Anne Kennedy’s 1989 lyric collection, Buck Mountain Poems, provides an evocative spatial and ecological record of rural domestic life, seasonal isolation, and ecological observation set atop Buck Mountain on Orcas Island in the San Juan Archipelago. The verses map daily habitation across rain-shadow slopes of Douglas fir, Pacific madrone, and exposed marine sandstone, situating contemporary island residency directly within the ancestral homelands, resource grounds, and maritime viewsheds long stewarded by Northern Straits Salish peoples, including the Lummi and Samish. Kennedy illuminates the granular logistics of upland island existence, tracing the material realities of steep unpaved roads, wood heat, rainwater catchment, and the constant temporal pull of ferry connections that bind isolated island ridges to mainland supply corridors. Ultimately, the work functions as an intimate literary cartography of place, capturing how late-twentieth-century rural homesteading negotiated the steep topography, ecological limits, and enduring Indigenous geography of the Salish Sea uplands.