Eastsound, West Sound, all around the…island?

||| BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

When I want our East-Coast relatives to understand what Orcas is like, I have to compare it with something that they already know. I use Manhattan Island, the hub of New York City, as my example. You might be surprised at how apt a comparison that turns out to be.

Orcas Island is about twice the size of Manhattan, and its longest road is twice as long. On the other hand, Manhattanites outnumber Orcasians by a multiple of 300. But now look at the similarities. Both Orcas and Manhattan are islands smack-dab in the middle of important ocean-going ship traffic. Both islands are the product of glacial land-sculpting, and both are mostly granite. Both were originally covered in deep forest, inhabited by many different species of land animals and birds, and surrounded by thick schools of useful fish. Indeed, just like Orcas today, parts of Manhattan still give refuge to wide variety of large and small indigenous wild animals, and, now that the Hudson River has been cleaned up, the fish have also come back.

Manhattan and Orcas are each home to a huge, interesting, and entirely satisfying public park. Although Frederick Law Olmsted’s stately and magnificent Central Park is wholly artificial, with every rock, every tree, almost every blade of grass, planned all the way down to the earthworms, Moran State Park remains almost exactly as nature left it, and it contains a couple of half-mile-high mountains which have no equal on Manhattan. But both parks have pleasant lakes for casual boating, and both have diverse and wide-ranging hiking trails, although those in Central Park are paved.

Smaller Inwood Hill Park, up at Manhattan’s northern tip, remains wild, and is almost exactly as it was when Peter Minuit bought the whole shebang from the Indians, right there, sitting under a tree that still existed when I was a boy. Visitors to Inwood Hill Park can see for themselves how little difference there really is, between Manhattan and Orcas. Orcas has many more pine and fir trees to Inwood’s oaks and maples, true, but the fauna, the geology, and the general lay of the land are very much the same.

In order to fully explain the Orcasian experience to the uninitiated, I have also to refer to Merrick, New York, once a small, rural, suburban village, where I spent my formative years. It’s a very near neighbor to Manhattan, and most of my extended family has been there at least once. Merrick is a mere mote, about a third of the way out on the South Shore of Long Island, but, because of the magic of the Long Island Rail Road, it was then, and still is today, a bedroom community for the Big Apple.

Nowadays, Merrick is all houses and stores and concrete, and it looks like the Bronx, but back when I was a child it was mostly vegetable farms. There were maybe 6,500 people living in the village back then, compared to today’s 5,400 Orcasians, and there was an A&P, a movie theater, one bar-and-grill, one school, a wonderful library, and a malt shop with a jukebox stuffed with Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. The telephone was “Hello, central?,” without even old-line Orcas’s four-digit ‘phone numbers, and the operator knew who I was, who my mommy was, and where in the village my mommy happened to be when I needed her.

So when some East Coast relative asks me what Orcas Island is like, I reply that it’s about the size of Manhattan, it looks like Central Park, and, just as it once was in Merrick, everybody knows everybody else. QED.