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.

The Taut Arc of the Dammed

Wires upon wires

A civilization's trajectory says a lot about it. Ours shows signs of being on the decline, with leaders who make Nero look effective and a weird hybrid of entertainment and religion that makes the bloody sacrificial rites of Aztec temples seem fairly rational. Some say we have reached great heights from our 1776 Declaration, or perhaps rocketed more steeply still off the ruins of 1945 Europe and Japan. That is too grand a scale for me, though, and I'd like to look at a smaller piece, at and arc that expresses American destiny through domination of our vast natural birthright: dams.

Other than a year in the realm of the Tennessee Valley Authority, I never lived near dams or gave them much thought. There, far from any salmon run, too close to the mushroom shadow of the Oak Ridge nuke labs and only at a middling distance from Appalachia's squalorous Depression history, the dams seemed fairly benign. I preferred playing in the small un-dammed creeks and streams, rills full of salamanders, but a sweep of flat impounded water next to a grassy park manicured by federal crews could be soothing after months of living with horizons hidden by trees and endless Smoky Mountain ridges. The cheap electricity helped hold poverty at bay.

Thousands of miles west and decades later, I entered dammed country once again. Older and more ambiguity-prone, it's a little harder for me to see them as simply good. Sure, they crank out the megawatts with none of the coal smoke or uranium leaks that plague other power generating schemes. But then again, they displaced people from their ancient homes, cut off the salmon from their up-river breeding pools, and drowned fruitful valley land.

Water, Gimme Water

The arcs of dams are many, and though the results transformative, none is the steep parabolic trajectory ascribed to America by hyperbolic boosters. Like the dip of the lines stretching between poles marching away from the turbines or the shallow arch of each segment in an irrigation pivot, the trajectory of dams is shallower than the water behind them.

The grandest of dams are concavities of concrete, water-weight pushing them firmly into place, plugging rapids and canyons. The technology of power generation has been refined, but the basic concept remains the same: let water drop through turbines, tubes filled with curved blades shifting current from water to wire. And the lines stretch out into the country, thousands upon thousands of little copper arcs sway between poles until finally they dive to ground in towns, allowing people and their enterprises to spread away from the drowned valleys.

Pipes and pumps, siphons and canals suck up the gathered waters of Cascadian rains and snows, and send them fieldward. Most of the water from Grand Coulee and the other primary dams flows through, but the small percentage diverted by the Columbia Irrigation Project through thousands of miles of canals big and small still waters nearly 700,000 acres of land that would otherwise be desert, and the plan allows for over a million acres. But by the time the final 300,000+ acres get water, some of the original acreage will be salted from years of irrigation and fertilization. Check out the soapy scum around the reservoirs, the crusty accumulation on rocks in the crop circles. Irrigated deserts always follow the same arc from barren to miracle and back. Ashes to ashes, soil to salt. Loess and less.

As an archaeologist, I've seen arcs abandoned, the scummy rings at the high water mark of civilization advanced and receded. The woods are webbed with old power lines ending at a pile of ketchup bottles and foundations where a logging town boomed and busted. Etched in the arid plateau are crop circles plowed, irrigated, and let go in less than a lifetime. At the acme were a million board feet or potatoes, extracted from a land then considered unworthy of continued human presence. It must have seemed spectacular as the trains hauled out log after log or when bumper crops trucked off to market, but really the peak was not that high, and the far end of the trajectory usually ended up lower than the starting point. Impoverished and eroded, forgotten. Damned by American civilization's version of progress and profit.