❖ A Bout with Surf ❖

One Hundred Days in the San Juans

Day 57 with June Burn

Inside this published map of the
Resorts in San Juan County,
most of the mentioned are situated on Orcas Island.
Locals began advertising their waterside cabins
and hotel rooms in the local newspapers beginning
in the late 1800s as restful retreats for tourists.
From this cropped detail of the double-sided
9" x 15" map we can trace the wake of the Burns,
in the essay below, as they rowed along the north shore.
Click image to enlarge.
Publishing date unknown,
suspected to be the 1950s.
Original from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historial Society©

"North Shore, Orcas Island. How different are the islands! How like the different countries even the different shores of the same island. This northeast shore of Orcas is a strange land, steep, high, with dark, forbidding beaches. Along the part that is the waterline of Mount Constitution, the trees seem to lie flat, they look as if one bank of them grew out of those below. The kelp beds are close against the bank which means deep water very close to shore.
      

BUCKHORN LODGE
The view from the water as mariners,
June and Farrar were rowing west to Harnden's beach.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Log©

As we near Buckhorn Lodge, a sleek, new mahogany boat upholstered in blue leather comes flashing out to meet us. Ten seconds ago it was at its moorings, now it is alongside us and Mr. Payson from Tacoma, the owner of these 115 leashed horses, offers us a tow to wherever we are going. We accept. The wind failed some time ago. We've been rowing a long way. A tow for five minutes behind this boat will take us nearer to our night's camp-spot than we could walk with our arms in two or three hours.
      The Harndens live somewhere along this north shore. We have an invitation to camp on their beach. It is past six o'clock, time to camp.
      People all along here are picnicking down on their beaches, fishing, or sitting on porches, talking dreamily. Houses sit on bluffs, hidden, secret. Or they cluster together low on the beach, friendly, gregarious––but which house is the Harndens'––they who used to live on Sucia Island? 'About a mile down the shore,' a girl shouts out to us. We have let our horses go back too soon.
      Slowly, we ease along this shore, looking for a comfortable beach. Underwater boulders left here by the glaciers are strewn over the low tidelands. We'd go aground, or a-rock, on one of those and never get off! On and on.
      This is low land, now––the isthmus at the head of East Sound. Just a mile down there is the village. We'll go over there tomorrow and spend the day talking to some of the most interesting old-timers in all the islands.
      Sand dollars! My stars, look at them all over the bottom of this bay! Black, standing up on edge, they look even stranger than when we find them on beaches, white and dead, mere skeletons, their star-shaped centers cut out with holes like the doors of an old kitchen safe.
      This tall white house with the luscious garden and the flowers, all with such a ship-shape look––this must be the Harndens. I'll just go ashore to say we're camping on their beach tonight––and they are not home.
      We camped anyway, not far away, on a shallow beach below the old salt marshes which are now fertile fields. It had the feel of prairie there––a new feel in the islands. We got a sudden sense of homesickness for the prairies of Oklahoma which we both have known. Home! How many places turn out to be home. How many places are wonderful and dear for some sudden sharp likeness to a little spot on which you stood to watch a meadowlark on a fence post, maybe.
      But that night another north wind came up. We had awakened to a sunrise clear and pure, the old ball rolling up over Lummi Island and shining straight across to us, still comfortably abed. Then all at once, without the slightest warning, there was the wind and in two minutes flat, surf rolling in over this flat beach.
      'We'll be aground in 10 minutes,' Farrer shouted as he ran down the beach, throwing off pajamas and grabbing on garments as he ran. I follow only one button behind him. At the water's edge, we were fully dressed, but we shouldn't have been, for in two more minutes we were fully wet pushing off the boat. But we managed to load it before it could quite come ashore.
      And so, away again, breakfastless, tickled at our first brush with surf in our lives.
      We'd row on around Point Doughty to Orkila, the YMCA boys' camp, we said. They had invited us. We could dry out there and ––maybe!––they might ask us to breakfast.
      But if it had been any later than five o'clock in the morning, we'd never have made it. It took us nearly three hours to row those few miles, for the wind wasn't going our way and, for once, we didn't propose to go its way. Finally, we rounded the point, slide down the bay to Orkila.
      And, sure enough, a man came down the beach to meet us. It was Mr. Emory, director of the Queen Anne 'Y' in Seattle. 'You'll have breakfast with us?' he said and we said you bet and in no time at all, boys had secured our boat in the lesser surf on this beach. Boys had built a fire in the big dining room and a day at Orkila had begun.
      We met 125 boys and 30 staff members. 

