Come on down to the library tonight for this event!…
Join writers Edee Kulper and John Ashenhurst as they discuss their process writing memoirs of their time in the San Juan Islands. We’ll also explore the journals of Rachel Adams, a Crane and Orcas Islander who kept a daily journal for thirty years chronicling daily life.
The Library is happily partnering with the Orcas Island Historical Museums on this program. Special thanks also to the Office of the Secretary of State through the Washington State Library and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, who are making it possible to digitize Rachel Adams’ journals.
Here’s a little background about each presenter…
Rachel Adams
In Memoriam by Karen Tongue Hammond
Although very much a New Englander—she was born in Maine, raised in New Hampshire, and had a New Englander’s dry wit—Rachel Adams grew to love the Northwest after moving to Washington state’s San Juan Islands in 1975. It was there, surrounded by woods and water, that she fully indulged her lifelong love of nature. “She actually knew one chickadee from the next on her birdfeeders,” says her friend Molly Herzog.
After graduating from University of New Hampshire at age 19, Adams served as a second lieutenant in the Women’s Medical Specialist Corps. She left the Army and then rejoined during the Korean War, and spent the next 21 years at Army posts in the United States and abroad. In 1955, she earned a master’s degree in physical therapy from the University of Southern California. She excelled in Army sports, says her niece Emily Watkins, winning the women’s All-Army tennis singles championship in 1956 and the singles and doubles championships a year later. She retired in 1969 as a lieutenant colonel and was awarded the Legion of Merit medal.
For six years after her retirement, Adams lived in a cabin in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, before joining a friend, Marilynn Anderson, on Crane Island in Washington. She arrived with Clio, a stray cat she had rescued as a kitten that would be her constant companion until the cat died at age 23. On Crane, Adams mastered ham radio, then the islands’ only means of communication, and the two women tended 7 acres of gardens and raised cows, chickens and rabbits. At one point Adams befriended an eagle that used to wait for her at the end of her favorite walking path.
Being close to the natural world always brought Adams her greatest joy. Although she majored in physical education, in 2010 she told a UNH Magazine writer, “If there had been the same job opportunities for women [in 1945] that there are today, I probably would have been a forestry major.” She was “literally, a tree hugger,” says Herzog, adding that Adams hoped to be reincarnated as a tree.
Adams’ sense of humor endeared her to her niece Watkins, who, as a teenager, traveled with her father to visit her aunt in Texas. Adams urged her Bostonian brother to try an unusual-looking pepper at the officers’ mess, and then sat back and chuckled at the look on his face when he unsuspectingly bit into a jalapeno. Years later, Adams was equally able to find humor in her own life, even as it took an unexpected turn with a diagnosis of aplastic anemia. Before she died on June 21, at 86, she was so inundated with cards and phone calls from concerned friends that she told Herzog, “I’m beginning to think I’d like to meet myself!”
Crane Island is just south of the west side of Orcas Island:
John Ashenhurst
In the 80s when we cruised through the San Juan Islands with our young family on a big green and white Washington State ferry, I wondered what it would be like to live in this beautiful place of mountains, forests, islands, and boats. And then we did.
From October 19, 2010, through October 18, 2011, I kept a daily journal of our life on Crane Island, a private island at the south end of Deer Harbor on Orcas Island and north of Shaw Island, across Wasp Passage. This is that journal, Haust(Autumn), the first of four volumes — followed by Vetur, Vor, and Sumar, (winter, spring, and summer in Old Norse).
Meet island people: odd, generous, insular, cosmopolitan, self-reliant, skeptical, devout. Follow resident otters, mink, raccoons, deer, voles, owls, ravens, eagles – all living sometimes reluctantly but creatively with us recent colonizers. See sunrises, wind-driven rain, king tides, opaque fog, starry skies, and hot tub sleet. Participate in wood cutting, daily boating and an occasional blown engine, a rock and roll choir, gardening club, food bank, men’s group, ferry culture, hiking, crabbing, IKEA kitchen remodel, community politics, farmers market, northwest gardening, publishing business development, community projects, holiday potlucks, water system, and docks management, religious congregation, garage sales and exchanges, parties, music, horse training, and the surprising richness of a small population. Experience coping, planning, cooperation, elation, joy, frustration, disappointment, success, friendship, betrayal, peace, love, the numinous, and gossip.
This is a memoir of a sort, what one person saw, reacted to, acted on, and wrote down, but it’s mostly about daily life on small, beautiful, private island, a marriage, a family, and a community.
And it’s a report of specifics, specimen days, short on generalization and advice, with hundreds of examples that can be unpacked in different ways. And finally, it’s not a travel book. It’s what you see and experience if you live on Crane Island or in Deer Harbor, or on Orcas Island, but what you can’t see passing through no matter how hard you look.
Yvonne and I loved our life on Crane; it was precious, surprising, and deeply satisfying. But it was also difficult and eventually too challenging for aging boomers — so we decamped to an easier life, RV travel, and now city life. But we’ll never forget our golden time on Crane.
Edee Kulper
In my senior year of high school, surveys were passed out to all of us. One of the questions asked where we would be in 20 years. The answers were typed up and compiled in a packet, which is in my memorabilia box. The page with my answers says,
“Edee’s most wonderful fantasy is to find an island to live on; she’d pick berries and spear fish, and he’d build their hut.”
Oh, the power of words… We moved to Orcas Island almost exactly 20 years to the day of my saying that! I couldn’t believe it when I realized it about a month after we moved here. Though when I was 18, I was imagining a tropical island. Ha!
Fortunately for my husband, he did not have to build our “hut.” But I do pick a whole heck of a lot of blackberries!
Before moving here, we visited six summers and were blown away by the natural beauty, the genuine friendliness of the community, and the peaceful magic of this place. It would’ve been seven except that at one point we asked ourselves whether we should go to Orcas Island again or have another child that summer. Flippantly silly-sounding, isn’t it? We chose the latter.
We made the leap and moved here in 2012. When we moved, I decided that since I was able to be a stay-at-home mom, I would put aside my love of photography and writing in order to be a very present, undistracted mom so that I could soak up every minute of fleeting childhood and never regret missing any of it. Then several years ago, my husband said, “Edee, you would be the perfect person to have a blog.” I would? I didn’t check my email or our answering machine enough to stay current with my own life at the time. We didn’t even have cell phones then, so a blog felt like quite a leap into social media.
My first response was, “You know, I don’t go on Facebook or Instagram much. And I don’t read other people’s blogs. If I start writing, I’m not going to be very current with what other people are doing, and I don’t know that I want to be.”
“You don’t have to be,” he said. “Just because you like to write doesn’t mean you have to keep up with what other people are doing and writing. You don’t have to write for anyone but yourself.”
Huh. “You’re right. I would love that. Even if only one person read it, I would enjoy it.”
He was right. I’ve always documented life with my camera, and writing is what I do – my life is in a tall stack of journals. I started this blog one day in 2017 when I was sick in bed and I’ve been loving it ever since. A little too much. Our island presents the most majestic backdrop for the comings and goings of our family’s daily life, which pulls me to capture each bit of magic and pass it on to you. I also feel drawn to record our island life because sadly I know that each little thing is changing as the years go by. We’ve already seen some cherished aspects slip quietly away.
For people who live here, everything I write about will be commonplace – perhaps even boring to read about. But for people who don’t live here, life on the island will look very different from life on the mainland.
