Perpetuating Frank

On Monday, a hero to many of us died. Billy Frank Jr. was a veteran of the fish wars, and although his contributions were many, his efforts a big part of achievements in tribal fishing rights, protection of salmon, and environmental stewardship, he was fighting an uphill battle all the way.

Up until the day he died, it turns out, when his last installment of Being Frank (his column as head of the NW Indian Fisheries Council) was posted. In his 80's, he was getting up every day and working to improve the fisheries and the environment, benefitting not just the treaty tribes, but all of us. At an age when most of us would hope to be relaxing, he kept pushing.

His will be big shoes to fill. Maybe even too much for one person, but fortunately, Uncle Billy touched the lives of multitudes. Obituaries mentioned his associations with state and federal leaders, with presidents even, and included statements from leaders and luminaries, but he also talked with everyone else. Little school-kids, fishermen, members of many tribes, even the very bureaucrats who could make his life painful. He spoke out for what he knew to be right, for his people and for the rest of us, too.

So all of us should carry on for him. That last article of his I mentioned above was about the dangers of an oil terminal where trainloads of crude could load their cargo onto tankers at Grays Harbor. In addition to his, as always, well-reasoned arguments against permitting such nonsense, let me add my little voice: the dredging and construction required for the project would likely obliterate the ancient remains of fish weirs and other sites left by ancient people who managed fisheries successfuly.

You can add your voice by visiting his post, and heeding his call to comment against this oil terminal and other projects that put our environment at risk. His voice will reverberate for generations, but it is time for us to step up and add our own. 

Silence of the Dams Lifted (Temporarily)

Emergence.

Recently, I walked what had been the bottom of a lake for the past 50 years. A crack had appeared in the dam plugging that stretch of the Columbia, and as a precaution, the lake had been mostly drained. The fat placid bullfrog of a lake became a snake, flaccid flow replaced by rapids.

Shallow soundings, deep sounds

With the water level dropped, rocks and riffles raise their voices.  The Big River (translation of many Tribes' names for the Columbia) sings its song for the first time in decades. Some say that there's a stretch just below the Priest Rapids dam where the river runs free, but for the most part, the Oregon/Washington part of the river (hundreds of miles) has lost its voice in the age of hydro-electric power and irrigation diversion. Hearing riffles and rapids amounts to time travel, and I was lucky enough to hear that past, now. 

One goose says to another...

With the Columbia back in it's channel, creatures from geese to archaeologists walk the flood plain again. Minus the muffling waters, footsteps echo, gravel slips and crunches. The old fords become visible again, instead of dark placid waters crossed only by bridges and damns. 

Threatening to fight, even in death.

On the other hand, dropping the level of a dam lake leaves a lot of creatures accustomed to the sodden past 50 years high and dry. What the photos don't convey is the smell of millions of mussels rotting in the Spring sun, the stench of crayfish turning to rotten goo in their exoskeletons. Weirdly, there was little evidence of gulls and crows Columbia Gorging themselves on this buffet. No wheeling and squawking birds, and the aquatic critters even more silent than usual.

Hopefully, I'll get back again before the dam is fixed, and waters rise again to swallow the roar of rapids, the rhythm of riffles.

More Ice

In my last post, I forgot the bell-bottomed ice-cicles. Not far below the blobular clusters, these stalacticicles dripped from overhanging moss to the stream,...only to be swept away. The terminal drips knocked off again and again, each time a little bit splashed back up to the descending column. What should have tapered, flared.

Fluidity rushing by beneath, while gravitational accretional forms try to grow longer, but only get fatter. Not great photos, and even if they were, not the most amazing of natural phenomena, but I like 'em, and they do not reveal themselves in many of the places where people congregate, so they are all the more special.

Lili's remix: heavily altered, but somehow more true.

Ice Zoom

From 50 miles away, glaciers may gleam, but ice's intricacy is expressed simply as a reflection of the underlying landscape and overlying light. This shot is from Paddle Park in Olympia, but a spate of recent fieldwork (yes, replacing culverts so fish can get through is a good thing; no, it would not be good to take out an archaeological site in the process) got me in the neighborhood of some pretty ice, expressing a few of its many moods.

A cool thing about frozen water is that sometimes you can glimpse the crystal structure on a pretty large scale, no magnification required. Here on this beaver pond, the freezing surface is only a few millimeters thick, but there are lines a couple of feet long, shooting out in all directions, weaving a web over the whole surface. Between the lines, smooth mirrors of the frozen stuff.

On another beaver pond, the glassy interstices were few. The whole surface was adorned with slivers and feathers of ice.

Meanwhile, by a stream, the spray of a small fall gets locked to a twig in blobular clusters. Not crystalline at all to the naked eye, more like ginseng roots or some other living thing.
 

