Salish Sea

Darkening Days

The mornings are becoming chill with the Fall. The deciduous trees burn with color. The season of fog and storm is coming.

This year I'm more leery of winter than last. This year I remember the sound of a gale among the Douglas-fir and Western red cedar, the gusts that roared like a north-bound freight, stout timber shattering beneath the weight of wind, the thunder of huge trees striking the ground. The sound of a gale in darkness—whether ashore or at sea—is always more terrifying than in daylight.

That winter storm felled trees that had stood several hundred years, trees that had likely been saplings before the Battle of Bunker Hill. They lay across the road in windrows, isolating our neighborhood. Houses were crushed. Fortunately, no one was killed.

The electricity in our neighborhood failed early in the storm. During that week a cold front settled on Puget Sound. The ground froze hard. There was no heat in the house but the fireplace. It snowed.

We dragged the mattress downstairs and slept in front of the fire, Linda, me and the dogs. Every few hours through successive nights I woke to stoke the fire and keep the cold at bay. Power wasn't restored for more than a week.

Climatologists tell us the storms will become more powerful and frequent. As the sea level rises places like Bangladesh will be inundated. Pacific atolls and the Gulf Coast may become uninhabitable. Wars will be fought over fresh water and arable land. Millions will become climate refugees. People will die, many people.

Is it avoidable? I suppose the answer is yes, even now we could at least ameliorate the effects, if we could take concerted action based upon enlightened self-interest, if we could surrender short-term advantage for the lasting benefit of all. But we have always been better at responding to disaster than avoiding it.

Perhaps I'm just becoming more dour with age but I find the inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers—or Lao Tzu—the only point of calm within the approaching storm.

"To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the
   whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars
   and his history...for contemplation or in fact. . .
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine
   beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
   or drown in despair when his days darken."
Robinson Jeffers, The Answer

Day Hike

On a recent holiday we went for a walk in the woods, Linda and I, up the Little Mount Si trail. It's not an exceptionally rigorous trail. It peaks at 1576 feet but most of that elevation is gained in the last half mile on a staircase made of gnarled root and worn stone. Nor is it especially remote, only a half hour drive from our home in Pleasant Valley, through Fall City and Snoqualmie to North Bend, and less than a hour from the streets of Seattle along Interstate 90.

An amazing photo of Mount Si from the Snoqualmie Valley. One (or the other) of the most climbed mountains in the US.
Photo attribution: papalars.

We walked loaded down with 20 pound day packs—a gallon of water, maps, compass, handheld GPS, spare socks, jacket, hat, first aid kit, poncho, emergency survival suit, binoculars, a Brunton barometer, my old Gerber sheath knife. Few people on the trail carried even a coat. One woman carried a Pomeranian. I felt substantially overdressed.

We often walk in the Cascade wilderness where inattention, bad luck, or misjudgment can be disastrous. I once heard that the third in a sequence of mistakes is the one likely to kill you. The first or the second may not be harmless but the third can be be fatal. Like three on a match. My guess is that by the third mistake death has time enough to accurately gauge your range.

The first mistake is underestimating your environment. The second is overestimating your resources.

We carried our packs past the sheer cliff face where the technical climbers practice their skill, past the bench dedicated to a climber who never returned from the summit of Mount Everest. You can see the various pitches by the tracing of pitons and carabineers left in the rock. I wondered if climbers trusted themselves to pitons driven by a stranger. I doubt I would.

I learned to practice distrust as a sailor on a coast that invites shipwreck. It was my job to cultivate negativity, to imagine the disastrous, to embrace the darkness and never be surprised. It is a skill fallen upon hard times lately, disreputed by a generation raised on positive thoughts and benign expectations. But even with practice I'm still surprised, as surprised as the day David Koch went missing.

I met him Tuesday afternoon. He was making a promotional tour for his magazine, DM Review.  I was the marketing manager of a small software company that bought his advertising space.

“I was likely the last person to see David alive and know him by name.”

He had a boyish face and thinning hair. His smile seemed expectant, as if someone were about to deliver a punch line. His conversation was softly spoken and hesitant or perhaps merely polite, paced to encourage interruption. He was, after all, from Wisconsin where time flows like glacial ice.

 
The rock face on Little Mount Si. Photo attribution: tarnalberry.

The Vancouver Sun reported the contents of his rental car left at the base of Grouse Mountain. There was the stuff typical of a business trip—dress shoes, white shirt, black suit, laptop, Blackberry—and the embarrassingly human details—a receipt for a Butterfingers and a nail file. It’s rather startling, like peering from the window of an elevated train into someone’s apartment and witnessing an unguarded moment, a candid gesture or expression that is utterly unimportant and completely human. He liked Butterfingers. It’s simply not something you expect to know about a dead man you met only once.

I was likely one of the last people to see David alive and know him by name. He left my office in Pioneer Square and drove north to Vancouver, British Columbia. He crossed the Canadian border at 6:30 pm. Before checking into his hotel he stopped and bought a ticket for the tram to the top of Grouse Mountain. (The summer day’s are long in these latitudes, lasting until 10:00 pm, and Grouse Mountain is a place to hike convenient to Vancouver.) He didn’t return with the last tram of the day. He was never again seen alive.

“I doubt a day pack would have saved David but it might have made him walk more cautiously.”

They found him eventually. A hiker followed the descending spiral of a bald eagle. The body had apparently been pinned underwater for some time. He had apparently fallen from the steep path above into a river in flood.

I doubt that a day pack would have saved David but it might have made him walk more cautiously, weighted by the gravity of each step. And despite the extra work required to carry all that stuff, despite the complaining joints and stone-bruised heels, I think I'll continue to carry my pack even on casual hikes, if only as a memento mori.

 See also: Lost on Grouse Mountain;
Missing, Presumed Lost

Technorati tags: Mount Si, Little Si Trail, David Koch, Grouse Mountain

Blood Moon

The recent lunar eclipse (August 28, 2007) began on the Pacific Coast around 2:00 am, what was once referred to shipboard as the graveyard watch.

This remarkable montage was taken of the moon sailing over Portland. Click the image to see the detail.

Photo attribution: Ed Williams, Chief Engineer, KPTV/KPDX

If you're not the type to stand graveyard watch, wait six months. The next full eclipse of the moon will be visible at a more civilized hour, 7:00 pm on February 20, 2008.

