It’s July in Florida, which means I am daydreaming of a little island in the Pacific Northwest, where you can put on a light sweater in the evening to watch the sun retreat into the earth. Add a pandemic (and the self-imposed travel restrictions associated) to the pot of anxiety and mosquitos and you have a recipe for wanderlust.
I keep coming back to the question: where to next? I’ve spent nearly four years in the travel industry, never spending longer than four weeks at home. I’ve been home now for five months, save for a few trips to the coast, trying to decipher my place here in Tallahassee, trying to be at peace with the stillness of staying home. Michael would tell you that despite being able to relax, I’m not great at staying still, and have since painted our office and studio, redesigned nearly every room in our house, read a lot of fiction, taught myself to bake sourdough, planted a number of vegetables, fermented cucumbers—you get the point. I’ve always championed domesticity for its most basic merit: the ability to care for oneself and their family. But there’s something about the feeling of the sun beaming on my face on a park bench in Australia, the smile from a French officer, the wildness of a forest of Douglas fir that lingers while I knead bread and unload the dishwasher. I’m grateful to have memories to transport me, to tease me, to inspire me while we make the most of our time indoors.
One memory in particular that resurges when the heat pulses at home is this trip we took last autumn to the San Juan Islands. It started off blissfully; I arrived in Seattle off the tail end of a work trip and Michael, who I hadn’t seen in a month, met me there. We embraced like it had been years—when you voluntarily spend every day together, any day apart feels like forever—and headed out to our one-night Airbnb rental in Seattle. We had dinner at The Walrus and the Carpenter where we discussed the Instagram-public break up of artists Daren Thomas Magee and Vyana Novus over oysters and white wine. How strange for them to elect such vulnerability for the sake of being “real” on the internet, where even the most vulnerable interactions are still packaged and edited. I think about this often.
The next morning came unexpected news from home. Our neighbor saw our kitten get hit by a car. We sat, parked on a side street in downtown Seattle, unmovable. It didn’t feel real. We were about to spend that Saturday exploring the city, the afternoon driving up the coast to Anacortes, and the following day, our 25th birthday, on an island in the Salish Sea. But all of that felt as though it had dimmed, like the rumors of the region’s endless gloom were true for your mind, too.
The sky opened up in the afternoon, though, as we boarded the ferry from Anacortes to San Juan Island, and the excitement of exploring this new part of the world together distracted us from the news of Marie’s death.
What followed was not as much a week of investigating the San Juan Islands as a week of investigating peace. I imagined a foggy and drizzly landscape—as if the white balance for the first week of November on the islands would be set to “cool.” I couldn’t have been more wrong. Grasses, gilded by sunlight, waved while we walked along the coast at Cattle Point, where I wondered to myself, have I ever seen a bald eagle in the wild before? I didn’t bother to rack my memory, I stood and gazed quietly, watching him watch me.
One night before dinner, we took the car to visit some spot Michael was sure he remembered directions to, and after a few wrong turns we ended up at American Camp as the sun was sinking. A tiny crescent of the moon smiled crookedly in the sky and I knew I’d never see a sunset like this again in my life. We didn’t bring our cameras, to our dismay, so we snapped some iPhone photos that gave no justice to the slow burn of the afternoon falling into the Pacific. We were the only ones there, alone with the driftwood and the waves, gawking and skipping and flirting with Canada. Michael stood behind me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, and I felt the thing humans have been trying to describe for ages, the feeling language can’t quite ever know.
On our birthday, we took the ferry to Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juans, a horseshoe-shaped land mass with the highest elevation of all the islands. A short ride from Friday Harbor, we were docked on the West side and driving to Eastsound before we knew it. Tucked in the center of the horseshoe, Eastsound reminded me of a perfect little settlement for Sims—a quaint village with a bookstore, waterfront restaurants, little cafes, quirky galleries, bed and breakfasts, trees and a tiny coast. Everything you’d really need, you could find it, and (it felt like) someone would have made it by hand for you. It was strange, celebrating another trip around the sun a mere 24 hours after we got such sad news. But as the saying goes, nature heals, and we’d been swallowed whole by fir trees, waterfalls and wandering trails. We drove up Mount Constitution, the highest point on the island, and hiked up to the lookout. I could only see mountains and ocean for miles. I posted a photo on Instagram of the layers of mountains, all different shades of blue, flattened by the distance of my lens to the trees. “Crunchy but good,” my dad commented. Wholesome, but a little hipster, is what I think he meant. A place for travelers, hungry to see something without wearing blue light glasses, looking to escape from the commodities of self-optimization sold to us incessantly. You could buy adaptogens to fight stress, or you could stare out into the trees and breathe.
I think that’s why I loved the San Juan Islands so much, and why I yearn for them now. I felt a sense of respite from the pace of normal life. And now that normal life has been turned on its head, I feel the anxiety of the unknown creeping every day. It’s places like these that I go back to when my thoughts wander into the abyss. I find comfort in knowing there will always be air to breathe on a mountaintop in my mind.
Visiting the San Juan Islands
Getting there: Fly to Seattle and drive up the coast to Anacortes, where you can take a ferry to the islands (or Canada). The ferry is part of the fun. You’ll need a car on every island to properly explore.
Stay at: Since Michael was living on the island, we didn’t stay in a hotel or rental property. I regularly browse Airbnb and have found several options on San Juan Island and Orcas Island.
Eat at: On San Juan Island, we loved sushi from Tops’l and Thai comfort food from Golden Triangle. On Orcas Island, I can’t recommend Hogstone’s Wood Oven enough. Their mushroom and green garlic pizza is one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had.
Do: This is the most important one! If I haven’t made it clear in the text above, it’s all about nature, and relaxing, and feeling present. There are so many opportunities to feel this - I’ll let my photos show.
