One Storm or Another

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

Years ago I read that shortly after a telephone conversation with Katherine Hepburn, who was at her seaside home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut at the time, Spencer Tracy became aware of a hurricane barreling up the Eastern seaboard, heading right for Old Saybrook. “But she never even mentioned it!” he exclaimed.

I am much the same way. I didn’t bring up our recent storms either. Long distance people had to ask, and I downplayed it. “We’re accustomed to winds,” I said, “and our trees are accustomed to winds.” But between us, it really was something. And not all trees stood.

One storm was a bomb cyclone, and the other, an atmospheric river. Unlike hurricanes, they have no names—we save names for earthquakes and wildfires out west. In any case, last month we experienced one right after the other. Everything all at once it seemed. Nearby Vancouver Island tracked gusts of 101 mph–the speed of a Catagory 2 hurricane. In Seattle the National Weather Station was damaged by high winds, while falling trees struck homes, a homeless encampment in Lynnwood, a King County Metro bus, and pulled down power lines all around the metropolitan area. 

I rode the storms out in my home on San Juan Island, wifi down, flashlights and candles at the ready. For what seemed like weeks I stood at the windows and witnessed the world whited out and erased. Wind and rain, wind and rain. Normally we can determine wind direction by the waves, but we couldn’t even see the bay. Everything vanished.

And yet we never lost power on San Juan Island. Be it the number of underground wires or the confluence of surrounding mountains, we were spared any outages through the two monster storms. I’m thinking we’re in a protected bubble here. 

Pinecones can slam against glass windows and batter the decks all they want—it’s just a lot of noise. 

Hold that thought. Keep it in mind as we look to the next four years. While trying to console me after the election, my daughter suggested “You’re in a good place, mom. Trump doesn’t even know about the San Juan Islands. He has no idea any of you are there.”

Originally published January 1, 2025 in The Journal of the San Juan Islands