Woodpecker D Adze

This is an adze that I made in more or less traditional Salish style, what anthropologists call the "D-adze" because of the handle shape.

The blade was made from a chunk of serpentine I picked up from a road cut on Cypress Island, ground down by rubbing it on concrete. Lashing is split cedar root over pine sap. The wood is the only non-local material, being from a black walnut board my dad bought decades ago in Ohio (which has been dragged to Virginia and now Washington, awaiting the time when I'd figure out what to do with it).

Salish adzes were sometimes adorned, and I chose to put a woodpecker head on this one. At first, it was because I wanted to stick with a fairly literal image (woodpeckers being carvers, like adzes), since I don't know enough about the person or Tribe I was making it for to choose something for its cultural significance or meaning. On the night before I gave it, though, I ran across a story of Dokwibatl, who came across a man who was trying to chop down a tree by banging his head on it, and transformed the poor human into a woodpecker. My intent with this gift was to honor a man who helped in my transformation from ignorant outsider to reasonably competent Northwest archaeologist, and so the woodpecker seems apt.

The wood that became this adze handle came from the same board that I carved into a sturgeon years ago, and which I gave to the Chair of Lower Elwha. The adze went to the Chair of Swinomish (who is also president of NCAI these days), with a special thanks to the THPO of that tribe. In between, another sturgeon went to Nisqually, a big halibut serving tray to Suquamish, and a stone fish club to a young Skokomish fisherman.

I'm not a talented carver, but not a horrible one either, and I still have all my fingers. I have not even attempted to match the Native Northwest formline style, and may never feel adequate to do so. I've never sold a piece, but I enjoy giving them away, and feel like I've been paid more than enough by having the chance to give them to host Tribes and have them be accepted. It's a lucky life.

Fear and Loathing (and bliss?!) in the San Juans.

Last week, I traveled to one of the San Juan Islands. Sounds like a place in Latino Latitudes, but they are our northernmost islands, ever since I stopped counting Alaska. After S. Palin said she could see Russia from there, oligarchniks have quietly been buying back pieces of it, and they now own enough land, oil futures, and moorages to have reversed Seward's Folly.

Meanwhile, down south, I sat on the deck of a small workboat, skimming o'er glassy waters on the way to my favorite island this side of Kaua'i. It was an international expedition, more or less, there being employees of two sovereign nations aboard, but tensions were low. My coffee buzz, borne of a 4AM wake-up and 2 or 3 hours of not-quite-as-fast-as-that-douchebag-in-the-BMW driving, was gone by then, and the remainder were northwesterners, cool enough not to let their 30% caffeine bloodstream affect their behavior. 


My job was to make sure a little hilltop was an OK place--archaeologically speaking--to plant a small weather station. I knew this would only take a few minutes, but was interested in what the reps of this other nation had to say about the whereabouts of a place that all of us agree exists, but none of us has been able to locate on a map, much less on the ground. Or, too many people have been able to locate it on a map, but they don't agree. Not violently, or even vehemently, more in the manner of a loss collective.

So there was no drama. No conflict. No more to write about.

So I ambled over to a place where some workers had been, uh, working. With big machines. And they'd gone where they were not supposed to. And obliterated some stuff. 

Irrevocably. Done. Nothing more to say.

So I continued to the south beach. Solo, toward the solace of data collection. The home of a man who invented a particular kind of mill saw, reduced for the time being to notes and numbers. Measured, sketched, GPS'd, until there are hours to rediscover the stories and graft them back to this bare limbwork. Sounds dull as it gets, but the uncreative busy work soothed me just then.


Moving on, it was time to climb. 600 or so feet up is the summit of a hill called Olivine, and for part of the way I followed old miners' roads, weaving twixt boulders loosed from earth but not barged away. Higher still, heading for a bald patch where I might have left a bag carrying camera and binocs, lost on the last trip here. In the camera, a memory card holding the only images of that place that had been torn away by machines. In the binocular lenses and dark interior, lagging photons showing 21 years of birds and cliffs, of places unreachable and just plain look-worthy. Memory and data, at waypoint 680. Maybe.


