The San Juan Islands

This is one of the high points on the western side of San Juan Island, and from the top the logic of the whole place lays itself out: a low, rounded island, water on every side, and more islands beyond, each the same low back of rock. The Ice Age glacier that overrode all of this ground the land down and left only a thin soil behind, and on the exposed tops the wind and the shallow, dry ground keep the forest from taking hold. So the summits stay bald and open to the view while the lower slopes carry trees. On a cool, clear morning you may stand up here in sun and look down on fog lying in the channels below, filling the low water between islands and leaving the high ground clear. Those channels are where the tide runs hardest, dragging cold water through the narrows. From this height you are really looking at the machine of the place — the cold sea below, the thin land above, and the fog that ties them together.

Mount Grant rises a little inland, an open hill with a wide look south and west over the island and the water beyond. What surprises people is how dry and open the high ground feels for the wet Northwest — grass and moss and bare rock rather than deep, dripping forest. These islands sit in a drier pocket than the soaked country around them, and on the windswept tops the thin glacial soil and the salt air keep the trees low and scattered. The reward is the long view. From the summit the sea reads as a set of channels threading between low islands, and on a cool morning you can watch fog pool in those channels while the hilltops stand clear above it. The same cold water that makes the fog is the water that feeds the shorelines below. The hill and the tidepool are two ends of one system, and from up here you can see how the pieces fit.

Biological Hill is a low rise on the island’s northeast side, close above Friday Harbor and the busy channel that carries the ferries and boats. It sits near the water rather than above the whole island, and that is the point: here you are down at the level where land and sea do business. The island’s marine laboratory works along this same stretch of shore, and people have long paid close attention to the living things of this water. Look out over the channel and you are watching the engine at close range — the tide pushing through, the cold water turning over, the gulls and cormorants and the occasional dark head of a seal all working the same rich current. It is an unglamorous view of a working waterway, and it may be the clearest place on the island to understand why so much life crowds these shores: because the moving water never stops delivering food to them.

The south end of San Juan Island opens into something you do not expect on a wooded island: a wide, treeless prairie of grass running out to a bluff above the sea. The American Camp Trail carries you into it. The openness is the sea’s doing as much as the soil’s — the glacier left thin, dry ground here, the wind comes straight and salt-laden off the water, and between them they hold the forest back and keep the grassland open. It is a landscape shaped by exposure. Deer graze the grass, most easily seen in the low light of dawn and dusk when they come out to feed, and overhead the open ground is good hunting for eagles and vultures riding the wind off the strait. Walk out far enough and the sound of the trees falls away entirely, leaving only wind and grass and, beyond the bluff, the sea that made it all this way.

Follow the same trail to its other reward: the edge, where the thin land drops to meet the cold water. This is where the note’s one idea shows itself most plainly. Along the bluff and down on the shore the sea gathers its richness against the rim of the island — seals hauled out to rest on offshore rocks, black oystercatchers working the tideline with their red bills, and in the cold months rafts of sea ducks like harlequins riding the chop. At low water the shore opens into pools, and in them lives the crowded cold-water world the tide keeps fed: anemones like soft columns, crabs, chitons clamped to the rock, urchins tucked in the shaded cracks. Little of this would be so alive without the moving sea behind it. This is the lens of the whole note in one place — the land thin and quiet, and the water at its edge doing the living.