From Google Maps

There are many places along the shoreline of the world’s oceans where when you look over the water to the horizon, all you can see is more water. The view from our little bay is quite different. Even though we are on the west coast of the United States, when we look out from our little bay, the entire horizon consists of land. What we are looking at are a lot of islands. We can see a few of the San Juan Islands, which are part of the United States, most notably Orcas Island, which is fairly large and has a high mountain with a lot of antennas at the top that make it easy to identify. To see the San Juans, however, we have to be looking to the Southwest.

Straight west of us is a series of Canadian Islands in the Straight of Georgia known as the Gulf Islands. And behind them, stretching for as far as we can see north or south is Vancouver Island, on which are many cities and towns including Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, which is actually south of where we live.

There are many days when we can’t see the high mountains of Vancouver Island because of clouds and fog. And there are days when we can’t see any of the islands because of clouds and fog. Sometimes when we stand on the beach the Salish Sea seems small, like a lake, with land on the other side, even though it is, in reality, connected with the vastness of the Pacific Ocean - the largest ocean on our planet.

The Pacific got the name by which we call it from Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. In 1520, after a treacherous journey to find the “Spice Islands”, now known as the Malaku Islands in eastern Indonesia. He and his crew had sailed across the Pacific for a huge distance for a long time. They sailed from Spain to South America and around the tip of the continent. Then they sailed west across the south Pacific to Southeast Asia where he gave the body of water its name. Their journey continued from that point across the Indian Ocean to Africa, around the souther tip of Africa and up its west coast to return to Spain.

The name Magellan gave to the ocean is a misnomer. The huge body of water is not peaceful despite the name he gave it. Magellan never saw the North Pacific up to the Gulf of Alaska, where powerful winter storms raise huge waves and the weather patterns that affect the countries of Canada and the United States form the clouds that distribute winter snows. The ocean is vast and varied, full of currents. Beneath the waters the ocean floor is varied with trenches and underwater mountains. A few of the tallest mountains appear above the surface as islands such as Hawaii. The deepest part of the Mariana Trench, called Challenger Deep, is nearly 36,000 feet below the surface of the water.

Compared to the open ocean, the Straight of Georgia, which got its modern name from Captain George Vancouver, who sailed into it in 1792. Vancouver wasn’t the first European explorer to enter the waters near our bay. A year earlier Francisco de Eliza explored the coast and gave Spanish names to many of the geographical features. Among the features that retained their Spanish names is the Eliza Island, near Lummi Island. Many other features, including our Birch Bay, received their names from the Vancouver Expedition as the English were the dominant colonizers for a long time in this region.

Of course all of the features we call by the names on the map had different names before European explorers arrived. People have lived in this region since time immemorial. There are many different Salish tribes. Our bay was a food gathering area for the Lummi People and was often visited by Nooksack who lived in the mountains to the east. They had their own names for the various places where they fished and paddled and camped. They had their own names for the majestic mountains that rise east of where we live. The Nooksack called the mountain we call Baker, Kollia-Kulshan, which can be translated “white mountain.” The name makes sense because it is covered in snow all year around and it shines in the evening light when the skies are clear.

All of this is new learning for me. Having lived most of my life nearly a thousand miles from any ocean, I learned that the United States stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean between Canada and Mexico. I knew that the 49th parallel was the boundary between the United States and Canada, which is the case in Montana, North Dakota, and Idaho, the border states where I lived. That is also true out here when it comes to the mainland. But in the ocean the border dips south and wanders through the islands so that where we live Canada is our neighbor to the west as well as our neighbor to the north. Instead of thinking of our place as where the corner of Washington meets Canada to the north and the Pacific to the west, in reality, we are a corner tucked into Canada which wraps around us.

Pacific is a good name for the relationships between us and our Canadian neighbors. Our countries have enjoyed peaceful relations for most of our history. There are a lot of cross border families in our county, whose members live on both sides of the border. We know couples with one partner born in Canada and the other in the US. We have friends whose children live on the other side of the border. I know a man who drives his truck across the border multiple times nearly every day.

And our waters, being protected by the islands to the west, are peaceful. Often the water in our by is so calm that there is no surf. We are shielded from the worst of the storms of the North Pacific. And we are treated to glorious sunsets whenever we take the short walk to the beach.