It's the Watershed

Thanks to stevenl on olyblog for posting this down-Deschutes shot. He thinks the postcard dates to the mid-1970s, a time when the Olympia Brewing Company still ran strong, and was so proud of it's beige industrial sprawl they issued this image, rather than the charming old brick building.

Olympia's motto, of course, was "It's the Water," and we do have great water, our artesian wells are famous, delicious, and clean. But surface water is an other story, a sad one, as this shot illustrates.

In the foreground, the Deshutes River, in summertime flaccid flow. Could just be a dead-calm day, but I feel like there's an oil sheen. Maybe not.

As far as the river is visible, the brewery takes up the right bank. Since I'm too lazy to track it down, I don't know what they may have flushed into the river as part of normal operations, but up until about the date of this postcard, when Dick Nixon signed the Clean Water Act (what a liberal!), people and corporations did dump all kinds of things in the water. All this view shows is a treeless bank and acres of impervious surface, which when the rain kicks in will dump huge amounts of runoff compared to what the natural watershed would have, not to mention the sediment, railway grime, and other trappings of civilization.

Which the river then delivers to,...Wait, I cannot see. It disappears on the other side of the Capital Boulevard bridge, past more brewery buildings, over the spillway...I mean Falls, and finally past the old brew house, Olympia's most famous ruin. There's a park on the other bank now, and the old brewery is abandoned. You can kid yourself into thinking it's returning to nature as long as you deafen yourself to the I-5 din.

But really, the Deschutes is about to empty into Capitol Lake. Or, as stevenl calls it, the Fetid Lake Of Doom, or FLOD. Flotsam and sediment from the watershed settle out here. In fact, the muck contains the remains of Little Hollywood (Olympia's Depression-era Hoovertown), and before that a literally marginalized Chinese community, I think. The artificial lake relies on a dam that transformed the original estuary into a pond (yep, the reflection of capitol and trees sure is pretty) with a sluice being the only way out. So the estuary gets buried and eutrophies (yep, the low tides and summer algae blooms sure are ugly).

The postcard more or less hides The Isthmus, site of many a battle in this millenium. Positions on Isthmus development cause the city council to change, parts of it were Occupied, it is home to Olympia's second most famous ruin: the Mistake on the Lake. Walk around the lake, and you'll see signs explaining various positions in the Debate of the Lake: dredge it, restore the estuary, do nothing...There is no sign saying "Isthmus be Hell."

Meanwhile, the lake keeps filling with muck, and the water keeps flowing into Budd Inlet. The head of Budd is divided into West Bay, which is where the Deschutes comes in, and East Bay, which is where a culvert let's loose what's left of Indian and Moxlie Creeks. Most of the city between East and West is built on dredging spoils and fill.

West Bay is undergoing a transformation these days, as the buildings and piers of yesteryear's manufacturing concerns disappear. Some of it is undergoing restoration, as far as a railway embankment can be restored to a natural state. But people are not about to abandon the waterfront entirely, ceding it to nature. So pockets of "beach nourishment" gravel and chained-down "large woody debris" have to coexist with armored shorelines in a state that I will now call Percivaltory, after Percival's Landing on the waterfront.

In the postcard, it looks like there may be log booms in the bay. No more, although the POO (Port Of Olympia) is hopping, putting trucked-in logs on trans-Pacific ships. The watershed's wood (state timber excepted) flows all the way to China. 

It's the Fountain? An Olympia (and Tenino) Mystery Artifact

The front of a font, maybe.

Last Fall, I came across something that other people have probably seen for years, and others have forgotten about for even longer, but it was new and mysteriouis to me. Embedded in an old road berm on the Eastbay shore was a big piece of carved sandstone. Recently, I was around as a city crew pulled it free as they prepare for an environmental restoration project. In decades of archaeologizing, this stands out as one of the biggest and most interesting artifacts I've seen. It also holds a few mysteries.

Now that I've had the chance to look at it a few times, see the dirt it came out of, and talk it over with a few other archaeologists as we examined it, a few things are not so mysterious. Like, it was pretty obviously just dumped here along with concrete, asphalt, and brick rubble, part of the berm that blocked the mouth of a creek; a neighbor thinks the Salmon Club may have been involved, but it is also in a City park, at the bottom of an old road, and may have been deposited by them. I'll get to why I think that may be the case in a bit.

The stone is sandstone, and a partially obliterated inscription on one end is enough to convince me that it came from the Hercules Quarry in Tenino. The top features a square flanked by two octagonal basins, and a tunnel runs through it. There is rust surrounding one side of the opening, indicating that there was a metal attachment there, and along with pipes running from bottom to top, it suggests that this may have been a decorative fountain. The base, beginning immediately below the tunnel through the stone, at first appeared to be sandstones as well, but turns out to be stucco over concrete. The very bottom is unadorned concrete that contains glacial pebbles and bits of shell, more what you'd expect of a locally-mixed batch than what comes from commercial suppliers. More specifically, what you'd expect from a shoreline local batch than Tenino. (Ironically, the development of commercial concrete businesses is what did in the Hercules and other quarries in Tenino.)

