Mission Creek, Flowing Again

Once upon a time, Mission Creek (or whatever its name was then), flowed into the Sound just north of Olympia Town. Then some people bridged it, and then some other people dammed it, making a sluice-gate where they could capture the salmon foolish enough to enter.

Then, decades later, some other other people got funding to remove the dam, to open Mission Creek once again to Budd Inlet and the Puget Sound.

Inland finally flowing into Budd Inlet

This is "restoration," which earns its quotation marks because it follows not the historically  or archaeologically or LiDARly documented channel, but instead an engineer's plan. Doing so meant digging into an archaeological site, which had been written off by archaeocrats as less-than-significant. (As it happens, some of that site was salvaged, as described here under the keyword "Mission Creek".)

You're looking at high tide, not stream flow.

So now the stream flows free,...at least as far as East Bay Drive. Maybe the beautiful shell beach will persist, or maybe not. Restoration is a guess what used to be, and a gamble on its return. Contractors get surveyors to show them where the 3:1 slope gives way to the 1:1, and work accordingly. One entity satisfies a mitigation requirement, another satisfies grant requirements, and another gets a truckload of archaeological data. But now the machines are gone; the work is done and paperwork is being wrapped up. Tides and waves, rains and freshets will get to work, re-sculpting this artificial natural estuary.

The end result may not be exactly what was there before, but it's a heck of a lot better than the dam and culvert that blocked Mission Creek until a month ago. There's a free-flowing connection to Budd Inlet instead of a 3-foot concrete tube--creatures will find it much easier to drift, swim, and crawl in and out of the estuary.

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...

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.

Pristine?

Oak savannah, pasturized.

Sometimes, my work brings me together with folks trying to do something called "restoration," by which they mean bringing the local ecology back to it's allegedly natural state, returning the pristine conditions pre-dating human intervention. Like the romantic ideal of Noble Savages, the concept of a totally natural, pre-human landscape is a concoction of minds less sophisticated than they conceive themselves to be.

Fortunately, the effects of Homo sapiens are clear enough in the NW environment that most ecologists recognize it, even if they are not quite ready to let modern humans interlope in preserves. Glaciers covered most of Washington until humans traipsed there, or pulled their umiaks ashore. As the ice retreated, human influence advanced across the land and sea, changing them. Many of you may have read that the Clovis people swarmed over the continent, killing and eating Pleistocene megafauna, perhaps extincting those camels, mammoths, and their ilk in the process. 

But meat ain't sustenance enough. There are vitamins and minerals, trace substances that don't show up in flesh, and people have always recognized that, or we would not be here now. So people pick shoots and dig roots. They gather weeds and harvest seeds to suit dietary needs. In a land where people showed up in glacial aftermath, it defies plausibility to believe that historic plant communities (and the animals that fed upon these) are the result of some pristine proces unsullied by the human touch. The touch that grabbed food and spread seed.

In the maritime Northwest, and in swaths of the interior, meadows and prairies have existed for thousands of years because humans spread fire to keep forests at bay. Savannahs had roots and oaks because people liked to eat carbs and acorns, because people had a hankering for the flesh of small and large four-leggeds with similar appetites.

So it strikes me as odd when "restoration" projects are based on the concept that the human influence should be eliminated. Often as not, the prescription is based on a floral community known from the late historic period or from a testbook, rather than the plants that actually occured on a particular piece of land. In the charcoal of an ancient campfire and in the pollen that fell between plank houses, the material remains of the actual environment is there to be seen, but I'm not sure if this record has ever been consulted.  

To admit that a landscape is not pristine is not to say that the place is defiled, just like not all people who've lost their virginity are craven whores. People in many places, the Northwest among them, learned how to nudge the ecology of a place toward a stasis in which large primates could eat well and the water, fungi, plants, two-leggeds  and four-leggeds could all get along. Sure, some natural successions were cut short, some species prospered at the cost of others, but this no less true in places where humans don't tread. The fact that archaeologists have found camas ovens buried thousands of years before foreigners strode in and found flourishing camas prairies suggests that a balance was achieved. 

Why then would newcomers presume to march in and insist on a "natural" landscape that locks out humans?

Oh Mylar

Washington boasts more geologic, biologic, and cultural diversity than most states. But like all states and throughout itself, there is the commonality of trash.

To this compunction of humans, none more than Americans, to this trail of lost things, abandoned stuff, and outright garbage, to these leavings I owe my livelihood. Even older, wiser cultures left traces, heaps of it in places where they congregated with more than immediate relatives and stayed awhile. We've come a ways since bottoming out on the burning Cuyahoga, but even in 2012, a great many under the spell of Mayan and Christian Apocalypse hucksters, we create trash day in and day out.

