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Spine vs. Slime: Our deteriorating politics mirror our deteriorating planet

A fried egg jellyfish floats in the Strait of Juan de Fuca off the coast of Washington

Slime.

You don’t need to go far to find it these day.

If you’ve been around kids, you’ve probably seen them stretching it and rolling into balls — it was one of the most popular DIY toys last year, thanks to the internet

Speaking of the internet, the slime is alive and well there too, but not so innocent. Slime ideologies of racism, anti-intellectualism and fascism, rolled into the textures of our memes, social media and (oh yeah) the federal government which has lately incubated amoebic ideology of toxicity and hard-core selfishness.

Where else can you find slime these days? Tar sands, a poisonous black sludge that oil companies are trying, ceaselessly trying, to move south and west out of Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast and to ports along the Salish Sea near where I live.

The Salish Sea, which includes Puget Sound, the Strait of Georgia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, is another battlefront in the slime invasion, this time the jellyfish and algae that have begun to choke out complex vertebrate lifeforms like salmon and orcas.

Infinitely pliable, slime is passive, non-resistant to external forces. Yet, when there is enough of it, it overwhelms everything. Jellyfish, like fascists, thrive in toxic environments that degrade more sophisticated organisms.

I believe that all these forms of slime are linked together (excepting, probably, the kids’ slime.) Big Oil brings in the money that shapes Trump administration policy and Big Oil brings in the money that fills the war chests of pro-oil members of the US House and Senate. The slimy souls, who prefer dollars over democracy, have demonstrated their willingness to sell land and sea for drilling, to cut away the safeguards that slowed climate change. And now we link to the slimification of the ocean, where jellyfish and other simple organisms choke out other life.

All of these slimeforms are a lot to fight, yet, I believe that those of us with spinal columns  have the tools and drive needed to win the battle. We can join others who say “no” to the oil that powers the slime machine. It is also within our ability, as sophisticated, social vertebrates, to create relationships and groups that push the slime back through cooperation. Victory has emerged out of environmentalist and Native American groups’ dogged resistance to major fossil fuel projects here in the Pacific Northwest. Groups like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have turned individual abuses into a national conversation about justice and equality — a broader challenge to the abusive, bigoted men who remain in seats of power.

The Rise of Slime

Rise of Slime, is the name for a trend noticed by the oceanologist Jeremy Jackson that as the oceans became warmer, polluted and overfished, they are becoming slimier too. Algae is one organism that does just fine in warm, polluted water. It has filled in where coral reefs, which couldn’t survive the changing sea conditions, have died. Here in Clallam County, Washington, you aren’t so likely to see algae in the water. Nonetheless, poisonous algal blooms have closed off mussel gathering two years running. The Washington Department of Health warns shellfish gatherers to expect more of these harmful blooms as the sea continues to warm.

More visible, than the algae are the jellyfish that clot the water throughout the warmer months. Cross jellies and comb jellies bloom numerous enough so that it can be difficult to look down without seeing through one of them.

There have been many occasions while kayaking when I could blindly dip my hand off my boat and be sure to come up with a clear, quivering blob. Whether or not this preponderance I saw is nature’s old way or climate reality, we could argue. Yet people have been seeing jellyfish on the rise the world over and evidence is beginning to point to jellies as a result of of pollution, overfishing and climate change.

Slimy jellyfish, with their simple needs can better withstand toxins than a more complicated organism such as an orca or salmon. The cnidarians may drift passively with the currents, but they are fast to reproduce and grow.

I think about these simple bags of slime, expected to do so well amidst the floating garbage. Then I think about the stunted ways our society communicates with one another now, how a couple hours of wading through internet news and social media will bring me to a similar protoplasmic, directionless feeling. Complex thought requires a diet of complex thought, before we bring our developed ideas into the world through gestation and nurture — not too dissimilar from the way mammalian creatures raise their young. Yet, in the toxic environment, it doesn’t pay to develop your thoughts, but to spew them out fast. Divide, multiply and overwhelm; that’s the viral strategy, the slime strategy.

Complex thought, like complicated, multicellular life is disadvantaged in the polluted environment, likely to be choked out by memes or plastic bags.

Witness the slimers like Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon or message board trolls who have flourished in the tide of toxic bullshit that flowed into the national discourse. At the center of it, quivering orange protoplasm oozing brain effluent out through a Twitter feed.

What about Hillary’s emails? Climate change is not the problem. Bigotry is not the problem. Skyrocketing inequality is not the problem. Fake News. Political correctness is the problem that we’re dealing with. Press conference over. Here’s your tiki torch/deportation papers.

Thinking people retain the wherewithal to see bullshit for what it is. Yet the sheer quantity of it  still has the power to overwhelm. If we take the time to address each new outrage, we spread ourselves thin and fall into involuntary myopia. There’s less time to go deep any more; it’s harder to settle down with a book when the news is blowing up yet again.

Paying for gas is paying for Trump

One way that I have tried to push back against the slime tide has been to watch my carbon footprint.

The act of riding a bike to work may not feel as cathartic as blocking a tank (or tanker ship) but for me it is less about riding my bike and more about not turning the ignition. The deep consequences of climate change have emerged out of seemingly trivial decisions such as driving or leaving the lights on.

Every time I fill up my tank, I feed the climate crisis. Compounding that, I know my gas money also feeds the ideological crisis of our time.

The dollar flows from the pump to the oil company, to the political action committee to the vicious petro-Republican agenda that oozes like tar sand over the fabric of our rights. The administration is soaked in fossil fuel — from Tillerson to Zinke to Pruitt. Oil companies may have hesitated to go all in with a racist liar in the general election, but then he won and they realized they were sitting atop a rich vein of opportunity. They pitched in millions for the inauguration; no doubt they are prepared to loosen their purse strings for the 2020 campaign.

A look at the obscene pro-oil, pro coal agenda pushed by the Trump team shows that the companies’ investment in them has been well placed. This year’s horrors included the administration pulling the country out of the Paris climate agreement and a move to declassify Capitol Reef and Bears Ears as National Monuments — to open the land to drilling. Further outrages include Zinke’s proposals to permit offshore drilling rigs in the Atlantic and Pacific.

The money from the Gas n’ Go doesn’t just prop Trump though. Thanks to Citizens United nourishing currents of money from companies like Exxon-Mobile and BP help feed the slime organisms that rule the swamp Congress. Witness the language of the newest tax plan that opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, saving money for billionaires so they could get the tax break they don’t need. Trump swiftly approved.

At the state level, the American Legislative Exchange Council also leverages Exxon-Mobile and Koch Industries donations to write the proposed legislation that the state senators and reps vote for. It is convenient when companies lean on politicians for results and have a bill conveniently pre-written that reflects their agenda, whether that agenda is about fracking standards or Stand Your Ground laws.

If any of what I have described above outrages you, just remember that we pay the bastards.

We support them every time we drive. The daily commute, visits with friends, a last minute trip out to buy dinner all put money in the pockets of those who have threatened our climate — helped feed the tumor growing on the face of democracy, equality and human decency.

A question of my own culpability

I continue to ask myself how much should I should use Tom’s on The Move to talk about the destruction of life as we know it on our planet. How much should I mention the climate crisis in my writing? Is it fiddling while Rome burns that I might admire dewdrops on the moss, while villainy is afoot?

I think of the balance between nature appreciation and advocacy when I look back on a summer  hike that I took with a couple friends who are heavily involved with environmental activism. Naturally, we had made this a gas free trip — having biked from Port Angeles to the trailhead, and then walked up to Lake Angeles at 4,000 feet. The lake was flanked by 2,000-foot cliffs of monumental stone. Even in the height of summer, the shadows held large swaths of snow. Snow gave way to braids of roaring water cascading down down to lake-level.

Throughout our hike, our group had talked about the latest outrages from the administration, dire indications of how climate would worsen drought and fires in the Olympic Mountains. Protests, petitions and letters to the policymakers awaited back down in Port Angeles, and my friend felt guilty about going above it all to admire the scenery.

Though I admired the commitment, it seemed wrong to me that someone who worked so hard to protect nature would doubt himself because he was taking time to enjoy it. I came up with Edward Abbey, who wrote in Desert Solitaire, “Where there is no joy, there can be no courage, and without courage all other virtues are useless.”

It is unthinkable for me to cut myself off from nature, which has been one of the greatest joys of my life. Yet the natural world remains under dire threat. I fear I may let my love of nature become a narcissistic relationship. If it enriches my life, shouldn’t I do something in return?