The top.

And that's about it for what I know. A once fancy piece of stonework, stripped of metalwork and dumped on the Olympia shoreline. Maybe a fountain, and if my interpretation of the inscription (shown below, after considerable computer enhancement) is correct, it was a presentation piece. It just so happens that the abandoned road heading uphill from this spot leads to the former location of the "Swiss Chalet" that stood in Priest Point Park from not long after it's 1905 founding until the 1950s. Before that, the Chalet had been part of Olympia Brewing Company's pavilion at the Lewis and Clark Expo in Portland. A nicely carved fountain proclaiming a presentation and naming the quarry seems like just the sort of thing that may have appeared in that sort of setting, especially since Olympia Brewing even in those days was stating, "It's the Water."

Or, maybe the Hercules folks presented it to the park. Or, something else. Some sort of Park connection makes sense, though, given the proximity (seems like an awful big stretch to say that some Tenino resident hauled it all the way up here to dump it), and the fact that you need heavy machinery just to move the thing.

"PRESENTED BY HERCULES QUARRY, TENINO WASH" (Guesswork in grey).

Odds are, this modestly monumental stonework, dumped and forgotten for years, is likely to be recycled by the City of Olympia. Maybe placed in the park, or maybe elsewhere, but people once again see it as something interesting, worth using for some better purpose than shoreline armoring. Maybe it could be fixed up and one of Olympia's artesian wells could bubble forth from it.

In the meantime, if anyone out there knows about this, or has photos of the chalet in Portland or in our park, leave a comment and let me know. If I find out anything, I'll write an update. 

Once and Future Islands

Early March found me in the Skagit lowlands, field after field of flat. Not much growing now, just puddles of rain and snowmelt. And maybe the water table coming up. Meanwhile, on NPR, the US Navy's chief meteorologist was being interviewed. The military is not exactly a bastion of liberalness (the policy for left of center personnel is Don't Ask, Don't Tell, with no end in sight), but when it gets down to brass tacks (or shell casings) they don't have a lot of patience for cockamamie right wing theories that fly in the face of science. A lot of math was developed with trajectories in mind; physics, chemistry, and materials science are at the heart of many a weapons system. Communications, surveillance, keeping copters and jets in the air,..the list of military needs that won't work on the basis of Creationism or Faith goes on and on.


This extends to long term planning, which is where the admiral came in. A scary proportion of Republican congressmen may deny the existence of global warming, but the US Navy sure as hell doesn't. They know that the sea is rising, and that the rate could suddenly increase if and when the Greenland ice reaches a tipping point and starts flowing into the sea at more than the accustomed glacial speed. They know that this will bring them headaches ranging from submerged and storm-battered bases to increased geopolitical stress and strife as populations migrate inland and fresh water tables are salinated. I'm sure the admiral would love to believe that it won't happen, but he knows better.


The low fields of western Skagit county have tasted the ocean before, and will again. The hills that poke up through the coastal sediments, long seen by farmers as intrusions into an otherwise nice field, will once more become islands. The dikes that have held back the Salish Sea will be gobbled by it, deltas will erase levees and fan out. 


All this in a blink of a celestial eye, a tic of geological time. The far-flung flats are no older than the last glaciation, anyway. The waters of the straits and sounds, seemingly so protected from the ocean and buffered by islands, rise and fall with wild abandon in just the short time that humans have been here. Not entirely because of water being frozen and then released, either. The land itself rises and falls as glacial weights pile on and flow away, as the oceanic plate plows beneath the continent, as faults give way. Some of the San Juan islands bob up rather gently on the rebound after glaciers leave, while others were thrust up suddenly from deep in the earth during subduction zone quakes that dwarf anything humans can recall. 


The Japanese quake and tsunami remind us that cities can be erased suddenly, landscapes altered in a day. (The geologists' office where I work displays a quote from Will Durant, "Civilization exists by geologic consent, revocable without notice.") The climate's change promises us a less obvious, but far more widespread, alteration of our earth. We humans, clinging to the coast, are in for some hard lessons, especially if we insist on denying what is demonstrably true because it does not comport with short term political goals or a particular religious outlook. Reality won't wait for the slow-witted, and even if they manage to make an ark, their drifting voyage will find whatever shores it may reach already occupied by people who operated not on faith, but on knowledge.

Backroads: 14 Gorge Power Maximum

 A couple of entries ago, I got us on the road, climbing 14 upriver past cascades, through the Cascades.

The range took its modern name from the falls of the Columbia. As a whole, not as high as it's iconic volcano peaks: Tahoma (and its many spellings, including Rainier), Baker, Adams, Hood, and pre-blast Saint Helens. But it's still thousands of feet higher than the river, a mile of basalt to cut through to get to the lowlands and taste that sea.

