teaching the ancient art.

"See these indentations?" Snaith is showing me dings in the cedar ribs of a kayak taking shape in his Orcas Island shed. "They're tooth marks. You bend the ribs by biting on them. It compresses the fiber in the wood."

I am spending a week in the San Juans, constantly bumping into people such as these, and late each evening, I review the day's adventures, wondering whether I might be eligible to become an islander. I weigh the islands' serene beauty against the headaches of a four- to six-hour car-and-ferry commute to Seattle, where I might need to go for at least occasional employment, and nightly the balance shifts in my mind. At week's end, intuition and local anecdotes convince me that anyone who's waffling--who isn't totally committed to the place--won't make it.

On the ferry back, I don't weep. But the boat arrives on the mainland way too quickly I hate having left.

Oases in the sea

The San Juans are an archipel-ago of amoeba-shaped isles scattered in the straits between the Washington mainland and Vancouver Island. Geologically; they're ridges and plateaus and mountaintops, whatever didn't get rasped into seabed by the last retreating glaciers 12,000 years ago. They number either 172 or 743 or some figure in between, depending on who's calling what an "island."

Many are just nameless rocks that break the water at low tide, providing sun decks for sea lions. Orcas and San Juan Islands, respectively 57 and 55 square miles in area, are the largest--and are the tourist destinations, sprinkled with shops and B&Bs.

Climate forms part of the San Juans' allure: The islands squat in the rain shadow of the Olympics and Vancouver Island range, so an average year's rainfall runs a little more than half of Seattle's 38 inches. Kayaking photographer Joel Rogers describes it as "a Mediterranean experience in an evergreen landscape." Locals call it the "banana belt."

Wise boaters take these descriptions with a grain of sea salt: San Juan weather can pivot on whim, suddenly funneling Arctic gales between islands or blooming with woolly fog. Twice daily the Pacific tries to pour itself into the straits, and the water churns like a Maytag. But it can also be achingly beautiful, its color ranging from platinum to ancient jade, depending on the light it's reflecting.

The archipelago's recorded history opened with tentative Spanish forays in 1790, which left a few surviving place names such as Patos ("Ducks") Island and Rosario ("Rosary") Strait. The British surveyor George Vancouver explored in 1792, his crew raiding the islands for wild strawberries and onions but otherwise paying scant attention. In the 1850s and '60s, both American and British interests began farming San Juan Island, and the dispute over which nation owned it almost triggered a minor war.

Tourism dates from the 185Os (San Juan Island's Hotel de Haro, built in 1886, is still in business), but it wasn't until 1922, when ferries began regular island calls, that it began to evolve into a serious economic force.

A place for new experiences

A visit to the San Juans is best not programmed. Make reservations for overnight lodging, of course. After that, set your agenda to the local clock, or to nature's. The natural world still dominates here. The archipelago is a trove of biological treasures. Most prominent are the orcas, the killer whales. Three pods, or extended families, spend their summers around the San Juans. Gray whales also chug by on their annual commutes between Alaska and Baja. As a result, whale-watching has become an island cottage industry. There are 20 whale-watching charter outfits currently listed with the chambers of commerce, aided by a mountaintop spotting service on Vancouver Island that radios coordinates to the skippers.

The human side of the islands is equally engaging, and surprising. The key, perhaps, is to open yourself to anything. I visit Neil's Mall on Lopez Island, an only-in-the-San-Juans omnium-gatherum, where residents and some visitors bring cast-off clothing, appliances, car parts, cassette tapes, and rusty bikes; and other residents and visitors drop in and take whatever they want. No membership fee, no charge, no questions. It's either pure recycling or communism perfected, but it works, and it's fascinating.