Lone Woman Of San Nicolas Island

A near-gale screams the loneliness of this remote outpost, an overgrown boulder that's a whipping post for weather sweeping across the Pacific. It's spring, sunny -- and about 45 degrees with wind chill. Winter jackets are zipped to the neck. Gloves would be nice. And you start to wonder how a woman dressed in only cormorant feathers could have survived alone for 18 years in this blasted, treeless landscape where even the ravaged rocks tell you they got a raw deal.

A near-gale screams the loneliness of this remote outpost, an overgrown boulder that's a whipping post for weather sweeping across the Pacific. It's spring, sunny -- and about 45 degrees with wind chill. Winter jackets are zipped to the neck. Gloves would be nice. And you start to wonder how a woman dressed in only cormorant feathers could have survived alone for 18 years in this blasted, treeless landscape where even the ravaged rocks tell you they got a raw deal.

The world knows of Ishi, ballyhooed as "the last wild California Indian" and the last of his Yahi tribe, who stumbled out of the wilderness into the gold mining town of Oroville in 1911. But more than 50 years earlier, another sole survivor, the "Lone Woman" whom the priests named Juana Maria, was taken from the only home she had ever known and where she lived alone for 18 years--San Nicolas Island.

"Original Accounts of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island," a group show at Side Street Projects, has the feel of 19 different rockets launched from a single pad. Some misfire and crash to the ground, others reach respectable heights and a few soar into an orbiting groove that's thrilling to behold--even as it destabilizes the solid ground we thought we stood on.

In the year 1960, a novelist named Scott O'Dell gave literary birth to Karana, an Indian girl alone on a wild Southern California island. The world received her happily, and the historically based "Island of the Blue Dolphins" joined the standard canon of children's literature.

Virtually every California fourth-grader is required to work on a project about one of the 21 Spanish missions in the state, and the stakes are high. The project accounts for a healthy chunk of a child's grade, so it was with a bit of breathlessness that Addison, my 10-year-old daughter, brought home her teacher's advice that students should visit a mission and preferably pick one that sets them apart from their classmates.