Vashon Island, reached by ferry from Seattle, is the setting for Lindy West’s visit to a women’s Red Tent gathering in August 2010. At first she treats the island and its ritual culture as material for skepticism and comedy. The visit instead exposes a limit in that reflex: she does not share the attendees’ beliefs, but finds their company nurturing and decides that sincerity is not something she wants to mock simply because it is an easy target.

Setting and Reputation

West introduces Vashon through the satirical shorthand of an island populated by hippies and yuppies wary of development, boutique farmers, and people riding recumbent bicycles. She also notes that a quarter of the children in its schools are unvaccinated. This description sets an ironic, wary tone; it is West’s comic framing of the place, not a neutral portrait offered independently of her perspective.

The gathering that brings her there is announced in August 2010 in an email received by The Stranger. An organization called Vashon Red Tent advertises a sisterhood event on the island. The movement’s stated aim is for women of different ages to meet regularly, share their stories, support one another, and honor menstrual cycles. The island is thus presented not just as a ferry destination but as the local setting for a community project that West approaches as both journalist and reluctant participant.

The Journey to the Gathering

West brings her friend Jenny, and the two nearly miss the ferry from Seattle. On the bench beside them sits a woman wearing high-waisted jeans and a T-shirt showing cats in sunglasses playing saxophones. West records in her notebook the thought that there are many different ways to be a woman. The brief observation complicates the caricature that might otherwise dominate her account: even before the ritual begins, a stranger’s conspicuous, specific style prompts her to consider variety rather than a single standard of womanhood.

They are running late, but stop at a grocery store to buy boxed wine and jelly beans, eating the sweets in the parking lot and drinking as much as time allows. The details give the trip an ordinary, improvised quality. West is not arriving as a believer making a pilgrimage; she and Jenny approach an unfamiliar event with anxiety, humor, and practical delays. Vashon’s ferry access also makes the gathering feel like a deliberate departure from their Seattle routine, even though the memoir does not present the island as a remote wilderness.

The Red Tent as a Local Gathering Place

West nearly turns back at the entrance. The event feels too intimate and foreign to someone who describes herself as clinical and says she prefers magic as escapism rather than as a claim about the world. She and Jenny enter anyway, remove their shoes, and join the women seated on pillows beneath a homemade canopy of red scarves in a community center. West gently deflates the ceremonial name by observing that the structure is closer to a pillow fort than a literal tent, but the improvised room still becomes the setting for several hours of shared attention.

The women talk about chocolate, and one passes a Hershey’s bar around the circle. Their playful, earnest comments strike West as familiar clichés, yet she says that she falls for them immediately. Chanting is part of the gathering. The scene’s significance lies less in a conversion to the group’s spiritual ideas than in West’s willingness to remain in a space whose language and practices are not her own. The community center on Vashon accommodates a form of belonging assembled from pillows, scarves, conversation, and ritual rather than from any grand or formal institution.

Afterward, West and Jenny thank their hosts and leave with their thighs numb and buzzing from sitting cross-legged for hours. They eat more jelly beans and talk about their feelings. West acknowledges that she doubts belief itself is necessary for the gathering to work for its participants, but recognizes that the experience was nurturing for her too. She connects the women’s invitation to replenish themselves with the amount of work women do, recalling that both her parents worked all day and that her mother also came home to make dinner. The island meeting gives that reflection a concrete social setting: a circle in which women have made time to attend to one another.

Meaning in West’s Account

Back at the office, West expects that her assignment is to make fun of the gathering, but finds that she does not want to. The women had been kind and earnest, and she asks what would be gained by hurting them. Her reluctance marks a change in how she understands her own comic habits. She recalls trying to appear cool, writing mean jokes for cheap edgy laughs, and accommodating casual misogyny in hopes that men would like her. In this context, Vashon becomes the place where an assignment to ridicule a community turns into a test of what kind of writer and person she chooses to be.

West does not present the visit as proof that she has adopted the Red Tent’s beliefs. She remains skeptical of supernatural claims and explicitly values the distinction between appreciating a practice and believing in it. What changes is her judgment about the people gathered there and about the uses of mockery. The island’s gathering lets her experience generosity without requiring agreement, and it makes open-mindedness a practical choice rather than a spiritual doctrine. Vashon’s narrative importance is therefore concentrated in one encounter: it gives West a vivid reason to resist the easier, lonelier habit of treating sincerity as something to excise from her life.