A Kayak Guide's Day Off

Well, the season has been a little slow to pick up and has left me with a couple days of exploration time, which I have gladly eaten up. Warning: what I’m about to say may leave you feeling envious, wanting, and could result in an expensive plane ticket to the islands.

Day 1:

 It began leisurely in my hammock, which I had slept in overnight simply because the stars beckoned me. Wiggling out of my sleeping bag, I rolled out and grabbed a book and relaxed for the next two hours, swaying in the breeze and letting my imagination walk through new, fictional lands. Once it finally came time to put the book down, I climbed the hill to the horse pasture where I raked grass for a while as a part of my work-rent-exchange and then just enjoyed leaning against the railing of the arena as the owner of the farm trained a beautiful horse named Alegre. Except for the pony ride at Howarth Park when I was 8, I have absolutely no experience riding horses. But Sus, the owner of the horse farm here, was explaining how the horse was cantering to the pace of her breath. In an out, step by step. When she released a large exhale, the horse stopped. It was pretty incredible. When little Johannes, the little 2-yr-old, cried to his mother, “Milk go night-night” the show ended and nap time commenced for the little guy. 

Some of the horses with their owners in the arena

 I headed into town and checked out a few books from the library on local history and tidepool critters. I learned that the road on which I live off of, Boyce Rd, was named for the first Sheriff in the county and whose wife was “toughened by the journey west” and a great healer and midwife, helping to birth over 500 babies throughout the islands. After the library, I popped by the farmer’s market for some rainbow chard and savory olive tapenade, all island-grown and island-loved of course. Then, I received a text from a fellow kayak guide that low tide was approaching and we made plans to meet at Grandma’s Cove for some intertidal foraging.

Grandma's Cove, located in American Camp

 The trail through grasses and madrone trees led us down the hill to an open beach piled high with driftwood which had been used to affix a swing, of sorts. After a quick ride, we started scrambling across the rocks, diurnally exposed by nothing more than the moon’s great bulk pulling water away from earth. We tip-toed through aggregating anemones and felt the pull of their stinging nematocysts harpooning our skin, too thick and leathery to damage. The Vancouver feather-duster worms waved their feeding appendages like a flamenco dancer waves her fan, tucking inside their parchment-like casing only when my curious fingers wandered too close. Beneath loose rocks, six-armed sea stars hid, their hundreds of tube feet clinging to the substrate using nothing more than water pressure in their water vascular system. Decorator crabs strutted their stuff, adorning themselves in bits of sea lettuce for a hat and red algae as modest top to their carapace.

Vancouver Feather Duster Worms

 I was completely engulfed in this world, where every little pool seemed to be another aquarium with ecological relationships like I couldn’t imagine. Each organism doing his or her own thing, crawling from rock to rock as if their life depended on it- because it does. Glancing up only to find better footing between the sharp acorn barnacles, I managed to glimpse something oh so one-of-a-kind in the distance: the 6-foot dorsal fin of a killer whale. Orcas! The southbound ebb current had brought them from north of us in the Haro Strait to the southern end of the island where we were. At first we only saw one male, one female, and one calf, which we thought odd since they usually stay quite close to their matriarchal family groups. After the first three passed by us, about 200 yards offshore, we looked into the distance and spotted the rest of the pod. Though they were about a mile out, they weren’t hard to miss as they lept clear out of the water and landed with a giant splash. One even showed off with some tail slaps, lifting her fluke high out of the water and then smashing it down to break the surface tension, emitting a sound we could hear clearly from our beach. 

Tail Slap

All I could think was how grateful I was to be able to witness such intelligent animals simply enjoying themselves. Not locked in a tiny tank, anguished by the pain of being removed from their family. Here they were, in all their glory, breaching, just for the fun of it. They weren’t leaping to touch a ball dangling from the ceiling, they weren’t lifting each other to the surface for some patron’s eager camera- they were so free out there, probably just as stoked as I am to live in this beautiful place. The freedom that they expressed with each lunge from the sea hung in the air like a lasting aroma, sweet and comforting. The tide began to come in and we walked up the trail, feeling more than satisfied.

