I am always interested in why people choose to live where they do. The answers range from, “It’s where my parents live,” to “It’s where I was born,” to “My grandchildren live there,” to “It’s close to an international airport.” The first question I get asked is “Why do you live on a small island in the rainy Northwest? I would think that you would live in a ski resort.”
Let me count the reasons why I prefer island living…
1. Ski resort lifts usually only run for about 100 days a year and I like the ocean.
2. Our island is almost twice the size as New York’s Manhattan. We have 4,500 people living here.
3. The ferry service is very limited and erratic at best, so we usually get in line at least an hour and a half before it leaves. It usually leaves within an hour of its scheduled departure, keeping people to a minimum.
4. We get an awful lot of rain and fog. In the nearby Olympic Peninsula, they get over 200 inches of rain a year and we get enough to rust anything left outside for more than a week.
5. We have two grocery store, no traffic lights, a half-dozen stop signs, a dozen restaurants and 32 T-shirt shops.
6. In 1996 the population on our island reached the same level that it was back in 1927.
7. There are almost no jobs available, except in the service industries and construction. Not to mention that there is very little employee housing.
8. I bought 10,000 baby oysters for a hundred dollars and raise fresh oysters in bags tied under our dock.
9. I can catch my limit of salmon when I go fishing.
10. Depending on which brochure you read, there are between 175 islands in this part of the world, or at low tide, as many as one for every day of the year.
11. I can leave the keys in my car or in my boat at the dock, along with all of my fishing tackle and never worry about anyone stealing any of it.
12. My friends can stop by and tie up at our dock, We can go out and set our crab pots, and after lunch go back out and pull up a limit of crabs for dinner.
13. Aside from running aground, there are only about 3,000 other problems that you can have while driving your boat.
14. When the orca whales swim by in front of our house, the noise of them spouting sometimes wakes me up from my afternoon nap.
15. Fuel for our boat’s motor is generally about a dollar a gallon more than it is anywhere else in America, so there are very few boats at any of the docks. Plenty of parking.
16. There is a nearby island I can row my dinghy around in about an hour. En route, I can say hello to a seal or two, watch a flock of geese fly overhead honking loudly and watch a dozen deer grazing on the island.
17. A famous man around 1900 was told by the doctors that he was going to die in six months. He got on a boat and settled here on the island and lived for 34 more years. I plan on doing the same thing.
18. I can practice my boating skills, spend more time exploring with my wife and our two dogs, cruise to Alaska in the spring, eat fresh oysters, crabs, and salmon whenever we want them and never watch the late-breaking-news on TV.
19. The islands are a long way from Hollywood, California, where I was born, and even farther from most of the ski slopes of the world where I have spent 62 winters of my life. An island is not a place that is for everyone. But it is home for, as my wife says, our two boats, two dogs, a cat, and 40 chickens, and her husband! We enjoy a comfortable house that faces south to soak up the warm winter sun which even shines occasionally!
Well, I guess those are good enough reasons to live where we do…why do you live where you do?