I wish I could say that I felt like a member of good standing with this relationship to the natural world, but I feel more and more like a freeloader who needs to do more.

It’s not that I don’t try. I have taken a few steps that most people around me have not, including adopting a vegan diet, buying the majority of my food in bulk so I can use reusable containers and driving my car with extreme parsimony. I use my bike for commuting, grocery runs and most other errands.

I cut down on the amount of produce I had to buy from out of state by making stir fries from stinging nettles I harvested, also going several months where the only fruit I ate was the berries, apples and pears I’d picked around Port Angeles.

The doorstep adventure remains my favorite way to travel. I consider it important that I have spent the past summer traveling throughout the Olympic Peninsula on bike and foot. It is my way of saying that I will not make an exception, even for doing the adventures that I love, that I would rather stay close and push myself near home, than fly out to some exotic locale, on the wings of a carbon blasting machine.

A cross country plane trip to visit family back home was my biggest carbon expenditure of 2017, and for all my other efforts, it likely tilted the scales beyond what would be sustainable for one person over one year.

Even if I disregarded that trip, my (mostly) grounded vegetable existence would still feel inadequate to address the task at hand.

Do vs. Don’t

Why inadequate? Inadequate because the bulk of my actions have seemed to start with “I don’t,”  as in “I don’t eat meat” or “I don’t drive my car to work.” I began thinking that if I wanted to have a meaningful place in the world, I needed to have some “I do” statements about myself as well.

Naomi Klein, the environmental activist and author, puts words to the feeling in her book No is Not Enough, which came out a couple months after Trump’s inauguration. Klein argues that if the opposition can only say no to things that Trump does, they will fail. There needs to be an alternate vision that they can say yes to. This vision would be a progressive agenda that stands up for human rights, corporate responsibility and sustainable energy.

The agenda Klein believes in resonates with me, but I want to say yes with actions as well as words.

Over the past year, I have tried to use actions to build my commitment to the environment. I haven’t done anything spectacular, just little steps that include volunteering time at some restoration sites, going out to help monitor stream quality around Port Angeles every month and spending time working with Olympic Climate Action. The later has included helping at a fundraiser against the Trans Mountain Pipeline, work compiling a weekly list of news stories for members, and speaking out at a county hearing about the need for shoreline zoning to represent climate change reality. These small actions have made me aware of those who do so much more.

Take Michael Foster, one of a group of five “valve turners” who broke into pipeline substations near the U.S. Canadian border and shut down 15 percent of the oil imports entering the United States in one day. Foster could now face more than two decades in prison for his actions. His sentencing is in North Dakota, the state where he shut the wheel on the Keystone 1 pipe and cut off the tar sands crude it was bringing into the U.S..

Not a compromising kind of guy, Foster. In a Seattle Met interview, he tells the reporter that fellow activists who fly in planes to vacation overseas are “actively destroying the planet — for fun.” He is also one of the kayaktavists who have blocked oil tankers and drilling platforms on the sea using sea kayaks as buffers.

When I saw Foster speak in Port Angeles, it was regarding the Trans Mountain pipeline proposal, a line that would haul more tar sands oil than even the Keystone XL project would and increase oil ship traffic by 700 percent on the Strait of Juan de Fuca between the U.S. and Canada. The sheer audacity of this project, the scale and money that would be involved was staggering to consider. Foster, the former mental health practitioner, had a message for our group: he may have seemed crazy that he was willing to trade away his freedom in order to turn a valve, but it was even crazier to believe that half-measures would save us from the climate crisis.

Coming together

Native groups have been another dogged and inspiring resistance to the fossil fuel industry. Tribes throughout North America have forced corporations to backpedal projects and the government to respect the old treaties giving them rights to fishing and healthy lands. The  fronts are too numerous to name, but include a stunning 2016 court victory where the Lummi Tribe used treaty rights to win against what would have been the largest coal shipping terminal in the United States at Cherry Point, Washington. Tribes in Washington and British Columbia are united against the Trans Mountain pipeline proposed by the Kinder Morgan Corporation. The Puyallup tribe continues to push back with lawsuits and protests against a proposed natural gas terminal alongside their reservation land at the Port of Tacoma.

Like Foster, citizens in these groups have been willing to face arrest for what they believe in. They, who stand witness to generations of exploitation, know the stakes.

Those who toed the line at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in North Dakota are coming back to fight projects in their homelands. I have heard the Lakota phrase “Mni Wiconi,” — “water is life” —  here in Washington, where it applies to the life within the Salish Sea just as aptly as it would apply to the Missouri River in North Dakota.

The theme of common struggle is not just geographic, however. It reflects the burden climate change puts on people across all walks of life — though the burden is shouldered disproportionally by the poor, the marginalized and the disenfranchised. Environmentalism is entering a coming of age moment where the public image of the movement is far more than just a group of concerned white guys like me.

Tribes that fight oil pipes also fight centuries of racist treatment and a prevailing attitude that their existence doesn’t matter. History shows them they cannot expect benevolence from those in power.

Every place where there is a fight to protect the environment, there is also a fight for human rights and dignity.

See the superfund sites, flush with oil refinery toxins, that flooded out when Hurricane Harvey slammed Houston, Most of the sites were put around working class black or Hispanic neighborhoods.

Another jarring image from 2017 — the President of the United States free throwing paper towels at a crowd of Puerto Rican hurricane victims. The moment demanded a leader who would acknowledge the need to do more to halt climate change, a leader who would see the need for massive and uninhibited aid to fellow Americans who happened speak Spanish and be majority Hispanic.

Instead, the supposed leader of the free world gave the Puerto Ricans a golf trophy dedication that they could share with the Texas and Florida hurricane victims.

Lack of empathy for these groups, the victims of climate change from flooded Bangladesh to the melting native Alaskan village to the strip mined Appalachian community, fits into what Klein would describes as a “sacrifice zone” mentality, an attitude where whole communities, entire regions, can be seen as necessary losses for the sake of business.

The ugly concept of the sacrifice zone is a product of the same mindset that accepts civilian deaths from an indiscriminate bombing, a mindset that not only accepts grotesque disparity between haves and have nots, but demands walls to keep the have-nots out.

Sacrifice zones have a way of creeping through anyway. One day you may be grateful to be inside the border with the sacrifice zone out of view; the next day, the pipeline is coming through your land, the storm has come for your city. That’s when you realize that your best hope isn’t setting yourself apart but stepping up,making connections. Now that you need someone else to have your back, you can ask yourself: Did you have theirs when it counted?

The idea of strength through unity runs through the “Join or Die” motto of the American Revolution, up through the Pull Together movement among Northwest tribes fighting the Trans Mountain Pipeline. More outreach equals more support from those who will sign your petition, or else put their bodies on the line with you.

Thus, the wise environmentalists know that their fight is with groups like Black Lives Matter, for gay rights groups, anti-poverty activists, those who speak for immigrants and refugees and the burgeoning #MeToo movement — all of whom are working to prevent people from being treated like disposable sacrifice zones.

The power of diversity is confirmed by study of nature: the most beautiful, complex systems exist with diverse actors fulfilling different roles. A healthy forest has a range of trees and shrubs, worms, bugs, helpful fungi nourishing the roots.

Organisms themselves are built on the harmonious relationships between types of life systems. This is true, even for simpler, slimier organisms like jellyfish. They are not altogether simple, boasting nerve nets, tentacles for feeding, tentacles for stinging, innumerable stinging nematocysts. Jellies may bloom into thousands, yet still drift with the currents — with little control or care regarding the agenda.

Far more complicated, far more threatened, we have the Chinook salmon that delivers nutrients from the sea through the rivers, back into the shadow of the northwest forest where it was born to propagate itself anew. Its brain allows it to follow the cues it needs to navigate back to its birthplace, its muscles allow it to thrash up currents that would splat a jellyfish to the wall.

The strength is reinforced by an agglomeration of differentiated tissue below the dorsal fin. Nerve and bone comes together to give the fish that feature that gives it membership in our shared phylum: chordata. The current goes one way, but the salmon has the power to resist (just like we do) — because of its spine.

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On Blasted Seas: A February Kayak Surfing Safari in Washington

“Ahh, I’m hoping to avoid that happening to me,” John said.

He was looking at the back of a heavy-set man in a plaid jacket, lurching awkwardly, painfully, from his vehicle across the gas station parking lot toward the doors of the convenience store.