Technorati tags: Lunar eclipse, Portland, Ed Williams

Houseboats of Lake Union

In a recent edition of Shavings (May/June 2007), the newsletter of Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats, Dick Wagner wrote about Gas Works Park, the Duck Dodge race across Lake Union on summer nights when the daylight lingers, and the 1909 international exposition.

The fair was burdened with the name Alaskan-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The shore of Portage Bay, where the university now stands, was picked for the site. The citizens of Seattle were eager to promote their new city. They planned exhibits of a Tokyo tea house and an Igorrate tribal village. They launched a transcontinental automobile race from New York to Seattle. (In 1900, Seattle had only one motor car.)

But there was a problem.

The state had no money to build an exhibit nor any idea how to raise the money. Someone suggested the legislature sell Lake Union.

The fact that the state didn’t actually own Lake Union was incidental. They had the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s designate the lake as navigable. After all, native canoes had been navigating the lake since prehistory. That bit of legal legerdemain allowed the Corp to define the “harbor lines.” The state then appropriated the sliver of space between the harbor line and the shore—another dubious legal maneuver—and sold it to entrepreneurs for $10 per waterfront foot.

Through this single, stunning piece of imaginative finance, the state earned enough to finance Washington’s official exhibit. The new landowners rented their sunken lots as houseboat moorage.

It seems an oddly appropriate beginning for Lake Union’s eclectic community of houseboats.

Schooner framed between Lake Union houseboats. Click thrumbnail for larger image. Photo attribution: stormyafternoon on Flickr.

Fireflies & Gravestones

I first sailed the Caribbean with friends on a Christmas holiday twenty years ago. We chartered several boats out of Marigot Bay, St Lucia, and sailed down the Leeward Islands to the Tobaggo Keys, then back again.

 Our first night was spent at anchor off the village of Soufriere, in the shadow of The Pitons--a pair of extinct volcanoes that rise abruptly from the sea-- with our stern line secured to a palm tree.

The Pitons, seen from Soufriere.
Photo courtesy luxurytravelmagazine.com

I later learned, in a bar built of rough planks that sprawled across the sand almost to high water, that an elephant had once freely wandered the beach at Soufriere.  The elephant had a history involving a bankrupt zoo and a local plantation owner and it was allowed to wander freely until it realized where the bananas went at night, the same bananas that sailors fed it during the day. The elephant developed the disconcerting habit of hauling the sailors and their boats ashore using the stern lines tied to palm trees. I’m told it was very gentle but insistent.

That first night at Soufriere we were still sailors escaped from a cold, wet San Francisco winter. It was impossible that we wouldn’t go ashore immediately in search of a bar.

It was dark by the time we rowed ashore, a moon-dark night filled with stars broadcast like sand across the sky. We beached the dingy beneath a copse of palm trees illuminated by fire flies. I had never seen fire flies and chased them through the dark until I almost tripped over a headstone. We had landed in the local graveyard. Within our first five minutes ashore we had managed to desecrate the dead.

There were no street lamps in Soufriere, no neon, not even a naked light bulb suspended from a frayed cord. Apparently the local power utility closed at 9 pm to conserve fuel. Lantern light spilled from an open doorway.

Town square, Soufriere, St Lucia.

There wasn’t a white face among the men who sat at scarred tables with mismatched chairs but there wasn’t a sense of threat, either. The bar tender stood behind a kitchen counter that was once painted bright red. He served us rum in water glasses, no two alike, and ice chipped from a monolithic block. The Caribbean heat dripped from us all, black and white, and puddled on the table tops. Occasionally someone would laugh at another man’s joke and his face would split like the sun splitting clouds—brilliant white teeth and laughter.

From Soufriere we sailed south along the Grenadines to the Tobaggo Keys, sheltered behind a fringing reef from waves that fetched all the way from Africa, and competed with the two other boats in our flotilla to make the best cocktail from ingredients at hand. Who knew you could mix tea with almost anything alcoholic?

On our return to Marigot Bay we stopped again at Soufriere. I had money enough to eat or drink but not both. Like a good sailor, I drank. By the time the rest of the crew found me in the beach bar, I was well advanced.

I’m not sure who first mentioned the elephant but it was a young local who offered: Would you like to see the elephant? Even in my less than sober state it sounded dubious but asking a drunken sailor if he’d like to meet an elephant is like asking the Pope if he's Catholic. Only one answer is possible.

Following a kerosene lantern through a moonless night across broken ground is a challenge when you're three sheets to the wind. It was like running down a steep hill, head-butting gravity. I smelled the elephant before I could see the dark stone barn where it lived. It was a pungent, earthy smell but inoffensive, like the smell of the African savannah, I imagine.

Our young man led us to a stone wall and a corbelled window without any glass. Inside it was utterly dark. (Pretty damned dark outside, too.) I could hear the rush of air from the elephant’s breath, smell straw and musk and rotting vegetation, but I could see nothing. Emboldened by rum, I offered my hand to the darkness. I hadn’t expected a response.

The elephant’s trunk seemed simply to materialize. It twined around my wrist like a snake and held me firmly but gently. I’m sure I would have jumped ten feet if I weren’t held in place. It sampled my smell and found, yes, I had no bananas, then lost interest.

I could easily imagine the caption from an article on page 56 of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Drunken sailor mauled by elephant on Caribbean island.” Of course, the animal rights activists would be outraged. The rest would probably wonder if elephants were indigenous to the Caribbean, then quickly move on to the sports section.

The beach at Soufriere, St Lucia.
Photo courtesy berendbotje.com

We regained the beach unharmed but broke. We launched the dinghy on an ocean full of stars but halfway back to the boat someone noticed the water level rising rapidly. We had failed to reseat the plug after draining the dinghy ashore and were knee deep in seawater. After a great deal of laughter and more than a few scurrilous comments about our seamanship, we were rescued by our mates.

Technorati tags: Sailing, Sailors, Soufriere, St Lucia, Grenadines, Leeward Islands, Elephant

Breath of Trees

Recently I read an excerpt from Singing to the Sound about a man who spent three days in the crown of a red cedar tree in a forest on the Olympic Peninsula trying to defend an old growth forest from harvesting. “Every evening at dusk there is this surprising shiver that runs through all the trees. You don’t just sense it, you can see the trees tremble like with wind. Then someone told me it is the trees themselves going through their daily change-from breathing out to breathing in.”

