The Sisterhood of Islands

Can a voyage to a constellation of islands thousands of miles away make you feel closer to home?

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. Southeast Alaska is 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. The names alone are enough to spark wanderlust — the Alexander Archipelago, Shaman Island, Battleship, and Bird. There are the huge “ABC islands” —Admiralty, Baranoff, and Chichagof — and smaller pinpoints of land with barely a handful of pointy pines and skiff-sized cobble beaches. Southeast Alaska is, it seems, as much water as land, a land of islands.

Somewhere among those islands, we are aboard the Edisto, a C-Dory belonging to our daughter and her partner, a kind of sister ship to the Little Dipper. In the waters of the perfectly-named Friendship Channel, we are sight-seeing among the blue-gray peaks wreathed in ribbons of fog …

We are pulling crab pots adorned with an array of sea life - sunflower sea stars and urchins and brittle stars — everything, it seems, but king crab.

We are drifting with the engines off laughing out loud at the grumbling stomach bellows and belches of Stellar sea lions, a barrel-full-of-rocks-rolling-downhill kind of sound as a pod of the huge creatures lounge like furred couches on the seaside rocks.

And we are watching the dorsal fins of a pod of Orcas slice the sunlit waters of the channel.

We are surrounded by life and beauty and islands. The Edisto weaves in and out, stringing small islands like blue-green beads on the white thread of its wake. There are lighthouses and foghorns, the cry of gulls and the ever-present shushing of the waves. In quiet moments, between the blows of the Orcas and the belching of the sea lions, it can almost feel like home, almost.

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. As we pass, I try to imagine dedicating my life to just one of these islands, one speck of land in the constellation of islands that is Southeast Alaska, the way my friend Richard Nelson did in The Island Within, a book I carry with me on the Little Dipper.

But I can’t quite do it. For all of the kinship and connection here, there is an unbridgeable distance as well. 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. But here the stories are mostly silent to me, an outsider without the local knowledge that would bring them to life. I will never know these islands like I know the Apostles. There are too many islands in a world sequined with islands to come to know them all - each one worthy of a lifetime of attention and care. And I recall something Nels wrote in his book: “[T]he particular place I’d chosen was less important than the fact that I’d chosen a place and focused my life around it.”

I’ve chosen the Apostles. As beautiful as Southeast Alaska is, with its glaciers and whale tails and mountaintops, I must admit that as the Edisto throttles up to head for the boat landing, at least a part of me is dreaming of the Little Dipper, its bow pointing up the West Channel, its own engine coming to life and setting off to sink even more deeply into the chosen islands of home.

— Jeff Rennicke

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