The vision was quickly gone, as we were speeding down the highway out of Port Angeles, two beautiful fiberglass kayaks strapped to the roof of John’s truck. There was no way to assess whether we had seen a man who’d eaten a few too many convenience store Twinkies over the years, or whether other factors like injury or illness had robbed him of the ability to walk easily.

Either way, even the brief sight of those tortured steps made an impression on John who, at 65, has seen plenty of his peers go down the road of decreasing ability and decreasing will to be active. He’s nowhere near slowing down though, keeping active through mountain biking, road biking and going dancing with his wife.

And he still hits the water in his sweet fleet of kayaks multiple times a week, winter weather be damned. He logs eight-mile downwind runs in a dagger-fast surf skis on Lake Crescent, regularly plies Port Angeles Harbor, amidst the log booms and harbor seals. Last fall, he and a friend paddled across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island and Victoria, British Columbia. (some 30+ miles.) When he needs a little more adrenaline, he’ll take his squat 14-foot plastic kayak, “rock gardening” — a pastime that involves veering the boat into, out of and over rocks when the waves are crashing in.

The waves would be crashing in today, alright. The forecast called for a strong wind flowing out of the Fraser Valley in Canada, howling down the Haro Strait to our launch at Freshwater Bay — a few miles west of Port Angeles. The National Weather Service had posted a Small Craft Advisory. Even so, the weather in Port Angeles was mild and windless. Feeling complacent, I only put a thin layer on beneath my drysuit before I headed out the door.

The tree branches did not clash, nor was there any other sign of wind as we drove along the road down to the put-in. It was only the last turn in the road, before I saw the trees begin to sway. Then I looked at the sea.

“Whoa!”

There were six-foot slabs of water rolling in, toppling over themselves in blasts of angry foam. The shallow, tidal beach only extended the violent interplay between land and water — row, upon row of breakers snarling into shore. When strong westerlies trouble the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the summertime, Freshwater Bay is usually a patch of calm. On this first day of February, it was the rodeo.

Further out, the sea hardly seemed kinder, with the waves rebounding off of Bachelor Rock creating more tumult. Even mightier waves loomed up and broke over themselves just beyond the bay.

To the north lay the snowy flanks of Mount Baker. It seemed to me that some hoary war god was pointing his finger at us from the summit, whipping up the armies of the sea against our launch.

John and I consulted. The waves were bigger than we’d expected, but we were confident we could punch our way off the beach in his 16-foot fiberglass kayaks. Maybe we wouldn’t be doing any rock gardening today. Maybe we wouldn’t even go out of the bay, but just getting on the water would be a worthy adventure, one with an exciting opportunity for surfing off the beach.

Before we headed out, both of us put some extra layers on beneath our drysuits for warmth. I slapped on a rain jacket too so that I could use it’s hood. John didn’t bring any head gear, but I gave him a wraparound hood, that I’d salvaged from one of my old jackets.

“Only trouble with these hoods is that they cut out peripheral vision,” I said.

Nonetheless, we agreed that it was going to be helpful to have as many warm layers as possible on this blowy February day.

I was also glad to have someone like John on board, who has spent years kayak surfing off the Olympic Peninsula and has experience in kayak rescue and other gnarly situations. An ex-prison guard (you would never guess from his easy smile or ready laughter), his job required that he be able and willing to restrain, incapacitate or kill violent inmates. This reality didn’t make him into anyone’s hardhearted authoritarian. In fact, he sympathized for the prisoners he watched, and thought it was all too easy for people in desperate circumstances to make the wrong decision. He is passionate about the marine environment and worries about what global  warming is doing to the waters that he plays on.

For the first part of the day’s game, we set our boats on the damp sand, just within reach of the waves, got in, snapped sprayskirts into place, started scooting ourselves toward the melee.

 

The tide in shallow Freshwater Bay goes out  quite quickly, and we had to scoot ourselves after it. Finally, a big swell of water lifted me off the sand, and I started paddling immediately, taking no time to put my hands into the insulating neoprene pogies on the paddle shaft. At first, the kayak’s upturned bow sliced easily through the sub-waves. Then, one of the larger breakers crashed right in front of me, burying me chest-deep in frothing water.

The kayak slowed, but I dug back in with the paddle, pushing myself forward. To lose momentum was to give up the game and get thrashed back into the beach.

I got to the face of the next wave — a taller one — just as it steepened before the break. This time my bow pointed up at the sky, and I dug in against gravity with ferocious strokes. The kayak nosed over the top, and bellyflopped onto the water on the other side. The wave exploded behind me. The next few waves were in varying stages of collapse, either allowing me to paddle over them, or else breaking over my deck.

 

Once we were away from the main break-zone, we were in less immediate danger of getting smashed up by a wave, but the waves were still steep, and more than a few of the bigger ones were still still break over themselves unpredictably — a nasty surprise for a kayaker.

“Keep looking to your left,” John advised.

Aye aye, Captain. I flipped my hood down so I could get a wider arc of vision.

The prettiest kayaking out of Freshwater Bay is arguably along the rock cliffs and sea caves to the west, but in these conditions, that area was sure to be a breeding ground for treacherous reflector waves and sneaky breakers coming over the reefs.

We opted to go east toward the mouth of the Elwha River, where there would be a sandy shore. Before our bows, Klahhane Ridge rose up in a snowy 6,000 foot wall above Port Angeles. It was backlit, but spectacular as always.

I kept looking to the left. The steep waves were forever on the cusp of rolling over. I would lean into them, and support myself by sinking my paddle into their sides with a high brace. Here and there I would accelerate my boat or slow down to avoid a surprise breaker. As I watched John’s boat disappear and reappear behind waves, I contemplated how difficult it would actually be for one of us to rescue the other if one of us capsized. Yes, it was safer that there were two of us, but as the seas got more wild, we had look out for ourselves, and keep an eagle eye on the water.

“There’s a break zone above that reef over there,” John called.

That patch of sea on our right was a place I knew because it usually offered calm. During the summer months, bull kelp growing off the sunken rocks there tended to dampen the incoming waves. Now the kelp was gone, and the waves were stacking up over the shallow water. Bathymetry was no academic concern here. Water depth had everything to do with whether we could glide over the waves or whether they would crash on top of us.

On our other side, there was another line of breakers, easily-eight feet high. Impossible to tell whether there was another reef there, or else some weird wave convergence/amplification happening in that zone. What was clear was that we were paddling a shaky corridor of relative safety between two much more violent zones. There was little to suggest that the big violent breakers further out couldn’t push their way in toward our current position, making for dangerous paddling.

John and I opted to turn about. The current in the strait was going west with the ebbing tide, carrying us back toward Bachelor Rock quickly.

Here and there were patches of fizzy water where tiny bubbles danced to the surface. Danger! These marked places where waves had broken recently and were likely to do so again quickly. I swerved my boat around one of these bubble patches, just before another wave came up and crashed in the exact spot.

“Wind’s dying down!” John announced.

The air was calmer now and warmer, though the sea was still bucked and heaved.

Perfect surfing conditions. We pointed our bows at the shore and waited to catch a ride. I flipped my tracking skeg down for better handling (John’s was disabled from gravel that had clogged the mechanism during  our seal launch off the beach,) started paddling tentatively in the wave direction..

The first wave nudged my boat along for a couple yards before it surged past me, but no matter, it gave me the acceleration I needed to catch the next one. I felt the back of the boat lift up as the bow sunk down into the trough. Leaning forward, to bring the weight of the boat to the bow, I paddled hard, then cut my speed so I wouldn’t overshoot. In no time, the wave was whipping me into a broach — turning me sideways in spite of the skeg and a hard stern rudder stroke.

I flipped my weight onto the other side, leaning straight into the wave face as it broke around me. The paddle fought for purchase in the aerated water. My head and torso were horizontal now. I jammed hard on the paddle and instinctively flipped my hips, sending myself back upright to finish my ride in triumph.

“Whoooo!”

The wave petered out and I quickly swung my boat around so that I could meet the next one head on. I noted that I had a slight ache in my shoulder blade due because of my sloppy high brace. Shoulder dislocation is one of the most common injuries that happens to kayak surfer. The risk is lessened by making sure to keep the paddle well in front of your torso while bracing, however. John and I paddled back out a few more times to catch some more waves. I had some good rides, but none as adrenaline filled as the first.