But only after crumbly cliffs and a final steep ascent under a sun as glaring as it gets in these northern islands (Not saying that much, Hawaiians, but acclimated me felt hot.) And there, in the place I had sat: nothing. No camera, no binoculars. Oh well. A pretty day, views down to the island (and a camera to catch 'em), the channels, more islands and straits, ocean. Boats unzipping wakes. A bell clanging in its language, inscrutably charming to my ignorant ears.


It was all downhill from there, beginning easily enough with a trail. Becoming a trace. Then just places less tangled than others. Then ever more precipitous slope, alternating between slick bedrock and loose talus made one by a moss skin over a skeleton of roots and rot. One leg carefully lowering my entire weight, then the other. Zig-zag switch-back, starting to wonder if I'd be back to the dock on time at this gastropodean pace.


On the other hand, it gave me time to appreciate the ancient fire-scarred trees scattered in this slanted forest. Occasional grandfathers, gnarled and interesting, surrounded by young'uns. 


I was looking up at one, it's branches akimbo with codgerhood and a disregard for verticality not tolerated in the tree farms and young forests I usually travel. Hunter S. had gotten that way in his old age, and years earlier had been nearly as curmudgeonly in his dismissal of amateurs one toke over the line, scoffing that until they'd dealt with the acid bats descending near Barstow, they had nothing to whine about.


And maybe getting all worked up over a hallucination is not that big a deal either. Imaginary bats swooping from the sky may be bad, but real yellow-jackets swarming up from their nest in the depths of hell ain't no picnic either. I'd been strung three times  before my body responded. They never really entered my vision, barely nicked my consciousness as anything other than pain when I took off in a clumsy cetacean approximation of running. Another sting, and realization that I'd be stung to death and devoured by the yellow-jackets at this rate.


I either stumbled or decided to jump, who knows? In any case, I looked down-slope and saw my feet before me, plowing downhill as I slid my butt across moss and logs, bouncing off rocks, pawing and clutching at whatever could help me steer this descent, maybe keep it from accelerating out of control (any more than it was). Extreme luge...sleds and ice are for panty-wastes. My mind thinking only of getting away from bees. Eyes pitching in by trying to spot a precipice before it was too late, and managing to do so.


Stop. Stand. Stung.


Again with the mad down-ward dash. Hop and lope, slide and hope. Managing to stick most of the landings and surf over a salal patch without it clutching me. Finally finding myself having covered a lot of ground, much closer to my destination. More importantly, out of the airspace of the squadron scrambled to chase me away. Not long after, I walked onto another old road, ambling calmly dockward. About 5 stings big enough to qualify, but no gashes, serious bruises, or broken bones sticking out of my skin. 


All in all, not a bad day.

Combover

I saw this the other day, an artifact for the future, but from my own past, so too modern for my taste.

I was on the Island again, gales having blown away my chaces of getting there last week when I could have seen some snow. This trip was with one of the tribe's biologists and archaeologist, and we made a circuit of the meadow, which is saturated now, and talked about what kinds of things might be done to restore the natural ecology. ("Stand back and wait," I want to say, but people want to see something happen in their lifetime, preferably before they are old, maybe this biennium before funding is diverted to cover a war or corporate welfare.)

One thing that tribes and scientists and land managers seem to agree on is that the dike cutting off the estuary ought to come out. Of course, the dike was first built in the 1870s, and therefore is a historic resource, something whose preservation should be considered.

But winter storms in the last two years have begun to erode the thing, revealing that most of the dike is not that old. I'd figured 1960s or 1970s, and on this trip, the latter and later of these seems right. I had a comb like the one in the photo. When I was small, they looked very similar, but the teeth were brittle, snapping off and allowing channels of snag to slip through. These must've been thrown away in droves, and will be abundant in the archaeological record. But the one show is "Unbreakable," rubberized or something. Boys carried them in their hip pockets into the 1980s maybe. I stopped paying in attention when I stopped combing my hair in '79 or so (a streak that continues!), but I am pretty sure these became uncool not long after.

