Tag Archives: Orcas Island WA

An Island Girl’s Memories

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I always leave Orcas with tears in my eyes.

Ever since moving away after 9th grade, knowing even then that Orcas Island would most likely never be home again, it’s impossible for me to leave the island dry-eyed.

Leaving Orcas is a process because it is, of course, an island. This means that you need: A) lots of money and a private plane or B) – the far likelier option – to take a ferry. A Washington State Ferry, to be exact. This means that you must arrive – at least in tourist season – at 10:00a.m. for the 3:15 ferry. This is because, as the only real option on and off the island, if you don’t arrive soon enough to claim your place in the ferry line, you will be stuck paying for yet another night at a hotel (if there are any vacancies), or driving your brother-in-law nuts when you drive back up the very same driveway from whence he waved goodbye to you several hours earlier, thus prolonging the inevitable teary last look as the ferry turns the corner, heading to Anacortes and The Main Land…aka, reality.

Just pulling away from Orcas.

Islanders know to arrive early. Tourists are warned, but they don’t always heed the warning. I remember one time a few years ago, in the height of summer, waiting in the ferry line with three cranky kids in the back seat. One woman had the audacity to walk up to my window and say, “Would you mind trading places with me? I have a plane to catch in Seattle and won’t make it if I don’t catch the next ferry.”

I about slugged her.

I refrained from calling her names and telling her all the things flying through my head – not the least of which was, “How on earth do you even think that a car can get out of line and TRADE places with you?” – and instead mustered my patience (and my teacher voice) and said, “No, not with three kids to keep happy for what would then be another five hours.”

Sometimes kids make great excuses.

I love standing on the deck of the ferry and watching the red-roofed Orcas Hotel grow smaller as we chug away from the dock. I mean, I don’t LOVE it…in that I hate that I’m leaving…but I love the ferry. Though, to be sure, I didn’t love it nearly this much when I actually lived here.

The Orcas Hotel, taken from the ferry boat.

One time, heading to my sister’s on Orcas for my college Christmas break, I was forced to spend the night on the mainland because the ferries couldn’t run in the high winds. My other sister had driven me to the ferry dock and dropped me off. It hadn’t occurred to either of us that I’d be stranded. It takes some pretty fierce winds to stop the ferries running. This turned out to be a terrible storm. The main power cable to Orcas was ripped out by the waves and my sister had no power for nine days. Thank God for wood stoves. I made my brother-in-law chocolate chip cookies (the mandatory toll for my prolonged visits), which I fried like pancakes on that stove. Gave me something to do.

The view from my ferry as another ferry pulled in to the Orcas landing.

For years I still thought of Orcas as home. I mean, I grew up there – spent the first 15 years of my life on its beautiful shores. Somewhere along the line Minnesota came to be home and Orcas Island became “the place where I grew up”.

And it was a wonderful place to grow up. Full of “only-on-Orcas-Island” events and moments. I remember telling a friend in college about one of those “only” things. She turned to me and said, serious as you please, “You grew up in a different world than I did, Gretchen.”

I had been telling her about visiting the orthodontist. Now, if you had to see the ortho for a routine check-up, you could go to your dentist’s office on one certain day a month right there on Orcas and get your business done.

BUT, if you had to actually get your braces on, or off, or had some other big reason to see him, then you had to go to his office, in Bellingham, WA. You could take the ferry like any normal person. OR…you could take the Tooth Fairy Flight. That’s right. A chartered plane called the Tooth Fairy Flight would come to the Orcas Island airport and take you and the other lucky saps who had to go see the orthodontist for some serious dental work, over to the mainland. It was terrific: an airplane ride, plus you got to miss an entire day of school, hang around downtown Bellingham ALONE, and fly in a plane like the rich kid you weren’t.

And if you can’t imagine such a thing, then you’ll understand how my friend felt.

Exiting the ferry on Orcas.

Mostly, though, growing up on Orcas was…normal.

As normal as a place can be when you get there via airplane or ferryboat, which, for me, was very normal indeed.

As Near as You Can Get, I Had a Perfect Childhood

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When I was a kid, growing up on Orcas Island, Washington, my father built me a playhouse in the backyard beneath a copse of shady evergreens. It wasn’t a fancy house, just four sheets of plywood, a flat roof, an opening for the doorway, and two windows, one looking south to the house and the second looking north to the cliff and the edge of the world.

Eastsound Bay, on Orcas Island.

I loved that playhouse. I played for hours in its shady interior. I read in there, pretended in there, and played game after game with my best friend who lived across the street, and whose name, believe it or not, was Gretchen.

I loved that playhouse. I played for hours in its shady interior. I read in there, pretended in there, and played game after game with my best friend who lived across the street, and whose name, believe it or not, was Gretchen.

To top off our name-connection, her birthday was six months to the day different than mine, making her exactly 1.5 years older than me. I always thought it was fun to celebrate my half birthday on her real birthday. (Even weirder – our husband’s birthdays, as we discovered years later, are on the same day!)

Gretchen and I would play there often. Barbies, board games, pretend. There was one game we really liked, where you take a piece of paper and one of us would write a sentence on it, then fold it over like a fan so the other couldn’t see what was written, and then we’d pass it back and forth in this manner until the page was filled or we were bored, whichever came first.

