Every time I say to myself, Self, enough blogging about the weather; surely there’s more interesting things to report on about island life!, something new happens.
Like, EPIC RAIN AND FLOODING.
In mid-November, we were among the lucky recipients of an “atmospheric river” storm, which dumped an extraordinary amount of rain on the island. We got rather a lot of water around the property here.
Not usually a creek. 
Our driveway. 
Also driveway. 
Our back gate.
Mark had to get out there with a shovel and do some repair work on the driveway after the storm finally passed, but actually, we were lucky.
It was quite a bit worse in several other places on the island:
That first photo is from our local newspaper, and it’s from the same storm that made those little canyons in our driveway. That’s Pt. Lawrence Road, one of the major roads on the island; the collapse stranded folks in 200 homes. There’s no other way out of there, except by boat.
I scraped the second photo off Facebook; that collapse happened several weeks later, after a few days of warnings about subsidence under the pavement.
As impressive as these sinkholes are, it’s what happened afterwards that has really struck me.
Almost immediately after the Pt. Lawrence collapse, the community sprang into action. A footbridge was built, with funding from the Orcas Island Community Foundation; neighbors picked up groceries, mail, and packages in town and shuttled them across; the local taxi service recruited volunteer drivers to take people to medical and other crucial appointments. The sheriff’s department stationed a paramedic on the far side of the washout. And the county got right on rebuilding the road; a temporary one-lane bridge opened up after less than a week.
Just in time for the Laporte Road collapse! That’s a less major road, and fewer people were stranded, but the same community spirit surged into being. And that road just opened back up again as well.
It’s been less apparent during the pandemic, as we’ve mostly stayed home, heads down, working and writing; but the strong sense of community is a large part of what attracted us to the island in the first place.
In fact, the very first time that Mark visited here—he was scoping out a place to bring me for our one-year-dating anniversary—he found a nice-looking bed and breakfast on the internet and made reservations. He arrived, and was greeted with fresh-baked cookies from Innkeeper Carol—and then was immediately invited to go sailing by Innkeeper Bogdan!
Needless to say, we stayed at Carol and Bogdan’s B&B many times thereafter; they remain some of our best island friends to this day. After a few years, they asked us to run the B&B for them in the winter when they traveled. That’s when we realized we didn’t just love visiting here, we had to figure out how to live here.
The other thing we noticed when we ran the B&B was, well, the community. Friends just dropped by, like people in sitcoms do. Our citified brains didn’t quite know what to make of that—but we kinda sorta liked it.
We enjoyed everything about life in a small, slower-paced place. We ran into friends at the grocery store, in the ferry line, at the island’s one movie theater. I remember one time not long after we moved here when we went to dinner at a local restaurant and I realized there was one table of folks we didn’t know. The whole rest of the place: filled with friends.
Crazy. Wonderful.
(We have also, I will admit, enjoyed living in a more remote house hidden in the woods, rather than a B&B right on a main road; we do like our privacy, and it’s hard to get work and writing done when folks drop in all day.)
So much of this community has, well, gone quieter since the pandemic started. No movies, no live theatre, no gym; masks and social distancing at the grocery store; we haven’t dined indoors at a restaurant since March of 2020. We stay in our cars on the rare occasions when we do take a ferry.
So I am really, really encouraged to see that the island spirit is still strong. Just…laying low. And springing to life when it’s called for.
Maybe someday I’ll stop blogging about the weather. It has continued to rain quite a bit, though there haven’t been any more road collapses in the last couple of days.
Instead, we’re starting to get the occasional snowflake symbol in the weather forecasts…so far, no actual snow, but…brace yourself, I fear there’ll be a snow post here before too long!
