San Nicolas Island of the Blue Dolphins by Marie Jarreau

Searching for Karana’s Footsteps
Jan.1, 1984: The roiling water below was blue-green as the aircraft dipped ever-closer towards the long runway on San Nicolas Island. The airport sat just inland of the little fish-shaped island’s east end. White washed waves of water met as if clapping into each other at the point of a sand spit that narrowed into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Santa Barbara.
My heart was pounding with excitement for this Navy assignment. While others stationed there would see San Nicolas Island as boring, tedious, humdrum, and isolated; this would be the most intriguing and inspiring place I had ever seen!
As we turned onto the final approach for landing, my eyes peering through the wind scratched window, I could see dolphins in the deep blue water sliding through the waves that rushed toward the rocky and sandy shore. I’d been advised that space on the island and the living quarters there would be limited and small, “Don’t bring a bunch of ‘stuff’ ” the assignment briefer told us.
The excitement of a new adventure peaked my interest as I stepped off the commuter flight. The small airport terminal was the same as others I’d seen around the country, but in making a turn around the island before we landed I’d already spotted rocky-beaches, coves, and sand-dunes I was eager to explore.
Throughout my 18 month Navy tour, I came to love Fridays for the quiet and solitude that existed after the crew exodus. I chose to remain on the island along with the skeleton support crew, most of whom never left the barracks or compound area. Throughout the weekend I was free to roam and explore almost as if I were there alone. It was a priceless experience!
Using maps and aerial photographs I’d familiarized myself with the landscape. A small library housed a number of books and periodicals offering photographs and information about the island. I was able to get the use of a jeep for touring the island and sunrise couldn’t happen fast enough on Saturday mornings. Most of my time was spent exploring the beaches teeming with boulder sized great-gray elephant seals, sea lions, seagulls, cormorants, California brown pelicans, whales ‘breaching’ off the west end and, on occasion, even dolphins.
I spent hours watching massive waves of blue-green water from strong currents that surround San Nicolas Island, being reduced to foamy bubbles as they settled into the sand in a continual game of “kiss-the-beach.”
I sat one morning on a smooth gray rock in Coral Cove and realized in an instant that I was actually in THE Coral Cove! I was sitting on the same rocks where Karana might have sat to watch whales, dolphins, or otters playing in kelp beds!
Over the course of the eighteen months that I was stationed on SNI I was, in a sense, tracing Karana’s footsteps. I went often to Coral Cove. I studied the slope of the headlands covered with yellow Coreopsis flowers as bright as the sun. The long sand-spit of Jehemy Beach on the east-end was one of my favorite spots. The current from the north and the south side of the island meet and seem to slap together into great heights at the end of a long narrow beach of sand.
I once found an awl, probably made of seal bone. It lay wedged into the base of an abalone shell. Sharpened on one end, it must have been used for puncturing. Karana or her people might have used it to sew a cloth of seal skin or maybe for weaving a basket of reeds. Holding the ancient tool in my hand gave me an eerie feeling! Might Karana have used the tool? I carefully laid it back into its spot.
Often, on San Nicolas Island, the clouds were gray and the wind blew fiercely. As I walked along the beach, the sounds that filled the air from the seagull rookery, the sounds of the seals and the roaring waves could also be deafening. I tried to feel what Karana might have felt as she heard the same sounds in the mid-1800’s. Loneliness, fear, sorrow, self indulgence, or was it a sense of belonging? It was all here, whether you knew the story or not. My own heritage as Choctaw brought me that sense of “belonging” or connection.
She was real. “Karana” was the name O’Dell had given his character. Missionaries who later rescued the real ‘lost woman of the island,’ gave her the name ‘Juana Maria.’ An ocean storm was brewing fast during the evacuation of her people and the ship could not turn back after she'd jumped into the water. It was assumed that she was lost to the powers of the sea, while trying to save her child.
She survived alone on the island for 18 years.
I walked the rocky beach of Coral Cove often at dawn and often well into the gray light of dusk. Had she walked here? Her footsteps had long been erased by strong winds and high tides but I felt her spirit in the island breeze.
My 18 month experience on San Nicolas Island and the strength and perseverance I learned from Karana on the Island of the Blue Dolphins, is a jewel I will always treasure.
Marie Jarreau