Bewilderment

There is underlying, somewhere inside me a bewilderment of living 3000 miles from my last canoe trip and for that matter, from the hundreds of canoe trips that I've set down in my journal.  I start my morning by changing the declination on my compass, even though on such a fine day I won't be needing it.  The tiny screwdriver turns the internal gear on the device and moves the pointer from 20 degrees east to 14 degrees west.

I drop S at her office, which stands on the former site of the Oatmeal Lots - a good story itself.  I continue down the hill to the Park of the Feral Cats.  A short steep carry down the bank puts me in the 1/2 mile wide Housatonic River.

I head out to explore the perimeter of an island that lies in mid-channel.  There are none of the familiar and comforting cattails of my former home marsh.  Instead, the island vegatation is reeds and a salt tolerant grass.  The island is steep sided and sedimentary with layers of grass/mud laid down over the years.  It is proto-adobe or perhaps pre-peat.  It reminds me of the peaty bottom of Union Bay that would rise to the surface at times duiring the winter.  As I circle the edge, the island becomes two, then three, and probably more.

It is the rattle voice of he Kingfisher that tells me that I am in the same water that I was in before.  My move over 3000 miles of land has deposited me in water that is one with the water that I last paddled.

I spot a couple osprey, some egrets, a few great blue herons - including one of the largest that I can remember seeing, mallards, Canada geese, and a few shore birds that I am not familiar with.  One thing that I find particularly pleasing is that none of the shoreline homes have lawns that reach the water.  In place of sea walls that were so common in Seattle are 25 yard wide (or more - sometimes a lot more) mud river banks held together with the same grasses and reeds that the islands bear.

In two hours my trip is done.  I have a feel for the flood tide and a general lay of the land in my mind.  I can get started.



ghost line of the high water



Killing Birds

'A' calls and asks me for a ride up to Smoke Farm.  She has a meeting and no car.  I have to take art up, so it is a kill two birds with one stone moment.  With the canoe is currently stored on the roof of the car and the Snohomish Estuary and the Stillaguamish River on the  driving route it could be a "kill three birds with one stone" moment.

After the meeting we entertain a paddle on the lower end of the Stillaguamish, but after a bumbling drive through bottom land farms we find that the boat launch is a DNR site and I don't have the required permit.  We head on to the put-in on the Snohomish instead.

Rather than repeat a trip into the Spencer Island area, we head down the river toward the sound.  As on our other trips, we have osprey in sight at all times.  At any one time there always seems to be 3 or 4 and at least one or two nests. We see kingfishers, sandpipers and great blue herons.  There are some caspian terns, but except for sea gulls, the osprey are the most numerous of the birds that we spot.

It is near low tide, maybe just a bit after.  The current is near slack in the river and we have a headwind.  We circle an island finding deer tracks in the mud of the recently fallen tide.  Our paddle is along old wooden sea walls and 20 foot high pilings where barges and log rafts were once tied.  It is all deteriorating and while it is industrial, it is old industrial and we talk about how we can still see what it might have been at one time.  The "industrial" is not opaque in this river.

 

We paddle on and with the motion well remembered in the muscles, we can watch for birds and seals (we see two) and take in new sights of a new terrain.  As we near the mouth, a distant crane leaning over a beached sailboat changes into two large sailboats that have been stranded by low tide, their owners milling about waiting for the rising tide to erase their poor seamanship. 

I tell 'A' that we should go over and portage our canoe past them.

Ahead lies Jetty Island, a sandy breakwater island made by piling and stranding old wooden barges and ships.  Neither of us have been there and with the weather calm we can safely head out across to explore.

Jetty Island

 

The island is wonderful.  It is a mix of dune and brush with some very large drift logs on the beach and derelict boats and barges in various states of exposure.

Western Red Cedar

What 'A' is looking at

 The island is visual candy and we wish we could explore more (it is 2 miles long), but we can't.  We return to the canoe and head back up river on a strong flood current and tailwind that makes the return pass as quickly and easily as this sentence.

