By Bernard Ohanian, National Geographic Editorial Staff
At quitting time America's luckiest commuters stream to the pier at the foot of Marion Street, a few blocks from the gleaming towers of downtown Seattle. Within minutes they begin boarding the four-tiered Walla Walla for a half-hour trip across the blue-gray waters of Puget Sound.
Topside, the ferry's main cabin looks like a floating diner with picture windows. Sitting in chairs or at restaurant-style booths, riders sip espresso or wine, work on laptop computers, or nap; others head to the top deck to powerwalk the quarter-mile circuit (a sign reminds passengers--no skateboarding allowed). The cabin soon fills with the sounds of Pachelbel's Canon in D Major, played by 18-year-old Akemi Uchida of the Seattle Youth Symphony. Her violin case is open for donations; she makes, she says, a hundred dollars an hour on a good day.
Today is a good day. In fact it's spectacular--the kind of day these commuters have come to cherish. There's a clear view of Mount Rainier, covered with snow, 65 miles to the south, and of Mount Baker rising regally 95 miles to the north. And looming just ahead is wooded Bainbridge Island, a storybook home where children play unsupervised in open fields and deer browse within a block of the main street.
Here, in Puget Sound, the United States begins breaking into little pieces before disappearing entirely into Canadian waters. More than 200 named islands, and hundreds more without names, dot the sound proper and the northern passages abutting the Canada-U.S. border a hundred miles away. Only several dozen of the islands are inhabited, and many of the smaller ones stretch the definition of the word "island": Barely visible at high tide, they appear during low tide as small mounds of rock and earth with a tree or two jutting out like tufts of hair on a balding man's head.
Their rocky silhouettes are the aftermath of glacial sculpting that ended 11,000 years ago. Now, on crisp autumn afternoons, the islands' alders, poplars, and big-leaf maples stand out like fiery exclamation points amid evergreen Douglas firs and western red cedars. Fresh water from mainland rivers mingles with Pacific salt tides that rush through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, creating rich environments for estuarine life. Over it all, the sky stretches above a prairie of water that meets the horizon in all directions.
"Look at a globe," says Drew Kampion, editor of the Island Independent newspaper, a biweekly. "See if you can find another place like this: a group of islands relatively close to a civilized hub, on an international boundary, with an abundance of natural resources and an eclectic wealth of creative people. It's like a piece of jewelry in which the stones set together and complement one another."
But some of the stones are losing their luster. Bainbridge, once all farms and forests, has taken on the look of an upscale leafy suburb; the island's Eagle Harbor is one of the most polluted in the nation. Farther north, on Whidbey Island, where farmland has been divided into house lots, commuters and Navy families have helped push the number of residents from fewer than 20,000 in 1960 to more than 55,000 today, making it the most populous island in Puget Sound.
Up by the Canadian border, beyond the reach of a daily commute to Seattle, the rustic San Juan Islands, still blanketed by forests and fields, also suffer growing pains. A huge banner that greets newcomers to the county seat reads: "Welcome to Friday Harbor. Please help us conserve water." Yet vacationers waiting to return to the mainland on jam-packed ferries search the wall-size displays in real estate offices along the main street in Friday Harbor, perhaps hoping to join 12,000 full-time residents in the San Juans--more than a fourfold increase since 1960.
The growth seems certain to continue. County planners predict that the population of the San Juans, now the fastest growing area in the state, will increase by another 50 percent over the next 15 years.
"Tell your readers it rains all the time," Bill LaPorte yells over the roar of his powerboat as we skim across the channel between San Juan and Shaw Islands. "Tell 'em we have horrible crime. Tell 'em to visit all they want," he shouts, "but not to move here."
LaPorte knows the lure of these islands, knows from his own story that one visit can be enough to set a soul to dreaming of a new life. Years ago he lived in Detroit, where he worked at a slaughterhouse by day and ran a little wild at night. "People who come here are either looking for something or running away from something," he says, his weathered face and gravelly voice hinting that he was doing a bit of both when he arrived in the area in 1967.
Now he's an actor, playing bit parts in productions at the local playhouse. He lives on a 31-foot cruiser, with framed pictures of his three grown daughters over his bed. And he's mayor of Friday Harbor (population 1,800), winning on a platform to maintain what he calls its unique village character and promising constituents they could always drop by his boat to argue about zoning regulations or press for a moratorium on T-shirt shops.