Beach Haven Resort
Click to enlarge.
Original photos from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

We went down the beach to see Mr. Kimple's and his two partners' Beach Haven resort, where Dr. Turner of the University's new medical college caught five salmon the first time he ever fished in our waters, met Mrs. Fleming, wife of Seattle's superintendent of schools, sitting on a log knitting, had some cookies made by Mrs. Kimple. That's all for today! See you tomorrow. June."
      If you have been following along with this Log there are many more excerpts from the newspaper articles by June Burn entitled One Hundred Days in the San Juans. She had a contract with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1946. In the 1980s editors with the Longhouse Printcrafters in Friday Harbor, published them in a book format, under the same title. Now a collector's item.
      

❖ THE SUCIA ISLANDS ❖

Rock formations in the
Sucia Islands group,
click image to enlarge.
Top photo is known to be by a professional photographer,
J.A. McCormick, a part-time, early resident of
Friday Harbor, WA. He traveled the area to
capture trap fishers on the water and the
village and farm life on shore.
Photos from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

Georgia Strait 
Day Fourteen of One Hundred Days in the San Juans
June Burn, 1946.

      

"We’re headed for Sucia after the perfect night at Patos Island. The tide is far out, again, going further. The rocks of the gourd-shaped Patos come out to meet us to the very edge of their shelf. The long island sits there so quietly, not a soul around except a big blue heron standing on one leg. Now he flies, flapping away, long legs dangling.
      The trees on Patos are short and wind-blunted. Winter’s southeasters must tear across this island like somebody going to a fire –– now we must leave these pastel bluffs behind and strike across another opening in Georgia Strait for Sucia. Farrar steadily rowing. The light breeze is against us but the tide still ebbs toward Sucia (we hope.)
      The San Juanderer is an easy boat to row, so heavy that when it gets up momentum it tends to keep going. By that token, I thought, a battleship might be still easier, but Farrar says you couldn’t get it started in the first place. Remember that: buy the heaviest boat you can possibly start and maybe it won’t ever stop and you’ll go on around the world in it — just like that. Provided you have no tides! This one we’re in now can’t make up its mind whether it’s going back to Patos or on to Sucia or off in some other direction altogether and Farrar’s dictum about the heavy boat is meaningless here. We’ve been just off Sucia for a half hour — for an hour. I’ve been rowing meanwhile—for two hours — I’ve been rowing some more — ahh! We get around that, too...and here is Fossil Bay after four hours of rowing a little more than four miles.

      The high cliffs of Sucia rise above us on two sides, the head of the bay a low, narrow neck of land connecting with a bay on the other side — Fox Bay.
Sucia Islands are in the northern part of the archipelago. They were named by the Spaniard, Eliza, in 1792. The name means “foul” or “dirty,” referring not to the island but to the rocks and reefs which lie everywhere around. Huge boulders, round, square, all shapes and sizes, lie in tumbles on the beach, seem to have taken root and grown into reefs just offshore. Boats skirt this island with caution. But once in these bays, there is security!
      The Sucias are 749 acres in area. There are eight islands. In the cluster with myriad bays between. A whole school of peninsulas. One of the islands seems to have no name other than “one of the fingers.” The names of others are Sucia, Little Sucia lying off the west shore, Herndon Island, a mere dot in Fossil Bay, North and South Finger Islands, lying parallel in Echo Bay, and Ewing Island, off the eastern end of the big horseshoe.
      The bays are comparatively shallow but deep enough for any of the pleasure cruisers that play around here. The bluffs are high, all but unclimbable with their tumble of boulders. The low portions are rich in growth. Madrona trees, like glossy Magnolias, are thick on all the islands. Wind-torn junipers give an ancient look to the place and the blown firs a worn-out look as if Sucia were old and weary. The wild and formidable mess of rocks completes the picture.
      As we come slowly into Fossil Bay we see the curious “guest book” on Herndon Island’s rock face. The names are of boats rather than of individuals which makes it more interesting.
      A boat comes purring out of the bay, looks at us, goes out again. A kingfisher alights on a high boulder, makes his sudden, powerful dive after a fish, goes off with it. Two bald eagles go screaming by, seagulls after them, barn swallows dipping and darting among the gleaming madronas. As we draw into shore, we see the clams spurting in the shale and when we go on shore, I hear the eternal clicking of the knitting needles as a million barnacles shut their traps.
      We take out a few lunch things, make a cup of coffee and sit on the rocks of the beach for lunch. It is 12:30. The silence sings in the treetops. The sun lies still and hot over the water and on our bare feet. It is a summer afternoon on a San Juan Island.
      But on the whole, you can have your beautiful Sucias! Their bold, steep bluffs, the madrona thickets, and the junipers, the endless shoreline full of boulders, the beaches, and the shallow bays. After Patos and Waldron and even Skipjack, this looks like the end of the world, wild, and dead, forgotten, unloved."

