On the Edge: Isolation shapes the land and lore
The 25-mile circle that contains the San Juan archipelago includes approximately 175 named islands and islets, another 282 rocks at high tide, and another 311 at low. Their cozy unity is like the cluster of stars in a galaxy, and their principal communities tend to be on channels and bays that aim toward the galactic center.
The outer fringe is different. The northernmost arc of islands in the contiguous 48 states — Clark, Barnes, Puffin, Matia, Sucia and Patos islands — are walled off by the bulk of Orcas Island. They face a Strait of Georgia so broad that their northwest horizon is only water. They sit low, aloof, wave-washed, estranged. And alluring.
Their sandstone is part of the Nanaimo Formation of Canada's Gulf Islands, not the igneous rock that dominates the San Juans. Yet wide water and boiling tide rips maintain a distinct separation from Canada as well, so these outriders don't really seem to belong to either nation. They float on their own.
Follow the bramble-covered point out to the paint-peeled lighthouse on Patos and you stand on the lip of the world: glistening water and distant mountains beyond counting. The shelves of rock seem scoured by wind, water and sun.
It adds to the isolation to know just how deep the surrounding water is. Many of the island bays are no deeper than a swimming pool, and yet a few hundred yards offshore they plunge to an abyss. Not far away there's a sounding 1,200 feet deep. No sunlight penetrates. No submersible has ventured. No one knows what's down there.
The outer isles are, in other words, islands as children would imagine islands: oddly shaped, mysterious, lonely, sculpted, cut off, compact, and thus perfect. If not the lair of pirates, they've been a layover for smugglers for 150 years.
Sucia Island entertains up to 100,000 visitors annually and yet twists and turns so intricately it gives the odd sense that each breathtaking vista is being seen by you, alone, for the first time.
These islands are state marine parks, accessible only by boat, and they represent a curious kind of hope at the edge of our state. They are an example of foresight, smart management and individual stewardship. By all rights they should be loved to death, and yet they are wilder, more lovely and cleaner now than they have been in a century.
"When I got this job, nobody else wanted it," marvels supervising parks ranger Dave Castor. Too distant from Olympia, he explained, a career dead end. Yet he has embraced these islands for 18 years, and never fallen out of love. "To sit in Fox Cove and watch the sun go down, or moor in Echo Bay and watch Mount Baker turn pink like a great big ice cream cone — I never get tired of looking at them."
Castor's enchantment has not been universal. While the remains of Native American camps date back 2,500 years, the first Europeans to see these islands were decidedly less impressed. There are many reasons why the Spanish elected not to press their claims to the Pacific Northwest, but one of them, surely, was their miserable boating experience in the San Juan Islands.
IT WAS 1791, almost a full generation before Lewis and Clark, and the Spaniards were poking northeastward in the aptly-named Santa Saturnina, or Melancholy Saint. Thirty-eight men were crammed into a 36-foot schooner and accompanying longboat, and on June 24, the saint's day of John the Baptist that gives the archipelago its name, it was raining, cold and bewildering. Nothing but damn islands, rocks, current, tide rip and mist.
The explorers found poor anchorage at Patos and named it the Spanish word for duck, which may be a reference to birds or perhaps to a prominent rock shaped naturally like a duck's head, which Castor singles out near the island's Toe Point.
Sucia Island is Spanish for "dirty" or "foul," because of its reef-strewn waters. Matia was one of the many names of the Mexican Viceroy. These outer islands had shallow harbors, little to no water, meager soil and gloomy weather. The wind wouldn't blow, tidal currents kept sweeping the Spanish where they didn't want, and they went aground three times.
At the same time, the British were discovering Puget Sound and the Americans the Columbia River. "You can have it," the Spanish essentially said. "We're going back to California."
The boundary dispute called "The Pig War" eventually put the San Juans in American ownership, and the government designated many of the outer islands as lighthouse preserves. Yet as early as 1860 the Wiggins family was homesteading at Sucia's Mud Bay. A descendant reported in an oral-history interview that raiding parties of Haida Indians would paddle into the bay to demand water as homestead children hid by climbing the trees.