 

The wind began to blow again, knocking down the swells and diminishing their surfability. John and I paddled further off shore to check out the water around Bachelor Rock. The small sea-stack, with its lone, wind-snarled pine at the top, creates the western boundary of the bay. It is often a place where the currents muddle into each other and the waves get weird.

Today, Bachelor was sending out reflector waves — almost as tall as the primary waves — out at a right angle into the wave direction. Where the crests overlapped, it created steep, short-lived towers of water, followed by a sudden drop-off. The water was difficult to predict or brace off of.

I intended to get a small piece of the action by cutting close, but not too close, to Bachelor and then turning back into the bay. But circumstances were going to give me a closer look than I wanted.

As I approached the rock, I realized that the tidal current was beginning to push me into the worst water. A jolt of adrenaline went through my system along with the realization I needed to act quickly and precisely to get out. I swung my bow to the northeast and paddled hard. Meanwhile, I had to make constant micro-braces with my paddle blade as the water rose and fell randomly around me. John matched my course from a distance, though I could only catch glimpses of his boat through the waves. The only path back into the bay was through a break zone, which I traversed diagonally with strokes timed to avoid the breaks. Luckily, nothing crashed on top of me and I got back into the safer water unscathed.

But where was John?

I swung my boat 180 degrees, and saw him very close to Bachelor, his kayak rising and dropping in the chop. His expression was etched in concentration as he made quick adjustments with his paddle, reading and responding to the chaotic water. Eventually, he spat himself back out from the danger zone.

He, like me, had drifted closer to the action than intended, and gotten a nice shakeup out of the deal. With the hood cutting down his peripheral vision, he’d been caught unawares while turning his boat around, looked up to find himself right up next to Bachelor and in extremely chaotic water.

 

Both of us had adrenaline pumping through our systems. Once we were out of the danger zone, the fear had left and reckless joy rose in its place.

We surfed back into the beach, loaded the boats, cold but triumphant.

John had met plenty of young people, he said, that look down on sea kayaking as a slow, boring sport. But he knows better.

True, many of John’s friends prefer to go out on the calm days and take their time. They don’t necessarily jump to join him when there is a small craft advisory or gale warning. Nor does he mind such easy days.  He  takes satisfaction from the calm concentration required for the perfect paddle stroke — the torso twist, the pressure on the foot pegs, the timing of the blade.  Even when nothing seems to happen on the water, he is not bored.

The crystal calm days and small craft advisories, each have their virtues and opportunities for play. Play, as he has frequently told me, gets top priority in his retirement.

After we unloaded the kayaks at his house, I’d be getting to work, while he had plans to go biking while the sun was shining and the sky was bright. We drove away from the boat ramp with Mount Baker and the churning seas in the rearview.

There would be other days for quiet paddling.

 

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Moments on Lake Ozette

Jarrett paddling on Lake Ozette

Some January day.

Jarrett and I stood amidst gear and kayaks on the shores of Lake Ozette — the biggest lake in Olympic National Park, at the north-westernmost corner of Washington, about to launch an overnight trip.

And lo! The sun was hot on my arms. Insects were flitting about. I felt, maybe a little bit silly, that I had brought the drysuit, neoprene sprayskirt, various and sundry items of hardcore cold water adventure.

This was warmer than half of the trips we had guided this summer.

“I can’t believe I went skiing yesterday,” I said.

The chest deep powder at Hurricane Ridge was a couple hours drive away, but was worlds removed from this all-too-pleasant lake front. The water was glass.
Jarrett wanted to know if I had brought sunscreen. I hadn’t. Psychologically, I’d been preparing for wind-whipped waves and sleety rain, not the possibility of a tan.

Jarrett slipped into his drysuit so that he could comfortably launch his kayak in the cold water. I was no mood to steam cook myself in Gore-Tex, and opted for shorts and a thin synthetic layer beneath my life vest.

No one said “Climate Change,” but on such an aberrant day, how could you not think about the warming planet and the new realities that it will impose upon our lives.

January might yet become the best season for kayaks.
And it will be just as well, because at least there will be something to do as skiable snow goes the way of the dodo.

Note to up and coming outdoor business owners: Maybe it’s time to start phasing out the skis. Kayaks will have the edge soon enough.

The snow will just keep shrinking up the mountains. Meanwhile, exciting new waterways are going to open up in low-lying places like Florida, Louisiana and New York City. Sure, the water may be a sludge of sewage, decay and industrial effluvia, but as long as the pH doesn’t get low enough to melt boats, you will probably still be able to float over it.

Think about the windfalls awaiting the entrepreneur who sets up the first guided kayak tour through Lower Manhattan.

“And this is the old New York Stock Exchange, where the short-term greed and willful ignorance of investors, abetted by a complicit government, helped bring the Great Flood. Hey, who wants to hit the snack raft for a New York pretzel?”

No one else had gotten the memo about the perfect weather it seems, because there were no other boats that we could see, no other vehicles at the boat launch into Swan Bay.

Jarrett launched first onto the smooth blue water. I made a couple adjustments to my gear and paddled after him. Within a couple minutes, I caught up to him. He had gravitated to a small shady spot behind some trees, where he’d have relief from the sun.

“You see that?” He gestured lazily.

A bald eagle perched in the branches above, scanning the water with its watchful eyes. It would be the first of many eagles we saw on the trip.

“I’m glad you got us out here,” I said.

 

The trip idea started less than 24-hours ago, when I’d called Jarrett to ask if he’d wanted to hit the water for a day. He was watching football, and said he’d call me back. When my phone rang again, I half-expected to hear that he’d be busy.

“You want to do an overnight on Lake Ozette?”

“Tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Hell yeah!”

Lake Ozette had been on his to-do-list for a while, partly because you can combine the paddle with a two-mile hike over to a remote beach on the Pacific Ocean. I was stoked to some kind of combination adventure. Moreover, I had a strong itch to get out of town for some time away from the hellish news cycle and a fuzz of wintertime blues.
On the road, the dark clouds around Port Angeles began to melt off. Within 45 minutes, there were blue skies overhead. Highway 112 took a serpentine route along the Strait of Juan de Fuca through a series of hairpin turns and jackknife hills. The mountains of Vancouver Island to our north glimmered with sunlit snow.

“Whooo! That’s beautiful.”

“I can’t believe this weather.”

“Awesome!”

Led Zeppelin on the stereo was the perfect compliment to our buoyant spirits.

“It’s been a long time, been a long time, been a long time!”

Indeed. I hadn’t been in a kayak since November.

The highway would continue out toward Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, on the northwestern-most tip of the continental U.S.

Before we reached this juncture, we hung a left onto a little-traveled backroad. Trees, thick with moss lolled over silty creeks. It was life-on-life, Washington’s bayou country.

Boxy metal gates blocked gravel roads that accessed logged out hillsides. We entered the National Park a couple hundred yards away from the boat launch.

Only half the lake shore is public land, and several logging cuts are visible from the water. I was grateful for the sparse number of houses.

The still water and the lack of people made it possible to perceive subtle cues from the environment.

As Jarrett and I paddled out of Swan Bay into the broader lake, we heard the distant sound of breaking waves. It was the Pacific Ocean — close to two miles off the west shore, but sounding close enough to be just over the next rise. The tumult of countless breakers blended into a white blanket of shushing, thundering agitation as thousand-mile swells threw themselves against the continent.

What a contrast to the miles of stillness we saw before our bows. A loon cried out from somewhere.

“Man! I am sweltering inside this drysuit.” Jarrett announced.

“That’s funny. I feel just about perfect right now,” I said. “This shirt and shorts are breathing great.”

“Have you felt the water yet?” Jarrett asked. I dipped my hand in, and it was icy.

“If someone were to tip you over right now, you’d wish you were in a drysuit.”

I made no further comment and gave Jarrett’s boat plenty of room.

Off of Tivoli Island’s south side

We steered around Garden Island and Preacher’s Point. Many of the names on the map recalled the Scandinavian settlers who lived here in the 19th century. Often they paddled boats made by the nearby Makah tribe. Excavations have recovered human habitation in the area going back 2,000 years.*

No sign of those past inhabitants now as we paddled our plastic boats over the still water. We set our sites on Tivoli island, a couple miles down the way, where we thought we might camp. Sure enough, there was a well established site on the north end of the island with firewood lying on shore.

