"Pugh Creek goes into the Whitechuck
the Whitechuck goes into the Sauk
the Sauk goes into the Skagit
the Skagit goes into the Sound."
- Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold
The Skagit is the largest river that flows into the Puget Sound basin, and in many ways our greatest ecological treasure. This past week I took a four day walk through the Skagit delta from Stanwood north, then across Fidalgo Island and Deception Pass as far as Oak Harbor. This was a continuation of a walk I began the week before that took me from my home on
Whidbey Island to Stanwood through the Snohomish and Stillaguamish deltas. My wife Sally joined me for the first two days of the trip through the heart of the Skagit from Stanwood to LaConner. It was a memorable trip.
- The Skagit, as Puget Sound's largest river system, covers 3100 square miles
- Ten billion gallons of water flow through the Skagit every day
- All five species of Pacific salmon spawn in the Skagit system - pinks, chums, sockeye, coho and king salmon
- 2900 streams and tributaries make up the larger Skagit system
- There are 376 lakes in the Skagit watershed
- 394 glaciers feed into the Skagit from higher elevations of the North and Central Cascades
- 276 wildlife species live in the Skagit, including 174 bird species, 73 mammals, 25 species of fish, 17 amphibians and 10 species of reptile
- Mt. Baker, at 10,773', and Glacier Peak, at 10, 541', are the highest points in the watershed
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Friday morning, Feb. 1st, Sally and I travelled by bus and ferry to the farming community of Stanwood, where I finished the first leg of my 125 mile walking circuit last week through the Skagit and back down Whidbey Island.
From Stanwood we entered the southern reaches of the expansive Skagit delta, walking ten miles to Conway along the busy Pioneer Highway. As with much of my walk the previous week, we braved this busy truck route for the first several miles as our only way through this maze of wetlands and farms. When the highway converged with the South Fork of the Skagit we gratefully moved onto the dike that holds the river in its channel, following that the rest of the way into Conway, where we enjoyed a good meal at the historic Conway Bar & Eatery.
From there we crossed the river onto Fir Island in a flurry of snow and hail, walking south along the west dike to the house of Sally's old friends Brad Furlong and Eileen Butler. A flock of several thousand snow geese were waiting to greet us, feeding in the corn stubble fields literally right up to edge of their property. As attorneys practicing in Mt. Vernon, and with three children at Mt. Vernon High School, we learned a lot about the Skagit during our stay, and enjoyed warm hospitality.
The next morning we continued our walk across Fir Island to LaConner. The forecast, which had called for rain and snow, dished up sunshine instead with morning frost, and we reveled in our freedom to pick our way across the delta on back roads with almost no traffic. This also brought us past several large flocks of snow geese who shared our preference for distance from the commotion of traffic. We stopped for by a flock of several thousand geese, spending an hour within a stones throw of this white sea of birds.
During this time I noticed something that fascinated me. For the first half hour we were there the flock fed in the field as if they would stay there all day. Then, very gradually, geese began to leave, singly and in pairs. Then they began to leave in fours, and over a period of several minutes a palpable agitation began to set in with the flock. Larger and larger bunches began to fly off, until finally the wave of agitation broke, and the entire flock took wing all at once with a suddenness that was breathtaking. The roar of wings made my hair stand on end. The flock filled the sky, obliterating the view of the mountains until, slowly, like mist rising from a lake, the mountains re-emerged from the cloud of geese as they disappeared into the far valley.
Snow Geese In Flight
I couldn't help but think of this as a metaphor for my own Circling Home journey. We are in a time of extremity in our culture, and there is much agitation in the soul of our nation. And yet from the outside it appears that there is little movement to change this behavior, and much resistance to change. Sometimes I feel as though what I'm doing this year amounts to whistling in the dark. What difference will it make?
But maybe we have more in common with these geese than we thought. There is no one leader who decides when it's time to make a move. Instead, there are many leaders and small groups who seem to move independently of the flock, but whose movement eventually tips the balance until a mass change happens quite suddenly and unpredictably.
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The Skagit delta is a battle ground, ecologically and politically. Fir Island was once a vast salt marsh that incubated massive salmon runs and hosted millions of migratory waterfowl. Now it lives with a tenuous truce as "reclaimed" farmland sandwiched between dikes that are increasingly at risk of failing in the increasingly wetter, warmer Northwest climate. Periodic devastating floods have dogged the delta settlements from the beginning, with legendary flood events occurring in 1815, 1896, 1897, 1909. 1921 and 1990. The 1990 flood buried Fir Island's farms under six feet of water. In 2003 the river came within inches of breaching the dikes again. Fir Island residents are waking up to the fact that global warming has put them in harms way, and they may be living on borrowed time.
The economy and culture of the valley is heavily invested in industrial agriculture, and the pressure to accommodate a growing urban population is intense. But these interests run head on into the power of the river itself, as well as native tribes and environmental groups who want to steer the Skagit back toward its larger ecological capacities. The Federal listing of
Skagit chinook salmon under the Endangered Species Act raises the ante even more, forcing competing stakeholders to the table whether they like it or not. The Skagit exemplifies the clash of cultures that dog ecological restoration throughout the rest of the Puget Sound Region, with intractable interests pitted against each other. The prospect of Federal intervention to save the salmon has led to an unlikely coalition of competing stakeholders to head off a Federal takeover of the salmon recovery effort.
Shared Strategy for Puget Sound is a promising new initiative that is directing these efforts, pushing hard for real compromise between these competing interests so that a future can be crafted that includes both salmon and people before it is too late. They know that if they can successfully implement a salmon recovery plan in the Skagit, they can probably pull it off in the other major watersheds around Puget Sound as well. This is a groundbreaking effort that I am personally very excited about that could become a model for resource conflict resolution nationwide.