Ergo gorge. Gashing into one of the world's largest lava flows, the big river relentlessly seeks sea, beating through rock to reach that salty embrace.

Route 14, rails, and trails all use the river's path. It's the flattest route, the furthest inland. My mind's blown, hundreds of miles inland, the river is still only hundreds of feet above sea level. In the last century, people dammed most of it, drowning the cascades, but also allowing boat traffic. Barges haul immense loads up and down the aquatic path.

The dams also harvest electricity, scraping electrons, smiling over spilt water. It beats burning coal (though plans are afoot to start shipping our coal to Asia, which is upwind,...brilliant), but the damns were pretty bad for the salmon people.

Another thing that likes to travel the gorge is the air. Cold air sinking across the winter plateau drops into a creek, a river, and finally the river. Oceanic storms push wet air into that Cascadian gap. The winds are legendary. Chinook winds bring spring, thaw the land. Gorge winds suck in world-wide windsurfers, fill the sails of tourism entrepreneurs, and all manner of metaphoricity.



Meanwhile, back in the real world, people discovered that they could scrape electrons off the wind. Oh, and make money. Turbines have sprouted rapidly, lately, and scouts scour the land, anonemeters in hand, looking for the next place to plant a wind farm. The ones in the photo here were cranking. 130-foot blades, tips moving 200 feet per second. They do a number on unlucky birds, and it takes a lot of bulldozed roads to erect and service these things. No energy is pure green, but like hydro, this one doesn't require overseas warfare. 

Wind and water flowed through the gorge as long as it existed, flowed so it could exist. Tales of raven and the other animal people tell how long ago they deciedd that the river should only flow one way, but river road Route 14 lets you go either way. Not quite as fast as the windmill tip, but a heck of a lot faster than the first 15 millenia of human travel in this ancient path.

Backroads: 14 Fog on the Columbia

Route 14 follows the Columbia along its north bank from near the mouth on up to the first big bend. How is a road following the Columbia River, one of the major arteries of North America, a back road? A road about a century old in its current path, laid down aside major rail lines even older, paving trails used by tribes since, as they say, "time immemorial," and before then by all manner of megafauna for whom time ended.

How? The interstate across the river in Oregon. I-84 is the choice of people who want to think that they are getting upriver fast, who feel slowed down when denied a choice of lanes, who want their travel tableau to be blurred and interdicted by semi trailers. More than once, people have looked at me with concern or pity when I say I'm taking Route 14 instead, asking if I know about the real highway across the river.

Last week I headed upriver on 14 from Vancouver, not at the mouth of the river, but in the tide's grip. On that day, nearly strangled in a fog. Up through Camas and Washougal, its white blanket interwoven with tendrils of pulp mill stink. But soon enough, winding through oak, gnarling dendritic silhouettes grasping handfuls of a cleaner fog, holding it to the earth.

My feelings on this are fuzzy. The fog can be cold and dreary, obscurationist curtailer of vistas, curtain shutting out the sun. Or it can be a coccoon, silken pod in which to meditate, swallower of clatter. I wrote about this then.

So popping up out of this into the sun could go either way. Freed from the drabness, exposed to the glare. Whatever. Nature carries on, regardless of whatever metaphor little humans want to paint onto it.

Beacon Rock and its trail (1777 steps to the top, last time I checked), wrapped in fog, is beautiful. From I-84 you can look across the river and see the rock, unless it's foggy and then all you see is guardrail.

Further up the river and into the day, the fog began to burn off. I got to see the end of it, lifting off the river, pushed down from the sun on top, thinning to a tongue, lick receding back down river, not wetting the sere plateau.

Backroads: Blue Slough

Head west, Olympian, on the ever-narrowing free way up I-5, stay right and swing onto 101, veering off to 8, crossing the black firested hills. Coming down into flat fields and eventually you find yourself on a road called Route 12, advancing on the sprawl of Aberdeen. The city's welcome sign says "Come as You Are," Nirvana fans.

And then suddenly you're on 101 again. Somehow you skipped driving around the Olympic peninsula, which means you have gained a good part of a day. Thank me later.

South across the Chehalis, writhing through miles of mud. Alder and cedar swamp. But you cross a river filled and dredged, urbanized. The ancient salmon weirs and piles for piers, piles for booming, and piles for every other purpose you can think of become entombed in mud or rot and contribute to a cargo of wood from twig to buttswell that rides this river seaward.

And then when the tide shifts, the wood drifts back inland. Into the river, its branches and limbs, its sticks and twigs.

Crossing the river was a beginning toward leaving that, though before doing so you pass through a town with one of my favorite names: Cosmopolis.