June Burn. Author, journalist, happy camper from San Juan and Whatcom counties was under contract with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to write columns of her sailing days through the San Juan archipelago in 1946.
      In the 1980s, this collection of published newspaper articles, One Hundred Days in the San Juans, was published in book format by editors on staff with the well-known owners of Longhouse Printcrafters, Friday Harbor, WA. 

❖ THE OCEAN LABS of FRIDAY HARBOR ❖

Day 83 of One Hundred Days in the San Juans.

One hundred articles were written by June Burn on contract with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1946.

      June's articles also appeared in what is now an out of print book One Hundred Days in the San Juans. Edited by San Juan Islanders, Theresa Morrow, and Nancy Prindle; Long House Printcrafters & Publishers, Friday Harbor, WA. 1983.

      The text below is verbatim for June and Farrar's Day 83 with vintage photographs from the Saltwater People collection.

The University of WA. Oceanographic Laboratories,
as it was called in August 1931,
the date of this photograph.
Click image to enlarge.
Original photo from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©
Photographer unknown.

"As you cruise into the bay of Friday Harbor from the north, just as you go around that last point, look to the right of you. Along that north shore, you will see many low buildings with tile roofs. They are the laboratories of one of the world’s few and famous oceanographic stations.
      These laboratories have had a long and honorable history. 

The laboratories at Friday Harbor had their
beginning in this "camp" photo c. 1905.
Students and teachers lived in tents.
Classes met in a rented cottage.
A 4-acre site was later donated by Andrew Newhall.
Photo from the archives of
the Saltwater People Log©

More than a generation ago, Professor Kincaid, at the University of Washington, thought it would be useful to study marine life; somehow wangled that old, ugly, yellowed-windows house on piers against the bluff south of Friday Harbor known as the Marine Station.

Early Oceanographic Laboratories, c. 1905, when
c. 15 students with Prof Kincaid and botanist T.C. Frye
camped among the fir and madronas near
Friday Harbor, San Juan County, WA.
Photo by James A. McCormick
Original photo from the archives of
the Saltwater People Log©

      To this, in delightful hardship and fun, students first came, began to study the living animals of sea and shore. It was called the ‘bug station’ and the islanders thought the students were playing at getting an education.

Long-standing Professor Trevor Kincaid
of the University of Washington.
Collecting specimens along the shore 
near Friday Harbor, San Juan Island.
Low res scan of an undated vintage photo from the archives
of the Saltwater People Historical Society©
Photographer unknown.

Professor Trevor Kincaid
Photo dated 1948.
Here he holds the old oyster shells or culch,
strung on wires to be hung in the water where
oyster larvae become attached to them. The
shells carrying the 'seed,' are scattered in oyster
beds to plant the new crop. In 1947
56,000 cases of seed were imported from Japan
and planted in Anacortes, Seattle, and Willapa Bay.
Photograph from the archives of
the Saltwater People Historical Society©

Gradually, though, the work of those students began to tell. (Witness the development of the Kincaid oyster industry itself, big and important, but promising far more for the future.) A knowledge that intangible but terribly potent good! —was increased. The bug station grew.
      Later, the UW bought 400 acres on the north shore of the bay, set up a larger plant known as the Biological Station, of which Dr. T.C. Frye became the director. There were tents in the woods and a big dining-living room to which, in its largest year, nearly 200 students, professors, and their families came from the world around.
      At the Biological Station undergraduates as well as graduate students could study the chemistry, physics, zoology, and botany and ecology of the sea. They could also study land botany and ornithology. Many thousands did. The old laboratories were in tents.
      Then, 15 years ago, I think it was, this marine station took still another form. The Rockefeller Foundation wanted to give our University some money. Had we needed for some specific new important project?
      The young chemistry professor of the old biological station thought we certainly had that need. It was time the scientists knew more about the sea, mother of all living things. Instead of a station where only plants an animals of the sea were studied, why not set up laboratories where the sea itself might also be explored? That was Dr. Tommy Thompson who was thereupon made the director of the project.
      What would it take to do this ambitious thing?
      Tommy had the answer ready. It would take new laboratories. The rest of the plant was all that was needed. Dr. Frye had already built that big main building to house library, kitchen, showers, reading-dining-living room. He had begun to set up new and more complete labs, too.

Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories
Photo date 17 Sept 1940.
Click image to enlarge.
From the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©
Photographer unknown.

      We already had the old boat, the MEDEA, to take students out over the Archipelago for new material. This whole area had already been set aside for the University’s use as far as gathering specimens.
      The main new need was for a floating laboratory — a ship in which students could actually go out to sea studying currents, temperatures, saltiness, heaviness, light, radioactivity, and many other properties of the ocean itself from California to Alaska.
      Thus it was that we got our ship The CATALYST in which, until the war, students traveled near and far, learning things about the sea that you can't call commercially useful, learning other things –– such as fish diseases and their causes, why water here or there is warmer than elsewhere and what effect it has on the fishing and what to do about it –– which are so useful that we now wonder how we ever got along without knowing them.
      Now that we had our ocean labs; the botany lab where kelp, seaweeds of all kinds are studied; the zoology lab where animals and parasites are studied; the physics lab where light penetration, heavy water, radioactivity, etc, are studied; the chemistry lab where salinity and all the complex chemistry of our mother blood is studied –– and so on through seven laboratories.
      Now we had our ship in which students went over the sea learning the most important things there are to learn, About 100 graduate students a year came from all over the world to study here. Great scientists came. Our Archipelago became world-famed.
      But everything stopped during the war. The labs were taken over by the Coast Guard. The ship was sold. That fine ship so delicately and fully outfitted for scientific exploration was sold! It seemed incredible that one of the most significant units of the University should be thus casually disposed of.
      Down on the campus, too, the parent Ocean Lab, dedicated by Milliken in 1931, was turned over to the Navy –– or maybe it was just taken by the Navy––for its work. Nobody minded at the time.
      But now that the war is over, people are saying again that the ocean work should get underway. We must get a new and better ship. The labs must start to work again.
      Dr. Thompson, on McConnell this summer instead of at the laboratories, reassures us. Of course, he says, they will get underway again. It takes a little time. 
      Come next summer, it won't be archaeologists borrowing part of the plant to live in while they dig. It will be chemists again and physicists, zoologists, pathologists, bacteriologists, botanists, ecologists with their seven laboratories, their two ships––one to stay in inland waters and the other to roam further afield––and their hundred young students delving into ocean lore, digging for the most important knowledge in the world! See you tomorrow. June."
Another Saltwater People post with founding information can be seen HERE

❖ TWO MAP MAKERS ❖ 1946 with author/historian June Burn

Day 78
Shaw Island
San Juan Archipelago, WA.

Mapmaker Helene Graham (1881-1970)
A Wellesley College graduate
who moved to Reefnet Bay,
Shaw Island, in 1941, 
the date of this photograph.
Many years later, after at least one
major renovation, the pioneer home
 was moved along the narrow road &
 across the cow pasture to
Our Lady of the Rock Monastery.

Helene's first map
 was a sculpted version
of San Juan Archipelago,
as seen here photographed by
June Burn for her article, Day 78
of One Hundred Days in the San Juans
for the Seattle-P-I, published 1946.

Mildred Winter and I drive down a good graveled road back to the south shore of Shaw Island to visit the Grahams, to see her map. It is like the deep faraway countryside in here, no water visible anywhere, the little schoolhouse, where only two children go to school this year, standing all by itself in the woods.
       Some farms are enclosed by extra high fences against deer––a pest on this island, too.

