Sometime in spring, I start being aware that the anniversary of my move to the island is coming up. In past years, I’ve held a big party on the closest weekend. Something about this year was different. This morning I remembered that today was the day after I woke up and was drinking a big mug of coffee on the deck.
Four years ago today, I loaded up the used Land Rover (bought off Craigslist), and headed to the Anacortes ferry dock, and sailed for San Juan Island. I’d worked here the summer of 1987, part of the summer of 1988, and intermittently visited my colleagues in 1990 and 1991. My mother and her twin sister (my aunt), had graduated from high school on Orcas Island (having moved up for their senior year to board with relatives while my grandmother ran off to Vegas for one of her marriages). So I had history. Of the places one could flee and reinvent oneself after a decade or more of hard work — six companies and four more as board/investor advisor — this called to me.
And so here I am.
That first day, I rolled off the ferry, familiar from past trips, into a town coated with nostalgia and memories, and stopped at Thane Bolger’s office and picked up the keys to my house. The packing in Seattle wasn’t completely done, and the moving truck wasn’t arriving up here for another 3 weeks, but today was the day, because the house closed the day before. I wasn’t willing to wait any longer to draw a line under the previous daily life I’d led, and start a new one. By the end of the day, I’d set up a temporary futon bed in the room that is now my office, a card table in the dining room, Rockisland had installed my internet connection, and I had some minimal patio furniture. It would turn out to be all I needed for the best three weeks I can remember.
Once set up, I headed to Friday Harbor for dinner at Steps Wine Bar and Cafe, run by my friend Madden Surbaugh. I’d met Madden the day I found my house, while sitting at the former Pelindaba cafe across from his (then) front door. I popped my head in, saw Madden wilting an utterly massive pan of greens, and much of my island life since then has been shaped and determined by that moment. I sat at the window table, and had a terrific meal (documented, along with my impressions of that day, here). I had a bottle of 1988 Vieux Telegraphe that I’d brought up for the occasion. Later, sitting on the deck, I finished the Chateauneuf-du-Pape and enjoyed the sunset.
Today, four years later, after 1460 days on the island, I still love it here.
As I reread each of my yearly anniversary dispatches, I am struck by how I lived a relatively charmed life for most of the first two years. I read, I studied, I enjoyed a bit of socializing and a lot of meals at Madden’s, but I had relatively little impact or influence, or was influenced by, the local community.
That all changed about a year and a half ago, when I ended up replacing my friend Cloud on the board of the San Juan Islands Agricultural Guild. Our current project, the Permanent Farmer’s Market in Friday Harbor, quickly became difficult and contentious. Increasingly I found myself puzzling about the community to which I’d moved. I clearly didn’t quite understand the demographics, the political makeup, the needs and wants of this community. I entered a period where my impressions of the island, quite frankly, were mixed at best. I loved the physical setting but I was clearly rebelling and coming to terms with the community itself. Tellingly, I didn’t even write a 2009 dispatch on my anniversary, a fact I didn’t actually know until I just went looking for it to link in the previous paragraph.
I’m not going to go into the FM project or other projects I’ve become involved with in depth. Each deserves better than random reminiscences.
But suffice it to say that I’m starting to come out of the valley….which I now recognize as the “holy shit” reality check about the enormity of how I’ve changed my life…and am starting to be at peace again with my decision. I’ll say it again, I love it here.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t grind my teeth about the difficulties of establishing a permanent downtown Farmer’s Market, or at the difficulties of simply disposing of one can of trash given the Solid Waste debacle, or at the regular delays and irritations of island life. Those things aren’t temporary parts of adjusting. They’re the grievances of an island resident.
But it does mean that I sit on my deck tonight, four years from the day I arrived, contemplating what the fifth year will bring, with something approaching optimism. Much has changed — Madden is on Orcas at Rosario, I’m on the Library board and we’re selecting a new Director to replace Laura, and I split my time between here and Seattle in order to spend as much time with Nicole as I can — but much also remains the same. I sit here outside with a laptop and a glass of wine, music playing, writing and watching the sunset build, and recall Lawrence Durrell’s words, that spell out my own affliction with such poetry:
Somewhere among the notebooks of Gideon I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people, as Gideon used to say, by way of explanation, who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication….But like all Gideon’s theories it was an ingenious one. I recall how it was debated by candlelight in the Villa Cleobolus until the moon went down on the debate, and Gideon’s contentions were muffed in his yawns; until Hoyle began to tap his spectacles upon his thumbnail of his left hand, which was his way of starting to say goodnight….Yet the word stuck; and though Hoyle refused its application to any but Aegean islands….we all of us, by tacit admission, knew ourselves to be ‘islomanes.’
I can’t wait to see what Year Five in my very own Paradise Terrestre brings.
