I guess I never really knew what kelp looked like before.
I know that all of nature is God’s creation and is valuable and beautiful and wondrous and blah blah blah, but man, up close, kelp is gross. The huge, thick green tubers look like the flaccid, bloated arms of long-dead sailors washed ashore. I can at least say I take some pleasure in the ickiness of poking them with my feet—not bare feet, ugh—just to remind myself of how squishy they are.
The landscape of the Pacific Northwest is everything you’ve been told it is, and more. It’s wet, but not as wet as I thought. It’s chilly, but not as chilly as I thought. It’s gray, but...you get the picture. I can’t speak for the entirety of Washington state, but my little corner is pretty cool. Living on an island in the Pacific Ocean (it’s close enough to be connected by bridge, but still) is not something that I ever thought I’d do. But here we are.
Did you know that bald eagles just hang out here, all the time? I’d never even seen one in the wild until a visit to the Everglades a decade ago. Like a newbie, a tourist, the first time I saw one here I stopped in my tracks and just stared up. I whipped out my phone and called my spouse right away. “There’s a bald eagle flying above the Market!” Here, they’re just up in the sky above commercial areas, swooping down into the sea to steal the seagulls’ snacks, making nests the size of small cars way, way up in way high trees.
And I’ve seen some way high trees. Searching for cool trees is kind of my thing, so I’m in the right place. Ever since I laid eyes on some old black-and-white pictures of American Chestnuts, “the Redwoods of the East,” I’ve been on the hunt for the tallest, widest, wildest trees my eyes could see. And I thought I’d found some, in Vermont, even in my front yard in Georgia, because those trees—some kind of conifers—were really big. But they weren’t big enough.
And while there are essentially no Coast Redwoods this far north (update: there are a few scattered around, but they’re not nearly as tall as the ones down in California), the Douglas firs are incredibly impressive. They’re wide and tall and some are really tall, up and up and up, and just touching one gives me a sense of their New Age-y, vibrating kind of energy. Even in their aged-ness of hundreds of years, it’s new, and exciting, too.
That feeling of the “newness of a new place” is, contrary to definition, actually quite a familiar feeling for me. It’s a bittersweet, double-edged sword, the best of times, the worst of times, a parade of metaphors. The newness is thrilling—new mountains to climb! New plant species to learn! New people to meet! New brands at the grocery store!—and the excitement of the possibility of “maybe...this place” is an ever-present voice in my head.
But the flipside of the metaphorical coin means unfamiliarity around every corner. I’m reminded each day that I know no one. I’m a stranger, albeit a friendly, desperate one, but this is not quite my home, and I’m still not used to it.
It’s happened to me, over and over again: the swell of the shininess and excitement of a new place, and the breaking of a reality of sometimes crushing loneliness. Now I can recognize it for what it is, and let those waves whisk me along, rather than wait for them to crash without warning.
It’s been 8 months* that I’ve lived here in Anacortes, Washington, a small city of 18,000 on the northern tip of Fidalgo Island—an island in the Puget Sound north of Seattle, just off the coast (connected via bridge to the mainland). A sweet little downtown with local shops, some decent restaurants, coffee shops I’ve never been to, and passable pubs. Enough local flavor (the Crab Pot Christmas tree!) to warm my heart and make me glad I’m here, now.
There’s an amusing mix of people here, although I would not consider it actually diverse. From my observation, the town is populated primarily by jolly (or reticent, actually) retirees who can afford the magnificent views and the magnificent prices that go along with them, plus those who landed here earlier than that to work at the long-ago mills, the canneries, or more recently, the refineries. And I’ll generalize and say that everyone else is here because it’s a nice small town in a beautiful place. Though it’s a little surreal to be living in place where the population skews so old, it’s also kind of nice. People are mostly polite, save for that annoying bunch of Trumpers who used to park themselves outside of Safeway every Sunday afternoon. But I think they’ve mostly retreated back to their caves these days (still, one has to be careful. They’re out there).
That pretty much covers the adults, since it looks like there are very few people my age here, comparatively. And though I get the sense that there may be those creatures known as “children” here, they seem to be hibernating during this time. I feel like there may only be 30 kids in this town, anyway, and they all go to my daughter’s school and are all between the ages of 3 and 5 years old.
(As I mentioned, I’ve been here for eight months, so I know what I’m talking about).
But it’s not really the people I find the most interesting—not yet, anyway. The land and the sea are plenty interesting enough. On those quizzes that ask you to choose between “mountains” and “beach”, I always choose mountains. The beach is great, but I’ve been a mountain girl ever since I discovered how the mountains made me feel. I love hiking uphill.
But here...you don’t have to choose! Islands with small mountains rolling down to cliffs that meet the Pacific. Rocky outcroppings thrusting out sideways and the kind of shore you wouldn’t want to get smashed against. And now that I have both, I don’t want to untangle one from the other. I love the unique, nose-pinging scents of the ocean and the forest, all smashed together.
Washington Park, at the western tip of the island, is easily my favorite spot. It encompasses over 200 acres of mostly second-growth forest, and it leads right up to the ocean, with jagged cliffs and sandy beaches and grassy knolls. Birds dwell in the undergrowth and seagulls fly overhead. Though much of it was logged a hundred years ago, what’s left is vibrating with life. If you hadn’t been told it was second-growth, you may not realize that these trees rise only 100 feet to the sky. That had the oldest trees been allowed to stand, we may have been able to see some of them even larger than that. These mammoths remind me that the past is still present.