What a remarkable world where even the trees breathe in the slow cadence of daylight and dark.

Electricity

It was three o’clock in the morning and the moon had just risen above the Sierra Nevada when the cougar’s scream sat me bolt upright in bed. It sounded like the cat was outside my back door. In the summer heat both front and back doors stood open to the cool night air. There was nothing to keep the cat from charging through the door and impaling my naked body to the damp sheets, other than its disdain for the smell of humanity. Admittedly, that was a pretty pungent smell—unwashed dishes, old laundry and human sweat.

I lived in a single wide trailer that my brother-in-law had hauled in place with a backhoe. From across the narrow valley formed by Tennessee Creek it looked remarkably like the wreckage of a DC-9 abandoned on the hillside. There was an awkward crimp in the roof line as if the trailer’s back had been broken on impact. Gray paint peeled in leprous patches. One side rested on the dirt, the other was propped with sectioned tree trunks called rounds that compensated for the steep pitch of the hill. There was no electricity, no running water, no sewage and no rent.

The land behind my trailer was mostly grassland rising through forest, past tree line, all the way to the roof of the Sierra Nevada. It was good habitat for a cougar and this one obviously resented my presence. Every three weeks it completed a circuit that brought it to my back door and every three weeks it objected to finding me still there.

The kitten that shared my trailer was no less intimidated. From its own early morning hunt on the hillside, it came bolting through the front door and landed on my chest with claws extended.

It’s an interesting experience, living without electricity. Our conditioned response when alarmed at night is to turn on the lights. It’s somewhat less autonomic to remove the chimney of a kerosene lamp, adjust the height of the wick, light the lamp, and replace the chimney. And when you finally get the damn thing lit, it’s barely bright enough to light your path on a moonlit night.

I lived for more than a year without electricity—less a social experiment than a flight from society—but I did learn something about the simple life. The myth of Walden Pond remains a powerful impetus in a culture beset by complexity and, I suspect, often lies beneath the fascination with apocalypse. Remember the Y2K phenomenon? My sister talked of outfitting a cave to prepare for that myth and my mother still considers the end of world as justification for her faith. (Even more terrifying, so does our current president!)

I learned that simplicity is hard work. Subsistence takes most of your time. The experience of living on that hillside in the Sierra Nevada has robbed most of my attraction for living rough. I’d much rather have time to spend on things other than staying warm, finding shelter, eating and digging holes to bury my waste. Still, I could have spent the time I’ve gained from technology more wisely.

But still I remember the sound of that cougar more than 20 years ago. It’s a memory that chills my spine across the intervening years. I may not have chosen the simple life like Thoreau, rather had it thrust upon me, but it’s lent me some perspective on my foolishness.

Sound of Gulls

There is something exotic about the cries of a gull echoing down city streets or the sudden flurry of white wings between towering office buildings. It’s as if something wild had wandered into the city, something unexpected and surprising, like a wind that smells of sea salt and distance or the fleeting shadow of a coyote cast by a street lamp.

The streets of Seattle and the air above the office towers are full of gulls. From the waterfront I often watch them ride heated columns of air. Glued to the earth, I wonder what it would be like to treat height as casually as I treat distance, stepping from a window sill 300 feet above the city streets as casually as I step from the curb. But the wings of a gull are hollow, made mostly of wind, while mine are dense and made of dirt.

As a poetic metaphor, gulls don’t stand close scrutiny. Like Bald Eagles, they’re opportunists, scavengers, pirates and thieves. It’s a misnomer to call them sea gulls. They’re not even necessarily coastal, often flocking to garbage dumps hundreds of miles inland and occasionally as far as the Great Salt Lake. But there is something breathtaking in the flight of gulls wheeling in the yellow light at the edge of a squall, like lost souls driven before the storm, or soaring past the city’s skyscrapers as if they were sea cliffs.

I think I would never live in a city where I could not hear the sound of gulls.

Technorati tags: gulls, Puget Sound,  Seattle.

Squall at Sunrise

Rain streamed down the windows of the passenger ferry's upper deck accompanied by Mahler's 5th Symphony on the headphones. Across a short throw of water, the Kingston auto ferry was silhouetted against a dark squall. The lights on the ferry's passenger deck seemed to puddle in the rain. Beyond, the squall descended like nightfall.

A small sloop made its way out of Appletree Cove into Puget Sound, the helmsman wearing bright oilskins, his shoulders humped against the rain. Down channel an enormous container ship moved with its decks stacked five stories high. Deckloads of containers are sometimes lost to storms at sea, swept overboard by high seas. Originally, the containers were as watertight as a ship’s hull. They continued to float for months, awash like deadheads*, invisible at a distance or in rough weather. The hull of a small boat or even a ship could be gashed by a container’s steel edges. A ship’s hull might only be scarred by such a collision; a boat could be killed, her hull filling in minutes, with perhaps just enough time for a practiced crew to grab the emergency bag and launch the canister raft. It was one of those hazards that troubled the sleep of captains but were promptly forgotten by their crews.

The containers are still vulnerable to storms but they are now fitted with plugs soluble in salt water. After a few days of immersion the plug dissolves and the container sinks to the bottom like a stone.

*Deadheads are driftwood, often complete trees—Douglas-fir, Western red cedar, and maple—that float just below the surface throughout the inland waters of the Pacific Northwest. They are difficult to see during the day and impossible at night. Hitting a waterlogged deadhead is like striking a rock.

Technorati tags: Kingston, WA, Puget Sound,  shipping, shipping containers, navigation.

Beaks of Eagles

The beaks of Bald Eagles are shaped like carpet knives, a fearsome hook to rend and tear. They need such a formidable tool to feed their unrelenting hunger. Almost anything is food for an eagle—ducks and geese, snowshoe hares, kittiwakes, seal and sea otter pups, starved deer and dead whales, road-kills and gut piles, fish kills, the afterbirth of livestock, garbage from town dumps and fish offal from processing plants—all grist for the eagle’s gut.

Apparently even the rain makes them hungry. At least it increases their metabolic rate as measured by oxygen consumption. Don’t ask who thought to measure an eagle’s breath in the rain. Yet an eagle’s bones are less than half the weight of its feathers. Ironic that hollow bones and feathers should encompass such ravenous hunger.