The biologists were a little impressed by this deduction, and maybe in awe of my nerdiness and ability to ply my trade in such shallow waters.

One day, when the dike is removed, I'll be there, scampering around the backhoe, rooting in the backdirt. The comb, like the ruler I found last time comes from the recent history of the place, when there was a school for boys. The fill that was pushed here encapsulated some of their history, from a time when I was a boy too. Maybe I'll find evidence of the brittle-Unbreakable sequence, maybe some toys or school gear, maybe Piggy's broken glasses or a conch shell...

Human Tides

People come and people go from faces of the earth. Our kind are increasing here in the maritime northwest as on earth as a whole, sprawl marches along highways, farms are gulped and a hundred plots plotzed out. It seems inexorable (as if I even  know exactly what that means), this primate tide.


But if you go out beyound the sprawl, go into the dark wood and windy mountain and all manner of muddy places our modern feet fear to tread, there are the high water marks of earlier waves of first people and the 600 generations that followed. Nature west of the Cascades swallows whole towns in a generation or two. I've been in places that had a hotel and a bank, a post office, neighborhoods and cemeteries, a good-sized herd of humans at the dawn of the atomic era. But then when all the trees had been cut, it was over. Railways pulled for use elsewhere, materials scavenged, everything else made of wood rots, archaeology gets made. Blackberries and alder thickets make it hard top gain entry anymore, and in less than a human lifetime are succeeded by evergreens that eventually create a blanket of roots over the whole thing.

Humans have ebbed off lands we think are wild now, and our own dominion over earth is bound to falter eventually. The ebb is in effect at Secret Habor, where an entire school campus was demolished almost two years ago. That's the photo here. If you know what you are looking at, you can see slope cuts where the main buildings were, and the backhoe is in a basketball court about at the spot where I found an old pitcher's mound buried in the fill. I think only 3 structures remain, with another 3 cabins on nearby private land.

This human retreat happens to be intentional. The school wanted to move to the mainland for logistic and financial reasons, and the state wanted to manage the island as a natural area. One thing still to come is removal of a dike, which is also in the photo above--its the shoreline at the right. Again, the cognizant eye immediately notices that the seaward face of the dike is eroding. About a horizontal foot is gone since a year ago.

In the 1870s, the first white homesteader diked off part of the estuary and managed to do a little farming. He didn't last too long, though, and in the 1880s along came Shadrach Wooten, who had married into the local tribe and may just have been moving to his wife's family place. Same thing happened with Mr Hansen, and those two families represented the high water mark for a couple of generations. Did they maintain the dike, or let the sea flood back in? I don't know.  By the end of the Depression, none of them lived there anymore, anyway.

After WWII, a Seattleite decided that the harbor could be a haven, and over the last half of the century there was a school for boys. During this time, the dike was reinforced and raised; I found a ruler in the fill, a spray-paint can embedded in a concrete seawall.

There have been other ebbs and flows on Cypress. The capitalist alchemy of tranforming salmon, timber, minerals and even wild rhododendrons into cash came in boom-bust waves crested and fell quickly. A tourism wave was proposed, and although it never really materialized did manage to carve out a few marks on the landscape. Older peoples interested in maintaining populations of strawberries and deer, roots and fruits and wood...their waves oscillated more in time with the seasons, and were less inclined to scour the land bare on their way out.

Enough of the fluff and opinionizing. Let's get back to dirt. This is the profile of a trench, with the water table at something like 125 cm below surface. Down there, you have clay that gets sandier the higher you go, until hitting an organic layer. In some areas, this has a lot of bark, in others there is perfectly preserved grass, and in others it's a finer peat. Could be from logging, a different sea level, ancient human intervention,... Then there's another run of grey clay into sand, and then you get into modern fill.

As you can see, there's a wooden pile, driven into the lower grey, and either very short or cut off at the inception of the uppermost fill. Cypress timber was tough by virtue of low rainfall and serpentine soils, and prized for pilings; several turned up in this trench, and none were creosoted. They are neither ancient nor modern.