A new bow man

The move to the far coast is not far off.  My last days of canoeing on NW waters are becoming more precious than ever.  I have a hundred or so friends to paddle with in not enough time to even get close.

My friend, 'P' comes along today.  It is our first trip together.  She used to row and prefers not to go to the familiarity of the big lake, so I take us back to the Duwamish, to the little sand bar on the inside of the bend, underneath the osprey nest.  It is a beautiful spot that I was surprised to find, a place worth visiting again.

We paddle up the Duwamish, but it is different than my last trip with 'A'.  We find a Ganesh figure (the elephant headed Hindu deity) in the mud on the bank.  We almost pass it and then turn back knowing that there is something wrong in leaving it there.  It is in three pieces, but I re-assemble it well enough and place it on a stump.

At the first fast water, all of the rocks are submerged.  I did not know that the tide came this high.  The rocks were 18 inches exposed last time I was here.

It is a usual good bird trip.  A great blue heron, a green heron, several kingfishers, some sandpipers, some ducks and Canada geese.

We talk a lot.  P tells me how she broke her wrist a couple years back and when she returned to rowing, it was no longer so appealing - the competitive and the teamwork required was too much.  We agree that canoeing is everything that rowing isn't...at least the way we are doing it.

The return goes fast, a third of the time going up stream.  The rocks at the first fast water are a foot out of the water.  Two osprey greet us at the take out.  This fall, I will travel across the continent to the far coast while they fly to a place as far south of the equator as we are north of it.  They will be back next spring.

Seed Bombing

'A' and I put in at the very north end of the big lake and paddle east into the mouth of the Sammamish Slough.  It is a fine sunny summer day, not too hot with a light breeze.  The big lake has been kept high (it is dam controlled) and it is clear that the lake at the other end of the slough is nearly at the same level - there is no perceptible current.

An osprey passes over with a fish in its talons.

We pass a large flock of teal that are scurrying off into the marsh island at the mouth of the slough.  There are more ducks here than I remember.  I don't think that I have come up here in the summer that often, but I don't remember clearly.

This is A's first trip on the Sammamish and the Sammamish is always a bit weird.  It comes at you in waves...expensive waterfront McMansions, which then give way to open brushy wetlands, then one of the best situated trailer parks in America, then a golf course, another fine trailer park, some forest land, another trailer park, park land, and not so bad backsides of industrial parks. 

There are, as always, a good number of great blue herons.  We also flush a green heron a few times...it is reluctant to leave its current territory.

Those are the details.  But, this is a long trip for a half day.  In fact, it is a very good half day of paddling.  We are covering more distance at a higher pace than I have ever done on this river.  'A' is becoming a strong paddler.  At a short break, we talk about how canoeing is different than any other form of travel that either of us has done.  We parallel a bike trail that is well used today, and I point out that we are on a different path than "they" are in many meanings.  'A' mentions how we seem to arrive at places that should take a long time to get to quicker than one expects.  She points out that we travel by canoe on ancient routes that are no longer the "usual". It is meditative travel, and we arrive by the back route unseen and unexpected.  Even we don't expect it.  After two hours I am ready to return but I say nothing.  A thinks we should turn around in another half hour, so on we go for 30 more minutes.

seed bombing

On the return we stop to eat blackberries that hang out over the river, and we seed bomb.  'A' has brought the last of her native seed bombs, clay balls with a variety of native plant seeds mixed in.  We hurl them at likely spots in need of some love.  'A' remarks that neither of us will probably ever know if any of them will grow.  She seems to be satisfied with the unknown of it.

We have covered just short of 16 miles.  It is a good half day.

Where the mixing is

Me and A put in on the west channel of the Snohomish River, a couple miles up from salt water.  This is all new terrain for A and an area I have paddled in only two or three times before.  This is the Snohomish Estuary, an area where salt water and fresh water mix.  Currents change directions with the tides - and the changes are often counter-intuitive.  The morning clouds have broke leaving a sunny afternoon.  Low tide was about 6am and the afternoon and evening high tide for today is separated by a low tide that barely drops at all.  We should not see any great changes in current during the trip.

