I found some kindred spirits this week, in the persons of a colorful ferry ticket-booth attendant, a retired couple living on an island, and an intrepid woman writer who’s been dead for over 80 years. Whatever else the road may be, it’s never dull.

When last you heard from me, I was in Port Angeles, a pleasant little town on the northeastern shore of the Olympic Peninsula. With the mountains on one side and the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Vancouver Island on the other, the “Port of the Angels” must have seemed like heaven to the earliest European explorers. It did to me, too, but as always I had to move on. So I steered east and north for Port Townsend, slowly tacking my way inland via the islands. view photo

 :: Ferry Me Across ::

Port Townsend was the launching point for the ferry to Whidbey Island, and ticket-booth attendant Andrew Karagas sent me off with a grin. His broad, smiling face and twinkling eyes told me that this was a person well-suited to working with the public, and his clever quips and expansive personality delivered on the promise. When he noticed that the map I was holding was fraying at the folds, he handed me a brand-new, 2002 one (“which I just stole fresh from a politician’s car”). I snapped his photo and wished we could have talked more, but the ferry was about to start boarding, so I drove into lane 5 as instructed.

The M.V. Quinault was larger than any ferry I had ever been on before, and I drove into the hull of the vessel itself rather than onto a flat, open barge of the type I was used to. I suppose that the heavy seas of the northern Pacific and the longer passages through the straits demand a more substantial vessel. As my writer noted (more on her later), Magellan should have sailed further north before naming the Pacific Ocean, because it is far from peaceful in its northerly reaches.

In the town of Oak Harbor, I passed a Southern Baptist Church, and thought about what a fish out of water that seemed to be. Whidbey Island is about as far northwest as one can go and still be in the continental U.S.; temperamentally, too, the island struck me as a poor match for Southern Baptists. Maybe the church existed mainly to serve transplanted Southerners at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island; whatever the case, it was large and prosperous-looking.

But the island was full of vacationers and I had no desire to linger. I passed the turnoff to the air station, crossed Deception Pass, and aimed for a bed in Anacortes, which lies near the northern end of Fidalgo Island. There was, you see, the possibility that I would get to meet Charlie and Doris Peckinpaugh, the parents of a friend, who lived another ferry away. view photo

 :: Meeting the Parents ::

Tim Peckinpaugh is a former boss and longtime buddy. We overlook each other’s politics—nowadays, he hardly ever accuses me of being a liberal-commie-pinko Republican, and I rarely comment on his misguided right-wing views. (Tim is married to a hardcore Democrat, though, so he’s a more tolerant guy than he likes to let on. Usually Pam just doesn’t pay him any mind, although she did object when she came home one November night and caught him teaching their baby son to cheer for Republican wins at the polls.) I knew I would like Tim’s parents.

So when Charlie returned my call, I was itching to get onto the ferry. In between crusty commentary on road names, he gave me intricate directions to their house; I now knew where Tim learned to laugh at the absurd and to meticulously attend to every detail. Of course I did like Charlie (an engineer who worked on advanced nuclear reactors and retired a vice president) and Doris (a former teacher of first-graders and remedial readers). And their home on the western side of San Juan Island was truly a little piece of heaven on earth. view photo

 :: Charlie’s Playground ::

The open, sunlit house was perched near the edge of the rocky drop to Haro Strait, and resident pods of orcas—killer whales—regularly swam by. Directly in front of the house was a little promontory perfect for whale watching, and that was Charlie’s Point; on the right-hand property line, a small cove had become Charlie’s playground. A little natural cave lay at the back of the cove, just exactly big enough to shelter his kayak. So the engineer had lined the back of the slit with foam padding (so he could shove the kayak in there without harming it) and rigged up a series of lines to aid in moving people and the kayak between land and cove. (The kayak wintered in the garage.) Doris owned the inside view of the Olympic Mountains.

The evening I arrived they took me to dinner at Roche Harbor on the northwestern point of the island. The dockside meal was superb, and we got to watch the little ceremony the harbor staff enacted at every sunset. A sort of honor guard—in a semblance of uniform—slowly lowered the flags of the harbor, Washington State, Canada, and the United States as their respective anthems were played. (When the volume fluctuated and scratches marred the music, Charlie joked that the recordings always wore out this late in summer.) It was really hokey and really fun. Generations of Washingtonians have been observing the custom since childhood, so it’s likely to persist as long as there is a Roche Harbor. Long may it wave, I say.

