07/14/2007: "Goodbye To All This"

When people ask me now where I lived before I moved to San Francisco, I tell them the San Juan Islands. Invariably, they wonder how I could leave such a beautiful place, and invariably I tell them, “Because I had to.”

To some, “had to” pertains to reasons of health or age, weather, a final protest of the inconvenience of the ferries, an intolerance of isolation, the lack of an on-island outlet for talent and/or experience, or the sad reality that the cost of living has finally become intolerably high.

None of these reasons applied to me. My domestic circumstances took a wholly unexpected and cataclysmic turn, and in order to cope I literally fled to what I hoped would be a place of safety, out of the shadow of my former life. As it turns out, the recovery I sought was not to be found, because in every corner I found nothing less than the recurring images of all that I had lost, which was everything.

With traumatic partings, goodbyes are often neglected. It has taken me months to find the voice to make them. Thus this letter to everyone in this close island community whom I knew either because they were friends, or neighbors, or through my business, Pelindaba Lavender, or through the campaign for Home Rule, or because we were simply fellow islanders and we greeted each other on the street or in the post office. Rarely have I known a community more committed to remaining interested in itself and in its future, bursting with the energy that derives from a population of varying educational, economic, political, and social backgrounds who are joined in the decision to live in a place of magisterial beauty. Those who live in the San Juans fall permanently in love with them. Regardless of why they leave, it is the beauty that imprints them, follows them wherever they go, like a benevolent ghost. So it is with me.

Many of the images that fill me with longing for my past are also those that comfort me in the present. For the year prior to my departure, almost every morning I would walk with good friends in Lime Kiln Park. Our route took us through forest, along bare coastline, through old rock quarries, past the crumbling buildings where a once important island industry thrived. We saw birds, seals, deer, ships, and surf foaming against rocks when the wind was up, tide pools. I can’t remember a single time when we didn’t see something that made us exclaim to each other. The immersion in both nature and camaraderie combined to make magic that I was blessed to share for a long time, and which I could not fully appreciate until it was no longer accessible to me.

The imprint of my San Juan years has grown deeper in absence. From a distance, I observe the “six thousand opinions surrounded by water” still jousting in editorials and letters to the editor in the local media; the dozens of benefits and the too-frequent memorials; the rituals of the seasons like Elegant Edibles, the Fair, and the Festival of Trees; reports of the Council meetings in which neither the issues nor the commentary of the entrenched council members seem to change very much; the famous police blotter which, in the years before I lived on the island, I found to be as charming as a children’s book (“House on Pear Point was found broken into. Missing: one peanut butter sandwich.”) I look at the pictures of the July 4th parade and recall all the years when I would be watching in front of the movie theatre, simultaneously joyful and despairing that I would be seeing the exact same floats for the rest of my life.

As it turned out, it was not to be for the rest of my life, yet all those parades are part of my embedded memory, as are the following: the sight of the first snowfall on West Side Road, the purple-gold sky on a late fall day, the owl perched on a branch on Bailer Hill Road, staring down onto an amazed observer for as long as half an hour; my beloved cats luxuriating in the heat of a stone wall near my greenhouse garden; the roiling white caps on the Strait just before a big storm. All of these images are as real to me as the San Francisco skyline outside my window.

While I call out these memories, record them to be read by the people who still live in my former community, I ask you to remember me, too.

Remember that it was my vision of purple descending down a hill on Wold Road that created Pelindaba Lavender; that it was my indignation that the will of the citizens of San Juan County was being ignored by their elected leaders, leading to the birth of the 2005 Home Rule movement. For better or for worse (and it appears to be for the better), Home Rule passed in San Juan County by a landslide, the first to succeed in Washington State in over twenty years. The campaign that achieved that distinction – the result of the talent, passion, energy, and commitment of many citizens throughout the County whom I heartily miss – has become a model for similar initiatives, previously believed doomed by so many. I ask to be granted a place, if not in San Juan Islands’ history, for that would be too grandiose a wish, then in the memories of those I had to leave behind. It is the only way I can heal my loss. It is, I hope, a fair request.

There are people who leave the islands and continue their relationship with them through writing letters to the papers, until at last their new lives supersede their desire to remain connected. I am not going to be one of them. It is not through the media that I reconnect with my former life, but through my friends. It is a permanent, indelible connection. But I felt that to those whom I would see regularly at Pelindaba, and to those with whom I worked both at Pelindaba and on Home Rule, I owe an affectionate goodbye. There are so many of you that I could not reach otherwise. Thank you.

Susan Meister can be reached at susanmeist@gmail.com.