Like many islanders, LaPorte--who is paid $300 a month as mayor--cobbles together a living from several part-time jobs. He sells signs, runs sight-seeing charters, and collects dry cleaning, which he hauls to the mainland twice a week. "You come here because you love the environment," he says. "Then you try to figure out how to survive."
You also try to leave yourself time to look for bald eagles, which nest here in one of the densest concentrations in the lower 48 states. So five minutes after I drop by unannounced one brilliant fall afternoon, we're out on the water, binoculars in hand.
We head north toward sparsely populated Stuart and Waldron Islands, then turn east toward Orcas Island, where Mount Constitution--at 2,407 feet the highest in the San Juans--rises under a thick coat of firs.
LaPorte slows the engine, and we pass the binoculars back and forth, scanning treetops for signs of an eagle nest. With none in sight he guides the boat toward tiny Jones Island, where we finally spot one of the majestic birds gliding high against the sunset sky. He cuts the engine, and we drift, watching. "Hoo-boy," he says softly, "I've died and gone to heaven."
"Every part of this country is sacred to my people," said Chief Seattle in 1854 about Puget Sound. "Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe."
Chief Seattle's Suquamish people and other tribes largely abandoned these islands under the terms of an 1855 treaty, and the Indian names were eclipsed. Spaniards, the first Europeans to see the San Juans, in the late 18th century, named San Juan and Lopez. Capt. George Vancouver led British explorers into Puget Sound proper in 1792, naming Whidbey and Vashon.
Today's explorers are tourists--officially uncounted, but at least three million a year--and new residents. They are the reason for Bill LaPorte's fear, shared by many others, that the islands are becoming too crowded. To an outsider accustomed to living in the heart of cities, it's baffling: Even with threefold and fourfold increases, how could these islands be overcrowded when the most densely populated, Bainbridge, has 17,500 people in an area the size of Manhattan?
Perhaps it's because most islanders have a bit of Norm and Toots Mills in them. Norm and Toots, both in their 80s, were born in the islands, and since 1962 they've lived two miles from Canada, on Stuart Island, with no ferry service and no phone lines. About a dozen families live on Stuart year-round; a few others come for weekends, arriving by small plane or, as I did, by private boat.
With its television, microwave oven, and other modern conveniences, the Millses' cedar house could be a middle-class home anywhere in the U.S., except that the view from the front door is a rocky blue-water cove on Haro Strait and the backyard is 37 acres of woods and pasture. Solar panels on the roof provide electricity, with a diesel generator as backup. Norm and Toots stay in touch with neighbors by cellular phone and CB radio, deciding whose turn it is to go to San Juan for supplies, a 20-minute boat trip in benign weather.
Not that they need much from the store. Their orchard and garden keep them in fruits and vegetables--if Norm and his shotgun can keep out the raiding mink and raccoons--and a reef net provides them with salmon.
But self-sufficiency has its risks. "I worry about her," Norm whispers when Toots leaves the room. "The chopper had to come get her twice over the winter." Like most residents of the San Juans, the Millses pay a hundred dollars a year for air-ambulance insurance, which covers an unlimited number of trips to emergency rooms at several mainland hospitals. Still, it's at least an hour between dialing help and arriving at the hospital.
Stuart is no place for invalids. Few islands in Puget Sound and the northern straits are; rough around the edges, they make demands of those who choose them. Recent arrivals Richard and Sharon Hooper are part of a new wave, determined to use technology to smooth out the edges. They moved their recording business, World Disc Productions, from Monterey, California, to San Juan six years ago "once we realized we could live anywhere," says Sharon. "All we needed was our computers and fax machines and a post office."
Now the Hoopers employ 30 people in a modern two-story cedar-and-glass building on the outskirts of Friday Harbor. Their expenses are about 5 percent higher than they were in California, mostly from increased shipping and travel costs. "That's not much when you weigh it against the improvement in our quality of life," says Richard. "We have a house in the woods, and I'm still awed when I hear the cry of a red-tailed hawk."
Other small companies connected to the world by computer are following the Hoopers' lead: After all, if you can run your business from anywhere, why not pick paradise?