The next morning Charlie gave me a tour of the cove at low tide, and I photographed large purple starfish and small red ones. I thought to steal one of the beautiful green stones lying about, but before I could find one that was crustacean-free, Charlie was calling to me to come see the next wonderful thing. So Uli left that much the lighter despite my intentions. view photo

 :: Running Whales ::

Happily, though, I did get to see whales. We were just about to leave for some sightseeing and lunch when Charlie heard the radio chatter that they were coming, so we set up on his point. (“Did you visit the point outside your room this morning?” he inquired with a grin. “That’s the guest point.”) We watched the boats carrying paying hopefuls line up a quarter mile offshore, and then, between them and us, came the whales. The leader’s fin was visible first; the pod followed, running. (Running, also known as porpoising, is fast swimming during which the whales clear the surface.) None of them did a spy hop for me—raising out of water to take a look around—but I wasn’t complaining. They were a magical sight as it was.

Three pods of resident whales frequent the San Juan Islands from May to October, mostly because the food is plentiful. At 1,356 feet, Haro Strait is the deepest water around the islands, and the transition between island and water is abrupt. Strong currents hit this underwater wall and cause the cold bottom waters to travel upwards (a process called upwelling), carrying nutrients toward the surface. This profusion of food attracts salmon, which in turn attract whales—Charlie said he’s seen whales practically herding salmon into the rock face so they can eat their fill.

Killer whales (more properly known as Orcinus orca) are a fascinating species. Found in every ocean in the world, they are the second most widely distributed mammal on earth, after humans. Despite the species’ overall success, though, the San Juan pods seem to be threatened: In 1995, they were comprised of 98 whales; by 2001, the number had fallen to 78. This precipitous population decline may be the result of decreasing numbers of salmon, pollution (PCBs), and/or boat traffic. No one knows for sure, yet, but I hope they find out before the orcas disappear. view photo

 

 ::Seeing the Sights ::

Uli and I followed Charlie and Doris to Lime Kiln State Park, which is home to a 1919 lighthouse and a restored lime kiln. In the 19th century, San Juan Island was famed for its extraordinarily pure limestone, which is 98 percent calcium carbonate and only two percent silica. From 1860 to about 1950, limestone was quarried on the island and fired in 2,000-degree F. kilns to produce pure lime. Because lime is reactive with many other substances, it’s useful in the production of steel, plaster, cement, and paper. Unfortunately for wooden ships, however, water is one of the substances with which lime reacts to give off heat. The lighthouse could help the ships avoid the rocks, but nothing could protect them from their dangerous cargo; many ships burned.

Then we went into Friday Harbor, where we had lunch and deposited Uli in line for the ferry back to Anacortes. My gracious hosts left me so I might do a little research in the town’s Whale Museum, and on the way back to the ferry I did a little more in the window of the local real-estate office. As I stood there dreaming, a woman—who might have been 30-something and chatting me up, I couldn’t say for sure on either count—stopped and tried to interest me in a house she was helping a local contractor fix up. She assured me that with 12 rooms and water views, it was a steal at $600,000 (owing to exigent circumstances). I assured her that it was a bargain that was still far out of my reach, so I wouldn’t be moving to the island anytime soon. view photo

 :: Women’s Work ::

Like my last kindred spirit, I seem destined for a considerable amount of wandering before I settle down. Caroline C. Leighton was truly a remarkable woman, as is indicated by the subtitle of the paperback edition of her volume West Coast Journeys, 1865-1879. Born in 1832 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, she became a teacher, like most of the other (relatively few) well-educated women of her day. She met her husband, Rufus Leighton, in Washington, DC, where she had moved during the Civil War to teach African-American refugees from the South. Rufus was a promising Treasury Department clerk who was sent to Washington Territory in 1865 to collect customs, and she went everywhere that he went in those wild days.

Caroline’s description of a particular miner seems to apply equally well to her: “He had uncommon powers of expression, and of thought and feeling, too, and took great interest in every thing.” She was smart, curious, witty, and kindhearted, but she was not above the occasional caustic observation. She opined on missionaries, saying that they “congratulate themselves that these barbarous ceremonies are no longer observed [and] that the Indian is weaned from his idea of the happy hunting-ground.” California miners didn’t escape her notice, either (“I rather think [their reverence for women] . . . was somewhat intensified by the extreme difficulty they found in doing women’s work”). And she ruthlessly skewered the great British explorer George Vancouver: “He had made up his mind, that all the streams flowing into the Pacific between the fortieth and forty-eighth parallels of latitude were mere brooks . . . and not worthy of his attention” (thereby overlooking the Columbia River).

I actually may get back to Mountain Time this week.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment. . . .
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