Hang a left onto Blue Slough road. That rhymes, in case you're not  familiar with Middle English landscape terms. It refers to a mire, a muddy place, often a river inlet, sometimes tidal. Blue Slough and its ilk nearby meet all of these conditions. The road is a narrow two laner, alder thicketedly woven into the mudflats on one side, a coarse blanket that must ripple during earthquakes and maybe some storms.

The effect of driving through in winter is a smear of grey. (So was the urban part, come to think of it, but I like that as whole lot less.) The clouds either just dark or flirting with lighter, but often brightening no more than an overcast day's glare on the thinned of diesel-sheened mudflat. The alders, buds just starting their spring blush, closer up and whipping by in what still ends up more blur than color. In the occasional house, people warm themselves with woodfires, their smoke smudging further the already greyny picture.

Stop, though, and color has time to compose itself, to make a showing. Down in the bottomland, trees shredding the wind high above you, the ground air motionless. A red fisherman's bobber, dropped in the sedges by a high tide. Patches of shamrocks, dappled or spotlit as the canopy whim decides.

Several times I've made this drive. The road is the wrong way to experience the place. A canoe would be much better. Ride the tide up Blue Slough, or maybe Preachers Slough now that it's not blocked by a culvert. Twist through the floodplain, maybe see some swamp mystery and live to tell about it. Get watched by eagles above and who knows what below in the muddy water. Slow down, drift, lift the veil.

Even More Complicated Once You Smoke It?

Obama just echoed a sentiment familiar to Washington government workers, about the need to simplify government. His favorite example (for some reason, Barak was not g-droppin' tonight, and curt intellect never plays well to the dullards who sit in both chambers, so he went with the sincere-sounding emphasis of certain words, heavily voiced but soft, vocalingus), his favorite example of what needs to be fixed is that the US Department of Interior regulates salmon in Fresh Water, while the Department of Commerce deals with them in salt water. And then the punchline, "I heard it's even more complicated once you smoke it."

Indeed, as any smoker can tell you.

Now, given that the US courts have also ruled that the treaty tribes get 50% of the salmon. Plenty of tribes here spend a lot of resources on salmon, have hired a lot of the best fisheries scientists. Hmm. So the question arises, if the US gov and the Native people have equal shares, why not let them take the lead? It may not be that complicated.

As any fish smoker can tell you.

Salmon cooked over alder in the thick of a run, or smoked and enjoyed long after the mudflat critters had disappeared the last spawned-out carcass, is simply good. This fall I had some, courtesy of the Nisqually Tribe, and as the guys were cooking them, I was wondering what generation they were to be doing basically the same thing on this river. Not far away is a 5000+ year old site, which would be 200 generations at 25 years per. Could easily be a lot more. I'm going with that recipe.

Alls I'm sayin' is, if people could manage to feed themselves for that long, managing to have enough salmon come back year after year for thousands of years (before 20th century fisheries regularly wiped themselves out), maybe those people should not just be asked to offer an opinion on how the feds want to run fisheries, maybe it should be the other way around for a while.

So Mr. President, I feel your pain, I know how you want to look less governmenty, and I offer you this advice: Seize the salmon by his tail, and toss him to the sovereign Tribal Nations. Simplify government.

Cool Ease



Once were glaciers. There still are, for now, just not this low, not this south. But their tracks reach halfway down from the pole, evidence of past sprawl.

For a long time, "glacial" has meant slow. A glacial pace excruciates and frustrates, witholds fruition until long after you've lost interest. To some it's majestic, stately, an inspiring slow march across ages.

Of course we know that to be bullshit now, and although the concept of glaciers as slow may hang on among english majors and other metaphor junkies, scientists who've studied this kind of earth artistry now know just how fast a glacier can move. In our warmed atmosphere, they can break up quickly, mile after mile of what appeared to be a solid block of ice fracturing, sliding, turning into mush in a single summer. Beneath their stoic mantles, river rush and rage. And in the cores that remain solid (for now), strata of long-fallen snow tell about sudden onsets of ice ages, rapid accumulations, quick thaws.

Here in the northwest, especially in the sere interior, areas bare of towering forests and other rock-swallowing greenery, geology speaks of other glacial speed. Glaciers here once held enormous lakes, icy fastness damming inland seas. As the climate warmed, water sought the weak points, runnning off the top, tunneling through cracks and voids, shimmying beneath, pioneering trickles searching for opening to turn the vast potential energy of the impounded water kinetic and free. Lake Missoula, about 200 miles long and holding something like 500 cubic miles of water, let rip and carved out the canyons we call coulees. Rock formations downstream held back water for a time, but the lake drained in a couple of days, and rock cannot hold up to that forever, a couple hundred square kilometers of it gave way, turning the once broad expanses of the laval plateau into a tracery of coulees grand and miniscule.

