A Tourist in Disguise, part 2

Finding a place to live in the islands....

Jane Fox’s series continues (here’s part 1 in case you missed it):

A Tourist in Disguise II.

To me, the situation seemed simple. I could not begin my life as a local of the San Juan islands without a place to live. And a place to live was exactly what I had almost found.
‘But it’s on the internet,’ complained my friend Chelsea.
‘No’ I said, ‘its in a barn’,
‘No, but you found the barn on the internet.’
I didn’t quite see her point.
‘I don’t quite see your point’ I said. Chelsea and I were sitting in her Boston apartment before I left for the West coast. With that cool, east coast reserve, she was trying to talk me out of it.
‘You don’t see my point?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t see the problem in surfing the internet and picking up some random advert for a barn for a rent. You don’t see the problem in traveling across the country to be picked up by some random man and taken to this barn on an island where no one knows where you are?’
There was a pause. I sensed she was unhappy with my life choices.
‘Nope’, I replied. I could tell Chelsea’s reserve was shaken to the core because she kept buttering her already buttered banana bread. Chelsea doesn’t eat butter.
‘You realise you are probably going to die’, she said.
‘Nah’, I replied,
‘He sent me a picture of his golden retriever. A barn killer wouldn’t have a golden retriever. He’d have a rockweiler. Or a ferret’.
Chelsea sighed deeply.
‘You realise there’s probably no bathroom’ she said as a final, stinging shot.

Even though poking at Chelsea’s cool was fun, it was different waiting on the Orcas ferry landing for a man who may or may not own a ferret. My friend’s words haunted me, and not just the quip about the bathroom. Although the job I was starting in four days was based out of Friday Harbour, the fact that the barn had been so cheap had given me the idea of living on Orcas and commuting. I had no idea how I would do this, but that that was the next hurdle. The first was to avoid death at the hands of the tall man now walking toward me. He was followed a giant, friendly golden retriever.

As it turned out, Chelsea needn’t have worried. Landlord turned out to be a kind, father of two who thought that renting his barn would be a chance to meet some ‘cool, interesting people’. Now, delivered by a man-i-found-on-the-internet anywhere else in the mainland outback, this comment would set my alarm bells ringing. But this Islander seemed…nice. Perhaps not normal exactly, but I was yet to learn that San Juan Islanders set their own bar for ‘normal’. In fact, he was so pleasant that I told him about my grand plan to master the art of being a local. He said nothing but eyed me.
‘Well…so far’ he began
‘I know don’t tell me, I look like a tourist.’
‘Well I was going to say tidy, but yea.’ There was a pause before he finished.
‘Living in a barn is a good start’.

And that was how I found my first piece of local identity. A tourist would live in a house. A tourist would not trust some friendly, random guy to unload their life in front of what was essentially a large wooden breadbox with no plumbing and a bare light bulb. A tourist would not think it was appropriate to shake hands over a rent comprised of both money and ‘good energy’. A tourist, moreover, would not make the commitment to a permanent change of bathroom habits:
‘You mean there’s no toilet.’ I asked, as we walked around the barn.
‘Nope’, replied landlord,
‘I generally go in the woods,’ he said, adding quickly, ‘but I mean the house is barely thirty feet away’. It was thirty feet, however, that was filled with cedar trees. At three in the morning I was certainly not going to stumble through there for relief. I sighed.
Apparently, I now lived in a barn and peed in the woods. Landlord grinned.
‘Welcome to being local’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I replied.

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The author, undercover

Jane Fox comes to the islands from Scotland. She’s working as an intern for the San Juan Preservation Trust, for whom she has made videos & shot beautiful photos for their outreach materials over the past few months.

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