      In no time at all, we swing down to Squaw Bay and stop in front of a yard so trim and tidy you would know it belonged to a civil engineer. Mr. Erret Graham is a retired railroad engineer from Indiana.
      You can tell how he loves this place, every driftwood stick, every blade of grass. His woodshed is stacked with beach-combed sticks and more of them make a precise pile on the front porch. His workroom is filled with maps of the islands, detailed property maps a-making under his hand now, for he still surveys land [for San Juan County.] 
      From Mr. Graham's notes copied from the government survey of 1874, I learn that there were twelve families on Shaw at the time ( who were home at the time.) Oliver O' Hara was one of them. This Squaw Bay used to be called O'Hara Cove.
      Julien Laurence is mentioned as living on Blind Bay near where the Griswolds now live, Mr. Priceman near the present store on Blind Bay, Capt. C. C. Reed near where Dan Huff lives now. Who were the other settlers?
      Mrs. Helene Graham's map is here. This is what I came to see. Built up with contour sections of paper, thickened with a kind of rubbery plaster, the islands lie there as fat and sassy as if the tides washed there twice a day, too.
      Elevations are magnified four times to give them the look they have in life.
      Such gifted people on this small island. Busy creating beautiful things, their own orchardy place one of them. Old man O' Hara, your place has fallen into good hands.
      Mildred and I set out again, drive around another road back to the Biendls [John and Ruth.] Trees almost meet overhead.
      Thus in two days and two nights, we have been clean around Shaw Island's 7.7 sq. miles.
      The 1874 government survey notes say that "the island contains sufficient good land for small farms but the larger portion is only good for sheep pastures." But McLellan, who gave it more study says it is the most heavily wooded of all the San Juan Islands.
      Shaw was named by the Wilkes Expedition in 1841 for a naval captain, John D. Shaw. Thirty families live here now--about 75 people in all. "People are going and coming so fast, it is hard to keep up with them," according to Mabel Crawford.
      The first Euro-American child was Emily Shaw Hudson (1886-1965) but she isn't an old woman by any means.
      The third and fourth and sometimes fifth generations of families which settled and left property and progeny are here now, recorded pioneers for researchers a hundred years hence!
      Goodbye, kind Mildred, Mrs. Ruth Biendl, and your beautiful farm. Goodbye, Shaw Island and all your friendly community. I climb and slide and almost don't get down this high bluff in a new place to find Farrar and the boat at the foot. It is lunchtime, but there's a breeze going our way. We'll sail and nibble as we sail--we're always eating!
      As we edge out from shore we look back down Blind Bay at the settlement built around that curve.
      "Now, we're leaving Shaw Island." I say and of course, Farrar says, "Oh, pshaw." (He can't help it.)
      See you tomorrow. June

Above words from Day 78 of 100 Days in the San Juans written by June Burn, for a series on contract with the Seattle P-I newspaper, 1946.

1946, May: Helene's well-known husband, Mr. Errett Graham, into his second career as an engineer, first began stamping his SJC survey papers this year with his new official seal, Prof. Eng #2081. For more local knowledge on the highly regarded, Old Town-canoeing-surveyor of San Juan County please see another Saltwater People post HERE

Shaw Island map (c. 18" x 24") drawn & 
hand-colored by the designer,
 Helene Graham, as a welcome gift for
new residents and friends throughout the
Archipelago.
The inscribed names are gone from
the scene but at least nine families
 have descendants still part of Island life,
one-half century later.
Click image to enlarge.
Map from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

      Circa one decade after the publication of this article by June Burn, Mrs. Graham centered her artistic talents on paper maps to document the property owners living on Shaw Island, as seen in the above image. 

      In 1959, Erret wrote in his diary that Helene had an original hand-drawn copy, done to a scale of 1' = 1200', prepared to mail to the Royal Blue Print Co in Seattle. The first print run was only ten copies but over the next several years she updated the landowners and hand-colored scores of maps to share as welcome gifts to new islanders and many friends throughout the county. There are still versions gracing the walls of island homes. 

      Helena taught mapmaking to the local Camp Fire Girls under the leadership of Gwen Yansen. She also lent a hand to Claire Tift and Earl Hoffman, sons of pioneers, when they were compiling the descriptive "Shaw Island of 1900 Map" sometimes on view in the Shaw Island Historical Museum.

      The fine contour map sculpted by Helene Graham (1881-1970) was donated to the Shaw Island Historical Museum in the 1990s by her scientist son, Ernest. Graham, also of Shaw Island. One of the property owners' hand-colored paper maps has also been archived.

❖ 83483 ❖ Mother Hen of the Islands in 1946 ❖ Written by June Burn

San Juan Island, 1946.