Benjamin Franklin’s low opinion of Bald Eagles is well known. He didn’t think them worthy of being named our national symbol. He thought them carrion eaters, scavengers, and pirates which of course they are—notorious pirates. They will harass a falcon or osprey until they surrender their prey, then take for it themselves. Immature eagles often plunder even their own kind. It takes skilled practice to earn a living legitimately; young eagles are short on both.

Their natural history is full of ironies. They are devoted, mating for life, but after the death of their mate they will take another, sometimes within hours. They will ferociously defend their nest against any threat but abandon it to human intrusion. Disturbance by humans is the single greatest factor in their reproductive failure. (If eagles had a mythology, Lucifer would look very much like us.) And if a nestling falls to the ground, its parents will continue feeding it in place until it’s fledged but one nestling will often kill another in competition for food.

They also practice one of the most spectacular mating rituals found in nature. Male and female Bald Eagles will sometimes lock talons and, with wings outstretched, fall cartwheeling through the sky, almost falling to the earth before releasing their embrace. It is a magnificent and maybe superfluous display. To quote Robinson Jeffers' poem The Excesses of God.

"Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain…"

In a nation governed by greed, a nation that has enshrined profit as a religious value but one also capable of astonishing acts of compassion and self-sacrifice, perhaps we chose our national symbol more wisely than Benjamin Franklin realized—a symbol to represent both the best and the worst of us.

Technorati tags: Olympic Peninsula, Bald Eagle,  Robinson Jeffers.

Ascendance of Eagles

On a morning late in June, mist drips from the needles of Douglas-fir and western red cedar on the outer coast of Washington, near Cape Flattery, the uttermost end of the earth. The cries of gulls and seabirds echo above the slow drumming of the surf in sea caves eroded from the cliffs. The fog horn on Tatoosh Island plays counterpoint.

On the dead branch of a Douglas-fir a Bald Eagle perches, its feathers glistening with salt spray from the surf. The tree might have died by blight or fire but still stands above the surrounding forest. It offers the eagle a commanding view of Tatoosh, little more than a half mile offshore. (The eagle’s relentless vision can pluck a rabbit from a field of broken cover or a river otter foraging along the tide line a mile away.) The tree’s branches are spaced widely enough to accommodate the bird’s seven foot wingspan, forming flight paths between the dead limbs, and still provide a lee when the wind freshens from the south.

From it’s perch the eagle watches Rhinoceros Auklets, Double-crested Cormorants, and Common Murres come and go, foraging at sea and returning to feed their unfledged young nesting on the island, until its own hunger becomes compelling. Hunger shapes the eagle’s behavior. Hunger drove it south from Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory, when ice began thickening on the rivers, and hunger will drive it north again when the bodies of spawned salmon began to stack like driftwood on the rivers’ gravel banks.

With widespread wings the eagle slips from the dead limb and glides past the forest’s edge, above tide rips churning the narrow channel between island and shore, above the fenced graveyard where the lightkeeper’s children are buried, to Burning Barrel Point where the murres nest in dense rookeries. The eagle’s presence ignites panic in the rookeries. Adult murres abandon their nests and flee toward the water. If they reach the sea they are safe from the eagle’s hunger.

The Glaucous-winged gulls and Northwestern Crows have been loitering with a purpose at the rookeries’ edge. When the eagle flushes the adult murres, they move quickly among the crevices and salmonberry bushes, plucking unguarded eggs or helpless nestlings and carrying them away. It is heartless but efficient.

Although only 2% of the murres that breed on Tatoosh Island fall prey to eagles, their population has steadily declined 3% per year since 1991. The decline is not a direct effect of eagle predation but rather an indirect one. Indirect effects occur "when the impact of one species on another requires the presence of a third species." One species changes the intensity of the relationship between two (or more) other species. On Tatoosh, the increased presence of Bald Eagles has made the murre rookeries more vulnerable to scavenging by gulls and crows.

Indirect effects are complex and difficult to predict but they may account for half of the interactions in ecosystems. The ascendance of the Bald Eagle leads to the decline of the Common Murre. Who knew?

Technorati tags: Olympic Peninsula, Tatoosh Island, Cape Flattery,  Bald Eagle,  Common Murre.

Gunboats on the Sound

Are the Washington state ferries defensible?

Since the attack on London's subways, there's been frenzied Coast Guard activity on Puget Sound. A small fleet of fast patrol boats were airlifted from San Diego to guard the Washington state ferries. The patrol boats are inflatables with rigid bottoms (RIBs) fitted with machine guns fore and aft. The guns are mounted and uncovered despite the corrosive environment. They are ready for immediate use and meant as a obvious warning: we are ready to kill if required. But a question remains unanswered. Are the ferries defensible?

For the past week the RIBs have been shuttling back and forth across the Sound with blue lights flashing, shadowing the ferries. Two boats are assigned to each ferry route. Their primary task is to interdict any vessel violating the security zone and safeguard the ferries.

For sometime now there has been a 500 yard security zone extended around all vessels greater than 100 feet in length transiting Puget Sound. The experts are concerned that a small, fast boat packed with explosives will plow into the side of a crude oil tanker or a Washington state ferry. It has happened before in other parts of the world. It could certainly happen here.

The Coast Guard is faced with a simple navigational problem — a calculation of speed, time, and distance. A boat traveling at 40 mph will take less than nine seconds to cross the security zone and impact the hull of a ferry. Nine seconds.

Nine seconds is  not enough time to request confirmation from shore. Whatever decisions are made in those nine seconds will be made by the boat's coxswain and crew. They must have received standing orders to unlock weapons and fire at their discretion. Anything less would make their presence  an empty threat.

On any sunny summer day the waters of Puget Sound are crowded with small pleasure boats moving fast. Any number of those boats will pass close aboard a ferry underway.

The crew of the RIBs will first try to warn an approaching boat by radio. Marine radio communications are typically torturous even between professionals. Among amateurs, they're largely non-existent. The lack of response to their radio challenge can hardly be considered confirmation of evil intent but it will waste seconds in a scenario that may play out in less than a minute.

The RIBs carry an M-60 machine gun mounted on their bow. An M-60 fires a 7.62 mm round with a muzzle velocity of 2,800 feet per second, 100 rounds per minute — enough firepower to shred fiberglass and marine-grade plywood, tear flesh and shatter bone.

