A Tourist in Disguise III ( the third installment)

Every so often, I like to share good writing from around the island…here’s a series of essays from San Juan Preservation Trust’s photography intern Jane Fox, who has lived in the islands this summer. Here’s round three (did you see Part One & Part Two?):

A Tourist in Disguise III

America is unapologetically dependant on the car. This has its logic. With a quantity of distance that is unfathomable to the British, one has to ask, how else is a person supposed to get around? I am not sure what I had thought I was going to do without a car.

Well, that’s not quite true. I believe the full extent of my thought process was, ‘it’s an Island; I’ll get a bike. Or a llama’. My thoughts on transport ended there. It was only when landlord was driving me the ten, very long, very hilly miles from the Orcas ferry to the barn that I realised my naivety. Llamas just aren’t that fast. Now I had my barn and my revaluated opinions on midnight toilet etiquette, it was time for something far more daunting. Wheels.

It’s not that I hate cars; I’m just deeply uninterested in the subject. Whatever has four wheels and goes without pushing is fine for me. As a few days past and my first assignments came closer I began to panic. I couldn’t afford to buy any of the colourful vehicles advertised online. I didn’t know enough to inquire after the various ‘for sale’ signs I saw on truck windows. All in all, buying a car was confusing and too much responsibility.

It was landlord’s bookkeeper who introduced me to the magic word of local transport. ‘The Beater’.

‘the what?’ I said, depressed after a fruitless hour trawling the local paper for llama saddles.

‘You know, a beater, just a crappy truck that you don’t take off the islands. You drive my truck, people will definitely mistake you for a local’. And with that, days of stress dissolved in the simple solution.

That was, until I met the truck. Coming from the land of the M.O.T had preconditioned me with a prissiness that I was surprised at. Nobody likes to sound like a princess, but this truck was pushing the limits.

‘So the windows don’t actually close’.

‘Nope’ said the bookkeeper, as she pushed me into her pride and joy; a rusty, custard coloured Toyota pick up.

‘What about the rain getting in?’ I said plaintively.

‘What about it?’ she answered.

‘And what’s this thing?’

That’s the hand break, doofus.’

‘So let me get this straight, the doors don’t open properly, the windows don’t shut, the hand break is a glorified piece of liquorice, and it may or may not turn right?’

Of course I said all this in my head. Outwardly I simply smiled in the way one does when one is trying not to imagine a Toyota induced death. The bookkeeper was saving my transport bacon and besides, I told myself, as I stalled my way out of her drive, I liked the floral seat covers.

My first afternoon of driving was indeed filled with fear, stalling and yet more stalling. However, what I realise now is that my ‘beater’ was one of the most valuable pieces of island identity I could get. It was the beater that raised my awareness of each island’s individual culture. In Europe, the answer to a superficial ‘fitting in’ had been the frown and certain pieces of clothing. It was nothing as simple here.

Amongst these islands there were as many different types of ‘local’ as there was microclimates. Now, with the freedom of driving, I could begin to notice inter-island differences, all through variations on the vehicle. The cars on Shaw were sensible, but saved from being staid by the strictly adhered to habit of waving. Waving, I noticed, was also practised on Lopez, but from more ‘beater’-like trucks. These were vehicles that still pulled their weight on farms.

Orcas (although the island most likely to host a VW camper van with flowers and messages of peace on it) was not a waving island. Neither was San Juan, with its faster pace and its flocks of Subarus. Most beater-y of all the beaters though, were those I saw on Waldron. As far as I could tell, waving was not practised on that island, but then, there wasn’t a lot of traffic to judge by.

The beater took me through my first lessons on a more laid-back island attitude. Locals stay in their trucks on the ferry, reading or napping. They don’t drive like a maniac to get into the ferry line two hours before. If they do choose the passenger deck, they don’t jump up (dropping Nalgenes and sunglasses) to race down to the car deck the minute the landing comes in sight. With the beater, I began to unwind, and understand the concept of ‘island time’.

So I was feeling pretty good a couple of weeks into my job.  The idea of ‘local’ had become more complicated and more inaccessible. But with the beater, I felt at least that I was seeing things from an island perspective. Even if I still mixed up where I was supposed to wave and where I wasn’t.

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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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