On a still summer morning on Washington State‘s Orcas Island, I rented a pair of tandem kayaks from a sleepy-eyed, flaxen-haired attendant barely out of her teens, who quickly returned to painting watercolors in the tall grass beside the weather-beaten sales kiosk. A gentle wind went shhh through tall hemlocks as my family paddled, two by two, to a rocky islet at the center of Mountain Lake, on the flank of Mount Constitution. There we clambered ashore, and the kids, Agnes and Rex, immediately began darting among the lodgepole pines, collecting sticks and pine cones to build fairy houses. Aside from the faint smell of a forest fire burning in the Cascades and a smudge of smoke on the eastern sky, it could have been a scene from my own childhood.
When I was eight years old, my mother moved my three younger brothers and me to Anacortes, a small island town about two hours north of Seattle. It is the gateway to the San Juan Islands, an archipelago within the Puget Sound and the broader Salish Sea, which divides Washington State from Canada. As an underemployed single mom to four young boys, she needed inexpensive outlets for our considerable energy. Taking our bikes onto the ferry and spending the day in the San Juans was an ideal solution. Certain activities here—huddling inside beach forts assembled out of bleached driftwood, waving at cars while cycling along the agricultural back roads of Lopez Island, watching from the second deck for the underwater “burp” of the ferry as it departs a port—are woven into the helices of my DNA. But I hadn’t been in more than two decades. So I booked a trip, to show the islands to my kids, to reconnect with them as an adult, and perhaps to have a few experiences that were out of reach for me as a child. As an added bonus, my mom came along too.
We posted up in a cozy log cabin at Lakedale lodge, a rustic mini kingdom on the island of San Juan, about 10 minutes from the main town of Friday Harbor. To enter, you cross a small causeway—the compound is an island within the island. Karl Bruno, Lakedale’s well-seasoned general manager, told me that its founders were pond builders, who in the late ’60s convinced the county to raise the road so that they could create the three lakes around which the resort is now arranged. For a generation it was a campground only, but today there are yurts and canvas cottages in addition to the cabins and tranquil main lodge. Families come back every summer to play life-size checkers and chess, construct birdhouses, and fish in the lakes for cutthroat trout. Sometimes the kids return as grown-ups to have weddings here.
Friday Harbor, a charming village that spills up a steep hill from the ferry terminal, looked just as it had 35 years ago, though I suspect that when I was little, the cafés were less chic and the sandwich shops not quite so artisanal. Certainly, the San Juans today have more private islands owned by tech billionaires and more boho big-city refugees, many of whom arrived during the pandemic, than they once did, but this is a place whose residents like things to stay as they are. At Vic’s Drive-In, a classic diner on the outskirts of Friday Harbor that claims to be the island’s longest continuously operating restaurant, co-owner Brian Carlson, a predecessor of Karl Bruno at Lakedale, tells me about the outrage when a previous owner tried to change the name to Vic’s Driftwood Drive-in. Why? “Because it’s Vic’s, and people in Friday Harbor hate change.” Driving through the woods of Orcas, I kept noticing signage that felt as if it could have been there 50 years ago: “American Legion Sunday Morning Pancake Breakfast”; “Orcas Island Jazz Festival”; “Indralaya, a Theosophical Society.” And, nailed to a telephone pole by a driftwood-strewn beach near the charming town of Eastsound: “Be Kind.”
But what most teleported me back to childhood was the San Juans’ eternal landscape, especially its shorelines. On the other side of San Juan Island at Lime Kiln Point, one of the area’s best places to spot whales, the kids and I clambered around the igneous rock formations splayed beneath the quaint 106-year-old Lime Kiln Lighthouse, marveling at the tenacity of the madrones that clung to them. Across the Strait of Juan de Fuca we could see the Olympic Peninsula, indistinct in the haze of the wildfires. If the day had been clear, I knew from memory, we would have been able to see Mount Rainier seeming to float on the southern horizon. On the Shark Reef Sanctuary Trail on sleepy Lopez, we emerged from old-growth fir trees to traipse along the bluffs, looking for crabs in tide pools, marveling at the countless barnacles, and observing a colony of sea lions sunning themselves on a rocky outcropping a few hundred feet offshore.
Later that day we went to Spencer Spit, where a sandy beach separates a quiet saltwater lagoon from the sound. Well-fed clouds, almost too substantial to be believed, floated above islands carpeted with evergreens, cheerful sailboats, and a poky ferry slowly gliding along the navy blue waters. My kids found a driftwood fort taller than me, with a plank you could move aside affixed with a sheet of paper that was labeled “Door.” They quickly joined forces with siblings from Oregon and embarked on an ambitious series of home improvements: patching up holes, putting in furniture, erecting a seaweed flag. There was already a lump rising in my throat when my mother turned to me and asked, “Does this remind you a lot of childhood afternoons?”
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Something I never got to do as a kid was eat at nice restaurants, and there are so many on these islands that make ingenious use of the region’s beautiful ingredients. Perhaps our favorite meal was at Buck Bay Shellfish Farm on Orcas, where we ate oysters on the half shell and seafood rolls artfully adorned with edible flowers at a picnic table steps from the bay where the restaurant grows its own crustaceans. Chi, my wife, trapped the persistent yellow jackets under spent oyster shells until a waiter arrived with lavender oil and instructed us to apply it to our wrists to ward off the insects.
