By Justin Cox
Communications Manager, SeaDoc Society
I moved into a house on the residential north side of Orcas Island three years ago. My back window looks out onto the Salish Sea in the distance, and just beyond that sits Sucia Island.
I’ve stared out at Sucia’s shoreline almost every day for the last three years of my life, but until this weekend I’d never set foot on it. Maybe that’s not as profound or noteworthy as I’ve decided to make it in my mind, but it’s my mind and that’s just how things work up there. Visiting a place that’s two miles from your home is pretty automatic unless you live on a chain of islands.
When you live in the San Juans, it’s easy to feel like you’re perpetually camping. Water surrounds you, trees line the horizon, the air is fresh, etc. etc. etc. But you also have a phone in your pocket, bills to pay, errands to run, and Netflix series to binge. Sure it’s beautiful outside, but that doesn’t negate your daily to-do list. The trips into nature are carved out in small and fleeting bursts.
So last weekend I finally went to Sucia.
Our Science Director Joe Gaydos and Board Member Audrey Benedict wrote a beautiful book about the Salish Sea, and there’s a chapter about its glacier-formed geological origins. The photos of Sucia stuck with me from the moment I cracked that book, and they sprang to life when I got to the island.
The tide-washed sandstone is smooth in some places and honeycombed in others—totally unique to anything I’ve seen in my short time in the Salish Sea. Some spots are even carved out into full-on caves.
We camped on the small strip of land between Shallow Bay and Echo Bay, the center point of the horseshoe-shaped island. My home on Orcas is also on a small strip of land at the center of a horseshoe. I’m choosing to find symmetry there.
I woke up the next morning to a gang of river otters hunting along the rocky edge of Shallow Bay, sending their tails into the air as they dipped to the sea floor. (Did not have a device in my pocket, so no pictures!). After breakfast and coffee, I set off on a hike toward the China Caves and the northwest corner of the island.
The stuff I said earlier about how it’s easy to feel like you’re camping when you live in the Salish Sea, but that you’re actually not—here’s a little more on that: I love reading and writing and poetry and song lyrics, but my attention span is shot to hell from years of personal and professional social media use, and also because I’ve just always had to work hard to maintain focus. I struggle to stop on a dime, forget whatever’s spinning around upstairs, and read something out of pure leisure and pleasure. I struggle with that, because I genuinely love doing that stuff.
I took with me a poetry book that had sat at the bottom of my backpack, unread, since a different camping trip I took last summer. It was a Billy Collins book my grandma had bought me some years ago. My hike was short and simple, just a couple of miles, but it took me down into the trees and then popped me out into the sunlight around Lawson Bluff, which looks northwest toward Patos Island. I sat and read a few pages of the book whenever I found a sturdy and inviting bench or log.
The book I kept in my pocket.
A poem I read (click to enlarge)
My hiking shoes :)
The island was beautiful and so was the extended break from daily obligations. I take comfort in knowing that the work I do each day is aimed at keeping that place and its surroundings intact and healthy.
Below are some more iPhone photos from my little jaunt out to Sucia, hopefully the first of several escapes my family and I make this summer.
Our team may occasionally share first-person pieces like this as we explore new corners of the ecosystem. To protect a place, you must first know and connect with it. These are stories about building that connection.