We paddled a quick loop around to the island’s south side to see if there were any spots that still had the sun, but no dice. Jarrett was down to see about sites on Baby Island, about a mile off, but I felt like we had a pretty good thing on Tivoli and voted that we start getting things set up sooner rather than later.

A dim realization had begun to rattle my confidence, as I thought about what I had (and hadn’t) packed.

I took out my dry bags and the bear canister. There was my stove. Ah, but where was the fuel? I remembered that I decided to take the fuel canister out of the can to save space and pack it elsewhere. Unfortunately, I’d failed to follow through on that last important detail.

“So how do you feel about a cook fire tonight?” I asked.

“Sure, but we can just use your stove,” Jarrett said.

“Well, you see what happened was…”

Jarrett might have been a bit annoyed, because I’d told him he didn’t need to bring his stove. Nope, Tom had it covered.

“Good thing we aren’t in the mountains,” Jarrett muttered. “You said you were going to bring your stove.”

I lamely pointed out that I had brought the stove; it was the fuel that I’d left in the car.

“No sweat. I’ll get a fire going no problem,” I said. I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass getting that fire started.

Sure there was wood everywhere, but most of it was damp. The grim reality I’ve encountered is that campfires on the Olympic Peninsula require generous amounts existential struggle and smoke inhalation.

I started by cutting up sections of logs and shaving wet bark from dead twigs with my knife.  After 45 minutes of gathering, I had sorted out various-sized piles of wood and arranged a cross-hatched nest of tiny twigs for kindling. Everything looked nice and boy scout-worthy. Now, the fun part.

I brought out one of my cotton balls soaked in petroleum jelly, ignited it with flint and steel, and used a stick to nudge it below my twig pile. Orange flame leapt up promisingly. The twigs were burning! The flames climbed higher, and I realized that the twigs were already almost all burned over now. Not what I wanted.

I threw more tiny twigs onto the pile, trying to get them over the fading licks of flame before they went out.  More tiny twigs. I started blowing desperately. Smoke was everywhere. I put my face to the ground to inhale from the puddle of clean air and rose back to the dying blaze for fire CPR. The twigs began burning again, and I tried to get some thicker, longer-burning twigs on the scene. They wouldn’t light of course.

My reputation was on the line and I was not going to let cold dinner be on me.
] I teased more tiny twigs into place. Tentative progress. Breathed the smoke. Cursed the fire. Blew more. Cheered as the the flames climbed up again. Tiny twigs. I cursed the fire, as it seems to change its mind. Blew on the fire. Applied bigger twigs.

As soon as I had flames that lasted more than 20 seconds, I grabbed a pot full of water and held it over the blaze.

“Or we could just use my stove,” Jarrett offered.

“You brought your stove?” I practically exploded.

“I thought I’d mentioned that.”

“Well, now that I’ve got this going, we’re damn well cooking over this fire.”

A fire with kayaks
And with dinner cooking

Because the bear can (mandated by the Park Service) only made room for my smallest pot, the meal was multiple courses, including pasta with bouillon cubes, an instant cup of pad thai, and some Spanish rice — with parsley garnish, fattened by the small canister of oil I’d brought along.

Jarrett took over fire duties, transforming my humble cook fire into a hearty camp blaze.

Venus flashed onto the scene first, leading the charge of the starlight brigade. Stars upon stars popped into existence above our fire — little sparks, the fine dusting of cosmic flame traced across the firmament.

The lake caught them, showed the sky its reflection. Even that still, dark water could not master the subtleties of heavenly detail. And I suppose it is the same with us, whether we aim our camera lenses skyward or try to encapsulate profundities with language. The thing itself, the present moment, holds the richest detail.

Earlier, I had watched the shifting gradients of color on the lake as the sun went down. Green blue in the west marched, seamless to the deep dark blues on the eastern shores. Wavelets crisscrossed themselves at the corner of the island, came to shore in the shape of diamonds. Gravel had moved away from this little place of interference and left a corridor of bare sand.

These and many other tiny aspects of the dynamic scene in front of me, danced inside my mind, which suddenly seemed a much bigger place than the night before, when I had been reading articles off a computer screen. The world seemed vaster and more full of possibilities.

And yet, the sunlight would banish the celestial tableaux from the lake’s surface. The delightful feeling that I had stepped closer to reality would also fade. It was an appreciation that required repetition, like Sunday Mass. If one can only fully appreciate the stars while under them, it is important to maximize that time.

Crossing wavelets bend around a snag in the lake
 Sunrise brings glitter paths to the lake surface
Kayak deck-mounted map showing Ozette and the nearby Pacific Ocean

Morning came with cloudy skies. It wasn’t raining, fortunately.

I went out to get the bear can holding our food. You wouldn’t expect the bears to be out in January, but I learned later that the bears on the part of the Peninsula didn’t really hibernate, because it never got deep cold. A local at a diner explained that the island had been visited by forest creatures. During calving season, local deer would swim out there to give birth, hoping to escape predators. But at least one bruin had gotten wise. The man had seen it swimming out there — probably with a hankering for some tender venison.

Sure enough, there were fresh deer tracks along the shore, but no sign, fortunately, of bears.

We made oatmeal with Jarrett’s stove, packed down the tent, loaded our boats and hit the water.

There was a strait shot across the water to where we would find our trail to the Pacific. Jarrett suggested we cut in a little sooner so we could paddle up the shore. In doing so, we saw what was easily a dozen bald eagles.

They perched in the branches of pines looking at the water. A couple of them took off as we got closer. Several were juveniles, lacking the distinctive bald head and white tail feathers and flashing white and brown beneath their wings. I thought back to January paddles with my dad and others on the Connecticut River, another place that draws eagles in wintertime.

Other signs of animal life included beaver-chewed branches along shore.

A sudden scurrying in the branches caught my attention. A small dark creature was running down the tree.

“Jarrett!” I hissed. “Come here and see this!”

By the time he had paddled up, the creature had vanished.

Eagle in flight
Perched Eagle

“It must have been a fisher cat,” I said. There has been a Park reintroduction program for these cagey weasel creatures, once hunted out of the Olympic Range. They are not something you spot often, and in fact, this was the second fisher, I’d seen in my life. The first time was in high school when I was running through the woods in Connecticut.

After I found out what a fisher was, I developed a respect for the little scrappers. They are tough, and will even go after porcupines.

Later, it occurred to me that I might have seen a bear cub, not a fisher. Still, the agility of the creature stuck out in my mind, and it may have been small for a bear cub this time of year. I believe that it was a fisher I saw in that tree.

The trailhead we wanted was in Ericson’s bay at the northwest corner of the lake. A small orange marker showed us where to park our boats.

We traded life vests and neoprene booties for sneakers and rain jackets. The rainforest trail was closed in by sword fern and salal shrub. A line of rotting boards offered a place to walk over the mud and soaking moss. The slick wood was as treacherous as black ice. We pushed our way through the salal, over and under fallen trees, put our feet through the oozing ground. Hemlocks, firs and giant cedars closed in  above our heads.

 

Trail challenges
The “dead end” is where our kayaks were

An hour of tromping gave way to an opening where we could see the gray waves of the Pacific.

Miles of lonely beach stretched to our north and south. Rock escarpments rose up in the distance. There was only one other hiker on the beach. He probably came in from a different trail and was far off anyhow. Another eagle cut through the sky overhead.

We ate a light lunch on a log. I went to mess around at the edge of the foamy waves.

There were so many patterns from nature here, including the lines of the waves, pods of bubbles, the arrangement of the small rocks along the sand, and the lines and dips that that the water carved around them.

There were also abandoned buoys, tangles of nylon rope, netting, globs of shattered styrofoam blown out over the sand, countless empty bottles. Here was one of the most remote beaches in the lower United States, and yet it too was part of our trash-heap ecosystem. As Jarrett pointed out, the remoteness of the beach also meant that it didn’t have the parks and recreation department, the local volunteers and other do-gooders who would clean up the refined sands in front of a block of beach hotels.

View of the Pacific
Foam and cliffs
Big box ‘o beach trash

The lot of this did detract from the wild beauty of the beach, but fortunately, there had been plenty of wild beauty to start with. As in the night before, I had the opportunity to bask in the wonder of a vast and natural place.

We left the beach, having not explored much of it and I was fine with that.

If left some time to explore some other islands and camp spots along the lake for the next time.

