Kenya RPCVs Fran Einterz and Joyce Peterson are new owners of the Jenne Farm and its 1908 farmhouse
A thousand places in Western Washington could vie for the title of "quintessential Northwest view," the one vista that seems to sum up why this is such a wonderful place to live.
You've probably been to a hundred of them. That cascading waterfall filling pools like champagne into a flute, a grove of trees lit like a cathedral, or a wilderness beach of pounding surf, birds orbiting towers of rock.
Yet there is one place so accessible, so historic, so panoramic and so representative that it perhaps deserves to be first among equals. The bluff trail at Ebey's Landing, in the middle of Whidbey Island, has been balm for ten thousand souls, a Mecca for urbanites seeking renewal.
On a clear day you can stand in wildflowers above a cobbled beach and take in the Olympic Mountains, the Cascade range from Mount Rainier to Mount Baker, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the entrance to Puget Sound. The foreground for this tapestry is a bucolic landscape of fields, farmhouses and wooded hills that hasn't changed much in a century.
It's the lack of change that this story is about. At the dawn of the 21st century, there's nothing harder than keeping things the way they were.
"These views did not happen accidentally," says Gretchen Luxenberg, a National Park Service liaison who pushes constantly to sustain them. "People have worked countless hours."
There is an almost unbroken swath of protection on the west side of Whidbey, extending from Fort Ebey State Park in the north to the Keystone Spit the state added to Fort Casey State Park in the south. Included is an astonishing mix of ecosystems and geologic features, from the wetlands of Crockett Lake to the glacially formed "kettleholes" of Fort Ebey: a network of forested craters that have become a playground for mountain bikers. Several old blockhouses, a pioneer cemetery, a whale skeleton at the Coupeville dock, and a biking trail along Highway 20 add to the mix.
A primary example of how this works is the story of Fran Einterz and Joyce Peterson, new owners of the Jenne Farm and its 1908 farmhouse. After working in the Peace Corps in Kenya they eventually settled on Whidbey in a $36,000 house, he working in social services, she in occupational therapy. These were hardly big-money people. But when the farm came up for sale, the couple swallowed hard and bought, for a whopping $900,000.
They could do so only because the federal government paid back half the purchase price in return for a permanent easement on 120 acres of the 143 total, keeping it perpetually as farmland. The couple fixed up the house and barns with tireless hand labor and now rent the farm to tourists and wedding parties, hoping to soon build a small caretaker's house for themselves nearby.
"We didn't want a showplace," Fran said of the house, which retains its beautiful 1908 woodwork. "We wanted to make a grandma's house."
The views from the fields, which are being fenced for beef cattle, are stunning. "On a clear day, you can see 100 miles," Joyce says.
