To say that Elijah Berry has a varied employment and career history is a bit of an understatement, as he’d be the first to admit. He’s done everything from cloud computing to nursing to working in the Antarctic.

Berry took over the Vashon Island Baking Company in January of this year, despite having no experience as a baker. He took a ten-week course at baking school, but attributes the continued success of the bakery today to the process established by the previous owner, Samantha Burdman, along with staff member Christal Gretch, who has worked there on and off for thirty years.

Berry, 39, grew up in rural Missouri, on a family farm built in 1872 by his great-great-grandfather: William Berry was an enslaved person who was freed by the Union Army from a field in Oklahoma during the Civil War. He joined the army and fought at the Battle of Vicksburg. After the war, William went back west, where he established the farm and married Caroline Boone, the granddaughter of Daniel Boone. The property today hosts a small museum, and the family cemetery is on the National Historic Register.

At the age of 17, Elijah Berry attended a liberal arts college, St John’s, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After graduation, he spent a full year — spring through winter — as a contract carpenter at the U.S. Antarctic base at McMurdo Sound. “The Antarctic has a raw, contemplative beauty,” he said, and the region is most commonly described as a “harsh continent.”

“It’s actually a joke at McMurdo,” he said. “Anything that goes wrong, from major stuff to running out of cereal, everyone just laughs and says, ‘Well, it’s a harsh continent!’”

After his Antarctic stint, Berry messed around for a year in Memphis, then taught high school biology and chemistry in Mississippi. Next came a job as a production manager for a film company in Los Angeles. But then he received a desperate call from the high school: their science teacher had quit mid-year, leaving the students with no one to shepherd them through the exams that they were required to pass in order to graduate. “I knew those kids,” Berry said, “and I couldn’t abandon them, so I went back.”

Afterwards, he attended college in Alabama (where to his surprise he fell in love with Birmingham), and emerged with a Bachelors degree in nursing. The US Public Health Service paid for his education in exchange for a commitment to work in the federal system for three years. Berry wanted to join the Indian Health Service in Alaska, but by the time he’d qualified the only option was the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Presented with a number of mostly undesirable options, he opted to join the federal detention facility at SeaTac. “I’d never given any thought to the Pacific Northwest,” he said, “but I knew if I went somewhere other than Seattle, I’d be trying to find a way out of the job.”

The facility was pretty awful, he admits, and the attitude toward treating prisoners, he said, was: “What disease is killing him, how much time does he have left on his sentence, and so should we treat him?”

His next sharp career turn brought him out of the healthcare system. A friend told him about his job in cloud computing, and Berry was amazed at how much money his friend was making. “I found myself thinking: This guy Jake is making way more money than me, and I bet he doesn’t get spit on or have to wear a stab-proof vest to work.”

Computing represented a different world, he said. When he signed with Amazon in 2016, he was amazed that, in addition to the generous salary, he was given a large signing bonus. He used that to buy a house on Vashon, a place he’d loved since first coming here for weekend trips while working at the prison.

Berry did some stints with smaller tech companies, but when his father died in 2023 he started to reevaluate his life. “It’s the dinner party test, right?” he said. “Someone at the table asks you what you do, and you realize that you’re neither proud of your job nor much interested in explaining your work. I realized I wanted to do something more meaningful, even if it was just at a local level. I also wanted to find a way to have a permanent life in a community instead of constantly traveling for work.”

For Berry, the bakery fills that need. “Vashon Island Baking Company has been a feature on the island for almost 40 years,” he noted. “It’s a part of the community. I love it when someone comes in and says something like, ‘Yeah, I remember buying maple bars here when I was a kid.’”

He knew that Sam Burdman (who also owns Glass Bottle Creamery) was interested in selling the business, so he approached her and they worked out a deal.

Berry is the bakery’s fourth owner in its four-decade history. He has changed almost nothing about the menu, but is putting a lot of effort into developing an aesthetic in recognition of the place the bakery has in the island’s community. “Because the food was already so well loved, I wanted to focus on giving it a fresh paint job and brightening up the space to be more inviting to both locals and off-island visitors,” Berry said.

So how did he feel about taking on a business he essentially knew nothing about? Berry smiles.

“It was a little scary,” he admitted. Then, with a laugh, he added: “But ultimately I have the unearned confidence of a liberal arts major.”

Phil Clapham is a writer and retired whale biologist who lives on Maury Island.