Then, of course, you read it out loud and it was hilarious. At least it was to a couple of kids.

A beach on Orcas Island - not "my" beach, but very similar!

But the best thing to do with Gretchen was to play on the beach. Her grandparents had an orange fiberglass rowboat, and we loved to take it out and paddle around, where once we were certain that a sea serpent greeted us but it was probably just a seal and we’d gaze down into the depths at the crabs, kelp, and fishes and I’d pray I wouldn’t fall in because I couldn’t swim. Sometimes we’d wear life jackets…but not always. (And as for bike helmets…what were they?! It’s amazing we survived back in the old days!)

Back on the shore we’d find crabs beneath the rocks and once we gathered them all in a bucket where they fought each other and foamed at the mouth until we let them all go, worried that they’d kill each other in their foamy anger. We’d build fires and roast hot dogs though for some reason we never camped down there, though I did with another friend a time or two. We’d play on the huge boulders and forget about the incoming tide and then have to wade back through the cold, cold water and then, of course, our feet would squelch in our Keds all the way home up the cliff path, our socks falling down and scrunching up beneath our heels.

Gretchen’s grandparents had a wooden set of retractable stairs built down to the beach and sometimes we would take that route home. We’d huff and puff up the 90 foot cliff and then turn at the top and look down at the beach, wanting nothing more than to be back down at the bottom, still playing, still having fun.

We’d always return home sunburned and freckled, our curly hair wild from the wind, our skin salty and our knees bruised from falling on barnacles. Worn out from the day’s activities, that wouldn’t stop us from camping out in Gretchen’s orange tent that night.

Pitched for weeks on her parent’s lawn, that tent was our second bedroom most summers. We’d collapse into our sleeping bags after a good evening of chasing flying termites around the yard with badminton racquets. Aside from the time an inquisitive raccoon (aka a terrible monster in our imaginations) brushed past the tent and scared us to death, we always slept well and woke early, often returning to our haunts of the day before to do it all over again.

It never got old, playing with Gretchen.

I probably have a million stories about those glorious days. Stick around and I’ll tell you them all.

- Gretchen

Missed It By That Much

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Now that my thought-life revolves around the question, “Can I blog about that?” I have gotten in the habit of carrying my camera with me everywhere I go. A lot of people in this day and age have their camera with them in the form of their cell phones. I am not one of those people. I have no cell coverage at home, so I have only a small flip phone without a camera, but that’s fine with me – I prefer a more serious camera, anyway. An intimidating camera that I don’t understand. But it takes way better photos than a cell phone…even if I don’t fully understand how to use it.

A couple of weeks ago, I learned this “have-my-camera-with-me-at-all-times” lesson the hard way. There was some sort of ice-fishing contest out on Lake Okabena in the middle of Worthington, MN, and a gazillion ice houses – along with their owner’s pick-up trucks – were out on the lake. More than I’d seen in the 14.5 years I’ve lived here. It was a better ice house village than in the Grumpy Old Men movies. It was begging for a blogger to photograph it for all my non-Minnesota readers.

But, alas…I was cameraless.

This made me think of other shots I have missed over the years. I have missed eagles (I adore eagles). I have missed old barns (I love old barns), I have missed events with my kids, surprise parties, and beautiful sunsets. I missed an amazing moon the other day.

But there are two shots in my life which still make me weep for the missing. Ironically, for both I actually had my camera with me but was unable to act quickly enough to snap the photo.

First, when I was in France with my mother when I was in high school, she and I took a bus ride to Chartres Cathedral. Yes, the cathedral was amazing…gorgeous blue stained glass, all the cool stuff in ancient cathedrals, etc., etc. But that’s not what I missed.

What I missed was through the window of the bus as we drove away. The bus paused – but not for long enough – on a bridge over the river which flows through the town where Chartres is located. Off in the background was the cathedral – like a magnificent castle on the horizon – and, a little way down the river from where we were stopped was another bridge – an old, stone bridge – and there, floating on the river in front of the bridge, was a swan. The cathedral, the stone bridge, the swan: forever in my memory, but never on film. It was truly a fairy tale moment.

The second fabulous (but missed) photo in my life happened as I traveled from college at the University of Oregon, to visit my sisters in Washington State. I took the train – something I only did the one time – and we were approaching the city of Kelso, WA. There, out the window for everyone to see, was a dilapidated old house (almost buried in blackberry brambles) in an overgrown field. More blackberry bushes surrounded the field, and a horse was eating grass off to the side of the house. But there was another horse there, too. And he was walking in the door of the ramshackle house. Walking in the door…as sure as if he lived there (which perhaps he did). The horse. The old house. The blackberry bushes. Fabulous.

I almost killed myself, reaching for my camera. But the train flew by and the opportunity was gone.

There is one last missed shot, though this one was not my own. My dad, who for many years was a semi-professional photographer on Orcas Island, missed this one. He and Mom were heading into town from our home on the north shore of the island. They turned the corner toward town, and there, running down the center of the country road was the entire high school football team, completely suited up with uniforms, pads, and helmets, chasing a herd of cows off of their practice football field. Sounds like a National Geographic picture about a story of small-town America, doesn’t it? But, sadly…no camera.

I am including no photos in this post. I mean, really…how could I do otherwise?