The floods happened when people were still a new and naturalizing species in the new world. I can see them, living in a good spot along the river, enjoying the bounty of an unspoiled landscape, and then feeling the earth shake, hearing a roar, and then being wiped out by a wall of water. Throughout the Columbia watershed, the best human habitat was ripped apart. The archaeologist in me weeps not just for the people who were swept away, crushed by boulders, and drowned, but also for the earliest sites, obliterated. (Of course, there must also be some sites, located in a lucky lee or a high bench that only got a blanket of sand and silt, where entire Pleistocene camps must have been buried intact.)

But once the ice sheets ceded the lower latitudes and no ice dams held more potential cataclysms, the coulees remained. Over time, the interior dried out, and the canyons became oases, protecting streams and ponds from wind and sun, collecting mountain snowmelt, thunderstorm runoff, percolating rain of yore. 

Above, scabland lava, sagebrush, fields of glacial till. Deer instead of mastodons, solitary sage grouse instead of sky-darkening flights of fowl.  Beautiful in its way, and far short of desolation, but plenty of dessication to go around. People traversed this country, hunted some, found patches of roots to eat, but it was sunburnt and windswept.

Far better to retreat to the protection of a coulee. Here there was water, and waterfowl, and all the critters who come to drink...and feed the people. Here grew moisture loving plants that could not survive up top: food, medicine, fiber, mats, and so many materials vital to the organic age. Here was escape from the relentless wind, a place where fire can be tamed and live in a hearth and that had more wood to burn in the first place. Here, flood-ripped canyon walls exposed tool rock, flood deposits made easy picking for cooking and sweatlodge rocks. Here, labyrinths well known to locals afforded escape from marauders, ambushes for hunting, secret and secluded spots for communing with the spirits. The great coulees, Grand and Moses and others, became highways as bipeds grew in number and eventually reintroduced horses.

Cool. Ease.

Abyssal Vent

*

In an effort to educate my deprived children--they have no broadcast or cable TV to tell them what's what--I recently introduced them to the 20th Century nature show, complete with the voice of David Attenborough. Regrettably, it was just his voice, no shots of his cavorting about the globe in old-school high tops.

I say 20th Century, although Blue Planet was aired in 2001, and I may as well address that discrepancy before some bored and bitter internerd acts like he noticed it first. To begin with, a year or two off ain't nothing in the scheme of things, and for an archaeologist it's dead-on. Second, the images you see on there are 20th Century, you only watched it later, you moron; editing and all the post production takes time. Third, and really the only important point in the bunch: Blue Planet is a decent nature show, a species that arose and flourished in the last century, but is in grave danger of extinction now.

And even if they make their way to a house or hotel with cable TV, the kids aren't likely to run across a similar beast. In the doddering final quarter of the last millenium, demigods like Attenborough and Page narrated masterpieces of the nature show genre while the rest of civilization fell, finally landing in the ilk of shark week, cryptozoology, and extreme animals. They read scripts laden with actual information founded in science, scripts with the confidence to sit silent while clever editing and sublime photography (itself patient and informed enough to be at the right place at the right time) conspired to tell the tales.

Anyway, we sat there watching the episode on the deep, dwellers in the dark zone. Benthic beasties beyond the reach of the sun, subsisting on the droppings of the well-lit seas above. Browsing the drifts of marine snow, filtering morsels and motes flung down toward them by currents, ambushing and hunting each other. But ultimately, or so we though and were taught through most of the last century, ultimately all life depended on the sun. Critters with no notion of the sun depended on its by-products for life, and when its flame faltered, all would perish.

Wrong.

If you got National Geographic you knew by 1980, if you were a marine biologist you knew earlier (maybe), but the glacial pace of textbook revision in the age of paper made sure that nobody else knew about this fact for many more years: along the great oceanic rift zones occurred some vents spewing hydrogen sulfide that were teeming with life. Polychaete worms, vast mats of bacteria, mussel beds, weird crabs (which is saying a lot),...all of these freaks living off of chemical energy. No sun, no photosynthesis, no herbivores, a food chain completely unlinked from all the others.

Then, a few years later, abyssal surveys in the Gulf of Mexico found "cold seeps," chemicals oozing up through the ocean floor to form lakes, their shores lined with communities of extremophiles, creatures capable of sucking life from methane, which I hope you will pronounce in the Attenboroughian way, "MEE-thane." [And yeah, I said 'lake' and 'methane,' o ignant internerd, because at that depth, the gases stay liquid.]

I have not yet heard how these unique ecosystems, having freed themselves from the vagaries of topside weather and the thousand other risks up there, have coped with the Deepwater Horizon Spill. Just when you've perfected the art of living off one kind of poison, along come a river of something else. Damn, evolution used to be easier before the humans got out of hand.

Anyway, as I am sure you can all see by now, the point of this whole entry is of course this: Life can arise where the sun don't shine, it can live on farts alone. And if sulfurous exhudations and mee-thane are all it takes to support a rich community of creatures, then long after the sun goes cold, life will hang on tenaciously around my own abyssal vent. There is hope beyond that most frightening of ends.

