Salt Water on my Skin
There is a theory, held seriously by some and half-seriously by most, that Orcas Island sits on an energy vortex. A place where something older than the roads and the ferry schedule and the wifi password hums underneath the moss and the madrone trees and the morning fog. People come up here specifically for this, to stand on the mountain and feel it, to sit at the water's edge and let something in their nervous system finally, finally slow down. To remember that they are a body in a landscape and not just a mind in a building. I am not here to tell you whether the vortex is real. I will tell you that everyone I know who has been to these islands talks about them the same way. They don’t really talk about it. Like the feeling is still happening and they don't want to break it open by explaining it too directly. I will tell you that people come for a weekend and start looking at real estate. That people come for a summer and find themselves still here years later. That people come to die and live 38 more years. Something is happening up here. You can call it what you want. The first time I came to Orcas I was a kid. Camp Orkila. I remember the trees being taller than made sense. I remember eating sunflower butter for the first time and thinking it was the best thing I had ever tasted, which probably had something to do with being outside and hungry and nine years old. But I have never been able to fully separate the sunflower butter from the island. That is what these places do. They attach themselves to the small specific things and use them to find you later, years later, when you least expect it. There is something about islands specifically. Not coastlines, not lakes, not mountains. islands. The fact of the water all the way around you. The fact that you made a decision to come here and the water is holding you to it. You cannot drift back to the mainland on a whim. You have to wait for the ferry. You have to stay. Most of us do not stay anywhere long enough anymore. We are always halfway out the door of wherever we are, already thinking about the next thing or the next place. The phone in our pocket is always offering us somewhere else to be. And then you get on a ferry in Anacortes and the water opens up around you and the islands appear on the horizon and something in the body releases. Not because anything has been solved. Not because the things you were worried about have gone away. But because the geography has made it clear, firmly and without negotiation, that you are here now and here is enough. I go running on Orcas now. Through old growth, past the lakes that catch the light in the morning in a way that makes you feel like you are the first person to ever see it even though you know you are not. And there is a feeling I get of total freedom. Not freedom from something specific. Something more cellular than that. Like my body has been here before and knows what to do. Like the island has been keeping something for me and hands it back every time I show up. This is not a unique experience. This is, in fact, the whole thing with the San Juan Islands. Everyone who comes here has a version of it, and nobody can fully explain it, and so the islands stay a little mysterious even to the people who love them most. The people who live here chose it. That is not nothing. In a world that makes it very easy to live somewhere comfortable and numbing, the people on these islands made a different calculation. They decided that the inconvenience was worth it. The ferry lines, the limited options, the fact that if you forget something you either do without or you wait. They decided that waking up to this was worth organizing a life around. Some of them came to make things. The potters and painters and weavers and woodworkers who needed space and quiet and a community that understood why you would spend three years perfecting a glaze. Some of them came to grow things. Some of them came for reasons they couldn't fully articulate and stayed because the reason became clear once they arrived. And some of them came because they were told they were dying and decided that if they only had one year left they were going to spend it somewhere that felt like living. That is the San Juan Islands in one story. You come for one thing. The island has other plans. I make photographs for a living. I have thought a lot about why I chose a medium that is essentially about stopping time, about saying this moment, this light, this person's face right now, is worth preserving. I think it has something to do with the fact that beauty is not permanent and I cannot stand the thought of it going unwitnessed. That a good moment deserves a record. That the light on the water at eight in the evening in July, when it goes gold and everyone at the table stops talking for a second because they all feel it at the same time, should not just disappear into the past like it never happened. The islands confirmed this for me. The feeling I had as a kid at Camp Orkila, that something here was worth paying attention to, that this place was doing something to me that I should not forget, was the beginning of understanding that attention is its own form of love. That showing up somewhere fully, with your eyes open and your phone in your bag, is the most generous thing you can do for a place. We made this paper because we wanted to give something back. Not a guide exactly. Not an advertisement. More like a record. A way of saying: we were here, we paid attention, and here is what we found worth writing down. There is nothing left to figure out. The ferry back leaves when it leaves. Until then you are here. The mountain is worth the drive. The water is cold and worth it anyway. At some point you will sit somewhere and feel the specific peace of a place that is not trying to be anything other than what it is. That is when the vortex gets you. You come for one thing. You leave knowing something you didn't before. It will change everything. You will be back.