Up in the San Juans, 1966

Having just turned 21, I spent the summer of 1966 with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Bellevue, Washington, just across Lake Washington from Seattle. Over the Independence Day weekend, we took the family's cabin cruiser, Molly Brown, on a voyage in the San Juan Islands just below the Canadian border in Puget Sound. Since it was the Pacific Northwest, it rained just about all the time, and memory tells me we didn't see blue sky or sun the entire four-day weekend. But, so what? Once you're wet, you can't get any wetter, right? One of our ports of call was a place called Boat Harbor, a place I haven't been able to locate anywhere in cyberspace today -- so maybe, like Brigadoon, it only appears once every so many years. As I recall, Boat Harbor was pretty much the exclusive domain of the Kendall family in those days, and the Kendalls, like Boat Harbor, seemed pretty elusive and ... well, ominous in absentia. The Kendalls did, however, make their attitude toward visitors pretty plain... In case there's any doubt in your mind about what a "haywire private dock" looks like, this image should give you an idea... Across the harbor, seemingly careened on the beach for caulking, but on closer examination permanently affixed to the real estate, was a vessel which may or may not ever have gone to sea, but which now apparently swashbuckled from a fixed position... All of this happened so long ago, I wouldn't even try to chronicle it were it not for the photographic evidence. Even though I fell in love with the Pacific Northwest that summer, I've only been back once -- for a short visit in May 2008 with my cousin and his wife in Gig Harbor, near Tacoma. There's still nothing that stirs my love for the sea quite as much as the clear, cold, wildly tidal waters of the North (anywhere in the world, but particularly here), teeming with creatures and peopled by quirky characters like the Kendalls (if they ever existed).