Tidewalker 2013

Remains of an old fish trap in Squaxin country.

In a week or so, there will be another few days of fairly low tides, but already the minus-3's are a memory. I didn't get out for as many as I had hoped this summer, but I did manage to explore in Birch Bay on Memorial Day, to train some people in the extreme south Sound the next month, and spend another day on another bay in the north Sound.

Clamming near Chimacum

While everyone else is out clamming, I'm wandering around looking for fire-cracked rocks and fishtraps. Some of them tend to be suspicious: a guy in an orange safter vest, taking notes and shooting photos, not digging clams. Must be a game warden or regulator or something. But if I don't approach and ask to count their haul, or if I make small talk and then move on, they just think it's weird, an incredible waste of time. I'll admit that there are times when I'm walking by siphon after squirty siphon, leaving tasty clams in the mud, getting nothing but wet.

Following the clammers is a good strategy for tidewalking archaeologists, though. They dig holes and turn up the sediment, giving me a view. It's a less controlled version of the "shovel probes" that provide the bulk of archaeological subsurface data. From our chats, I often learn about what shellfish do well at a spot (a proxy view of traditional subsistence), and sometimes hear about artifacts people have found while digging the intertidal. Seeing the number and extent of holes from any given low-tide day also helps put in perspective on what an "intact" archaeological deposit is below the high water mark.

Fertility in Lummi Land

Truth is, I don't find a lot of archaeology doing this (although finding the occasional fish trap more than makes up for the usual monotony). Plenty of other things--like this mass of eggs stuck to a rock, or the Van Gogh swirl of eelgrass, or a boulder coated with colossal barnacles--plenty of amazing sights distract me from the lack of sites. A day hitched to the rythm of the tide, timing a walk to skirt the furthest reach at the lowest of ebb, movinng ahead of the flow and covering as much ground as I can, a day in synch like that can be deeply satisfying. Some days, the water is reflecting blue sky, and others everything is a cold metal grey; both have their appeal. Even when a cold rain pelts, I know that in an hour or three, the tide will push me back, I'll get in a warm dry truck, and drive back to a hot shower.

The other time of deep low tides, in the middle of the night in the middle of the Winter, is dark enough that I can rationalize not going out to archaeologize. I make no claim to being anything other than a fair weather tidewalker. Other than flaunting the small chance that one day I'll wander into some mud and get stuck as the tide comes in, there's not much swash or buckle to it. Mostly, there is no excitement, but some day I'll find an amazing artifact, and the few fish traps that have revealed themselves when the tide lays low have been professional reward enough. Someday, though, I may need to bring a bucket and come home with some clams...

It's the Water(shed)

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.

Some Salish Sea Beaches

Where the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca meet the Sound of Puget, the tides rushing in and falling out swirl round myriad peninsulae, islands, and rocks. On the rise, they reverse the course of even the mighty rivers twice a day, pushing into inlets and sloughs, fjords and marshes. As streams and rivers deliver sediment by the daily mote and occasional landslide, as bluffs calve and slump down to the shore, the tides grab rock and sand, smudging it around each cliff and dune, softening the drop into the deep. Carbon in the forms of leaves, seaweeds and logs rides tides and storms to the high water mark, adding to the littoral, the liminal that separates and unites land and sea: the beach.

Slow that story down, stretch each hour to a millenium or two, and it plays out with tides of ice. Glaciers carved out much of the sea, drowned land under grinding flows and ebbs. Each advancing lobe plows deeper while the sheer weight pushes the bedrock down. When the climate warms, the glaciers retreat, barfing collosal slurries of meltwater, rock and grit as they do. Freed of the weight and exposed to Northwest rains, the land beneath rebounds and erodes downstream. Sometimes, the glacial pace speeds up with a rushing river beneath the ice, or collapse of an ice dam that unleashes great lakes all at once.

On either scale, rocks and organics end up along the shore and on the floor of the Salish Sea.

Meanwhile, the sea sends up it's contribution. Creatures crawl up, seaweeds drift in and hold fast. All those rocks become covered with coatings of single-celled organisms, draped with flaccid primitives, crawled over by critters with exoskeletons, all while the clams and their kin burrow down and spit up sand (all of them poop, or die, or both, adding to the beach). On a low tide, the land normally hidden by the sea's glare and motion emerges, occupied over every inch in stark contrast to the plain plane of water we normally see on the calm Salish Sea. No wonder the local people have always said that when the tide is out, the table is set.

Set the table these days with these beach denizens, and you may find people saying that they ate already. Let Bourdain eat the barnacles, or that thumbheaded Bizarre Foods guy enjoy the salty cartilige-covered-in-slime texture of the limpet (well OK, Hawaiians will take the latter with gusto, but for the most part, moderns have narrowed down the list of edible shellfish to a handfull). But look at the species spread in many an old shell midden, and what you find is diversity closer to what lived on the beach than what a modern table holds. That's what happened when people needed the beach and it's life in order to live themselves; that's how it was before oyster and geoduck became conspicuous and expensive consumption.

Of course, seeing these old sites has become harder. More than a century ago, many were dug up and hauled away to burn the shell for lime, or fed to chickens to make their eggshells harder, or just piled up in dikes to "reclaim" the marshes that fed previous generations. Later, people took to armoring the shoreline, strangling natural beaches beneath fill and junk while what once stretched in front was washed away. People who believe that they own a piece of the earth want to build right up to the line, and in so doing wiped away that magical stretch of neither-land-nor-water that any good beach embodies.

For a variety of reasons, the Northwest has escaped widespread sea level rise thus far, but it will not forever, and future storms will wipe away the archaeology that could tell us how people adapted to previous changes in climate. A shift in the winds, a subduction zone quake, and the wisdom of millenia calves away, pulling certain kinds of knowledge out of reach. I've seen coastal sites that are within a few storms of disappearing entirely. Meanwhile, the agency responsible for archaeology has poured resources into studying buildings on the shore and promoting them as tourism magnets, with no perceivable effort to document and learn from the older coastal sites and what they could mean for our well-being and survival.

Beaches will always exist (they will replace the buildings when we are gone, surely as the tides will continue to flow and ebb), but the beaches that we can learn from, the ones that tell the stories of how people dealt with climate change or tsunamis, for example, are eroding, their creatures thinned to a faint shadow of their former abundance and diversity by the ongoing acidification and extinctions.