August 2020

The State Park placard on Sucia Island describes tectonic upheaval as the force behind the island’s odd formation. The pressures of the pandemic are similarly responsible for the strange shape of 2020. As social circles got smaller and adventure closer to home, it remolded relationships with family and the outdoors, including mine and the annual mother son adventure my mom and I call “Motherboy”.

My mom is active with multiple hobbies, a career, and six grandchildren. We’re close, but a phone call a month has always done us fine. When the pandemic hit and sharing a two person tent felt irresponsible, I didn’t worry that Motherboy wouldn’t happen. I wondered instead what form it would take. A short time later, she discovered sea kayaking as a socially distanced hobby by the length of her paddle. In just four months she accumulated enough gear for the both of us and enough experience to make it feel safe.

I joined her on a Thursday in Bellingham, WA and we departed from Gooseberry Point on the mainland north of the city. The plan was a four day trip, twenty-four miles to three uninhabited islands in Puget Sound’s San Juans. The tide out of Hale’s Passage took us north around Lummi Island and into the Strait of Georgia then ten miles west to Sucia Island. It was the longest water crossing for both of us and the big water on kayaks made us feel small. That far from land, her simple instructions on how to re-enter a swamped kayak began to seem very complicated.  

A double rainbow appeared just before sunset and we set up our hammocks on Sucia’s Echo Bay. Sucia Island is a collection of peninsulas, some grassy and others forested, that form a horseshoe shape like a messy paint stroke. The next morning we hiked around its coastline of Madrona trees to explore. Unsurprisingly, the bonsai landscape is so popular with boaters the island has its own water treatment system. To catch the afternoon tide to Patos Island, our next destination, we portaged our kayaks across Sucia’s narrow center to China Caves and Shallow Bay, a small cove with deeply pockmarked rocks used by people smugglers at the turn of the last century.

Patos Island is the most north westerly of the San Juans and sits two miles off Sucia just a few hundred meters from the sea boundary with Canada. The currents around it are stronger than the inner islands and it can be a fight to get there depending on how you approach it. The current was nearly whitewater where it swept us like a river into the lagoon at the island’s southwest end.

In the late afternoon we set up camp on a bluff on Patos. We hung our hammocks overlooking the lagoon and the remains of the old dock used to ferry supplies to the lighthouse back when it was a manned station. All the islands are enchanting but the emerald water full of white sailboats had a magical feel to it. It was intimate to the point the people on boats felt like our roommates. A duo even brought us wine and s’mores in their skiff.

Patos Island is best known for its classic lighthouse. During sunset we walked to the foundation of the old caretaker’s hut in the meadow surrounding it. While cooking dinner we watched the Patos station flash at five second intervals and its Canadian counterpart across the strait flash at eleven second intervals. It looked like the two were having a conversation, the polite Canadian listening and Patos interrupting.

A storm passed in the early evening and by three in the morning the sky was clear. My mom knew I’d brought my tripod and she woke me up to tell me the stars were out. In the Northwest clear skies feel rare around salt water, especially at night. Catching calm weather away from city lights on a moonless night was too good to let pass. Despite my extreme comfort, I put on my parka and took the path through the woods to the station.

I knew the Milky Way would be visible in our hemisphere during summer but I hadn’t put any planning into astrophotography that weekend. From the moment I finished fumbling with my tripod and saw my first exposure, I knew the secret was being out in the right conditions. The point beyond the lighthouse exhaled a cloud of stars in an infinite arc above the station up over my head. I remembered my mom telling me about a kayaker on Sucia who said he wanted his ashes spread at Patos. The mist of stars felt like spirits departing.

We left around noon the next day to Matia, a smaller island we’d passed. When we rounded the eastern toe of Patos, though, I saw what looked like a mast listing at a forty-five degree angle near the shore. We put in at the next cove and went to investigate. It was a thirty foot sailboat floundered on the reef —  an honest to God shipwreck. We’d heard that boats in Anacortes were damaged in a windstorm but there wasn’t any sign of an owner and the wreck didn’t seem recent. Maybe the Coast Guard thought it was fun and left it.

At Matia Island we reached a heavily forested wildlife reserve with a nature trail and a dock at the west end. There are no fires allowed on Matia but the island is beautiful. A micro islet with droopy sandstone melted into funny shapes fronts the harbor. At sunset we watched the water go glassy calm and reflect the candy-striped sky.

A sneeze interrupted our dinner. We looked out just in time to see a pod of Orcas dip into the bay. We grabbed our life jackets and followed them. It was my first time seeing an Orca in the wild. Their dorsal fins were like vertical wings and in the quiet of slack tide all I could hear was their burping and spouting. We watched from a distance and then paddled back before the tide shift stranded us.

I got so used to the rhythm of loading and unloading kayaks, hanging hammocks and tying tarps, I could have spent another week comfortably. It wasn’t long after pulling our kayaks out of the water for the final time Sunday morning that I noticed we didn’t need a big ordeal in the outdoors to keep us close anymore. As summer turned to fall, we began to talk often and not always about waxing skins or crevasse rescue. The pandemic had twisted us together like the basalt and sandstone on Sucia Island.