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After spending Saturday night with our friends Lauren Jay and Billy Robinson in LaConner, Sally caught a train back home and I continued walking on my own.
My first stop was the Swinomish Indian Reservation, where I hoped to see my friend Ray Williams. It has been my privilege to work with Ray on a number of initiatives bringing activists from diverse arenas together. He is a person of unusual generosity of spirit.
Turned out Ray had been up most of the night preparing for a ceremony in the Swinomish longhouse, and was still asleep when I stopped by his home. I told his wife not to wake him, and headed on down the highway, disappointed to
miss this chance to see my friend. Sometime later a car pulled alongside me and it was Ray. He invited me to drive back with him to his house. When I told him about my vow to not get in a car this year, he pulled off the highway by the Swinomish Channel, and we talked for a long time. I hadn't seen him in a couple years and we had a lot to catch up on.
Swinomish Channel
Ray has represented the Salish people at gatherings of indigenous leaders all over the world, and is a compelling leader in the effort to bring back the ceremonial life that has bound his tribe together for centuries rooted in this place. Yet I have never heard him once take credit for anything he has accomplished. He is one of the most humble people I have ever met. Ray invariably gives credit to his elders and teachers for the insights and achievements that have flowed from his life. He would be appalled to be singled out for merit in the ways we routinely strive to do in our mainstream culture. His way of quietly passing credit along to his elders is itself a great teaching for me.
Ray told me there are now over 100 longhouses in Salish country from Puget Sound to Vancouver Island, and that there is growing interest among young people in the tribes to be part of this tradition. He and his wife Doreen have dedicated themselves to bringing young tribal members into the longhouse tradition. He has also built a large carving shed in his yard where a traditional sea going canoe will be carved from an old growth cedar tree later this year. Local native youth will work on the canoe under the guidance of a master canoe carver from Vancouver Island, and the canoe will be paddled to an indigenous gathering of sea going tribes in California and Mexico in the summer of 2009.
Ray told me what I am doing this year is important work. He said all of us were indigenous once, and the pull back toward the spirit of the land is hard-wired in everyone. He said we are so far out of balance now that any movement to reclaim our roots arouses joy in the ancestors. He told me that I should not doubt that the ancestors are ready and eager to help me on my journey, whether I know it or not. They can feel this longing to restore balance, and they want to help us in any way they can.
He told me that when I feel discouraged or heavy along the way I should leave the road and walk through the underbrush. Let the branches and sticks sweep over my body to pull the heaviness off of me. He said that red cedar boughs are especially good for cleansing the body that way, if I let them sweep over me. And when I cross a stream or come back to the Sound I should stop and wash my hands, and splash a little on my face and head. This will also purify my intention and bring me back onto the path with renewed energy.
If it were anyone else telling me these things, I'm not sure I would know what to make of it. But Ray is different. Something about his utter lack of guile makes me trust him and take seriously what he says. When he says that the ancestors are speaking to us, and offering us guidance, I believe him, even if I don't know who my own ancestors are. I know I just need to reach deeper inside myself to realize the truth in what he is saying. As I headed on my way, I felt honored and blessed that Ray had made such an effort to find me and share these thoughts with me. The whole trip was worth it just for this.
Mt. Erie from Pass Lake
By the end of the day I'd walked sixteen miles through Fidalgo Island, around Simult Bay and through Deception Pass. I made the Deception Pass Bridge back onto Whidbey Island just before sunset, walked the last mile by trail through the State Park until I got to Cornet Bay where my gillnet boat is moored for the winter.
Deception Pass is one of the most powerful places in Western Washington. The tidal currents in the pass reach 8 knots as the whole of Skagit Bay drains in and out of this narrow channel with each tide cycle. It's one of the Big Energy places in the Puget Sound Basin.
Deception Pass got it's name from Capt. George Vancouver on June 1, 1792, when he was deceived into thinking it was a bay
instead of a pass around an island. Joseph Whidbey, a member of his crew, led the first group of European explorers through the pass, and it was his name that Vancouver gave to the island on its south side.
After walking seventy miles from my home on the south end of Whidbey, it felt good to cross over the bridge and step again onto my home island.
It had been a month since I visited the Martina at her winter moorage. I lit the stove, checked the engine vitals, then fired her up for awhile to charge the batteries. Everything checked out fine. Once the diesel stove was good and hot I made myself some tea and dinner, wrote in my journal, watched the night come over the bay, then crawled in my bunk in the foc's'l for a well-deserved night's sleep.
Monday was the final day on this leg of the trip, and this one felt more like a slog. I picked my way south along back roads in a heavy drizzle mixed with snow much of the day. I covered another sixteen miles by the time I made Oak Harbor in the afternoon, and I was feeling tired and ready to get back home. I was amazed how much I'd seen and learned during these days on foot in the North Sound. Without a doubt, there are new layers of richness and complexity when I look at the map of this place I call home.
This morning I got up for my morning meditation at the usual time in my little meditation hut behind the house. I go out to sit most mornings at about 6:30. For the past several months that has meant sitting in the dark by candlelight. But now the change of light is catching back up with me. The spring equinox is not far away. I can literally feel the slow journey of the earth around the sun, and the turning of the seasons, by the migration of light in and out of my morning meditation practice. I started this morning to the sound of owls, moved on to rooster calls, and ended with the first round of spring robins that I have heard this year as night turned slowly to morning. My Zen teacher Harada says that the change of light is the most powerful time to sit. I'm glad to have the company of daylight again.