As we put the canoe in the river, there are seven osprey soaring overhead with a whistling chorus that is as striking as their flying.  The estuary is one of the best places that I've been for seeing osprey.  Then we head up river a mile to Dead Man Slough where we explore a half dozen abandoned boats.

this hulk is a 50+ ft fishing boat

  Then we paddle off toward Spencer Island.  The island had once been farmed, but the county has purchased the southern section and torn down the dikes that kept the water out to return it to estuary.  It is here that the trip always takes a wilder feel.  It is easy to look at the sparse swamp forest, dead snags and stressed evergreens and imagine that you are much farther away.  These are the ghostly forests that one thinks of as being geography of the farther north. With the moderately high tides we will be able to paddle the interior of the island both through old farm drainage channels and where the former fields are flooded.  We try to enter where I've gone in the past, but drift logs have made the entry more difficult then necessary.  We continue farther north.  We see more osprey.

We find a better and completely open access a 1/2 mile down the channel.  The tide is flooding the island, so at this time all currents are "in".  The opening takes out out into a broad wetland with cattails, reeds and grasses where the thin trees are distant from us.  We head south up the island until finding another channel which, fighting the flood current, brings us east into the middle channel of the river.

Undecided on which way to go, we cross the river and explore a backwater which has ten or so discarded floating dock sections in it just waiting to drift off and become shoreline debris.

After a break, A opts for circling Otter Island.  Otter Island was never diked and it is more heavily treed than other areas in the estuary.  Rounding it takes us briefly into the east channel of the river before returning to the center channel.  We see some birds we don't recognize.

Eastern Kingbird

Bohemian Waxwing

We spot an inlet on Otter Island and decide to explore.  For some reason I did not enter this opening when I was here before.  It is narrow, treed and brush lined, with tight turns and short views.  It is delightful.  We spot two does, which move off rather unhurried.  The inlet keeps going for a few hundred yards before it is blocked by a log.  On the return we surprise a 4-point buck still in velvet.

We cross the channel to retrace our route up the slough to the south end of the island.  A spots a black animal as it we startle it from a nap in the sun.  She says. "otter", but get a better look as it dives into the water and then returns to land.  "Not big enough for an otter, it's a mink."  We go back and look at the sunning spot that it spent some time creating - clipped plants - almost like a flattened bird nest.

Now we have been out long enough to fall into the rhythm of a long trip.  I think about telling A how glad I am that she is coming out canoeing with me so often before I move east across the country, but I don't...I just keep thinking it.

Further Exploration is Required

Me and A set out again.  She is agitated with the rumble of life today.  I am not much less agitated with it myself.  A strange thing that I have discovered about canoeing, a thing that no other activity that I have tried does, is that canoeing washes all of the loose and unimportant stuff of life from the skin of the soul.  It doesn't leave you shiny, it leaves you level headed.  If I am not careful, I could very well become a constant nomad. 

After our last trip I looked on a map and found a place that we could put in on the Duwamish that was not much more than a couple hundred yards from where we turned around 2 days ago.  We will start there and continue upriver.  Arriving at that bend in the river, we do the 100 yard portage to the water.  It is not only a good place to put a canoe in, but it might be the best shoreline that I have dropped my canoe in the Seattle area - a low sloping sand beach with an active osprey nest on a pole nearby.

Lunch

We both remark, immediately, that the river character at this point is completely different than anything we saw the other day.  Gone are the industrial surroundings and with it the unsightly shitty looking sea walls of tires, odd pieces of metal and discarded concrete.  This section of river is remarkably free of debris with just a few exceptions.  The current is steady but not overly grim.  We move upstream at a mile and a half per hour, maybe a bit more.  We only have to bear down in a few short sections of faster water.  I tell A that it will break down to 2/3 - 1/3.  2/3 of our time will be spent going up, 1/3 coming down.  I teach A the draw and stationary draw strokes...just a few minutes of that and I let it go.  It just needs to soak in.