An 18-year old kid from Idaho likely stands behind that gun as the RIB pounds across choppy water at flank speed. His blood is full of adrenalin. His head is full of pop culture icons like Rambo. He can hardly hear the coxswain's voice over the sound of the wind, the waves pounding against the hull, the scream of the outboard engines. Was he ordered to fire? Is he supposed to fire? He can hardly hold himself in position against the RIBs violent motion. How is he supposed to fire?

It probably won't make any difference whether he fires or not. A terrorist with any boat handling skill could determine the weakness of the Coast Guard's moving defense and approach the security zone at the point of greatest distance from the RIBs. The largest ferries are 460 feet long, too long even for a fast patrol boat at one end to turn and close the distance in the time allowed.

Are the ferries defensible? Probably not, at least, not from attack by a small boat traveling at high speed and driven by a skilled boat handler willing to die. The simple fact is that nothing — and no one — is defensible against someone willing to sacrifice themselves in the attack.

Technorati tags: Puget Sound, Washington State ferries, terrorism, Coast Guard

The Point That Isn't

A brief history of Point No Point.

A few miles north of Kingston, a spit of sand extends a quarter mile from the shore where Admiralty Inlet enters Puget Sound. The S’Kallam called it "big nose" (Hahd-skus), descriptive if inelegant. Lt. Charles Wilkes, disappointed with the poor anchorage in the lee of the spit, called it Point No Point. Wilkes commanded the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1841. Wilkes was a cartographer; Point No Point was the name that made the charts.

I often walk the gently shelving beach at Point No Point at low water. It’s one of the rare beaches this side of the Sound with sand that stretches for miles. The headlands that back the beach rise several hundred feet—glacial till and sedimentary rock, mostly. The soft rock erodes into sheer cliff faces embedded with shells.

A single immense boulder, twice the height of a tall man, stands at the tide line. It’s an erratic once carried by a river of ice that flowed through Admiralty Inlet, abandoned when the glacier withered and withdrew. At its greatest depth that glacier buried Seattle beneath 3,412 feet of ice. It gouged the rock and shaped the land beneath my feet and left stray boulders as a remembrance.

Coho, Cutthroat, and Chinook have migrated past this indefinite point longer than the memory of man. Beach anglers fish for them on the outgoing tide. The oldest documented eagle’s nest in Washington state commands a view of the spit and the migrating salmon. And sea birds hunt the shoals.

There are people who count dead sea birds for a good cause. On Point No Point they’ve counted the usual cast of characters—Glaucous-Winged Gulls and Double-Crested Cormorants—and some more exotic—Bonaparte’s Gulls, Buffleheads, Horned Grebes and Northern Fulmars, Pacific Loons, Pigeon Guillemots (birds with the unsavory habit of spitting fish oil when disturbed), Surf Scooters and Western Grebes.

It may be that the oldest eagle’s nest is known because the Point has been continuously occupied by light keepers since 1880. Point No Point was considered sufficiently hazardous to earn the first light on Puget Sound. In 1868 the bark Iconium grounded on the Point and in the winter of 1875 the Windward steered so widely to avoid the dangerous shoals that she wrecked on the opposite shore. Even the existence of the light, however, was of no help on August 24, 1914.

The passenger liners S.S. Admiral Sampson and Princess Victoria were both moving cautiously in thick fog, making revolutions for slow ahead. They sighted each other too late to avoid collision. The bow of the Princess Victoria, sharp as chipped flint, almost cut the Admiral Sampson in half amidships. Most of the Admiral Sampson’s passengers and crew climbed over the railings onto the deck of the Princess Victoria who managed to limp into Seattle with a 14 foot gash in her bow. The Admiral Sampson sank by the stern, taking with her 11 passengers, 4 crew, and her captain.

Cottages now occupy the backshore along the point. Even the steel superstructure of a former President Lines steamer—round ports, bridge wings, port and starboard running lights, and a Grateful Dead sticker—has been pressed into unlikely service as someone’s home. The houses occupy the route of the first road built on the Point in 1908, a road between the light house and the village of Hansville. It was one and a half miles distance between the two. The road was only one mile long. (It didn’t actually reach the light house for another 11 years.) An enterprising resident imported an automobile so that he and his friends could drive back and forth on a road going nowhere, drunk as loons probably, hooting and hollering.

The light has been automated, the keepers long gone, and radar has mitigated the Point No Point’s hazard to navigation but  the fog horns of ship's transiting Admiralty Inlet still bellow in the winter, cutthroat trout and sea lions still skirt the shore, and sea birds still hunt the shoals in season.

Technorati tags: Puget Sound, Point No Point, shipwreck, lighthouse

Occidental Park

There is no grass in Occidental Park. In fact, the paving stones—red brick, mostly—are so uneven that crossing them safely requires sensible shoes and close attention. They're more like cobbles piled upon the foreshore by a high surf.

The park is only a block wide—an easy stone’s throw—wedged between the narrow streets of Seattle's Pioneer Square district, hemmed by red brick Victorians constructed at the turn of the century before last.

Benches in the park are thickly shaded by London plane trees—an incongruous comfort in the Pacific NW where the sky is often clouded and sunlight fleeting. Men sitting on the benches  dress in deeply layered clothing and gesture in emphatic conversation with themselves. Not all of them are old but even the young men look uniformly weathered as if they’d been living rough all their lives, sleeping in alleys and beneath bridges, shying from sirens and the sound of gunshots. Sometimes you can catch their eye in an unguarded moment, a moment lulled by sunlight and security, and the pain seems fathoms deep, mute and insensible, like the pain of a caged beast. At night they must live guardedly, lightly sleeping to keep from becoming prey. There are few places even on Skid Row where a man with no money can find a safe place to sleep.

But in mid-day the night is a lifetime away. Young software programmers full of caffeine and pizza walk through the park. Someone tosses a Frisbee over the heads of office workers eating  bagged lunches. Pigeons scurry across the paving stones and underfoot, oblivious to the fact that somewhere overhead, soaring on heated air rising from the city streets, a peregrine falcon is hunting them. I always watch for them among the glass and steel, the pair of falcons that breed high on the Washington Mutual tower, but I’ve yet to see them fall from the sky in that staggering dive that approaches 200 miles per hour. I’m told when they spread their wings to break their dive the wind through their flight feathers sounds like ripping canvas.

