Fragment #12
When I was a little girl, growing up in Seattle, my family would decamp for some period every summer to a small island ninety minutes north. We didn’t own land, but we rented, first, a cabin from friends of my grandparents and then later, after our family grew, a slightly larger house down the hill on Guemes Island.
Guemes, pronounced “gweh-mus,” not “gway-mus” or, god forbid, “gweemes,” is located in the San Juan archipelago that sits between Vancouver Island and mainland Washington State at the mouth of Puget Sound, the last stop before the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia might carry a sailor out to sea. It is, for sure, one of the lesser San Juans. None of my friends back in the city had ever heard of it, though they might have gone camping on Lopez Island once, or taken a school field trip to the big island, San Juan Island itself, site of a nineteenth-century skirmish known as the “Pig War,” wherein British and American troops fought over just where in the water the international border separating land the British and Americans had appropriated from the Coast Salish peoples should go. Guemes had, in the 70s, a little store selling milk, Wonder Bread, popsicles, and bait that was open, if I recall correctly, twice a week. For groceries and anything else you had to take a little ferry for a quick ride over to Anacortes, the port town, which featured both a Safeway and a Prairie Market, as well as an A&W drive in and an ice cream shop we stopped at religiously on our way back home every year. Anacortes also featured the big Washington State Ferry dock, where a gleaming white-and-green car ferry—much bigger and more interesting than the dinky boat that ran back and forth to Guemes—carried islanders and tourists from the mainland to the larger, more developed islands: San Juan, Lopez, Shaw, and Orcas.
Orcas.
Orcas was where my cousins summered and every year, for a week or two, or maybe longer, my parents would deposit my sister and I over there with our aunt and uncle for a respite. Sometimes we took the big ferry; once we went in our own tiny boat, across the terrifying straits to drop anchor at Doe Bay, on the island’s southeast tip. (Maybe we did that more than once? All I remember is clinging to the side of the boat, my life jacket cinched tight and pressing up against my chin.) Up the road from Doe Bay, on land that backed up to Moran State Park, my aunt and uncle had a little house. It had no electricity, and no indoor running water. We washed dishes in an outdoor sink, and fetched blocks of ice from the Olga Store to keep the icebox cold. The house itself had just a sleeping loft for the adults. The children slept in a bunkhouse down a path toward the orchard, far enough away from the grownups to allow all the freedom four small girls could ever want.
My cousins JJ and Susanna mapped pretty cleanly onto my sister Emily and myself. JJ was a year older than me; Susanna a scant six weeks older than Em. We had free run of the place, in my memories. We ran around in worlds of make believe and played endless games of Yahtzee. JJ had a horse, Ranger, and I would tentatively try to ride it. Sometimes we would all get bundled into the VW van for a trip to the movies in Eastsound, or to the freshwater beach at Cascade Lake. My strongest memories are of the times we would trek down the road to the “resort” at Doe Bay, then home to something called the Polarity Institute. Whatever was going on at Polarity was, at ten, incomprehensible, but I knew that people there wore a lot of white and flowy clothes. Occasionally, Polarity people would wander up the road to pick apples from my cousins’ orchard, and that annoyed my Aunt Lydia enough that, as the story goes, one day she marched down to the resort and said, Hey now—you all are welcome to all the fruit you want, but you’ve got to give us something in return. How about you give us free access to your spa?
The spa at Doe Bay featured three outdoor hot tubs and a sauna on a cypress-shaded deck overlooking the water, and our squad took full, unsupervised advantage of this access, no doubt to the annoyance of many pilgrims seeking enlightenment, or at least peace and quiet.
These summers on Orcas and Guemes are signal memories, a sundrenched childhood idyll of dirty knees and discovery. On the hourlong trip from Anacortes to Orcas, there was always a moment when the big ferry slipped sight of the mainland and crossed out of the rain shadow of the Olympic Peninsula. The skies brightened and the world was left behind. My Aunt Lydia called this “going through the magic curtain,” and she was right. It was plain and simple magic. Years later, as I moaned, brutally hungover, on the ferry home from Susanna’s wedding on San Juan Island, I tried to put words to my longing for this space, that time. Lydia didn’t miss a beat. Wouldn’t it be nice, she said, to be eight years old on Orcas Island forever?
By then, of course, my aunt and uncle had divorced and the house on Orcas had been sold. Lydia, my father’s only sister, who started med school in her 30s and went on to become a brilliant neurologist, was herself in a wheelchair, as ALS continued its inexorable advance. Lydia, my godmother, who plied me with vermouth one late night in San Francisco when a flight home from college got detoured and grounded there, who I loved with the love of a starstruck child—died in 2005. Her birthday is tomorrow. My cousin JJ, her oldest daughter, died today.
Yes, I buried the lede.
JJ lived just a few hours around the lake from Chicago, from me, but as adults we lost touch. She and her husband built a happy life in Michigan; once or twice, on one of their regular trips to Chicago to go to the Lyric, we got together, but even the last one of those was more than several years ago. But family is family, and everyone in mine is a force unto themselves. JJ was an early and enthusiastic LiveJournaler; she loved books and she loved cats. She was a librarian for years, and when she decided to get into editing I gave her the lowdown on the University of Chicago manuscript editing program I had done myself. In late August she spiked a high fever that left her hallucinating. Her husband took her to the hospital; she never came home again. It was a staph infection gone septic, cascading into a medical hall of mirrors of complications. Over the last three months she, and he, have cycled through the exhausting, never-ending trauma that is end-of-life care in the United States.
She was well cared for, and comfortable, I’m told—but thanks to insurance issues, she was moved to a facility two hours from her home; thanks to COVID, her husband wasn’t able to visit her, even if he could make the drive. It’s unfathomably sad.
I’ve been thinking about her a lot these last few months, as her medical odyssey wound on. We are all living in the past this year—telling each other stories about trips we’ve taken and meals we’ve eaten; shows we’ve seen, art we’ve made. We tell stories around the fire about shared victories and grievous losses, hollering through our masks about dreams that came true and those that foundered. JJ’s crisis has thrust me back full-force into stories of that sunny childhood, richer in golden memory I’m sure than I experienced it at the time. Then, it was just life, taken for granted in a swirl of joy, community, and possibility impossible to imagine today.
JJ didn’t have COVID, but because of it she died alone. If you don’t want that for your loved ones, for your family, for yourself, stay home. I am preaching to the choir here on this newsletter, and I physically cringe at the Olympic-level scolding that the COVID era has engendered, but if even one person is moved to change their behavior, to stop contorting themselves with ridiculous rationalizations and excuses—we’ll get tested; we’ll only be with family; we’ll wave our magic wands—then it’s something. While you're hunkered down, how about donating to the Democratic Senate races in Georgia and urging your elected representatives to protect the Affordable Care Act and, even better, reform the whole cruel and usual system.
Someday, soon, we will make golden memories together again. In the meantime, take care of those around you; be gentle with what you love. In ten years that's what I want to remember about this time.
My god I miss you all.