That's a question that sticks in Stanley Bennett's craw. "The first place Californians ruined was southern Oregon," he says, his blue eyes full of dismay. "Twenty years later they moved here and helped ruin this place."
He and Wanda, his wife, retired 17 years ago to Whidbey Island--a 45-mile-long crooked string bean of land that is less crowded than Bainbridge and less raw than the San Juans. "It was really rural when we moved here," says Stanley. "But these newcomers are citifying the rural atmosphere." They're also citifying prices. With profits from real estate booms in California, Portland, and Seattle, new arrivals have bid up the price of housing from Bainbridge through the San Juans, more than doubling taxes for islanders who bought their property a decade ago.
The naval air station near Oak Harbor, 15 miles north of the Bennetts, is adding to the pressure to grow. Once slated for closing, NAS Whidbey Island is now bulging at the seams. There isn't enough base housing for everyone, and off-base housing on Whidbey is often too expensive for Navy allowances--so some Navy families live as far away as Mount Vernon, a mainland city 40 minutes by car over the island's only bridge.
More serious than the lack of affordable housing is the lack of water. On north Whidbey the city of Oak Harbor and the air base have enough drinking water only because the city pipes it in from the Skagit River on the mainland. Coupeville, a central Whidbey town that draws water from rain-fed aquifers, has halted new development because some wells, overtapped by the growing population, have run too low.
Throughout the islands, water shortages are an ironic by-product of the appeal of a life surrounded by water. The San Juans, and most of Whidbey, lie in a rain shadow created by the Olympic Mountains and get only half Seattle's 38 inches of rain a year. That rain is precious: Aquifers, and the occasional rain-catch device jury-rigged onto a rooftop, are the primary sources of water. Last spring, after two years of drought, low water levels in Friday Harbor's reservoir forced the town to restrict new water hookups.
Many islanders blame developers for the increased competition for water, as well as for what they see as a general environmental decline. Some contractors try to meet environmental demands halfway, burying utility lines and cutting water use in their projects. This give-and-take grows out of what Bob Olson, then president of the Useless Bay Development Corporation in south Whidbey, calls the supermarket factor. "You can't stay mad at anyone around here for very long, because you'll probably run into them at the grocery store the next day." Thrown together on an island, unable to avoid one another, opponents stumble toward compromise.
But just how much compromise can the islands take? That's the concern of animal behaviorist Bob Otis, who for six seasons has come to study killer whales, or orcas--the unofficial mascot of the San Juan Islands.
Three resident pods of orcas, each with its own dialect of sounds, cruise Haro Strait between San Juan and Vancouver Islands from April to September, looking to intercept salmon headed back to the Fraser River to spawn. As the orcas chase the salmon, boatloads of tourists chase the orcas.
Bob, a professor at Wisconsin's Ripon College, sets up a lab each summer in an old lighthouse in San Juan's Lime Kiln Point State Park--"the best place in the world to watch killer whales from land." The whale pods, named J, K, and L, pass as close as 20 feet to the lab. Variations in dorsal fins and a distinctive saddle-patch pattern of black-and-white markings allow the researchers to recognize each of the 93 orcas in the three pods, referring to them with numbers designated by the locally based Center for Whale Research.
Nationally the orca's popularity has exploded over the past two years as a result of the movie Free Willy--the story, filmed in part in the San Juans, of a captive orca returned to the wild. At the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, visitors snap up orca earrings and coffee cups along with memberships in the Adopt-an-Orca program, which increased from 3,000 to 50,000 after it was touted in the Free Willy home video.
On the June day that I join Bob and assistant Vicki Zimmerman, a nearby resident calls to report that whales are moving in our direction. Most days just one pod passes by the point, but a few times every summer the three pods come together in a superpod--mingling, probably mating, and squeaking and squealing loudly enough to be heard onshore.
We head out to the rocks, where it soon becomes apparent that we're going to be lucky. "There's K-17!" says Bob, pointing to a whale 50 feet offshore. "And L-41. There's J-6. They're all here!" So are boats filled with whale-watchers, seemingly out of nowhere.
For more than an hour the whales--concentrated in front of us, as if our post on the rocks were a reviewing stand--dance in an unchoreographed ballet. Some pop their heads straight up out of the water, then submerge, a move whale specialists call spyhopping; others breach, then hurl themselves on their sides with a huge splash.