When the electric trolley approaches the stop at Occidental Park, the conductor sounds his bell repeatedly. The insistent clanging of the trolley bell is oddly incongruous, like an echo from the Depression that’s become unstuck in time.

Amid all this urbanity, the most incongruous sound is the wild trumpeting of the Glaucous-winged gulls. The gulls compete for scraps with the pigeons and crows. Their cries echo from the surrounding brick walls like sea cliffs and the distant traffic sounds like surf breaking against basalt headlands. The gulls cry is utterly alien, inhuman, and timeless. It seems to undo the very existence of the city, as if the city was merely a cloud’s shadow carried away by the wind.

Doing the Time Warp

Each workday I stand on the pier in queue for the foot ferry to Seattle in the company of other commuters, double-crested cormorants, gulls—western and glaucous-winged gulls mostly—and sometimes a river otter foraging among the tidal rocks of the breakwater. Each workday I shuttle the length of Admiralty Inlet in the company of oil tankers, cruise ships, container ships and warships, tugboats with barges, fishing boats, ferryboats and workboats, schooners, sloops, ketches and an occasional yawl. The channel is broad and deep with few obstructions. It was cut by ice through bedrock and basalt—chipped and gouged, crushed, pried, split, scaled,  shattered and scoured by ice. Everywhere the scars of ice are evident.

In cultivating a sense of place, it seems the dirt beneath my feet is a good beginning so I’ve been studying the geology of the Pacific NW. I have no passion for geology. The secret lives of rocks would likely remain secret if it depended upon me. Textbook geology puts me to sleep as certainly as if I’d been cold-cocked with a two-by-four. But learning the local geology—learning what roughly piled up the Olympic Mountains on the coast, what broadcast the islands across the Salish Sea and dug the deep-water channels between them—that I find oddly compelling. And yes, the secret lives of rocks, at least the rocks I can see and touch.

I haven’t gotten very far in my study. I’ve learned some pretty useless facts. Geologic periods were long and mostly boring. There were no animals prior to the Cambrian; there was no oxygen. Blue-green algae ruled the world and Montana was a more interesting place.

If I imagine geologic periods like frames in time-lapse photography, things get more exciting. The earth writhes in plastic convulsions; mountain chains erupt and erode, sputtering like gutted candles; oceans rise and fall rhythmically; the sky flashes the sulphurous color of Dante’s Inferno, then turns gunmetal gray with clouds a mile thick; rocks the size of continents crash together, spinning off volcanoes like Catherine wheels; North America sails imperiously westward, scraping rocks from the sea floor and piling them haphazardly on the shore; and the ages of ice come and go like the breath rattling in a dying man’s lungs.

Seems my vision of geologic time is more like the Marx Brothers’.

Technorati tags: Puget Sound, Admiralty Inlet, geology

Magnificent Indifference

The Army Corps of Engineers often find themselves in the unenviable position of defending the status quo against relentless change.  Twenty years ago the Corp dredged the Columbia River to accommodate ships of increasing draft. They piled the dredging spoils on Rice Island. Caspian terns, native to the Pacific Northwest, like nesting in soft sand and Rice Island had plenty of sand. It was also protected form predators. The terns were fruitful and multiplied. Eventually they numbered over 20,000—70% of the world’s population of Caspian terns.

They were also voracious, eating 16 million salmon and steelhead smolts each year—17% of the migrating juvenile population. The birds were suddenly a menace. Federal authorities determined a solution: move the terns.

It seems that Caspian terns are easily led. Using sound systems and decoys, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lured the terns down the river to East Sand Island near the mouth of the Columbia, hoping they would find something other than young salmon to eat. The image of otherwise mature adults boating down the river broadcasting tern songs is precious. Far be it from me to further abuse their self esteem; I’m sure their colleagues made them pay dearly.

Resistance is futile

Reluctant terns were encouraged more forcibly. Their eggs were stolen, their rookeries were intersected by fences, and their nests were buried beneath a crop of winter wheat. Resistance was futile.

The government seemingly succeeded. Within a few years the number of salmon eaten by the terns of East Sand dropped somewhere between 3.5 and 7.7 million, an oddly ambiguous range. But environmentalists objected, several species of salmon were still almost extinct, and the alternate prey species favored by the terns (herring and anchovies) were fleeing global warming into colder water. Federal authorities determined a solution: move the terns.

They now plan to spend $2.4 million to move the terns to Sequim (on the Strait of Juan de Fuca), Oregon, and San Francisco. It’s questionable whether even the alluring folks of the Fish and Wildlife Service can capture a tern’s attention for that distance.

But that doesn’t settle the problem of the cormorants.

What about the cormorants?

Even Fish and Wildlife isn’t certain why the double-crested cormorants began settling on East Sand. Typically they prefer nesting on sea cliffs and ledges. No one knows much about the habits of cormorants; they’ve been paying attention to the terns.

Salmon makes up a smaller percentage of a cormorant’s diet but they’re a much bigger bird—four times the size of a tern—with an appropriate appetite. Last year they ate 6.4 million salmon, significantly more than the terns. It’s a problem.  Federal authorities determined a solution: move the cormorants.

Only the cormorants are less tractable than the terns and not as easily swayed by a pretty voice or bedroom eyes. So the authorities in such matters enlisted several bald eagles to intimidate them. They installed posts on East Sand for the eagles to roost. The eagles behaved as expected, swooping down to take their prey. Nearby cormorants paid no attention.

Ah, the magnificent indifference of Nature.

Technorati tags: Caspian terns, cormorants, Columbia River

Frog Falls

The world is considerably more mysterious than priests and politicians would have us believe. How else explain frogs falling from the sky? Small toads, actually, bouncing off the taut skin of English umbrellas. Or common minnows sliding off the slate roofs and clogging the gutters of Aberdare, Wales? Waterspouts? Sure, you can trot out that swaybacked old excuse but it has no legs. Waterspouts don’t pluck only one kind of amphibian or small fish out of a pond, fastidiously ignoring all the surrounding muck and water plants. In fact, a waterspout is more likely to rain mud and sticks on your head than small fish.

People mostly ignore what they don’t understand—toads falling from the sky, people reduced to ashes in overstuffed arm chairs, and that disquieting sense of the familiar called déjà vu. Charles Fort actually collected the stuff. He spent 27 years in the archives of the British Museum and New York City libraries scouring old issues of newspapers and magazines looking for the unlikely and the inexplicable. He filled books with it: The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents. Charles Fort died in 1932.

