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01/09/2012: "Donna "Pauli" Gavora"

March 13, 1956 ~ January 5, 2012

Donna Pauline Gavora, 55, passed away January 5, 2012 at her home in Friday Harbor, Washington after a long battle with cancer.

Pauli lived on San Juan Island for the past 24 years. For a few years Pauli did building designs and land use permits, and then started Gavora, LLC, providing land use consulting and marine structure design and permitting for businesses and property owners in the northern Puget Sound area.

Pauli was an adventurer, a lover of art and ideas. She loved to kayak and hike in Alaska and brought her love of the outdoors to her new home on 15 acres on San Juan Island, where she designed a small home and created a natural park-like setting around the house that gently transitioned into the natural forest and plants that dominated the property. She said she raised “cows,” which of course were the numerous deer that found their way to her little bit of paradise.

She was fearless in the face of both new places and new ideas. As a thirteen-year-old she spent most of her eighth grade year with relatives in Czechoslovakia. Later she spent her summers north of Fairbanks, tending the greenhouse and gardens at Arctic Circle Hot Springs, and while still only a teenager, Pauli would ride along to help her girlfriend take a string of horses up to a hunting camp - a trip that caused her father to insist she carry a 30-06 along in case of a grizzly attack: “Had I fired it, it would probably have blown me out of the saddle.”

In college and later in graduate school she studied history, philosophy and anthropology, always asking the hard questions and taking the time to try to find the answers. She loved nothing better than to have a spirited intellectual debate with anyone, on any subject.

While she kept her eye on new adventures, Pauli was also deeply involved in her community. She was president of the American Legion Auxiliary Unit 163. She revitalized and organized the annual Arbor Day tree donations in San Juan County, annually giving away thousands of seedlings. Pauli was a passionate local advocate and fundraiser for the WWII Veteran Honor Flight Network and the Wounded Warrior Project. She was a loving daughter and sister, an admired aunt, a devoted friend, and a patriot.

Pauli is survived by her parents, Donna and Paul Gavora of Fairbanks, as well as her sisters, Alexandra Gavora of Friday Harbor, Jessica Gavora of Washington, DC, Jennifer Gavora Button of Fairbanks, and Carrie Gavora of Washington, DC; her brothers, Daniel Gavora, Rudy Gavora and Steven Gavora of Fairbanks, and Matthew Gavora of Vancouver, Washington; her siblings’ spouses and 19 nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the American Legion Auxiliary, PO Box 662, Friday Harbor, WA 98250 and reference Wounded Warrior Fund or Honor Flight Fund.

A Different Time, A Different Place
By Pauli Gavora

I hate to seem ungrateful. I, like most people, do appreciate the return of the light and the warmth that the sun brings this time of year. I remember as a child, lying in the snow bank in the early winter of Alaska, looking at the stars at 2:00 in the afternoon: as days grew progressively darker, progressively colder. And wondering with a certain amount of anxiety “how do we know its coming back? Perhaps we have broken loose from our lunge line, and it will keep getting darker, and colder.”

That was a different time, a different place -a different sensibility. Here I am now, begrudging the suns return. It’s the light thing actually. It is the winter light’s romance with the old barns, that I value: their flaws, their failings, are not to be revealed in those beginning-of-the day hours. When things seem hopeful, and “lovely” -a word that I rarely use, comes, unbidden, to my mind.

I love my morning drive into town on Beaverton Valley road. I love what the oblique early morning rays do to the color of things. I think of writing a letter to Richard Lawson in his violet house, and thanking him for the equine images offset in chestnut and bay that graze on the oh-so-green grass near the white fence. And I especially want to thank the people who own the old barns which line the path into Town. The way the angled rays catch those sloped roofs. Who, besides Euclid, would ever have thought that there could be such beauty in an irradiated rectangle, triangle, trapezoid?

My childhood anxiety about the fastness of the tether has been replaced by one concerning the impermanence of these objects -so gorgeously revealed in the early hours by the winter sun. Will the oblique rays of the autumnal equinox, find the horses and the barns still standing? I have been told that one of the horses is very old, and the barns have been standing for a long time. Things change, and there is not much you can do about it. All I know; is that I am happy to have been here, happy to have had another season -of the winter light’s romancing the barns.


[The above was written several years ago by Pauli when we first started The Island Guardian -even the name was her idea. I of course wanted to print it, but Pauli demurred. “Run it when you need something to post,” she said. And so it went into the hold file, where it has remained until today, the day after Pauli passed away. And today is the day I do need something to post to honor and memorialize the most important person in my life, and in the life of so many who knew her. Her own words do more than anything I, or any of her legion of friends could possible say, to show one part of her that made us all love her -Jack Cory]