After the orcas swim off, Vicki says she counted 25 boats--a lot for a weekday early in the tourist season but far short of the one-day record of 64 set July 3, 1993. "I haven't found any evidence that the boats harm the whales or alter their behavior," says Bob. "But if the number continues to grow at the current pace, by the year 2001 we'll have solid boats"--leaving the orcas no room to come up for air, to say nothing of breaching and spyhopping.
Many of the whale-watching boats are converted fishing vessels, evidence that the economy of the islands has strayed from its traditional bases of fishing and farming. Salmon gillnetters, purse seiners, and reef netters could once make a living by fishing all summer--could even, in exceptional cases, pay a year's bills from one day's catch. Those times are gone, probably forever.
Some Pacific salmon runs have been reduced by 90 percent or more, largely because of overfishing, sediment buildup, and the destruction of habitat by dams and reservoirs. As a conservation measure the state virtually eliminated commercial harvests of chinook and coho last year and severely limited catches of sockeye, chum, and pink salmon. Fishermen had to call a hot line to learn exactly where and when they could harvest.
The new limitations have sliced into the income of people like Jim and Lisa Lawrence, who live on San Juan Island and fish off the island's west side. They depend on earnings from the summer's salmon catch to subsidize their work as artists: Jim carves wooden masks and makes silver jewelry, and Lisa's bright oil paintings are a mainstay in Friday Harbor's most prominent gallery. Now, says Lisa, they fear that rising real estate prices and waning salmon runs could eventually mean the end of a lifestyle that has supported their principal work for two decades.
Something less tangible than art is lost with the decline of salmon: the spiritual connection islanders have with their land and its waters. "Fishing makes me feel part of the islands," says Jim, a strapping man with a graying ponytail who moved here from Seattle in the early 1970s. "Of course, I'm related to the rocks and the trees here by marrying Lisa. Her people have been in these islands for thousands of years."
Lisa, a blue-eyed strawberry blonde, is part Swinomish Indian, so the Lawrences are among the beneficiaries of a 1974 federal district court ruling granting half the annual local salmon catch to Native Americans. The decision reaffirmed fishing rights guaranteed in the 1855 treaty in exchange for Indian lands.
But these days the largest salmon haul in the islands--3,000 tons a year--goes to a BMW-driving Norwegian businessman who grows his salmon in pens off Bainbridge and has been salmon fishing exactly once in his life. Adding insult to injury, his fish aren't even Pacific salmon. They're the Atlantic variety, which grow larger in captivity.
Salmon aren't the only form of marine life suffering in the sound. In some urban harbors bottom fishing for flounder, sole, and sand dabs is discouraged because of contaminants from factories, pulp mills, and sewage-treatment plants. Rotting pilings and abandoned cranes at the entrance to Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge were once the arms and legs of the Wyckoff creosote plant, which spent 80 years turning timber into railroad ties and telephone poles coated with the tarry substance. The plant closed in 1988 and is now a Superfund site; the Environmental Protection Agency has already spent two million dollars in an effort to blanket the creosote-soaked harbor floor with a protective layer of sediment. Warning signs are posted nearby in English, Spanish, Lao, Cambodian, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese: "Bottom fish, crabs, and shellfish may be unsafe to eat due to pollution."
Throughout the islands, tidelands once rich with shellfish beds are closed to harvesting, their waters sullied by runoff from streets and parking lots, agricultural wastes, leaking septic tanks, and sewage and oil from small boats.
The dwindling marine stocks mean that fewer and fewer islanders can support themselves entirely from the water. But others are trying, in the face of some opposition, to harvest the sea in ways that match island traditions without depleting local resources.
"To make a living off the water you either fish it--and we've totally squandered that--you use it for transport, or you try to farm it, either salmon or shellfish," says Ian Jefferds, the wiry young president of Penn Cove Mussels, Inc. The Coupeville-based company, the largest mussel farm in the Northwest, grows mussels off the coast of central Whidbey on 25 rafts that look like diminutive aircraft carriers: flat-topped, low in the water, and lined up with military precision under a bluff to blunt winter winds that lash the mile-long cove.