I'm really only starting to analyze the sediments, and at some point will have to find funds or a compelling con to get dates and expertise. I'll get back to you when I do. 

Cypress Again (Finally)

This third Summer in the NW began to seem familiar, my body more used to the rythms, seasoned enough to feel comfortable just past halfway north to the pole. And as you may recall, I was pretty sure I knew ahead of time that August would find me on Cypress Island.

But government time does not comply with the seasons, and even though they recognize years and do some things annually, they prefer the biennium. So August slipped to Sept., then boat trouble delayed the whole operation to October, maybe Halloween, but still I drifted along in the belief that in the islands, Autumn falls softlier than where I live, and the trip could still play out under that season's rippling sideways sunbeams.

But the calendar fell subject to arcane formulae concerning the availbility of funding, rules rules and more rules, other project timelines, and quite a few other variables of less or more dubious officiality. Government time set the trip for late November, when it would finally be darker and rainier than usual. Specifically, early on the Monday after Turkey Day, which meant a Sunday drive on I-5 with a million other people.

Foreboding didn't really have time to set in, and my hermitty self grinned at the promise of island seclusion. The road was crowded, but not clogged. Everything went well dockside, then a run no more complicated than dodging crabpots in Secret Harbor. The predicted gale held off til late in the day, by which time we were tucked away low in the lee, watching low clouds skudd, but feeling only the greatest gusts. (The return was on a channel glassier and calmer than I'd ever seen it.)

The boat and backhoe pilot stayed over, more fun than hermitage, and remained a few days til the work was done. It's really nice to work with someone you don't know, and find out that they're interesting and can handle themselves in the field.

My part was spending time in trenches through the old ball field, filled in past years and destined to be re-opened to the ocean in future biennia. So I was looking for things in the fill to tell me when they were deposited, and found a pitcher's mound and superball (no earlier than 1970s, based on materials).

To get deeper we had to run a pump, which at times would empty the trench quicker than water at the far end could drain. Other times it just choked on clay or the rodent who'd drowned the first night. In the 40 minutes or so between pump and seepage victories, I walked the muck, troweled clean the walls, drew stratigraphic profiles. Oh, and shoveled saturated muck.

Like all good dirt, this stuff says something. I haven't figured it all out yet, but the sequence of sand, clay, sand, organic, clay, sand, fill tells a tale of a Salish Sea and people. Was that organic layer a natural thing, maybe when glaciers sucked the sea shallower? Or a Salish woman's silverweed marsh garden? Or logging droppings?

Questions to ponder later.

Cypress Moon

Somewhere sometime back I said something about sticky places, specks on the globe that have the power to hook a guy, play out the line sometimes for years before reeling him back, maybe let him take off on another run, but always that little bit of drag, that tugged lip, pointing back like Elvis's lip did to Memphis.


Maybe I also blurted out something about how new places keep sticking to me: ancestral farms and grandma's and mother's houses, gardens of my own, settlements Virginian and Hawaiian, grounds in both Washingtons. Maybe I revealed that Cypress Island is one of them near my latest abode.


And already it is clear that this island is where I will end up in the August moon. In the past two years, events have conspired to send me there and then. Today I learned that it will happen in the third as well: a descendant of the islands only Zoe (so far as I know) needed to reconnect with her kin's story and organized a trip, a coworker who took over a restoration project wants to walk the place with an archaeologist, and then there's me--more aware than ever that an August trip to Cypress is a treat not to be refused. 


Treat? I mean blessing. And so the fishing metaphor ends (because that would be a sham, as you aware of my paltry angling acumen must already be thinking), with me swimming willingly back to this place, as I hope to to Nu`alolo in the coming year. Lured by the aroma of those sweet springs, beckoning tendrils cast into the deep blue, that vast and shapeless world, luring the shad, o'opu, and salmon. 


So, maybe a fishing metaphor after all, but more of the ancient and collective "the run delivers fish" kind than the "guy in a bass-boat with an armada of lures" kind. Either way, I'm hooked.