Assuming my supply of beans holds out.

* Oh, and since I don't get down there much myself, I lifted the photo of some extremophiles from:
(2005) Tubeworm May Live Longer by Cycling Its Sulfur Downward. PLoS Biol 3(3): e108. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030108

River James

I started this blog a couple of years ago starting upstream against the James, and there is always part of me that will live there, or at least in the Tuckahoe swamp feeding its flow. The headwaters, frigid eddies and snow-rafts heading downstream under dim-winter grey, were the last I’ve seen of that river where I once canoed, swam, waded, and kept a wary eye out for snakes.

Lately, though, as I followed a blog (http://300songs.com/2010/09/28/55-james-river-cracker-and-camper-van-beethoven-richmond-virginia/) by the songwriter and adoptive Richmonder David Lowery, the river has flooded back into my consciousness. That blog started as a way to explain his 300 songs, give them some context spin and stories, but it has spawned some interesting essays on cultural geography, on the natural and man-made material underpinnings of music and lifeways. “James River” is one of those songs.

James as in Jamestown, as in centuries of arterial flow (rum and sickle cells upstream, moonshine and tobacco downstream), as in a city’s flusher, as in a swath of wild through so-called civilization. Lowery recognizes in its neglected banks and muddy water the “elegant decay” of a defeated Southern capital. For all the talk of rednecks and junkies and that, you can tell he loves the place. Sometimes, at least.

Richmond is where it is because of the Falls; it lies on the toe of the Piedmont foot, or if you want to look at it another way, the promontory above Tidewater’s swampy expanse. Just like Alexandria (DC being a modern invention by Virginia standards) and Fredericksburg. All these Falls cities had their ports, and it’s tempting to thing that’s the end of it, cities just automatically spring up at the point where merchant ships had to stop and unload.

That probably explains why the settlement lasted, but not why it appeared. The English set up near the falls because that’s where Wahunsenacawh held court. The Spaniards who didn’t stay too long called him Carlos, I think, and the new batch of Europeans took to calling him Powhatan. His homeland was to the north on a smaller river, but once he’d fought, married, and politicked his way to the apex of a large confederation, he headed to the James. What he called it, I have no idea, but the first English just called it Powhatan’s River before they came up with the original idea of naming it for their bible-revising king.

Wahunsenacawh wasn’t there because he had deep draft merchant ships, although the logic of stopping at the falls holds true for canoes. Maybe he didn’t want to be too far from the Chickahominy just downstream, a tribe who stood out in the region for their democratic system of government and widely feared warriors—double threat to a guy like W. Probably he wanted to control the flow of trade between coast and interior. Definitely he did not want to live way downriver at some hellhole like Jamestown Island, with its bad water and malarial swamps.

Oh, and the precondition to all that commerce and politics: a river spawning huge runs of fish. I won’t quote the 16^thcentury shamster bit about walking across the river on their backs. That’s frickin’ ridiculous, and it saddens me to see so-called historians repeat false claims intended to trick people into putting money or themselves into the Virginia venture. But there were unimaginably more fish than now, and of course a bunch of them would run into the falls, creating a major harvest locus.

Anadromous fish excel in excess capacity, and so large annual harvests are possible without killing them off. The humans coming to get the fish would have swelled the population during certain months, and would have had some impact on water quality, especially if a downpour came after they’d done a big burn eroded gullies and caused a pulse of ash and mud. So was the river in its pristine pre-human state when English colonists set foot on the river their progeny would one day dump kepone into? No, but it was likely in an evolutionary, ecological balance.

The river in those days could be a boundary, but nowhere near as much as when Europeans came along. The great chief’s influence didn’t go north of the Potomac, and of course there have always been beefs between left and right bankers on any river, but all it takes is a look at the names of Tribes to know that they saw rivers as centers more than as edges: Chickahominy, Mattaponi, Pamunkey,…

Now, rivers divide counties, states, nations. The James separates Henrico (no Spanish pronunciation in this honorific for Henry, you either say hen-RYE-co, or if you are old and local enough, Hen-RUKkah) and Chesterfield. The line it wrought on maps and in minds of Euro-Americans was frought with various worries and prejudices. Although the City of Richmond annexed part of the south long ago, the power and money generally stick to the north. Long before there were railroads and wrong sides of tracks, ‘South Side’ was a slur.

Maybe this stemmed from racism, the south bank of the James near Richmond being one of the few places where free blacks could live. Or maybe it’s geography, south of the river being the ever-broader coastal plain, lots of creeks and swamps (culminating in the great Dismal Swamp) but not enough rivers to connect with the wide world. In time, Southside sprouted manufacturing and chemical plants, refineries, and neighborhoods for the workers. The owners of these concerns settled in a way that reflected US history: labor and resources extracted from the south fed opulence in the north, which kept expanding westward. Just as Southside brings forth visions of smoke and white trash, a Richmonder understands that West End means wealth (and pretensnobbery).