Fort’s response to the waterspout excuse was wonderfully succinct: "A pond going up would be quite as interesting as fishes coming down…It seems to me that someone who had lost a pond would be heard from."

And the most unusual thing about stuff falling from the sky—three-spined sticklebacks, salamanders, freshwater crabs and shrimp, clams, snails, crayfish, frogs or toads—is that they rarely fall in mixed lots. Mostly they consist of a single species of uniform size and age.

I have no explanation for such things but they seem to incorporate a wonderfully eccentric sense of humor.

Peregrine Falcon

Early morning and a peregrine falcon perches high on a sea cliff on the outer coast. Surf beats against the foot of the cliff, spindrift hangs like mist and the rising wind tastes of salt. The peregrine watches intensely. Far below, a rhinoceros auklet returns to its rookery from feeding at sea, skimming the ocean’s surface. The falcon slips from its perch, folds its wings, and plunges headlong toward the sea.

A peregrine’s dive, called a stoop, has been clocked at 200 miles per hour—the fastest flight of any bird known. It falls like a bullet aimed at its prey. When the  peregrine pulls out of its stoop, talons extended to strike, the apparent wind across its wings sounds like a canvas sail ripping from luff to leach. The sound incites panic in the auklet.

The auklet breaks left, then right, desperately trying to avoid the closing talons. The peregrine follows each movement as closely as a shadow, twisting in its own wind. Its powerful wings encompass the auklet and beat it into the sea. With a deft turn the peregrine banks and plucks the stunned auklet from the water, talons striking through feathers to bone, then regains altitude with each wing beat. The auklet’s struggle ends abruptly when the peregrine’s beak closes on its neck, cleaving its spine. The severed head tumbles through the air.

It seems a cruel reality but the peregrine is not without enemies of its own. The most deadly of those is ourselves. The pesticide DDT exterminated the species on this wild coast forty years ago; they have since been re-introduced artificially.

Adult peregrines are also taken from their roosts at night by great horned owls and Golden eagles prey upon their young. Bald eagles and red-tailed hawks steal food from them in flight and common crows steal food cached on the ground. Peregrines may also cause deadly damage to other peregrines invading their territory or too closely approaching a nest. They will stoop on an interloper as they would prey.

Nor is the peregrine’s prey entirely without defense. The shorebirds, gulls, and terns they typically hunt often flock together when threatened, turning in unison like a choreographed dance, presenting no isolated individual for the peregrine to target.

Here on the outer coast, their prey includes rhinoceros auklet, Cassin’s auklet, savannah sparrow, northwestern crow, common murre, Leach’s storm petrel, even glaucous-winged gulls despite their size, but shorebirds are the most common prey—the  American avocet and willet especially.

On the coast, peregrine’s prefer tall cliffs or offshore stacks for nesting. Cliffs offer the advantage of hunting from a perch, defensible nests, and updrafts for soaring. They like a broad view. At Sequim, on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, they usually perch on the stumps and snags of Douglas fir and western redcedar, on coastal cliffs and bluffs, drift logs and root balls, branches or boards. On Puget Sound, they make do with sailboat masts, industrial cranes, and waterfront building, navigation towers and utility poles, large ships, grain elevators, and water towers.

They are fiercely defensive of their young. Peregrines will not hesitate to attack a bald eagle if it approaches the nest too closely.

Young falcons are fledged at about six weeks of age. On the Olympic coast that’s usually between June 2 and July 20. The raucous cries of fledglings in flight begging food from an adult can be heard at great distance. It is part of the wildness of this coast.

For the first 2-3 weeks after first flight, prey is mostly transferred to the fledglings while still perched. Afterwards, it’s passed directly from the parent’s beak or foot while in flight. Next, prey is dropped from aloft and the fledglings required to retrieve it in the air. Finally, the family hunts together, the fledgling closely following as its parent stoops on prey, attempting the capture the prey as it tries to escape from the parent.

Rock and Hawk
Robinson Jeffers

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow.

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

Technorati tags: olympicpeninsula, olympicnationalpark, robinsonjeffers

Ghost of Advertising Past

Painted on the side of a brick building overlooking Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle is a faded advertisement for the Washington State ferries. Beneath an illustration of an antique ferry is the caption "Have lunch over seas" in an equally antique font. It’s a clever pun despite the fact that Puget Sound never qualified as a sea and the state ferries have discontinued food service onboard. There is probably a name for such things, or should be—the ghosts of commerce lingering like the faint impression on the Shroud of Turin. This particular case is even more convoluted—a false ghost—since the Washington State ferries didn't exist prior to 1951.

Technorati tags: seattle, pugetsound

Perils of the Pacific NW

Great Blue Herons nesting in the towers that support high power transmission lines are intermittently shorting the power grid and plunging Puget Sound neighborhoods into darkness.  It seems the herons are pooping when they take flight. In itself, not unusual for a bird. Their logic is impeccable. Why carry superfluous weight into the air when the heavy lifting is your own? The peculiar thing about heron poop is its length—almost three feet. Streamers of guano are spanning transmission lines and providing an unexpected path for electricity to propagate. Electric poop.

The herons themselves aren’t electrocuted because they’re not grounded. In theory, at least. Years ago I read that the Crown Prince of Moldavia (or some obscure middle European principality) who was fond of falconry watched his prize Harpie eagle take stand on a transmission tower and promptly explode into a cloud of feathers. It must have disconcerted the Prince. Even more disconcerting to the poor heron with 10,000 volts aimed at its ass.

Technorati tags: pugetsound, birds

Elliot Bay Books

I work in Pioneer Square, Seattle, on Occidental Avenue South—a street with no cars. Around the corner is Elliott Bay Books. Elliott Bay is an intellectual landmark in Seattle's history, a place that anchors the city in a sea of change. It's a book store with worn plank floors that groan beneath your feet like a wooden boat working in a seaway. There are as many levels to the store as the Robinson family’s tree house—the floor suddenly pierced by a staircase that descends to a rough cafe or rises to receding levels of books like a trick of perspective in an Escher print. It reminds me most of the chandleries that still existed on the waterfront of Los Angeles harbor when I was young—the smell of Stockholm tar and Manila hemp and kerosene, the dark and crooked places crowded with ground tackle, hurricane lights, and oilskins, and the old men with scarred faces who stood behind high counters, dour and frightening. Those were places where a child, or an old man, could dream as deeply as a mollusk encompassed by a shell.