United States Coast Guard 83483
Standing by in Friday Harbor,
the county seat of San Juan County.
Click to enlarge.
Original photo by Webber from the archives of SPHS©

"The Friday Harbor waterfront would look snaggle-toothed without a long blue-gray ship that lies along one of its docks year in, year out.
     The San Juan Islands would wander around lost in the wet grass, like young turkeys after a rain, if it wasn't for that same boat.
     Coast Guard boat, 83483, is the very mother of the San Juans. She's our ambulance: when you are sick, call the Coast Guard and they will rush you to a doctor. She's our rescuer: when you get stuck on an uncharted reef, don't worry; get in your dinghy, row for shore and telephone the Coast Guard, though chances are someone on shore has seen you and done it already.
     The Coast Guard will take the county nurse around to the islands, or the county superintendent of schools, or any government official who needs to get somewhere fast. They patrol the islands for lost boats, patrol the international regatta races, answer calls from the lighthouses, occasionally hunt somebody on vacation who is wanted quickly back home.
     One day Farrar and I were standing on the dock above the float where we had our boat, looking around at this amazing, busy scene of the Friday Harbor waterfront. (The water was just as still, Mount Baker was still and white, the boats tiptoed in and out of the harbor.)
     A nice looking fellow in faded, spotless jeans came up to us and asked if we'd like to come aboard the Coast Guard ship lying off that dock.
     We would! All week we had wanted to, hadn't got up the nerve to ask.
     The tide was low. We climbed down the sturdy ladder onto that lean, spacious deck, met the crew of three and went below for coffee.
     Charlie Novak of Nebraska, 20 years in the CG, is the skipper. Roy Rosensier, also of Nebraska, is seaman first class and Gene Carrigan of Missouri is the machinist mate. These three keep a boat normally meant for a nine-man crew and they keep it in apple pie order, too.
     Inside the pilot house we are allowed to look through the eyepiece into the radar machine, which takes a miraculous moving picture of whatever is around. 
     Day or night, in fog or sunshine, this contraption can find a lost boat or show the way through the islands. Radar beats a cat for seeing in the dark.
     Below deck, two big 1,200 HP engines start with a push on a button, shove the big boat along at racing speed. This tall blond machinist mate loves these horses.
     How lovingly he brushes and curries them till their coats shine! How neat his stable where the tools are all in their places––no curry combs, but monkey wrenches and pliers.
     Below deck, forward, we see the galley with its electric range and refrigerator––the ship generates its own electricity. The captain's quarters are behind this, the crew's quarters still farther forward, all clean as pins. They can sleep 14.
     The first two numbers of a CG boat tell its length; the next three, its class number. This ship is 83 feet long and is the 483rd in that size. This ship is copper sheathed, fast, utile, powerful and handsome.
     We sit in the galley having coffee. The skipper gets down his report for this month to show what kind of calls they go out on.
     The boat took a land office inspector from Friday Harbor to Waldron to see some land a man had built on without knowing that it belonged to the government. (It came out all right. I guessed it was young Ethan Allen from the description of the location. He had written the land office, telling what he had done; they appraised the land, gave him a chance to pay for it and that was that.)
     Governor Wallgren came up, was taken around on 83483.
     They searched for a missing plane. Found it on Waldron Island with a missing propeller. Transported a bomb disposal officer to Lopez Island––found it was nothing.
     Searched for the Malibu Steelhead.
     Looking after smaller boats seems to be the main job of the Coast Guard. Fishermen are pretty good, the boys say. They take care of themselves. Yachtsmen who go in herds are okay, too. But when they go singly they're forever getting into trouble. And hunting for lost boats in all the nooks and crannies of these islands is nobody's idea of a picnic.
     The Friday Harbor CG boat serves all the islands from Smith Island north, from Bellingham west––the whole archipelago. But when it isn't out on some call, the big gray ship lies here against the dock reserved for it.
      The tide is not so low as we leave. The ship has climbed up part of the ladder for us. As we step out onto the dock we turn to look again at the slender ship that is the guardian angel of the islands."
June Burn. Day 91. One Hundred Days In the San Juans. The Seattle-Times. 1946.

❖ "DECATUR ISLAND, AN OLD FRIEND OF MINE... "

Day 39 from One Hundred Days in the San Juans by author, June Burn.
Written on contract for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1946.

