still lazy after all these years

Decades after a boyhood of easygoing afternoons in Washington State's San Juan Islands, Jesse Ashlock returns with his own children to rediscover this bucolic corner of America where time almost seems to stand still

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On a still summer morning on Washington State's Orcas Island, I rented a pair of tandem kayaks from a sleepy-eyed, flaxen-haired attendant barely out of her teens, who quickly returned to painting watercolors in the tall grass beside the weather-beaten sales kiosk. A gentle wind went shhh through tall hemlocks as my family paddled, two by two, to a rocky islet at the center of Mountain Lake, on the flank of Mount Constitution. There we clambered ashore, and the kids, Agnes and Rex, immediately began darting among the lodgepole pines, collecting sticks and pine cones to build fairy houses. Aside from the faint smell of a forest fire burning in the Cascades and a smudge of smoke on the eastern sky, it could have been a scene from my own childhood.

When I was eight years old, my mother moved my three younger brothers and me to Anacortes, a small island town about two hours north of Seattle. It is the gateway to the San Juan Islands, an archipelago within the Puget Sound and the broader Salish Sea, which divides Washington State from Canada. As an underemployed single mom to four young boys, she needed inexpensive outlets for our considerable energy. Taking our bikes onto the ferry and spending the day in the San Juans was an ideal solution.

Certain activities here-huddling inside beach forts assembled out of bleached driftwood, waving at cars while cycling along the agricultural back roads of Lopez Island, watching from the second deck for the underwater "burp" of the ferry as it departs a portare woven into the helices of my DNA. But I hadn't been in more than two decades. So I booked a trip, to show the islands to my kids, to reconnect with them as an adult, and perhaps to have a few experiences that were out of reach for me as a child. As an added bonus, my mom came along too.