This part of the river meanders.  There is always a bend ahead and we steer for the insides of turns as we ascend in order to take advantage of the slowest water.  The river is 50 yards wide in most places with a bank that is 6 to 10 feet high.  We spot a few green-backed herons, many kingfishers, a most curious raccoon, and one bald eagle.

We find a drainage entering the river as we get to the city of Renton.  This might be the remains of the Black River.  The Black River drained Lake Washington before the Montlake Ship Canal was opened in 1916.  That lowered the lake 10 feet and the shallow Black ceased to flow.  We nose up into it aways on the return.  There is a pearlescent tinge to the water that we wonder about.  There should be a good deal of rainwater runoff from all sorts of terrain and industry finding this spot.  We don't drink it.

Looking for Lunch

We see not a single boat on the water, again.   As we take out and portage the canoe, we both comment about how much better we feel.  We've not dodge our issues - the canoe has returned us to level ground.  We have a peace with the world the is healthy in all ways.

 

Clearing of the mind

I have been grinding away, moving, packing and selling our home.  That done I dove into a beadwork marathon.  My head is full.  I grouch at my poor wife on the phone, my brain not able to organize dates.  This morning I toss out a canoe trip to my friend A and she bites.

Having sold my canoe storage facility, I have the canoe resting atop the car, so a short drive to someplace that I rarely paddle in is the plan.  We load up and head to up the lake to the Samammish Slough.  We get there and find that the keys to the padlock that I have on the canoe are at home.  I am a creature of methodical process, and with my process disheveled the process breaks  (A is messing with my old Stanley tape measure about this time and I point out to her that it is 32 years old - case in point).  We head back for the keys as I announce that we weren't supposed to paddle there today anyway.  We head to the Duwamish River instead.

The Duwamish is one of the nations filthiest rivers and a marker for the oddness of Seattle, a city that generally thinks itself to be greener than thou, but ignores the vile grossness of its underside, as long as not too many people are looking at it.  We start in the area called South Park.  There are few places to launch a canoe on the Duwamish as most of its banks are private and heavily industrial properties.  There are four Superfund sites on the river.

Tire Wall

I guide the canoe near the shore as we head upriver.  The tide is down and it is an almost archaeological experience as we attempt to identify various man made debris.  We pass through the remains of the 14th Street drawbridge to the site of Boeing Plant II, a factory building that ran right to the water.  Only a low brick wall and a sign announcing it as a future wildlife site stand above the seawall.  The seawalls on the river are arbitrary combinations of this and that - metal here, busted concrete there, metal stacked on concrete, wood over rock...  The strangest of seawalls are the tire walls.  Hundreds of old tires piled up, held in place by pilings or who knows what.  It all seems to be a construction from pre-clean water days.  None of the former geniuses that ran things ever intended for anyone to see this.

Boeing Plant II/Superfund site

A little over a mile up we get to the "turn around point", a round dredged area in a natural bend in the river that was made for barges to be spun around in.  The river begins to improve from here as the industrial areas fall behind.  There are primordial ooze logs in the silty mud banks.  We start to see the first of many kingfishers, a couple of great blue herons.  A spots a green backed heron.  We are above the tide level and there is a current to paddle against.  A points out that the water is becoming clearer.  Debris is less frequent, but still an exercise in deciding its origins.  We find a metal hulled speedboat in the mud and a crushed trimaran on the opposite shore.  At one spot there is such a cornucopia of things in the bank that it must be an old dump.

Interior of an old wooden barge

A bit over four miles up we get to the "rapids".  It's not much of a rapid, just a short spurt of fast water.  We give it a try and almost beat the current but not quite.  We decide it to be a good spot to turn back.

The air goes calm and balmy as we head down.  The tide has risen and the river current goes slack within a mile.  We are paddling. We are into the rhythm of an all day paddle even if it isn't that long.  It's automatic.  It just goes on, not grueling, never dull.  The mind has a place to go.  A baby osprey sings at us from a nesting box on the right hand bank.