"We fit the marine heritage that the islands are trying to maintain," Ian says above the squawk of seagulls outside his office, a small gray building at the end of a pier that once served as a farmer's dock. His company raises only mussels native to the cove, and regular tests show that these natural filters keep the water clean. Still, Ian has had angry words from homeowners on the surrounding bluffs who say the mussel rafts ruin their view.
The battle of aesthetics versus economics comes up again and again. Last spring the 16 Native American tribes in the Puget Sound area went to court to force a settlement similar to the 1974 salmon decision. Last December they won their case; a federal judge awarded them rights to 50 percent of the harvest of all local shellfish.
Shellfish farmers and many local landowners vowed to appeal. "There'll be fireworks if the Indians get rights to private tidal lands," says Ian Jefferds. Most of Washington's tidal flats (the area between the mean low-water and high-water lines) are privately owned, and beachfront homeowners fear that, as a Whidbey resident put it, "you'll find people digging in your front yard anytime of the day or night."
But Tony Forsman, executive director of the Suquamish tribe, says such concerns are overblown. "You can plan ahead--this beach on this date, that beach on that date," he says. "Tribal members won't be able to just pick up their clam forks and hit the beach whenever they need a few bucks."
When pressed on why he thinks the issue raises tempers, Forsman is quick to answer: "The idea that private property is sacred is nationwide, but it's especially strong out here."
Paradoxically, the insistence of local property owners that they may do as they wish with their own land may be as much a force for conservation as for development.
"These islands aren't really rural anymore," Bob Myhr says as we tour Lopez Island, flat and dry, in his 1977 Volkswagen convertible. Farms and orchards began disappearing from the San Juans in the 1940s as Washington's Yakima Valley became more competitive. "What's valuable here now," he says, "is the appearance of rural."
Myhr runs the nonprofit San Juan Preservation Trust, working to preserve the islands' bucolic look by persuading landowners to forfeit their land's development rights--and earn a tax break in the process. Landowners place conservation easements on their property and name Myhr's group as trustee. Such easements, attached to the deed in perpetuity, ensure that no matter who buys the land, or when, it will never be covered with shopping malls or tract housing. The trust, founded in 1979, now administers easements covering more than 6,000 acres in the San Juans.
A similar, more ambitious project--the 17,000-acre Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve--protects forest and farmland in the heart of Whidbey Island. Fifteen years ago local conservation groups, alarmed that the land might be sold to developers, persuaded the federal government to put aside money to buy conservation easements to the thousand-acre Ebey's Prairie, leaving the land itself in the hands of the farmers.
Today the prairie anchors the national historical reserve, the first of its kind in the nation. It includes two state parks and the entire town of Coupeville--stores, farms, houses, schools, and a historic waterfront awash with brightly colored wood-frame buildings.
I take in the full sweep of the reserve from the top of a sand bluff, 300 feet above the surf at Ebey's Landing. Amid wild roses I look out on barns scattered among the neat furrows like children's blocks. Mountains rim the horizon on three sides. The lights of Seattle glow in the dusky sky to the south--glimmers of a busy mainland life that seems far, far away.
I headed back to the mainland the way I had come--through Bainbridge Island, scorned by residents of Whidbey and the San Juans as an example of development run amuck. Here the questions I heard throughout the islands are most urgent: Do people who have found paradise have the right to pull up the drawbridge? Can new arrivals, many of them wealthy, leave room for longtime residents? How do islanders live productively without destroying the very way of life they came here for?
On the west side of Bainbridge, away from crowded harbors, a few farms and chunks of forest remain, including an amphitheater of trees that surround the serene gardens on land tilled by Junkoh Harui's family since the early 1900s. The family had a prosperous nursery, extensive gardens, and a large grocery store until they were summarily evacuated during World War II, along with everyone else of Japanese descent on the islands.
When the family returned five years later, the greenhouses had collapsed, the sunken garden was overgrown, and most of the nursery plants had been stolen. One of the few plots remaining intact sprouted with dozens of small red-pine seedlings that Junkoh's father had hastily planted in the surrounding woods, where the young plants might have enough shade to survive.
"My parents had what is called gaman--inner strength, the strength to persevere," Junkoh says quietly, pausing on the wooden bridge leading into the forest, where the red pines now soar 60 feet. "It's a great legacy for us." It's a legacy for these islands as well, a gift of renewal and respect for the land and the sea and the dreams that are lived here.
Copyright 1995 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.
