A Sisterhood of Islands

An Alaskan postcard

Some things seem very familiar here: we are adrift among wild islands ringed with sharp rocks and fringed with forests, there are bear tracks on the beach, and we are on a C-Dory. But, this time it is not the Little Dipper. These are not the Apostle Islands, and we are not on Lake Superior. As if to make that point perfectly clear, something is just now rising off our starboard side and moving quickly towards the boat: the immense dorsal fin of a male Orca.

With the Little Dipper on the hard for the winter, Jill and I have come north to the islands of the Inside Passage near Juneau, Alaska, a dot-dash land and seascape spangled with over 1,100 islands, some the size of small states, others as tiny as the dot on an exclamation point. There is a sense of kinship among all islands, a kind of sisterhood. However large or small an island may be, it is a definable piece of the planet, a little earth adrift in the sky of sea. An island seems more knowable, somehow, than the immensity of the mainland, as it would not be unreasonable, within the span of even a single human lifetime, to come to grasp at least some of an island’s meaning and truth, like memorizing a single fist-sized rock held lightly in the palm your hand.

There are stories here of shipwrecks such as the tragic 1918 wreck of the Princess Sophia that took 364 lives. There are stories of hermits like Jim Huscroft of Lituya Bay who was said to make 14 different kinds of pies for himself for Christmas dinner. There are tales of lighthouses and bear encounters, just like in the Apostles

As we weave in and out of the islands, I try to imagine dedicating my life to just one of these islands as I have in the Apostles, one speck of land in the constellation of islands, a tiny piece of the earth. It is not the Apostles, but it is like visiting their sisters.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)

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