Ah, island life. Palm trees, turquoise water and a lazy pace born of constant humidity and year-round temperatures in the 80s. “You have to wait for everything,” Asheville interior designer Cate Scales remembers of her ten years on Saipan, one of the Northern Mariana Islands. “Americans are go-go-go, and that just makes island people go slower.” 

Her adventures on Saipan, southeast of Japan, began in 1993 when she arrived to spend three weeks with her relatively new love, Ben. They started dating in their hometown of Lakeland, Florida, right before he took a clerkship with a federal judge for the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas. Scales, just 24 and an intern at an interior design firm, found Saipan breathtakingly beautiful and the community friendly. When she called her parents to tell them she’d decided to stay and had, in fact, already taken a job as personnel director at a Club Med-type resort (despite knowing nothing about the human resource field), her father told her he’d already packed her things. “Everyone except me knew I wasn’t coming back,” she laughs.

The couple settled in a rented house on a hill overlooking the Pacific. They had daily gatherings with friends and swims in the ocean. Then they were married on the island, wearing headdresses made of flowers. After Ben’s clerkship ended, he worked on a probate case that would consume the next five years. Cate took a position as human resources director at a Japanese-owned timeshare hotel and loved it. Their lives became even more tied to the rhythms of the island. 

Saipan is roughly 46 square miles with a multicultural population of about 60,000, including Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Tibetans, Koreans and Americans. The local Chamorros are quite westernized. For Scales, in a human resources role, the most challenging cultural dynamic was the enmity between the Japanese, who provided the high-end economic base for business and tourism, and the Chinese, who opened manufacturing plants, bringing in low-wage workers. Eventually, the Japanese took their dollars elsewhere and the economy crumbled, including the hotel where she worked. 

The birth of their daughter Georgia was something of a final straw for their island life. The huge distance from family and the realities of island living suddenly felt untenable. Medical emergencies had to be transported to the Philippines or Hawaii. Since everything from milk to building materials was imported, there were few fresh vegetables. “We ate a lot of sushi,” Scales says. Most difficult was the fact that she always felt like an outsider and didn’t want her child to grow up feeling the same way. 

In 2001, a chance invitation to the annual music fest, the Swannanoa Gathering, put Ben, a musician, in touch with a musical community that felt right. For Cate’s part, she says Asheville felt immediately like home.  

Trading island life for mountain life meant having to deal with more than just three stoplights. But it also meant great organic produce and only having to go to one store instead of five or six small, poorly stocked shops. It was the end of daily strolls on the beach but the beginning of seeing spring daffodils pop up. For Cate, it also meant returning to her first career choice: interior design. In Saipan, she’d helped friends decorate their concrete-block houses, some of which were used as Japanese spy shacks during World War II. Out of necessity, she used what materials she had on hand, a practice she still maintains where possible. Her first project in Asheville was the old 900-square-foot house in Montford she and Ben bought and expanded with a two-story addition. Cate says acting as contractor and designer during the process put her right back in her creative element, and she decided to hang her shingle out as CS Designs. 

Today she works from home, with bamboo shades, photos and mementos to remind her of the island days. But she says she has no regrets about trading the blue of the Pacific Ocean for the Blue Ridge Mountains and saying hello to faster-paced days of family and career. –Janet Hurley