Though, really, sometimes you don’t know if there will be a next time. I don’t mean that in the apocalyptic, kayaking down Wall Street sense — though I am severely concerned about the health of our planet — but mainly in terms of the ups and downs of our lives: the sickness, the health, long workweeks and yes, the reality that life is a fragile thing, easy to snuff out.

To Jarrett, who has had some close calls in his day, getting out on the water or into the mountains affirms that he is doing it right. Time outdoors is an invaluable facet of a life that also involves work he takes pride in and a committed relationship.

Keep hitting high notes, and it will be more likely that you will end on one.

It’s something I’d do well to remember.
* https://www.nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=96997

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Tubal Cain

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The author steps inside the Tubal Cain mine

The snowfall was one thing Lauren and I hadn’t counted on when we set out in search of the Tubal Cain mine in the Dungeness Valley.

First there was the drive up from Sequim, where we climbed a couple thousand feet into the Olympic Mountains via a winding dirt road that was full of potholes. We got to the trailhead a bit before noon. The snow was beginning to pack onto the dirt. Soon enough, it would become impassable.

There was only a light dusting on the trail as we began our hike, but as we gained elevation, the snow deepened. High white peaks glared down on us.

A couple hours into our hike, the trail we’d been following through the trees became a slog through deeper powder. Following the twists and turns of the trail became more difficult. There appeared to be a fork next to some orange flagging. Lauren thought we should go left, but I insisted that we go straight ahead. My way petered out into a meadow a couple minutes later. The snow made it difficult to see where anything went.

We doubled back and tried Lauren’s route, which led into a boulder garden. We passed a few pieces of metal, which seemed out of place. A B-17 had crashed  here on a rescue mission back in the ’50s, and apparently the debris had scattered over a large area (though we were probably looking at old mining equipment.) The main crash site was close by, and was a popular spot for visitors to check out, but it seemed unlikely that we would have time to check it out now that it was getting late.

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On the pothole road

_mg_1305Lauren at a stream crossing along the trail

_mg_1300Moss closeup 

We had both put off lunch for a while, and were hungry. A large, overhanging boulder made for a semi-sheltered rest stop, where we could sit down.

The rocks had a weird smell to them like a mix between stale beer and marijuana. For a second, I wondered if someone else was out there with us, but we had seen no other tracks in the snow.

We sat down on my sleeping pad, eating fistfuls of Lauren’s homemade trail mix. I looked dubiously at a bruised up banana I had brought along. Fortunately, Lauren had the idea to incorporate it into a sandwich with flatbread and pieces of a chocolate bar. As if this weren’t fancy enough, she added a bit of the flambé. Using my lighter in lieu of a torch, she put the chocolate to the flame, melted it over the banana in a fine drizzle. This method took no small amount of time, but the melted chocolate pattern elevated the utilitarian wrap into backcountry gourmet.

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Wrap construction and Lauren with the finished product.

Unfortunately, the clock was running down on us.

If we didn’t head back soon, we would likely finish our hike in the dark. I decided that we owed ourselves another 10 minutes of searching for the mine before we called it a day.

I pulled the map out and squinted at the features to see where the trail was supposed to go.

It looked like the mine could be on the other side of a creek, so we crossed over. I took us up a snowy hillside, approaching a cliff wall. Something about this felt right, but I couldn’t tell if I was drawing conclusions based on false optimism. I beat my way ahead of Lauren through the drifted snow on the way uphill. There was a patch of gravel that looked trail-like. Once again, there was that strange skunky odor in the air. A few steps beyond and I was at the bottom of the cliff.

And there was the mine! It was a dark opening, a mouth in the gray body of the rock.

Row on row of icicles hung above the darkness like an array of fangs.

The beast had announced itself with stale breath — the dead odor that I had perceived earlier.

A drool of a stream gurgled out from the unseen depths.

Come on in.

I let myself savor my trepidation and turned back down the slope.

“Whoo Lauren! Come on up! You gotta see this!”

Several icicles fell off the rocks and smashed into the stream below. Plenty more of them were waiting up there — a definite hazard.

I also wanted to go in. But how far did the rabbit hole go?

I took a headlamp and a small lantern out from my pack. Well, we’d come this far.

Lauren was game to accompany me on some minor-league spelunking. I walked in first, with ginger steps upon the various stones and pieces of smashed up wood poking up above the water. There were segments of dilapidated tracks that would have transported cars full of ore back in the day.

Here in there were half-rusted pipes put in there God-knows-when; I only trusted half of them not to shatter beneath my feet. I shone the light in front of me, saw only a uniform corridor, retreating to oblivion. There was no undulation or other variation as in what one would expect from an ordinary cave. Neither were there stalactites or stalagmites.  It was just tall enough to walk under, just wide  enough to stretch hands out to reach either side.

A century ago, efficient men had chipped the tunnel straight and direct into the rock so it would bring them to the copper ore. The mine was named after Tubal Cain, a metalsmith and the biblical descendant of Cain — Abel’s jealous brother. For all the work that the men had put in, the mine had brought more hardship than profit. The clearest legacy of the men’s labors was the straight and narrow shaft bored into the rock.

There was one variation against the uniformity of the stone however. It was on the ceiling, where I perceived small hanging objects, here and there. Small, furry, hanging objects.

I turned carefully around to Lauren, noticed one of them near her head.

“Sooooo…” I said in a voice that was meant to sound calm, and which likely inspired the opposite, “How do you feel about bats?”

“I actually really don’t like them,” Lauren said.

“OK, so maybe we should walk back out the way we came.”

“You’re seeing bats in here?”

“Just don’t look up at the ceiling.”.

I waited until we made our retreat back to the light to announce that indeed there had been several chiropterans in the mine, one of which had been only a couple feet away from Lauren’s head.

Lauren noted that bats or birds, or anything flying at her head were really not her cup of tea.

They weren’t my cup of tea either. I recalled Stephen King’s book Cujo, where a bat bite turned a once lovable dog into a homicidal killer.

But that was just a story. What business did stories have to do with being afraid of the dark and its mutants and zombies and Gollum and old Tubal Cain himself, waiting for victims dumb enough to enter his lair?

What business?

I turned back to the mouth.

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Mountain view within the valley

“I’ll be back in a little bit. I just want to see some more,” I said. You can tell them my story if I don’t come back.

Going back into the cave, I hunched over like Quasimodo, in hopes that any bats I dislodged would miss my face.* The stale air in the shaft made me uneasy. No photosynthesis putting out fresh oxygen here. Our nostrils can tell us much about our proximity to life.

I began to feel hot under my jacket as I walked into the earth. I picked my way above the stream, moving from stone to wood, to any section of pipe I trusted enough to put my weight on. I took one misstep and managed to put half my boot in the water.

“Damn!”

“Are you alright?” Lauren called from the open world far away.

“Yeah, I’m OK.”

I kept trudging forward. I wondered if there would be any side alcoves or tunnels and if I would have the nerve to explore them. A big open chamber would be pretty cool. All I found was the same endless tunnel. Finally, after I spent many minutes of walking straight, the ceiling dropped lower and the walls closed in. The corridor went further toward some unseeable destination.

While the passage was still wide enough to move through on my feet, do to so, I’d have to walk through the stream, which ran deeper in the narrows. With a couple of hours of snowy hiking ahead of me, I was in no mood to turn my feet into ice blocks.

I hated to admit it, but I was relieved not to have an excuse to turn around. If not for the obstruction, how much farther would I have gone?** I guessed that I had gone about 100 yards through the narrow corridor, or about the length of a football field. I was ready to go back.

Hardier explorers than I will have to plumb the mysteries of Tubal Cain.

I picked my way back over the stream to the entrance of the mine. Every step made the walls a little brighter. I exhaled in relief and then took a breath of the fresh mountain air outside.

No bats had attacked, I had made it out alive and it was time for Lauren and I to hike back out through the snow to the car. I was glad get back to the land of the living.

_mg_1311The author takes a moment to mess with his pack

Notes

* After I returned from the hike, I talked to a friend who had been on a few cave tours. Even when bats fly out, they will avoid collisions with sonar, she said. The best thing to do if a bunch of bats come at you is to stay still and let them steer away. If you freak out and flap your arms, they are more likely to be confused and hit you.

** Apparently, the Tubal Cain mine goes almost 3,000 feet back into the rock. So I was probably only a tenth of the way in. I also learned later that the mine is still private property and I was not supposed to go in because of risk (unspecified.) I’ll plead innocent here, having not read this anywhere before the trip. I dug information about mine history here: http://www.kawal.net/tubalcain.htm.

