Backbone > Panet Waves

Greetings from Earth Island
By Eric Francis . Illustration by Emil Alzamora

Three years ago, after leaving the Hudson Valley and wandering the planet for a few years, I moved to an island. It's called Vashon Island, in the Pacific Northwest. If you want to understand Vashon, imagine drawing a line around the town of Rosendale, about four miles wide and 15 miles long. Dig a huge mote, two miles across and 600 feet deep, flatten out the hills, add rain (most years), add a big supermarket, and subtract the Thruway. Add the “mellow northwest vibe” and the occasional earthquake and poof, you've got Vashon.

There is no bridge to the mainland. Our island is said to be a “15-minute ferry ride from Seattle.” This is an exaggeration. The ride is 15 minutes (which is the best part, big boats are cool), but it leads you to West Seattle, a different city. Then it takes another 20 minutes to unload and load the boat most times of day, plus waiting in ferry lines, plus driving to and from the ferry on either side of your destination. That can be anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes, depending on where your point A and point B happen to be. One does not conveniently hop over to the city; it’s not like getting on the F train or the Bay Bridge.
Despite the transportation challenges, people are very attached to living here. Our setting is beyond beautiful, surrounded by Puget Sound no matter where you look. Views of Mt. Rainier from the east side of the island are rather astonishing, reminding me of scenes from the Elf worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien’s early writing. The place is very seductive, all the more so because nothing much happens here. When on-island, one cannot go to the mall, get stuck in a traffic jam (excluding the ferry line), or go to McDonald’s. If you want fast food, there’s Tatanka, the excellent bison taco joint, or Zoomies, which used to be a pathetic Dairy Queen that fortunately met its doom.

The air is clean—from Vashon, you can often see the smog hanging over Seattle, and it’s a grim reminder of reality. Our island is quiet. Though 15,000 cars a day pass through the main intersection, we don’t have any stop-and-go lights, just four-way stops, the rules for which nobody seems to understand. At night, there are two bars to choose from, but they’re pretty empty during the week. You can also choose from 15 churches on any given Sunday. Most of the social life happens in private. This ain't San Francisco. Currently we’re having a problem with the King County Sheriff’s deputies who come here, who think they work for Tommy Franks, but our little community newspaper (the Ticket) seems to be flogging them back into submission.

Truthfully, I had no idea where I was moving. Living in the Hudson Valley provided me with a love for rural communities, where everyone knows everyone and to a very real degree, everyone must get along. But it's different on an island. There is no Exit 18 or SUNY New Paltz to provide a constant flow of new faces. Many people seem to have been born here and never left. There is a contingent I call the Mushroom People, because they are all connected underground, even though they’re several miles apart. These are the folks whose grandparents live here, too. It's said that people who have lived here 20 years are still considered newcomers. My Web developer is an excellent young man named Jordan. He is a Mushroom Person. His descriptions of being friends with people he's known since before kindergarten are entertaining. They are like first cousins; they know one another through and through.

It took me a while, but I began to tune into the “island mentality” that permeates every bit of our culture here. At first it's invisible. You sort of look right at it, but don't want to really think that everyone knows something you don't. It actually works the other way: They don’t know you, and that is intimidating. Outsiders, alternately, know something that many people who have spent their lives here don’t know, which is how the larger world works, and that change is both possible and healthy. At first I described this quality as “provincial”. Slowly, I began to notice what it means to be from the Big City.

I began to look more closely, and noticed how rarely I ever socialized one-on-one with an island native, or was invited to the home of someone who lived here for any length of time. There is a sense of intentional isolationism. People want to live at the end of the longest driveway they can find, in the words of one of many people I've queried on this whole situation. I get lots of great feedback on my horoscope column, but exceedingly few requests for consultations in what's otherwise a very busy practice.

Part of the island mentality includes two other important components. One is that there’s just one way to do things, and the other is that's just the way it's done. In particular, there is a real degree to which the truth is not spoken openly. This gives rise to a sometimes shocking rumor mill. I once went to get a cup of coffee at the Burton Coffee Stand and was congratulated on having recently gotten married. “Are you sure? Eric Francis, the astrologer?” (I'm difficult not to notice here.) “Yep, that's what I heard.” The next week in my column, I asked for my new bride to please come forward because I wanted to meet her, and offered a free copy of my CD. Nobody thought it was particularly funny. I was ragging on the most deeply revered communication system we have, inaccurate scuttlebutt. Get a bad rap and you’re supposedly done for.

Despite all, the place has grown on me. One by one I’ve met people I can truly relate to, and who look out for me. Situations have worked out one at a time. I have the best landlady ever, who calls me her housemate. I’ve grown accustomed to the island mentality, which, once you recognize it and develop a relationship with it, becomes somewhat entertaining, mainly because it's so predictable, and a kind of game. And it’s really fun to be on the inside rather than the outside. Being a full-blooded Sicilian has helped in this respect—visiting Sicily once, I was whacked by the island mentality.

In the end, it’s all harmless enough on Vashon Island; this is a place where growth is limited by a lack of drinking water and land, and where greed is limited by our very small (actually, shrinking) economy. Either you make it here, or you flee to the mainland; at least there’s a mainland to run back to.

As time went on, I began to notice something when I visited the mainland, which works out to be not all that often. There’s always been a certain quality to people, all people and all social circumstances, that I could not put a name to. I first noticed it in the 4th grade, when I moved to a new neighborhood, a “good neighborhood” in Brooklyn, and everyone had the inside scoop and I was an outsider. It works the same way in corporations, in small companies, in towns and villages and neighborhoods. People from the next block are oddballs. “They're really weird up there in Columbia County.” It is the island mentality. Having identified it on my island, I could suddenly see it everywhere.
Earth is, in actual fact, an island, so it's not all that surprising. We are living in the only place we know of with actual life. That place is a tiny planet, covered mostly by water, on the far edge of a galaxy. The galaxy itself is an island, millions of light years from the nearest other galaxy. Very trippy. There is no ferry to get you anywhere. We can barely build a safe space craft to orbit the Earth. Leaving the island known as Earth means death.

This seemingly natural emphasis on differences rather than similarities, of being frightened by change and invasion, is a human quality that is exploited by countries and religions. More often than not, no matter who you are, everyone else is considered an outsider. No matter how queer you are, somebody else is really queer. As it turns out, certain people in power exploit this factor and use fear to make anyone different into an enemy, then profit from it. Our entire economy, looked at one way, is based on divisiveness and then offering false inclusion. Marketers divide and conquer the world by market classes such as income, gender, age. The best marketing device in the world is “buy this or you're an outsider.”

Unfortunately, these expressions of island mentality are getting us into very serious trouble right now. We live on an island, but without treating it as such. We don’t see the limits of where we are. We don't take the advice that we must get along. We have sufficient resources here to make ourselves sick and kill ourselves. And—check it out—there is no place else to go.