There are over a dozen short trails through the woods, and the two-mile road snaking through the park is the perfect running loop. That magical combination of music and exertion and nature on all sides never ceases to bring out wonder-bursts every time I go. Oh, the trees! Sitka spruce, Western hemlock, Douglas fir—they’re not as tall as redwoods but they might as well be to me. They’re the biggest trees I’ve ever seen. Huge heron nests, like the moon got caught up there, in the uppermost reaches of trees that can’t possibly be standing so high—that is, if we imagine that they only start growing aboveground. (Imagine the root systems needed to keep these things balanced upright)! Downed dead trees, some of whose limbs still rise upwards and curl over themselves like the ribs of an orca. Trees dead for decades, with whole ecosystems comfortably residing in their corpses, proving that death becomes life.
I should mention that while Washington Park is undeniably special, it is by no means the only place like this on the island. Almost 3,000 acres of forestland is preserved here, and the story is a lot of the same.
A fascinating sight are the huge stumps of trees felled for timber a century ago; the stumps themselves over 20 feet around and taller than I. To see the girth of what the trees once were in comparison to the large trees now is humbling. Out of these decaying carcasses grow new trees, sprouted from seeds that landed in that veritable habitat decades ago. Some of those trees now rise 30-plus feet to the sky themselves, their roots pouring over the top of the giant stumps like alien legs making their escape from their (literal) hosts.
Forests don’t take anything for granted. Fungi and moss and lichen and trees make use of it all, gnawing at the nutrients to fertilize their planetary takeover.
And, of course, there’s the stunningly beautiful Pacific Ocean, that I am (have to say it) blessed to glimpse every single day, that I can touch whenever I want. Having pretty much only experienced the warm, briny, brown Atlantic, I thought that the Pacific would be the same, only with waves crashing to the right instead of the left. But what I see here, the water nestled amongst mountainous islands cresting out of the deep sea, is altogether different than I expected. Some days, like today, the water is a perfect greenish-blue with sun rays penetrating right through it. I stare at the surface, waiting to catch a glimpse of the whales that I just know will appear the second I turn my back. Instead, I’ve been in awe of the diving cormorants, those stand-ins for loons, rafts of sea otters, even a couple of sea lions. Seagulls—real, fat ones, not the scavengers of Lake Champlain, or the confused and misguided ones formerly of the old Kroger parking lot on Garners Ferry Road in Columbia, South Carolina—these birds actually have winds to surf on, and they’re absolutely huge, like the ravens and hawks hanging about.
I don’t know enough about seaside topography, but the wind-whipped land adjacent to the ocean is drier and boasts different fauna than the deeper forest. Here, it’s the spindly, orange madrones, with silky smooth trunks that proliferate. They’ve crept all over, rather deep inland, and whenever I see them, I know that the ocean is close.
I know from past experiences that the newness does wear off, and the magic and the wonder tend to fade. But I try to revel in the uniqueness of the time and the place of where I am. I’ll probably always imagine myself looking out from the Southeastern corner of a map of the U.S., so being in a completely different spot will always be jarring. Spending one’s life—for me, approximately 20 years—in a “home” environment and then getting outside of that environment really upends your system and your perspective. The awareness that something other than what you already see and touch and feel actually exists in real life—but still the shock of it when it enters your life. Did I ever even imagine myself living here? Not really. But then again, I didn’t expect to spend my whole life in South Carolina, either.
I’m still in the midst of a transitory year that followed another year of transition—settling into a new place, then boom! a pandemic, and boom! goodbye new place, hello new new place. It’s a lot for my brain to handle. This year has been a lot for everyone’s brains to handle, and this is the particular way it’s been challenging for me. Transition makes it hard to appreciate the present. But I sure am trying.
I think some places and times can feel like home in some ways and not others. Like I walk into Safeway and I don’t recognize a single face, masks notwithstanding. There’s no reason I would. The only people I talk to on a regular basis basically exist within my home. But amongst those majestic trees and the scent of earth and the mud on my ankles, there is a kind of a home. The new and the familiar commingled, the alone-ness of it and the sense of purpose in self I feel when I’m out there. I am truly myself, and that is a kind of home, isn’t it?
But this is feeling like home by the way I drive my daughter to school every morning. By the kitchen I’ve organized to work best for our family. By the grocery store and the post office and even a few downtown shops. Home is in the routine, and maybe that’s all it is right now. That, and a sprinkling of very special, very tall trees.
Reflection questions/Food for thought:
In what ways has your experience of “home” shifted since the pandemic began? In what ways has it remained the same?
Are you living in a place you never expected to call home? How does this feel?
Do you have strong feelings about trees? Is there a specific tree or species of tree you feel connected to, and why?
Everywhere I’ve lived, I try to learn as much as I can about the place: the people, the land, the geography, the history, the culture. Here, I’ve taken the opportunity to read books, take a class, and listen to podcasts, all centered around the Pacific Northwestern forests and their (rather recent) history. Before then, many debts are owed to those who came before, particularly the Salish, Coast Salish, Skagit, and S’Klallam peoples, who lived here before white people settled here, and who still live here today.
*Eight months as of this writing. While I now live in Bellingham, about an hour away, my job is in the forest of Anacortes–literally! Eventually I’ll write about where I am at present but pretty much all I wrote here, in April 2021, still applies.
Image: Trail and madrone trees, looking southwest from Washington Park, Anacortes, Washington, Fidalgo Island. On the left is Burrows Island, in the far back is the Olympic Peninsula, and in between is the Salish Sea/Pacific Ocean.