"Lopez Sound. Our callers this morning were the Balsleys from Decatur Island, newcomers from Seattle. They had invited us to their beach then had to go off on the ferry today, we were afraid we'd pass them by––as we meant to do. We're sort of getting ahead of ourselves in material and some of the islands will have to wait till next summer to be set down in "story and song."
      But not the Balsleys of Decatur, anyway. Here they are to tell their own story––now that they have the very prettiest place in the islands! You just ought to see it. And if you have the map I told you to get, you will see that they have what looks like a perfect harbor for the summertime. It is that one on the west side facing north inside the peninsula that makes a high protecting bluff around it. We can see their white beach from here.
      The Balsleys have a little resort just in bud. They call it San Elmo for the patron saint of sailors. Their bay is 12 feet deep with a fine bottom for anchorage. They have their own garden and chickens and a cow. 'And I'm just about the best cook you ever saw,' little Mrs. Balsleys says, tempting us down for dinner on a night when they'll be there.
      Decatur Island is an old friend of mine. 

For early days of the Decatur Island Howells, Stewarts
and friends, Mary's award winning history book is in
book stores now. Catch one while you can.

I used to go there to visit the Howells, now of Bellingham, Mrs. Stewart, a Howell, still lives there. William Viereck of Orcas and Bill Reed, the shipbuilder, used to live on Decatur. Davidsons, Wohls, Hansons, live there now. 'They're all fine neighbors,' the new Balsleys say. 'They treat us like old-timers, too now.'
      Decatur is the island that lies below Blakely, hemming in the waters between them and Lopez, to make Lopez Sound. It is nearly as large as Waldron with about 3,000 acres, covering three and a half square miles. It was named by the Wilkes expedition for Stephen Decatur.
      The beaches on the island are practically endless. Long curving, bright beaches that lie at the foot of bluffs, run along the low farmland and swing round the heads of all the bays. Decatur is a lovely island! But it has only one child of school age living there now. The Balsleys and the Stewarts will each take in welfare children to board next winter so as to have a school for that child.
      It is another bright, hot day as we leave Spencer Spit. Just as we set sail for the south, the north wind that has blown all week comes to a sudden stop, swings around to the southwest in fact. We take to the oars. It's hot. We take off our shoes. It's hotter. We get into shorts. It's burning us up. We get back into shoes and all our clothes. The sky is as clear as the water is smooth as the air is still as the islands are silent. The dome of Baker shows across a dip in the fat back of Cypress.
      Slowly Blakely goes astern. Decatur comes abreast and slowly retreats. Little Trump's rocky bumps come nearer and all the time Lopez walks along toward the north on the other side of us.
      It is noon. We'll go ashore on Trump Island and have lunch on that little six foot beach between two rocky bluffs. We have turnip, beet and kohlrabi tops with cheese omelet, potatoes and lettuce. Nuts, crackers, jam, coffee. Nor bird appetites, ours!
      As we leave this miniature bay we see a big crab on the bottom and another. Farrar ties a rag and a lead to a string, lets them down gently in front of the crabs. They reach out their two big front claws, grasp the rag, hang on and are gently lifted over our gunwale into the boat for our supper. Farrar says they must like to chew the rag. Then we catch a rock cod to make up the quantity and row off for Center Island where Mr. Schaldach lives in a big log house overlooking the East and Mt. Baker.
Fararr says if he could live like this all the time, he wouldn't mind dying. You only mind dying when you feel you haven't lived, he says.
      There is a fine madrona grove on Center Island, the stems shining in the going-down sunshine. The trees rise clean out of the ground, no underwood on this side of the island––we go around to the Schaldach's.
     And they are not at home.
      Heigh-ho, off we go, row, row, row, row! On around the wide bay of Decatur. We'll go to International Boy's Camp tonight, then. We'd better not pass it up or we'll be kidnapped again.
      We pass slender little Ram Island that used to belong to Dr. Binyon, and the other little one beside it. He called them Ram and Rum. The sun is fairly bursting its sides shining as we cross Lopez Pass for the headland where the boys' camp is located.
      "If it was like this all the time, you couldn't drag me away from this country," Farrar says, thinking about the times we have wasted somewhere else.
      We round the point into the badly misnamed Mud Bay and come upon white teepees. We're at International Boys' Camp before we know it. A fleet of rowboats and little sailing boats, a flock of little girls and boys in swimming. Why this is a girls' camp, too, and we later learn they are mainly brothers and sisters.
      The camp has lately moved from San Juan Island. Stacks of lumber, timbers, an old buggy, ladders and nameless other things still lie on the spit at the head of the beach. And the big lodge itself is still unfinished. But it is very handsome and unusual. Farrar takes a picture of it before we've said hello to anybody.
      Yonder comes Mr. Henderson. See you tomorrow. June."


