Jan Walker

A Farm in the South Pacific Sea

by Jan Walker http://janwalker-writer.com/

An American business woman with three failed marriages and no children moves to the Kingdom of Tonga to raise Spiny Lobster in the sea. She lives in a palm frond fale without electricity or running water, struggles against humanity and nature, and learns about love.

ISBN: 978-0-9828205-2-0

Sell Sheet

The story behind the book

Shortly after her ninth birthday, June Sandusky, the woman at the center of this story, was uprooted from a Chicago home with housekeeper and nanny and plunked in a homestead farmhouse on the western shores of Puget Sound. She loved it there. She helped her widowed grandmother, two aunts and three uncles harvest food from the sea, orchard and gardens. By age fourteen she took turns at the helm of a passenger ferry that ran between Bremerton and Poulsbo. The young ferry captain, a neighbor, claimed he fell in love with her then. He was eighteen and, within months, would be involved in the war effort. Many small ferries on Puget Sound quit operating the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. He and other able bodied men in the area joined the service or took jobs in the shipyards that started operating shifts around the clock. The U.S. navy had to repair or replace battleships, destroyers, cruisers and other craft sunk or damaged in the attack.

June’s mother had settled in Seattle by then and insisted June move in with her. The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, less than five miles from the family farmhouse, was considered a target of Japanese bombers. World War II dominated lives everywhere in the county and especially around Puget Sound. At seventeen, June was hired by a private Seattle shipyard as a coppersmith apprentice. She became a journeyman in the trade and remained employed there through the last half of the1940s.

In 1950, with a short marriage behind her, June moved to San Francisco to work for Morrison Knudsen on the Broadway Tunnel under Russian Hill. She returned to Seattle when that project was complete, invested in a small apartment building and enrolled in business school to study accounting and business management. She took a month long vacation to crew on a passenger cargo ship that sailed in the South Pacific and vowed to visit there again. She settled in her Seattle building where she married and divorced two more times. She wanted children but never got pregnant. June’s mother berated her for her failures as wife and woman. June left her apartment building in the hands of a manager in late 1962, and fled to Honolulu where she worked as hostess in various restaurants along Waikiki. She’d become proficient on the comptometer, a pre-computer calculator, and operated a private bookkeeping business on the side. She spent most of her non-working hours swimming and scuba-diving the many beaches and reefs on Oahu. She’d learned scuba diving in the cold waters of Puget Sound and found diving in tropical waters without a neoprene suit freed her spirit. She embarked on a self-study of oceanography and marine science and developed an interest in spiny lobsters. Warm-water fishery labs were just starting to grow them in contained environments. During her third year on Oahu, she dove at a reef known as spiny lobsters habitat. There she watched a female extruding eggs. A fully grown female could produce 500,000 eggs, a young one at least 50,000. A free-diving Hawaiian man suddenly entered the scene. He snatched the lobster, shucked its eggs, twisted off its tail, tucked it into the front of his swim trunks and surfaced.

That scene became the prologue of A Farm in the South Pacific Sea. June spent another year researching spiny lobsters and looking for a place where she could afford to experiment with growing them in the sea. She returned to Seattle, prepared her apartment building for sale, liquidated her other assets and moved to Tonga, a constitutional monarchy that lies near Fiji and Samoa in the vast South Pacific Ocean.

June’s mother never forgave her for “squandering her real estate investment and business potential” in such a manner. June never regretted her choice. Her Tonga years remained the highlight of her adventurous life.