Island Times

There are many places to hide along the convoluted coastlines of the Pacific Northwest. In Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings, the English author-cum-sailor Jonathan Raban writes that he “had never seen charts on which land and sea were so intricately tangled, in a looping scribble of blue and beige.” Laurie Ricou, the region’s most steadfast literary critic, observes that “at the edge of the continent, the land looks to be breaking into pieces. Its map is a confusion of islands.” This unruly land-and-seascape makes the Northwest a mecca for boaters, while the notion that the coast is a separate world has long rendered it a destination for those fleeing the city, the past, the draft, conformity, or themselves. As Jack Hodgins shows to comic effect in The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, one of the great British Columbia novels, there is no better setting for disappearance and reinvention than “the ragged green edge of the world.”

But there is no...