        
      

❖ LIGHTHOUSE LADS ❖ 1946 with June Burn

PATOS ISLAND LIGHTSTATION
San Juan Archipelago, WA.
Photo by Corbett, undated.
Original from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©
Click image to enlarge.

Day Thirteen of 100 Days in the San Juans 

June Burn. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer July 1946.

Patos Island.

Hazy sun at 9 o'clock on a calm Tuesday morning. I'm sitting alone in the San Juanderer while Farrar goes ashore on Patos to take a picture of the lighthouse and the boys we met there last night.
      On Patos, we found the sweetest graveled beach and sheltered cove and sleeping plateau we've ever had in all our camping years. The beach fell away sharply so that the boat hadn't such an easy chance to go aground as it had on Skipjack last Friday night. Above the beach on a jutting point that overlooked Orcas and Sucia and Waldron we spread the tarp and sleeping bags in deep, soft grass. It rained during the night, pat-pat-pat, right close above our heads on the canvas––a sweet sound when you know that everything is well covered against it.
      As soon as we had anchored, we found the trail up from the beach, around the point to the lighthouse. The San Juanderer looked like a big glaucous-winged gull sitting on the rich green water of Active Cove. The ubiquitous russet-back thrush kept whistling his evening song from the fir and madrona woods behind the shore.
      Scrub salal forms most of the undergrowth of the forest here, with clumps of ocean spray every now and then to light the forest.
      How open and grassy Alden Point where the lighthouse stands! There are two dwellings, several smaller structures, water tanks, the lighthouse at the very end of the point overlooking Boundary Pass, Canadian waters and islands, and facing Saturna Light.
      Instead of the two families we expected to find, four young boys are stationed here. the CO is a 26-year-old Indian boy, William E. Moody, from Tulsa, OK; the youngest, Paul W. Haltkamp, 20, from Stockport, IA; Joseph J. Mattero, from San Francisco. Haltkamp says he has been longest––too long––at this lonely base. He has been here three months.
      The CG cutter comes once a week from Seattle bringing supplies. They are allowed 99 cents per man per day for food but from the look of this list that they sent in last week, I'd say they are out of pocket themselves now and then. Here it is: 2 lbs of cocoa, 25 lbs of sugar, 5 lbs brown sugar, 2 jars berry jam, 7 loaves white bread, 4 lbs butter, 5 gallons fresh milk, 6 dozen eggs, 5 lbs cheese, 10 lbs ice cream mix, 4 lbs hotcake flour, half a case each of peaches, pineapple, peas, canned milk, 10 lbs apples, 5 lbs oranges, 3 lbs grapefruit, 3 heads lettuce, 3 lbs carrots, 5 lbs tomatoes, 5 lbs onions, one cured ham, 5 lbs bacon, 6 lbs round steak, 5 lbs beef roast, 5 lbs hamburger. 
      Each boy cooks for himself, eats when he chooses, for they keep a 24-hour shift at the light, each boy serving six hours on and 12 off. 
      Down at the lighthouse there is a very large––oh, 6-ft high, 8-ft wide, say––double panel of dials, clocks, levers, lights and other mysterious gadgets. But the main business seems to be transacted over the radio telephone. We heard them tune in to that and the results were as funny and unintelligible as the tobacco auctioneer's jargon.
      At the end of the complicated rigmarole we learn that our old friend; Commander Zeusler, now Rear Admiral Zeusler, coast guard commander, 13th Naval District, is on terminal leave and Capt. A.M. Martinson is taking his place for peacetime duty in these waters.
      We thought how strange to get the news of Admiral Zeusler's retirement like this! (Professor Thompson, did you know it? You went to Alaska on what was then Commander Zeusler's ship and here he is an admiral and on terminal leave, that must mean retirement.) Well, well, visit far-away lighthouses and keep up with your neighbors.
See you tomorrow. June.
A post on the author Helene Glidden and the book of her childhood on Patos Island can be seen here.