A settler named Weir reached Matia as early as 1883, and a staffed lighthouse was on Patos by 1893.
In her odd and delightful memoir, "The Light on the Island," author Helene Glidden mixes fact and fancy about her childhood on Patos, where she moved in 1905. She records both improbable adventures (an epic shootout with smugglers) and real historical events such as the passage of the Great White Fleet and (possibly) a visit by Teddy Roosevelt to her lighthouse-keeper father: The President did visit the San Juans. So remote was the outpost that three of her siblings died of disease because they couldn't reach medical help in time.
An opportunistic early resident of Matia was Elvin Smith, a "hermit" who squatted on the government land about 1891 and made a meager living as a mail-order faith healer. He prayed for sick supplicants who wrote him from across the United States, and rowed over to the Orcas Island post office to collect occasional gratitude payments if they were cured. He lived on Matia 30 years, planted an orchard, raised small animals, and drowned with a friend when their small boat swamped in 1921. Remnants of his homestead can still be spotted.
IT WASN'T JUST the presence of permanent settlers that made these islands different than they are now. Native Americans routinely burned to promote wild foods, and the absence of fire today is causing extinction of prairie plants. And white pioneers logged. While Matia still retains a lovely grove of old growth and a few big trees survive on Patos, most of today's trees are second-growth.
Sucia Island was homeport to excursion boat trips in the 1920s, and a children's summer camp after World War II. There are reports of a fox farm as well. Gold and coal claims were filed, though never used, and from 1900 to 1909 a sandstone quarry operated on Fossil Bay. The road and picnic area at the head of the bay next to the old quarry date from that time; before then, water lapped all the way to the cliff face.
The sandstone proved to be of poor commercial quality but high scientific importance, as geologists work to piece together the complicated geologic history of the Pacific Northwest. In his evocative book "Time Machines," University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward describes how the southern side of Sucia is Cretaceous seabed 80 million years old.
Geomagnetic evidence indicates it originated at the latitude of Baja California and slowly drifted north, just as California west of the San Andreas Fault is moving north an earthquake-jolt at a time. Castor said this migratory rock is fused with younger Chuckanut sandstone at the joint marked by Fossil Bay and Fox Cove, pressure helping bend and fold the island into a steep-sided horseshoe.
Coves, channels and valleys in these islands run from northwest to southeast, and are the result of both ocean erosion carving at softer rock and glacial advance during the Ice Ages. Big granite boulders, carried from far distant mountains, sit like misplaced orphans on Sucia's south shore.
In detail, the sandstone is carved into fantastic shapes, looking in places like a honeycomb, or the folds of a brain, or gigantic mushrooms. Salt water crystallizes in the porous rock and begins breaking it, while algae forms on the roof of new cavities to prevent erosion in that direction. The result is abstract art.
The ecology is as bizarre as the geology. Sucia, for example, has only river otter, mink, deer mice and voles as its mammals. Yet it is dry and sunny enough to have representatives of mountain and desert plant life, from cactus to Rocky Mountain juniper. Matia has an isolated colony of Pacific tree frogs so deafening in their lusty spring mating calls that they can be heard from the anchorage.
THESE ISLANDS have been on the edge of not only geography but the law. Matia was reputed to be the hideout of an Indian named Skookum (strong) Tom, supposedly a renegade murderer. Famed smugglers such as Lawrence Kelly and Henry Ferguson, a one-time member of Butch Cassidy's "Hole-in-the-Wall" gang, plied their trade here. (Ferguson was eventually hanged for shooting an officer on Vancouver Island, but the more genteel and well-liked Kelly had a point on Guemes Island named for him.)
