A Tourist in Disguise IV ( the last installment)

San Juan Preservation Trust’s photography intern Jane Fox wraps up her series of essays about living here this past summer. Here’s round four (did you see Part One & Part Two, as well as Part Four):

A Tourist in Disguise IV.

Of course, the funny part was that it had taken me two days to notice it. And when I finally did (somewhere between Friday Harbour and San Juan Valley), I nearly drove off the road. After all, it’s not every day that a two-foot long zucchini turns up on your passenger seat. I pulled over and had a closer look. Yes. It was exactly what I had thought it was. I hadn’t imagined it, a giant vegetable poking out from under a pile of clothes and overdue library books. You know you’re getting used to a place when the massive security breach it took to place a vegetable in the cab of your car makes you feel not worried or angry, but wonderfully welcome.

It had been that feeling of welcome or inclusiveness that had been missing from my life several weeks before. So far I had enjoyed my life as a tourist trying to hide. I had a fun job, a great office, an interesting (if somewhat spidery) place to live, and a growing sense of the diverse beauty of the San Juans.  There was just something bugging me. It didn’t take shape until one Friday night when I wanted ice cream and so got on my bike and headed to the store.

I realised I hadn’t been to the store on a Friday night before, because if I had, I would have known that it’s a bad idea. It was hopping. Or whatever the Island equivalent of that is. Clearly defined groups of people were grabbing for their evening and weekend supplies. Everyone knew each other and shouted greetings and plans over the aisles. And there was I, making my quiet B-line for the ice cream. At the check out the young man, obviously assuming that since I was under one hundred and three, I would be going out, said

‘So, you got a plan for tonight?’. It was just innocent chat. Pleasant. Polite. But it drove at the heart of what was bugging me.

‘Baby’ I said, hold up the ice cream carton,

‘Youre lookin’ at it’. With that I left, with a clear sense of my problem: I needed friends.

It would seem that I had been doing everything I could to observe the local behaviour; using Marketplace instead of Kings, learning the names of the Ferry workers and chatting with them, avoiding certain restaurants, swearing at tourists as they stopped in the middle of the road to take a photo of another deer.

Yet I hadn’t put any thought into actually joining the community. But how do you go about doing this? Each island was full of gregarious people, but I was hardly going to hang a sign around my neck that said ‘In need of friends’. Although, a couple more ice cream-Friday nights and I might have considered it. There was nothing in my ‘walk like a local’ note book, no answer as to how and get actual locals to talk to a fraudulent one. The only solution came from the island communities themselves.

Each island, no matter the manner and air of the place, had a sense of involvement with their surroundings. You only have to look at the success of the breakneck fundraising for Turtleback Mountain to understand how much ‘involvement’ is a part of the San Juans.  Although it went against every tightly wound, dour impulse in my Scottish soul, I gave it a try. I got involved. The event that took the brunt of my proactive burst was the Eastound solstice parade. And my sources told me that the organiser was making costumes that next Saturday.

That next Saturday. Trying hard not to look desperate, I pulled up to the garden where the parade party was going on, stepped out of my truck and went over to introduce myself. Under the midsummer sun the mad, creative rabble pulled parade costumes out, and pulled me into conversation. It was by far the best bit of localisation I had been through, and the one that took the longest to achieve. I could drive a crummy truck and sigh at the tourists, but I didn’t feel like a local until I met the people who defined the term.

From there on in my community adopted me. I now knew my neighbours and had Friday night plans. I now learned local gossip, inter-island snobberies and community issues. I now heard local stories, like the one involving the bountiful zucchini harvests and what happens to the spare zucchini…

So it was that one tourist in disguise came to be sitting in a beater truck thinking that there was nothing more welcoming than a criminal act. My attitudes towards living and toilet situations, time keeping and vehicle quality had all adjusted with life on the San Juans.

It seemed only right that I was now perfectly happy to have someone break into my truck to leave me a spare zucchini. I was finally at home and included. Even if I didn’t feel entirely local, who would leave a two foot long vegetable in the car of a mere tourist?

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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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