Puget Sounds Tasty

So yeah, I'm the aquatics archaeologist. So I'll be looking at a lot of fishbone, shell middens, and old fishing camps.
None of which taste good.
And I'm no fisherman. The closest I ever got was that field season in Maui, when I would blast Primus' "I Want to Be A Fisherman" while gathering seaweed, and the time when I was about 10 and caught a good-sized bass from an Ohio farm pond. I tried my luck with the 3-prong during the Hawai`i years, but never was much more than a tourist on and in the water.
Then the Virginia years. Seafood highlight was when my girl and her cousins netted a few dozen blue crabs. Mmmm... Otherwise, though, I returned to the old, "Who wants to eat seafood out of Mid-Atlantic water?"

But now, back near the Pacific, I hear the blurbling call of the wild denizens of the deep. And they say, "Eat me."
In a nice way.

Aquatic archaeology is not a license to eat, but it is important to observe and ask questions from Those Who Know what kind of yummy stuff comes from the local water. Up at the top of this post, you see the boat, and behind it the floating home, of a salmon farmer. Atlantic salmon, penned and grown like slippery cattle. Why? Because 1 pound of food yields 1.3 pounds of fish. That never happens with cattle, top producers of loose, half-digested, corn-filled stool.
Now this next picture, all of you Hawai`i people will recognize. Locals here focus on oysters, little clams, and the obscene gooeyduck (spelled geoduck, for some reason). But man, you can walk a cobble beach and pick up opihi without risking your life on the cliffs.


This is making me hungry. Aloha.

The Life Aquatic

A big (2.5million acres worth) of my job is to deal with cultural resources on State Aquatic Lands. Some places, like this, are only submerged when the tide is up, and my work is possible with the aid of rubber boots if I time it right. One thing that made it easy to take this job is that the people I work with understand earth's rythms--tides and snowfall and all--and act accordingly. Like when they planned the big statewide cultural resource training, they looked at the tide charts first, because they wanted to take people to sites like this one. Which consists of the remains of a fish trap (see the two lines in the mud, converging on the channel?) Originally, the lines were palisades that let water pass through, but not fish, which would converge on a little gate, where people would scoop them up. So when people tell you the Northwest tribes were "hunter-gatherers," keep in mind that sometimes the gathering involved development of infrastructure and resolution of territorial claims.

Of course, I work for a bureaucracy, and I don't get to just run around in tidewater mudflats looking for fishtraps. Sometimes I get to run around mudflats looking at pilings. There is a big project to remove creosote pilings from Puget Sound, but it happens that some are old enough to be historic, and I need to find out which, and document them before they get pulled from the mud (creating the "giant sucking noise Ross Perot talked of). The pilings here, by the way, are basically a corral for logs,, where they would be dumped off a train, awaiting a water voyage to a mill. And it ain't all as easy and fun as it sounds; I will have to go deal with Pile-preservationists, who think that these creosoted voices of the past must be preserved.

And then there are the days when I spend little time on actual water. The first happened on April 2, which dawned cloudless and calm. I drove 3 hours through Seattle and on north, and boarded a state launch at Anacortes. A short run brought us to Secret Harbor (really), on one of the few San Juan Islands that has not been developed. Or not much, anyway. Looking back out of secret harbor, you are treated to a view of Mount Baker, if you are so lucky as to arrive on a clear day, which I was. The photo is lame, but maybe you can sorta see what I mean. Beatific day, by any account. We saw seals, eagles, herons, starfish, kelp, and tolerably few bipeds. Fortunately, the Department plans to restore the ecosystems around Secret Harbor in the wake of logging and some development. Even More Fortunately, they won't just jump into restoration without considering cultural resources, and I will be forced to do further archaeology there in the meantime. Even More More, in walking around with the eco-guys, we figured that the digging I'd like to do to see what the archaeology is will be useful to them in determining what it is they want to restore.

So while I do not live the Life Aquatic like Steve Zisou, I'm doing okay.