I learned about the scale of the mine, its current ownership and the B-17 here:  http://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/an-eerie-october-hike-to-downed-b-17-and-old-mine-site/

Posted on

The Tides Beneath The Mountains: Three Days on The Hood Canal

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Paddling the Hood Canal. Photos by Jarrett Swan.

Launch

It was still dark outside when my friend Jarrett and I lifted two heavily-loaded kayaks onto the kayak rack had just built onto the roof of his weathered white pickup.

We had cinched the boats down tight with cam-straps and shaken them vigorously in their place to make sure they were immobile. We drove past the streets of Port Angeles under heavy rain. It was the kind of weather that doesn’t exactly make one eager for three days of exposed paddling, followed by nights cramped nights in a tent, where a few cups of moisture could mean the difference between comfort and misery.

Over those three days, we would paddle north for almost 60 miles of the Hood Canal, a salt water arm of Puget Sound.

November paddling. In a rainy part of the country.

We had packed for the wet, but knew that damp and cold were talented at evading the defenses we put up for them. We had gathered drysuits, windbreakers, miscellaneous and sundry camping items. We stuffed the gear into the narrow dry bags we would need to fit them in our kayaks. There were pounds of food that we’d use to keep our caloric furnaces in order.

Now they were very heavy kayaks that threatened to crush us when we lifted them.

We moved slow that morning stockpiling heat from cups of coffee. Killing time comes very naturally when you have reservations about starting a trip.

I drove behind the truck in my Civic, street lamps and neon flashing back at me from the rain-slick pavement. Gradually, the gray illumination spilled out of the east. It was a soggy cardboard sky. A scraggly remainder of ochre leaves rattled on skeletal roadside trees.

As the wind picked up, Jarrett stopped so that we could get reinforce the kayak straps. The wind whipped at the trees as we went about lashing down the boats. It felt like gale force conditions.

“Are you sure we should be paddling out in this kind of weather?” Jarrett asked.

I considered. The conditions did look perilous, but we were still close to a hundred miles away from the boat launch where it might be a different story. Having spent a whole day planning and packing, the idea of turning back left a bad taste in my mouth.

We pressed on, and in another forty minutes or so, we came to the takeout point at Quilcene Bay where there was the same strong, southerly wind that we’d encountered when we’d  stopped to fix the boats. Mean whitecaps were curling over the agitated water. The good news was that they were going in the direction we would be traveling. I parked my car and got in the truck with Jarrett. Hopefully, we would be back in this place in three days at the end of a successful journey.

Ice age glaciers up to 3,500 feet deep, carved out the complicated network of channels and islands west of Seattl, including the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound and Hood Canal, which makes up Puget Sound’s westernmost arm with the Olympic Mountains rising up on the other side. If the glacier had carved a couple more miles to the east, it would have joined the Sound and turned the Kitsap Penninsula into an island we could boat around.

The Canal channels both wind and tides. Jarrett and I expected to make our best time paddling in the mornings when the tides were going out and the current was with us. The Canal also has a strong tendency for southerly winds however, and this was also in our favor.

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Setting off at the end of the canal near Belfair State Park

When we got to the Belfair State Park at the end of the canal, the high tide spared us the effort of carrying our boats out onto mudflats.

Next to us was Big Mission Creek, which came in running swift from the heavy rains. October had been a record month for much of Western Washington. In nearby Olympia, there had been 12.4 inches of rain, compared to the average of 4.6 inches for that month.* 

I watched a dark form thrash in the current, dorsal fin skittering above the water. It was trying to go upstream, but the current was too much. I saw the salmon fight its way higher where the water moved fast over loose gravel, then it gave up and let the current take it back down toward the salt water. Perhaps it would find another route. As I gazed around the pool, I saw other salmon sitting in the water, fighting the current now and then. None of them seemed to have much luck. A few scattered carcasses lay beached on the rocks. Hopefully, they had spawned already, but I wondered if the unusually high current had prevented them from getting where they needed to.

Our kayak journey looked like it would be less perilous then what the salmon had to deal with. The winds had miraculously stilled and the start of the Hood Canal looked glassy. The rains had diminished, although heavy clouds to the west promised more to come. The main challenge was hauling the heavily-loaded boats to the water. Then we had about 15 miles ahead of us to Potlatch Campground where we would stop for the night.

This section of the canal was just over a mile wide. We would be heading west all day, until we reached our campground at The Great Bend, where the Skokomish River comes in. There, the canal goes north and whither would go the kayakers.

The loaded boats handled differently in the water from what we were used to; they were slower and more reluctant to turn. Jarrett found his boat had a tendency to drift to the left for some reason and had to paddle harder on that side.

I was grateful for the skeg, basically a fin that drops down, which made the boat easier to stay on course. If I wanted to grab a water bottle off my deck or mess with some equipment, I could paddle hard for a second and then let myself drift, so that I was still making progress, even when I wasn’t paddling.

The outgoing tide, gave more oomph to out paddle strokes.

When we paddled hard, we got warm. The fleeces we wore under our drysuits were definitely overkill. If we broke a sweat, it would mean dealing with moist, clammy clothes, likely for the rest of the trip.

The water was a tannic brown like well-steeped tea, very different from the clear, cold water I was used to guiding on the Strait not far away. Neither were there the large clumps of bull kelp of Pacific giant kelp that flourish in that rougher, rockier water. In shallow spots, I could look down at the sand, and see the white blobs of oysters growing there, another critter that I don’t see when I paddle on the Strait.

Various diving birds populated the water surface, including merganser ducks, murres and grebes the size of geese

“Hey check it out, in that tree!” Jarrett shouted. There were two bald eagles watching us.

When we took a break at a state park, all the heat we had been saving up seemed to disappear. I threw on my balaclava for extra warmth, and we paced around eating sandwiches in the drizzle.

It was good to get moving again and get the warmth back. Soon I was dipping my hat in the water to cool off and was grateful when it started pouring.

Now and then, a small black head would pop out of the water and a harbor seal would regard us with curious eyes.

We made one more stop at the town of Union, before we crossed the large bay at the mouth of the Skokomish River, which is none for a massive salmon run. Though, we didn’t explore the river mouth itself, we likely would have encountered droves of salmon, and the nets that the Skokomish Tribe sets up to catch them.

The veil of clouds began to break in the west, revealing the jagged faces of the Olympic Mountains. Mighty snowfields looked down at us from the high ridges.

As if to herald this vision, the mournful cry of loons called out from in front of us, seemed to embody the essence of that powerful place.

Croaking Salmon

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Jarrett in hardcore rain gear

The Potlatch Campground was in the midst of a construction project, which meant that it took a moment to find the proper place to set up shelter.

It is worth mentioning that the we camped both nights of our trip on places made possible by the Washington Water Trails Association, which laid out the Cascadia Marine Trail from southern Puget Sound up to Canada and with a connector into Hood Canal. If there had been more time, the paddler-specific campsites along this trail would have given us many options for camping and adventuring in the region.

A small stream flowed through a human-dug drainage nearby. Dozens of flopping, struggling salmon thrashed there way over the shallow water. Several of the fish were stopped at one of the many logs lying in the ditch. Others were almost completely out of the water. lying seemingly dead, and then bursting into a frenzy of flapping effort that gained them an inch or two of progress, if any. I watched their beaked mouths, monstrous, opening and closing as if trying to take in the air they couldn’t breathe. Their sides looked bruised, even actively bleeding from the  effort of going upstream.

I walked further and further up the ditch, only to find more and more salmon that had somehow flopped their way up. Were they spawning successfully? Or was the drainage ditch only a cruel trick that led them to their doom? Of course all of the salmon would die, whether they reproduced or not. Same is true of humans, I suppose.

Bearing witness to the Amazing Cycle of Life was not getting our camp set up any faster. I helped Jarrett rig up the rainfly that we would sleep under and got to work cooking dinner beneath the handy pavilion nearby. It was nice having a dry place to eat when the rain started falling again.

There was no break in the precipitation that night. The staccato drops made a constant din on the outside of the rainfly. Thankfully, the soil where we had set up was loose and drained easily. We didn’t have to worry about it puddling up on us.

I had a couple of damp clothes items in my sleeping bag with me to dry them out for the morning, though this made sleeping far less pleasant.

“I hate sleeping in damp bags,” I muttered.