Wind Song

Ken Cooper, Cultural Consultant for Fish, Timber and Wildlife of the Lummi Tribe of Washington state, listens to the "trees as they talk to one another, the songs in the wind, the stories of the pathway that started a long time ago…When I come back I play the song that I hear floating on the wind and play the feeling that I hear coming out of those trees that are pained, that know they’re going to be cut down. They do talk. They have a lot to teach us. Anybody who goes in the mountains and sees beauty has a form of healing."

I’ve been listening to the wind though I’m not yet sufficiently silent to form sense out of the sound. The sound of the breeze among the tree tops captures my attention as sharply as the cawing of crows. I understand neither but I know intuitively that something is being communicated. Somewhere I read that the song of trees has been recorded between 50 and 500 kilohertz, well above the 20 kilohertz limit of human hearing.

There is also a wind song that is audible. In Heaven’s Breath, Lyall Watson wrote "Redwoods and cypress tend to build up a dense background of white sound, casuarinas exaggerate shamelessly, amplifying the easiest sea breeze into an incipient gale; but the virtuoso performers are undoubtedly the broad-needled pines." Minute eddies and ripples form to leeward of each pine needle, the turbulence creating a whisper on the wind. All the small sounds gather to form a thunderous chorus in a gale. The Japanese make pilgrimages to listen to the sound of a dry gale in the pine forests. They call it matsukaze, the wind that knows the song of the pines. Matsukaze (literally, wind in the pines) evokes among the Japanese a feeling of exquisite solitude and melancholy.

Technorati tags: wind, windsong, trees

Not Man Apart

A few days respite from work before beginning the commute from Kingston to the Seattle waterfront onboard one of the new Mosquito fleet. This morning I sat on a park bench overlooking the Kingston marina drinking a damnably expensive cup of coffee beneath a sky obscured by high cloud. The water of Appletree Cove was so still that concentric ripples left by a gull taking flight could be seen half way to the far shore. I listened to the high, distant drone of a float plane, the twitter of swallows returned from the south, the irritated cackle of crows (crows seem always irritated), and the sound of gulls squabbling over some scrap of food or place to stand.

To the west, above the trees and beyond Hood Canal, the Olympic Mountains were covered with new snow from a gale that blew in from the sea last night. Because they are so close to the coast,  snowline in the Olympics is only 5,500 feet. Inland, across Admiralty Inlet,  snowline in the Cascades rises to 8,000 feet.

There was a sharp edge to the beauty, as sharp as chipped flint or a muscle shell. That beauty has evolved over millions of years yet everything now bears the mark of humanity, even what cannot be seen. We have become evolution made conscious. We shape the future of the earth. The changes that once took geologic ages we now make in a century and less, in a single lifetime. We have enormous power but we lack responsibility. It’s understandable in a species so young. We are a planetary experiment, the first we know where evolution has become self-conscious. But, like most experiments, it may fail and be abandoned.

There is some reassurance. The earth will persist in any case. And it is a grand experiment whether or not we succeed.

"Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
   and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or chose
   the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, by merciful and uncorrupted and
   not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
   not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the
   whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars
   and his history . . . for contemplation or in fact . . .
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine
   beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
   or drown in despair when his days darken."
Robinson Jeffers, The Answer

Technorati tags: kitsappeninsula, pugetsound,   robinsonjeffers

Tatoosh Island

On a bright day last Fall I drove to the end of the earth and parked. A boardwalk of cedar planks led from the trailhead, through stands of western hemlock, red alder, and cedar draped with epiphytes, to Cape Flattery and the northwestern most point of land in the contiguous United States.

Cape Flattery is a wild and unruly place listed in Joseph Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea as one of the four great capes of the world, in the company of the Cape of Good Hope and The Horn. It is a place often obscured by fog or stormbound on a coast that invites shipwreck.

The cedar boardwalk winds three-quarters of a mile from the muddy trail head through the Makah Wilderness to a cliff that falls abruptly into the sea. Stunted Sitka spruce have been bent by the sea wind into the shape of breaking waves.

In 1778 Captain Cook wrote of this place: "Beetling cliffs, ragged reefs, and huge masses of rock cut by the waves abound on every side." The cliffs are riddled with sea caves where the waves surge and sound like distant thunder. During Winter gales the thunder rolls and the Cape trembles beneath your feet.

Tatoosh Island lies less than a half-mile off the pitch of Cape Flattery. It’s the largest of the rocks and reefs that girdle the Cape. Even so, it’s only a fifth of a mile in diameter, 20 windswept acres without a single tree. The wind sometimes blows so hard it’s tumbled light keepers ass over tea kettle and once blew a bull into the sea. God alone knows why a bull was kept on an island of only 20 acres. It emerged from the cold water unharmed but in marvelously bad temper.

On the island there are thickets of salmonberry, thimbleberry, and fireweed growing shoulder high. The smell of cow parsnips mingles with sea salt and guano.

Tatoosh is mostly inhabited by sea birds—gulls and guillemots, petrels and cormorants. The cormorants nest on the vertical cliff faces wherever a displaced rock or erosion has created a burrow slightly larger than themselves. The Makah traditionally believed that sea birds were their reincarnated dead; the birds’ raucous cries at the approach of a storm warned the living to avoid the Cape until the storm passed.

On Tatoosh eagles prey upon the chicks of common murres and gulls, snatching them from crevices in the sea cliffs and nests secreted beneath salmonberry brush. The eagles are fastidious eaters, gleaning the meat from each rib, polishing the bones with their beaks, then cleaning themselves on the salmonberry. Crows scavenge the bodies of auklets beheaded by peregrines.

The westerly swell bends around Tatoosh Island, a phenomenon called refraction, so that they meet head-on at a shallow ledge of rock in the narrow channel between the island and the shore. The channel is known locally as The Gut. When the surf is heavy The Gut literally erupts into geysers of white water and spume where two halves of the same wave collide head-on.

There is a dramatic temper to the Cape like that of a Greek tragedy. This is land’s end, the uttermost bulwark against the sea hammered by the weight of the  Pacific. In this war of attrition the land is fated to lose.

Technorati tags: capeflattery, olympicpeninsula, pugetsound