To cap the night off, I stopped by “The Knoll” where some of the guides live and were making apple cobbler in a dutch oven and then relaxed at another friend’s house on a porch swing at sunset watching the ferries come in before cuddling on a couch with the girls for a documentary, twirling red vines between our fingers. It was a pretty darned good day.

Day 2: 

Another day off! The San Juan Islands are made up of many, many islands both big and small and it seems nearly impossible to get to all of them. But, the biggest and most traveled in these parts are San Juan Island (where I live), Orcas Island, Lopez Island, and Shaw Island. 

On this day, I decided to go to Orcas Island. Now, the ferry system here is pretty great but also pretty expensive if you plan to take a car anywhere. However, as a “walk-on” passenger, you can take the inter-island ferry all day for free! San Juan Island is particularly walk-on-friendly because the town is completely centered around the ferry terminal with all the restaurants, museums, and shops that a tourist could want. Orcas Island, however, is much more spread out and difficult to get around by foot. To solve this problem, the islanders encourage hitchhiking. There are hitchhiking posts all over the place and, in a place where the biggest war ever fought was over a pig, it’s a pretty safe thing to do. The first car that passed me by on Orcas picked me up and contained 3 college guys. What’s a girl to do? We hung out for a little while and drove over to Moran State Park where we jumped from a gnarled Douglas Fir tree into Cascade Lake and floated comfortably in the warm waters, gazing up at the cloudless sky. After the swim, I said thanks for the ride and decided to climb Mt. Constitution, the highest point in the San Juan Islands. With an elevation gain of about 2000 feet in the first 2 miles or so, it was a pretty tedious hike but the view from the top was beyond worth it. The trees at the summit opened to reveal an eastward view of Bellingham, Mt. Baker, and the Twin Sisters. When I first came through the clearing, I just about screamed, the view was so breathtaking. Mt. Baker, an ancient volcano proudly stood towering over the land, capped with snow and creating clouds as wet air is forced over its top. To the south were the Cascades and the Olympic Mountains, with Puget Sound tucked in there as well. And, peaking around the corner, you could see the Canadian mountain ranges, also capped with snow. It was all I could do to just sit on a bluff and admire it all. 

The view from the top with snow-capped
Mt. Baker in the distance

I started thinking about how everything I could see was once trapped under a glacier 2 miles thick, compressing the land beneath it. But 10,000 years ago the ice melted and revealed this: a beautiful expanse of fjordlands dotted with life and history. I considered how the waters would someday erode this place, wearing away the islands until they were no more. The islands, it seems, kind of stand as a symbol for each of us. We appear out of nowhere in a blip of earth’s great history, only to be removed from it. And while the idea may seem dismal, I watched the waters being forced around even the smallest of islands, creating forceful countercurrents. The islands have the power to change the course of water, just as we have the power to change the course of history. It is devastating to be here and know that the herring fishery has been depleted by 90%, that the waters used to be so thick with salmon it seemed as you could walk across them, that first-born orcas usually don’t survive because their mother’s milk is so full of hormone-altering PCBs. These things are absolutely tragic but they should be equally as motivating. Perched like an eagle above it all, I wanted the world to sit on the bluff with me and just feel the beauty of this place. To let the song of the crow and the pull of the water draw us in to the earth that we are a part of. To feel the rays of the sun freckle our skin and the Doug firs release their needles into our hair. I am of the belief that humans desperately need more moments like these to reconnect to the land we call home. It is easy to be doom-and-gloom about conservation topics but that’s just not good enough. The earth and sea are far too beautiful to be treated this way. One glance of an orca calf playing with his mother in the kelp forest, and I guarantee you’ll never want to go to SeaWorld again. The ocean is one big, giant classroom that welcomes us to learn but lacks a voice to speak for itself. So, we must be the speech-givers. We must be the ones to stand up and say that enough is enough, we are running out of fish, the oil slicks are unsightly, and dumping is disgusting. The ocean has given to us for thousands of years, and I think we owe it to the ocean to give back.