I grew up in that westward expansion. I knew that as a recently fatherless girl, during the Depression, my grandmother had helped run a boarding house in Richmond, but the truth is that neither of my parents grew up there; they arrived in the late-1960s and decided that the West End had better schools, so I ended up growing up in suburbia. I remember no other place before.

Yet, still in reach of the river. We’d hear the trains on the James, played there from time to time. My dad’s work was not far from one of the bridges. On rare but indelible days, winds from the southeast would waft the warm sweet spice of curing tobacco from Shockoe Slip right up to my nose.

A nose that knew the stink of swamp and the danks of copses. Across the street from our house, there was another row if identical houses, and then Tuckahoe, the James trib separating Henrico from Goochland Counties. The placename refers to an aquatic plant whose tubers formed a crucial foundation in whatever Food Pyramid was promulgated by Wahusenacawh’s Department of Health. One of those taro-like plants that occurs in every tributary of the James, in sloughs and swamps everywhere through that country. And before a succession of tobacco, corn, coal mining, and real estate development took over, I imagine some patches were cultivated, others were half-wild reserves, and a few went feral. Our swamplands were once breadbaskets.

But all those things did happen, and the woods I walked were thick with greenbriar and honeysuckle vines, mostly under thick hardwood canopy. Step in the wrong place, and the mud would suck off your shoe, poison ivy would baste you with time-delayed blistery misery, cottonmouth or copperhead would strike, or worse. A few times it froze hard enough to venture off the trails and onto the ice, but always with the fear of falling through. When it finally did happen, someone got a boot-full of water and muck, but nothing worse, and we grew out of some fear.

One time me and my friend were walking through these woods when we came upon something worse: 4 boys coming the other way. At their head was a guy who was fairly big and thought of himself as a strong guy, being just bright enough to know he’d never be the smart guy. We’d met at a log crossing The Ditch, a mucky gash dumping the neighborhood storm drains into Tuckahoe swamp. I stepped on and so did he, and in the middle he grabbed my walking stick and tried to twist it from my grip or me from the log. Neither succeeded, and I don’t even remember who got to cross first. Just the rush of adrenalin, a stalemate, and then cracking up when he solemnly uttered, “You’re strong. I admire that.” Like in some old melodrama about days of chivalry or some such crap delivered in a fake English accent.

Meanwhile, I was thinking, “You’re a fatass.”

Turns out the guy’s family were Southsiders.

And so this entry ends with no summary, no pith. Just me taking a break.

Holy Water! (said like Robin in the Batman TV show)

It's half past noon on Sunday, and the vast parking lot of the church at the end of our road is empty. The lot filled up for an hour, shuttle buses brought people from satellite lots, then everyone left. Some come back on Saturday for something or other, but for the most part people seem convinced that popping in for an hour is all they need to attain salvation. Oh, that and tithing to the church.

This particular place is called Church of the Living Water, but Church of the Killing Irony would be better, since they paved over a spring to build the place. More than an acre of impervious roof and asphalt, and so of course there's a big bulldozed basin intended to mitigate the damage to the wetland, or at least catch some of the storm runoff they create. By way of landscaping, there are parking lot islands of grass and some trees, and a genteel kill zone of pure grass on the street wide. Pure, luxurient grass and nary a weed in sight, which of course means hefty doses of chemicals. These run off into 18th street and eventually down to Indian Creek, a waterway as abused by the American experience as the people it's named after.

And this outfit has the gall to proclaim itself Church of the Living Water.

Of course, truth be told, the Lutherans, as old a Christian church as you can get without sticking to the original Catholic brand, have recently expanded their church (a block away) and also had to dig a big stormwater 'pond' (yay government!). There's is nicer looking, having some shrubs instead of just weeds.

Meanwhile, a block or so in the other direction, the Jehovah's Witnesses just started on a new Kingdom Hall. Ripped out some trees and of course all the blackberries a few weeks before they would have ripened. For two solid months now the construction crew has showed up, pushed dirt around, and left for random lengths of time. Basically all they've done is make their wetland pit. Last week they put down straw and hydro-seeded it. Which, in case you are not privy to landscaping terms means they pulled up with a tank truck full of water, chemicals, grass seed, and green dye, and sprayed it over the ground. The least natural and most ungodly way imaginable to make something grow.

It will work, establishing a hideous alien monocrop that will, chemical warfare aside, turn host to whatever other weeds drift in. I'm hoping for blackberries, personally, as a sign that even if god doesn't mind having flocks out trashing all Creation, at least evolution can achieve balance, or at least a bit o irony.

Maybe, maybe not. Better odds than hoping for a vengeful lord to smite the Church of the Living Parking Lot, though.

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.