It used to be, garbage pretty much stayed around the house. Standard practice in Euro-America was to just toss stuff into the yard. Whatever didn't feed sow, fowl, or microbia got kicked around until disappearing into the brush and eventually the soil (because the microbia will get their way, nearly always). My grandparents were born on farms that dealt with trash by burning it, tossing it in an old cellar, or hauling it off to the swamp-edge of the field. I don't know this for a fact, but in between just throwing stuff out the back door and having it hauled or barged off to god knows where, it's a pretty safe bet that refuse didn't travel too far.

Over the 20th Century, urbanizing America took to hauling rubbish to landfills in some place without clout.  Garbage went global. Not for everyone, but post-WWII American cities extrude waste streams unequaled, eventually across international borders and into the deep blue sea.

And ever since about half past Reagan, into the deep blue sky. In the form of mylar balloons that travel the winds and land far from the crying kids who loosed them. Before mylar, there were rubber ones, but they lose the helium faster and disintegrate a lot faster once they come to ground.


I've seen the flash of a Barney balloon in sagebrush and deep in the woods. Mylar emblazoned with princesses and "Happy Birthday" and "Get Well Soon" and "I Bought You Something That Will Soon Be Trash" turns up everywhere. Most of the state is more or less downwind of the population centers, but I don't know that they all come from Pugetopolis. One day, it would be nice to find one from Japan, I guess. 


As long as future archaeologists are able to identify these as helium balloons, they shouldn't be too confused. Except maybe to wonder what sort of ritual or status display led people to release so many tacky balloons into the winds. If mylar proves to be durable over the long run, it may be another chronological marker of our post-Classic period, before crazy excess went back to being rare. 

There may be a fairly sharp end date for mylar balloons, since helium is bound to become more expensive. That's at least partly because alleged Democrat Bill Clinton signed a 1996 law privatizing the industry and forcing the US Government to sell it's stockpile by 2015. But don't worry, with Texans controlling the reserves and corporations running the show, what could go wrong?

  

Moloka'i on the Columbia?

[Dredged from the Mojourner Truth archives, this was posted first as "Holy Bull" in 2008, back when Hawai'i events like the shutdown of Molokai Ranch orbited closer to my consciousness, and before I'd seen much of anything in the Northwest.]

 

Fear and loathing rains on Moloka`i. The Ranch just shut down, and 120 people lost jobs. Just like wiser people told me, that land trust ain't gonna happen. so neither is the subdivision. Read into that what you wish, for I'm only half-smart, a haole, and not even living Hawai`i nei anymore. I suppose you could count this as a victory for conservation, except that we have no guarantee that the next thing won't be far worse than 200 houses.

Far from there, this week I journeyed back east of the mountains for the first time since my Columbian descent in January. And when I got there, a guy who goes by my middle name took me site-seeing and surveying through a landscape that was Hawaiian-ish. Think Kaluako`i, Moloka`i, but sagebrush instead of kiawe and lantana, and sometimes the red silt is sand. But the same outcrops.

The first non-bovine photo here is also the first site I found in Washington. One of the 10 guys helping us survey cameup with the name "Lone Juniper," and you can see 1/3 from the left, halfway up, the lone juniper. The site is just to the right, and consisted of a couple hammerstones and some lithic debris. [NOTE: Hahahaha. The hammerstones turned out to be just a strange form of weathering. Analogy to Hawaiian artifact forms has limited value here.]

And it's not just the basaltic landscape and lithic scatters that seem familiar. Ahu happen here as well. One like a cupboard re-done to make a fowl-sniping blind, with old branches on top adding a height and cover. Another, closer to the river, has an amazing overview of what may have been the richest salmon river; it also has a nice split boulder, just like them Moloka`i shrines. Maybe us humans is all alike.

Anyhow, perched on one of the ahu was a basalt core (pictured). Fresh, as if some Hawaiian were still worshipping the adze god there. There is a certain clue to this un-altered photo that should tell you whether this is me in the frame.

The day before, we checked out some old farm sites on either side of a road through the plain. Then went up a soil-mantled talus to a little pali with four tiny c-shapes. Each big enough for a sniper, but nothing to stop the enemy from going around behind. not tall enough to be visible from far, or massive enough to support anything. each using outcrop for foundation, on brow above slope. Seen them on Moloka`i, too.

So far from Moloka`i, but still doing Molokine archaeology.