Loving The All Of It

Commencement Bay and Tacoma's Industrial Waterway

Day Three of my bike trip last week through the inner Sound was a full immersion in the industrial corridor between Tacoma and Seattle - fifty miles, to be exact, of uninterupted industrial sprawl and development. It was a wild ride.

My day began with a ride down Colvos Passage along the west side of Vashon Island. I took a ferry from Vashon to Point Defiance in Tacoma and headed into a very differnet world. Residents of the islands in the sound, when they catch a ferry to the urban corridor, will often say "I'm going to America." This is usually not meant as a compliment. Any satellite image from space of the Puget Sound basin makes it graphically clear. The east side of the sound from Tacoma through Seattle and Everett is overwhelmingly concrete and urban development, while the islands and the west side of the sound remains predominantly rural and green. 

 

Seattle is often touted as one of the most livable cities in America, with its proximity to the picturesque waterways of Puget Sound, stunning mountains and nearby wilderness. People keep pouring into the region from all over the United States because of its natural beauty and robust economy. But increasingly, that beauty is deceptive. An additional 1.5 million people are expected to move here in the next three years alone, adding a city the size of Portland to an already overtaxed urban infrastructure. And despite its picture post card reputation, the region is in serious trouble ecologically. 

Puget Sound's orcas, a prime indicator species, have been listed as among the most contaminated animals on the planet. Most of the Sound's wild salmon runs are seriously depleted, and some are extinct. Thousands of acres of commercial shellfish beds are closed because the clams and oysters are unsafe to eat. Many beaches are off limits to swimming because they are so contaminated with bacteria. Two million acres of forest have been turned into pavement in less than one generation, with toxic runoff from homes, industry and automobiles slowly choking the life out of the Sound. As one who grew up here, I've watched these tides of change endlessly rising. Climate change is merely the exclamation point on a host of threats that can no longer be ignored. 

I've said that one of my goals of my Circling Home year is to fall back in love with Puget Sound, to rekindle a love affair that goes back to my childhood growing up by the shores of this inland sea. The easy way to do that is to travel only to places that exemplify its natural beauty. But what kind of love affair is that? It's like always trying to re-live your first date, stuck in a shallow infatuation that can never result in true intimacy. 

So today's ride through the industrial corridor was an act of defiance against superficial love. It was my first serious expedition, outside my car and off the freeway, into the underbelly of Puget Sound's industrial sprawl that I've avoided most of my life. What might it mean to include this in my affections, to turn toward that which is most unlovely in my home region as a first step toward a renewed commitment to restoration. For five hours I rode non-stop through a network of former estuaries and fertile valleys that are now carpeted with industrial development, almost completely buried under concrete. From Tacoma to Puyallup and Sumner, Auburn and Kent, along the ghost path of the old White River drainage, diverted a hundred years ago into the Puyallup River, past the unmarked grave of the Black River that once drained Lake Washington until the ship canal and Ballard Locks turned it into a dead river, and down the Green River into Seattle's infamous Duwamish estuary, the former home of Chief Seattle's tribe, now one of the most toxic sites in America. Call it a blind date with the darker sides of Puget Sound's troubled legacy. I arrived finally in downtown Seattle exhausted from the effort of dodging semi-trucks on roads with no shoulders through tens of miles of industrial sprawl. This too is Puget Sound. 

Along the way I conjured up images of Chief Seattle, whose ancestral house and grave lie close to where I grew up near Poulsbo. Words from his 1854 speech echoed in my mind; "To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. . . Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see." How could he have imagined how far we would sink before the truth of his words caught up with us. 

We have a lot of work to do.