“Really? I’m completely dry in here,” Jarrett said, thwarting my attempt to give my misery some company.

Every now and then I heard splashing from the salmon in the ditch. There was also a low croaking sound from the same direction. I pictured those beaked mouths that I had seen in the stream earlier, opening and closing, opening and closing.

“The salmon are coming out of the water to eat us,” I announced.

When morning came, there was a dim glow on the horizon, and the sky appeared cloudless.

“Man! How about those salmon croaking last night?” Jarrett said.

“Oh yeah. That’s so weird. I had no idea they did that.”

I tried to make the sound.

“Eyeaghhhhh!”

“Aaaaggghhh!” Jarrett said.

“That’s going to be the rallying call for this trip,” I said. “You know, when the going gets tough. We’ve got to think like these salmon. Eyaaaggghhhh!”

We ate a bunch of oatmeal mixed with coconut butter as a pick me up.

As the sun rose, we set up gear to dry.

A couple of state employees came over to the stream to monitor the salmon. We found out that the state had dug the ditch for the salmon, who hadn’t been able to use the stream before.

Though the fish didn’t seem like they were having much luck to my untrained eye, apparently they had been getting far upstream, and even when they didn’t, many still had  still found room to spawn successfully. After the spawn had grown up in the ocean, they too would return to this place.

“We could hear them flopping around last night, even croaking,” Jarrett said.

The workers seemed surprised to hear salmon that salmon croaked, but we told them all about it.

So far, the stream mitigation work had been successful enough that members of the Skokomish Tribe had set up nets near the mouth of the stream. It was also a popular spot for seals, which had a taste for the fish. A group of seals were on a raft nearby, lounging in the sun. It was only after the workers left that we heard the seals start talking to each other.

“Eyaghhh!”

“Uhnnn!”

It looked like we had mistaken the sounds of the seals on the raft for salmon in the stream. Rookie mistake.

The Close Encounter

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Beach time

Drying clothes and talking gave us a late start onto the water. We aimed far out into the canal to take the best advantage of the tidal current and a light southerly wind. Under the full sun,  we’d traded out the warm fleeces we’d worn the day before for thinner synthetic layers. Now we could see several of the Olympic Mountains in sunny relief, including The Brothers and Ellinor.

We were about a mile offshore when we decided to raft up and take a break. I was eating some peanuts when I heard a sharp exhale from the water next to us.

I almost choked.

A massive sea lion head was poking up looking at me. Maybe it was 20 feet away. The head popped back down. At a glance, the sea lion was easily over 500 pounds, though  maybe a lot more than that. Male Stellar sea  lions can push 2,500. They can get much heavier than that, to basically the size of grizzly bears. While they are not necessarily as ornery as grizzlies, I’ve heard these sea lions can be pushy, including accounts of them grabbing hold of divers’ fins. * I’ve had one of them swim alongside me for a couple minutes, snorting and merging closer  to the point that I slapped the water with my paddle to ward it off.

We floated for a while longer, and the head came up next to us again.

“Pffffft!”

The sea lion breathed out. It gazed at us with large dark eyes.

Was it pissed with us or was I just projecting? Did I want to know for sure?

The head went down again.

A few moments later, it popped up again.

“Pfffffft!”

“OK, I’m about ready to take off now,” I said.

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Jarrett at anchor, waiting up for the author

We made good progress on the way to our camp at Triton Cove, in large part because of the current moving with us. I avoided taking an onshore bathroom break by way of a challenging maneuver, leaning my boat with Jarrett grabbing onto back deck. If the waves had been tall, it probably would have been a no go, but it turned out to be more convenient than using a bottle or adding a mile and a half to the trip distance. Learning new skills is part of the reason for adventure if you ask me.

In the miles before camp, we enjoyed views of Glacier Peak and Mount Baker in the Cascades to the north of us.

We ended at a boat ramp where we unloaded our kayaks and then hauled them up to a grassy campsite. It was just after 3 p.m., but the sun was already low in the sky. We took advantage of the light that was left to set up a clothes line to dry some of the clothes and gear.

While the sun set, we heard the sound of seals croaking from the water nearby. It was still cool, even if we had mistaken the same sound for salmon earlier. Eventually, the western light faded and the stars began to glimmer. Illumination from the distant cities of Seattle and Tacoma blobbed over the east like a false sunrise. The night brought dew as well. I felt some clothes on the line, and realized that they were already getting damp. Should have caught that earlier.

I through everything inside our shelter, packed my drysuit away in a kayak hatch. At least, knowing that there was only one day to go, I didn’t have to be so worried about damp layers, provided I had a spare in reserve.

The Last Day

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Ready for the morning

The night saw plenty of moisture accumulate beneath the rainfly, despite our best efforts to ventilate. The clear skies had made the morning that much colder, and the motivation to get out of our sleeping bags that much harder to summon.

We were out of the tent by 6:45 and I walked by headlamp to a nearby stream where I filled up water to start breakfast. The sun rose with a fiery corridor reflected over the Hood Canal. Warmth began to find us. Still, we didn’t take the time to hang stuff up the way that we had the previous morning. We were hot to get moving.

By the time we’d eaten, taken down the shelter, organized gears loaded everything into the hatches, put on drysuits and hauled the boats to the water, it was nine o’clock. We had the favorable current and some tailwind. Once again, we took far out into the canal, where we could see snowy peaks towering above us to the west, and the even larger Mount Baker and Glacier Peak rising up in front of us.

Briefly, for a few minutes only, I caught sight of the Great Grand Daddy of the Cascades: Mount Ranier. It always appears dreamlike to me and I struggle to tell myself that the thousands of feet of snow and ice there are real things, part of the same reality below where there were trees, parking lots, wet sand.

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Sunrise kayak portrait

Things were getting more interesting on the water, as the clouds began to fill the sky and a tailwind began kicking up two-foot waves. I caught some great surf rides, using the skeg to keep on track.

We pulled onto a marshy spit where we replenished with food. Jarrett unpeeled the top of his drysuit to put a fleece on. I decided that even though it had gotten a little cooler, a balaclava would be sufficient to keep me toasty. Sure enough, after we started paddling, the sun came back out. Soon Jarrett was roasting with his warm layer on but with no quick way to change clothes. I flipped my balaclava down and commented on how wonderful I felt.

We went by the Dosewallips river drainage, where we saw two bald eagles and at least a dozen harbor seals. They were, no doubt, gorging on the migrating salmon. I felt a greater understanding for why so many Northwesterners, including native tribes, express such reverence for the fish, seeing firsthand how much depends upon their bounty.

We took a break in a nearby marsh so Jarrett could utilize the bounty of a convenience store in nearby Brinnon.  I entertained myself by exploring a nearby culvert, too low to paddle through unless I sunk deep inside my cockpit. I handed my way up along the ceiling to the other side of 101, where the marsh came up against some farmland. Going back out was more fun since I had the tidal current going with me and sped through the dark passage like a torpedo — banging up against walls occasionally.

Jarrett and I snacked in the full sun, watching the marsh birds flit to and fro. He decided to ditch the fleece he’d put on earlier for our last push to Quilcene. It was clear that we were making great time. The fact that the wind was picking up from the south was just another bonus.

We sped away from the marsh and then across the water to a large point. The waves gifted me with many a surf ride. The Hood Canal forked in front of us. To the east went out toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the San Juan Islands; West lay Dabob Bay and, off of that, Quilcene Bay where my car was parked.

Fourteen knot winds pushed us along at a fast clip, with more assistance from the waves. It wasn’t long before we pulled into the Quilcene Marina: the end of our ride. We paddled in so that our boats hit the ramp at the same time, bumped fists.

Compared to what the salmon were doing, we had had an easy time of it, moving with the elements instead of against. It was also easier than carrying the stuff that we’d brought out on our backs as we would have on a hiking trip, The hardest part was managing the gear rodeo so we kept our stuff dry. There had been no massive waves, nor punishing gales, but their had been time to chill, tp contemplate the beauty of the mountains, the beauty of the water and the uniqueness of some of the creatures that made this place their home,

“Great trip, Man,” Jarrett said.

“Great trip,” I agreed.

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Hood Canal at morning

Notes:

*http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/olympia/washington/united-states/uswa0318/2016/10 and http://q13fox.com/2016/10/26/soggy-nw-on-verge-of-breaking-october-rainfall-records/

** http://www.marinemammalcenter.org/education/marine-mammal-information/pinnipeds/steller-sea-lion/