The islands proved ideal hiding and holding grounds for entrepreneurs seeking to beat tariffs, taxes and prohibition. Wool, sugar, opium and — after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act — Chinese workers were smuggled from Canada while apples, playing cards and shoes went the other way. The heyday was American Prohibition, when a bottle of booze bought wholesale for 50 cents in Victoria could be sold to a drinker in Seattle for $12, a trade made possible by corruption in the Seattle Police Department.
The temptation remains. Deception Pass State Park rangers helped nab a $3 million shipment of B.C. Bud marijuana at the Cornet Bay boat ramp a few months ago. And the prize for all-time-dumbest smuggling goes to a Florida group that bought a small island in Sucia Island's Echo Bay in mid-winter in the 1980s. It seemed perfect to stash marijuana, given that the whole place looked deserted.
Little did they know that an area that empties in the storms of winter has drawn as many as 700 pleasure boats in a single Fourth of July weekend. The island buyers were busted sailing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and their acquisition seized and given to State Parks. The stashing spot is now known as Justice Island.
The annual tide of visitors isn't just bad for smuggling, of course. It pressures the islands.
Sucia Island represents one of the proudest achievements of Northwest yachting: When a California developer expressed interest in acquiring half the island from the Johnston family in 1958, a coalition of boating groups led by a visionary named Ev Henry raised $25,000 to buy the parcel instead and turn it over, in 1960, to State Parks. (Today, a single waterfront lot in the San Juan Islands can easily cost 10 times that.)
But that boater philanthropy also made Sucia a recreational mecca. By the 1980s, the island was jammed on peak summer weekends. People spray-painted their boat names on the old quarry face. To keep up with the crowds, State Parks had 100 garbage cans, 36 outhouses and a crew of three who spent all day simply hauling trash.
Ranger Castor knew something had to be done. The spray paint was sandblasted off. The stinking outhouses, which cost $35,000 a year to pump out, were replaced with composting toilets. A "pack it in, pack it out" policy was instituted on garbage. Some boaters howled, but others realized there was no logical alternative. Today there isn't a single garbage can on Sucia, and no litter, either.
Solar power helps run water wells and a new filtration system purifies it. Herbicides have been banned; invasive plants such as English ivy are pulled by hand. The old orchard has been uncovered and forests are growing back.
Castor has even more ambitious plans to ban all anchoring, which harms eel grass beds. Instead, he'd like to increase the number of mooring buoys from 48 to 156 and use bottom screws to replace the massive blocks that hold them. He'd like a full-time harbor master so buoys could be assigned and skippers could leave during the day to fish or sail without having to worry about having a place to tie for the night. He's trying to stop fossil hunting, and wants more signs interpreting the environment.
In other words, Castor wants to get Sucia and its deliberately lonelier neighbors ready for the pressures of the 21st century. And herein lies a problem, because State Parks has been slowly asphyxiated for funding since the glory days of the 1960s and early '70s.
Washington ranks 47th in the nation in per visitor spending on its parks, one-third the national average. It has a repair backlog of $300 million. Only half its 250 acquired parcels have become functioning state parks, because there's no money to develop them.
"We're falling further behind," said Cleve Pinnix, director of the agency. "We're being squeezed off the budget plate." The more money that rangers raise through assessing user fees, the more the state Legislature cuts their budget. People yell about crime, schools and roads. State parks are taken for granted.
Except, perhaps, for these islands. This outer crest is still too hard to get to, and when you arrive, there are no services. Most who do come tread lightly, as if sensing the fragility, and care for them like their own. As a result, this place at the outer reaches of the state has become not just a smuggler's haven but sanity's haven.
Maybe that ethic can now be smuggled south, like the wool and opium of old.
Say It So
The proper pronunciation of island Spanish names is a matter of some dispute and personal preference. Ma-tee-a has been corrupted to May-sha, or even Mattie. Sue-see-a is usually called Sue-sha. And Paw-tos is often called Pay-tos. It's a choice between correct Español and common usage. And don't get us started on Padilla Bay!
William Dietrich is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer.