Nature Writing and Other Creative Nonfiction

“Sockeye. Chum. Coho. Chinook. Pink. Steelhead. When I moved to Seattle in the late 1980s, people talked of fish once seen in creeks that had long since been forced under strip malls and parking lots; they spoke of how many salmon they used to catch and how big those sockeye or Chinook were. The anadromous Pacific salmon and trout that had once dominated the rivers and streams of the Pacific Northwest—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Northern California, British Columbia, and reaching into Alaska—seemed to be everywhere yet nowhere, appearing and then disappearing like an old family ghost, spoken of often but usually in the past tense. Like ghosts fading from human memory, the salmon’s return to their ancestral home seemed to become more tenuous with each passing year.

I came to Seattle after having lived for three years in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, where a boulder-strewn creek flowed through my backyard and the Catskill Mountains were close by. For a time, my cottage there was a sanctuary from the stresses and strains of working in a domestic violence program, but it wasn’t enough to silence the call for a change echoing through my life. Nature was in abundance outside the small town of Woodstock—but missing were ballet and theater companies, swing dances, neighborhood Chinese restaurants, nearby university classes, Shakespeare in the Park, and many other joys of city life. Seattle had all that and more, yet as much as I enjoyed being back in a city, I found myself longing for nature. And the more I tried to find it in my new home, the more curious I became about salmon.

In 1991, “Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads,” a landmark research paper, identified 214 naturally spawning native salmon, steelhead, and sea-run cutthroat trout stocks that faced a high or moderate risk of extinction across California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Forty-one of the at-risk stocks were from Washington State, many from the Puget Sound region, where Seattle is located. Of the eighteen stocks the study cited as “presumed extinct,” most were also from my new state. In 1999, Puget Sound Chinook were listed as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), as were Hood Canal summer chum, Washington coastal and Lake Ozette sockeye, Lower Columbia River Chinook and chum, and Middle Columbia River steelhead. Upper Columbia River spring Chinook were listed as “endangered.” That same year, bull trout were listed as threatened across Washington and the rest of their traditional range. By 2007, Puget Sound steelhead joined the threatened list.

Salmon and their relatives, then, are at once part of this place and yet distant from it, which was rather how I felt about my new life in Seattle. When I started to search for salmon, I never imagined they were with me in Seattle or other nearby urban areas…

Those first trips south and east of Seattle were along a confusing array of highways and side roads, often to places with names I couldn’t remember, much less hope to find on a map…Yet there I was in mid-October in a Sierra Club carpool weaving its way through the small city of Redmond, home to Microsoft. We drove past upscale housing developments and horse farms before pulling to the side of a two-lane road beside an unmarked blacktop footpath, which could have been easily mistaken for a driveway.

Behind the neatly cut lawns and multi-car garages, flowing through a wild riot of sword fern, lichen-encrusted alder, dense stands of salmonberry, and the ubiquitous Himalayan blackberry, was Cottage Lake Creek, spanned by a rain-battered wooden footbridge. Just a few feet below the bridge, the water was thick with pairs of mating sockeye darting back and forth, nipping the tails and fins of intruders to keep them from their precious redds, the gravel sites for their egg nests…

The sockeye had lost the sleek silvery fitness of their ocean phase. Now in mating colors, their bodies were crimson and gleaming in the swift, clear water. The deep green of their heads appeared almost pagan. The males seemed humpbacked; their snouts descended into hooks. Sockeye pressed their bodies close to their mates, their tails quivering in rapid, intense bursts. It seemed absurd that I could hear—cutting through the suburban Sunday sounds of barking dogs and pounding hammers—the sharp, slapping noises of a female salmon lying flat against the creek bed, her crimson body arching out of the shallow water, her tail thumping in determined flaps as she carved a redd into the gravel. In the last, fierce instincts of their lives, the sockeye lunged for deeper water or slashed at nearby fish. The fins of most of the sockeye were pale, and their bodies were dotted with a patchwork of white fungus, which heralded their deaths.

I leaned on the footbridge railing to stare at the sockeye. I had a strange feeling of awe and incomprehension. I was being called to witness. But what was I seeing? The Pacific Northwest, I’d heard it said many times, was anywhere there were salmon. But what were these fish to me? Years later, I would understand that what I saw was the creature that would guide me into my new home.”

“We were salvaging vine maple at this site, and cascara, Indian plum, ocean spray. Also any conifer we could find; western red cedar, Douglas fir, western hemlock. All are native flora often found along Pacific Northwest streams and waterways. By morning’s end thousands of shrubs and seedlings, placed in burlap bags, would fill a rented moving truck. Thousands more would be left behind. The county organizes plant salvages when local forests are set to become housing developments, strip malls, or highways. The flora we were digging up would be replanted along streams, wetlands and estuaries, many of which are salmon restoration sites.

Was I saving this forest? Or was I just another hand cutting it down?

This site was called Valley Green. Or perhaps it was The Gardens. It’s hard to tell one residential development from another. The nostalgic names belie the landscapes they create. A mud path from the forest had been widened to become a rain-slick asphalt road, twisting and curling through unmarked culs-de-sac. There were cleared plots of rock and grey dirt, white pipes, and neon-yellow earth-moving machines. Stuck in the dirt were white posts printed with black block letters that said “Storm Sewer Water.”

The model home was open for display. It was a beige house with a tan roof, four windows to each side, and a two-car garage. I tried to imagine what this land would look like with two hundred, three hundred, four hundred beige houses—all with clipped lawns— standing side by side. Weeks or months or years later, I might drive past The Gardens, Valley Green, or other suburban developments, with names like Meadowdale or Emerald Creek, and would never recognize the land where I had spent Saturday mornings filling burlap bags with big-leaf maple, thimbleberry, sword fern, salmonberry, snowberry, and more.

The county ecologist overseeing the several dozen volunteers was standing nearby. She was dressed for rain, of course. She wore boots and dirty jeans, and her white-streaked black hair was sheltered under a wide-brimmed, khaki hat.

“How much is coming down?” I asked her.

We looked toward the forest. The woods were a labyrinth of salal, sword fern, Oregon grape, red huckleberry, and alder. Tight trillium buds were just rising from the dark, rain-soft earth. These were the few I had learned to notice and identify in this green blur of a forest. Growing beside them were so many more I had not yet come to know. It struck me: I’d lived in Seattle for nearly ten years, yet I was still so new to this region. And there I was learning to identify the flora by salvaging it.

I heard the trill of wrens. I heard the soft thud of shovels.

“All of it,” the ecologist said, shrugging. “All of it.”

***

“Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul,” wrote Emily Dickinson. And in these woods, there were small hopes. Bumble bee queens, pregnant and waiting for spring, were somewhere hidden in the cracks of a nurse log or in the earth beneath a tangle of winter’s golden grass. A bird, perhaps twice as big as my thumb, flitted through the alder trees. I looked for field marks to identify it. I tried to remember the slides I’d seen at Seattle Audubon classes. Red-breasted nuthatch, most likely, I decided. A Pacific wren foraged under curling fronds of sword fern. That bird I knew. Chit, chit, chit, it called, so close I could see its pale eyebrows. Dark-eyed juncos with plumage looking like a monk’s brown cowl darted amid the roots and fallen leaves. At the edge of my sight, a hawk flew into an alder stand. A Cooper’s hawk, or perhaps a sharp-shinned hawk. There was a rustling in the fallen leaves, then silence. If woods like these kept coming down, would I ever have a chance to learn one accipiter from another?

When I was young, I wanted to save the world. I thought I could do that by organizing and boycotting and marching and leafleting and demonstrating against the big issues: nuclear proliferation; violence against women; so many other avoidable injustices of our time. I value that activism for what it changed in other people’s lives, and for what I learned from it; I trust it made a difference, however slight. I would do it again if necessary.

Now that I’m older, I still want to save the world. But time is costly. Passion more so. I no longer want to determine my actions and define my life by what I oppose. I want to act and live here in this world with what I love, simply and solely because I am coming to love it.”

“…Bees crave light. Once inside my bedroom, they apparently forgot how they had entered, whether through an open sash or a crack in the window frame. Evolution had not prepared them for following summer light back out through glass windows. I watched as fragile wings beat into a black-veined blur as bees tried to fly through my window and back outside to the garden. These were worker bees, after all, each of them a nonreproductive female with one of their main roles being gathering food for the rest of the colony. When each bee finally calmed down, I caught her in a glass cup and released her outside, watching her fly to the orange nasturtiums like an infant kept too long from the breast.

There was a certain noblesse oblige in my actions. If the bees were grateful, they gave no sign. Off they went, without even the proverbial backward glance, to where the hot July days were sending sunlight falling in sharp, shining sheets over the tattered rosebushes and scraggly lawn of a house I rented with three housemates, all massage therapists who moonlighted as dancers and yoga instructors…

I didn’t release the bees out of a fondness for insects. I tolerated the spiders spreading their delicate webs in my bathroom corners. They were my allies, eating the flies and whatever else was wandering through my basement rooms. And how could anyone hate butterflies or ladybugs? But it takes an act of sheer intellectual will for me to remember I share a far distant evolutionary ancestor with all the other creeping, crawling creatures I collectively ignore and dismiss as bugs.

While I couldn’t claim to know a great deal about bees, I did know that the ones hovering about my scented candles, their fuzzy black bodies crowned with a yellow cap and tipped with a gold ring around their tail, were bumble bees. Was it pollinating behavior when a bumble bee arched its fuzzy body and rubbed its thin legs over the powdery remains of my incense sticks? What was the function of the translucent droppings the bees left on the red and yellow wax hanging from my brass Hanukkah menorahs? The longer I watched the bumble bees, the more enchanted I became with their short, intricate lives. Unfortunately, they were dropping like flies. Losing even part of a day trapped in my bedroom was too long in a life that lasted a few weeks.

At first, there had been just one bee. Then another. And another. Soon there were too many bees. Every morning, I’d pull out the teacup and get as many bees outside as I could. Then I’d cook breakfast and start calling clients for my grant writing business. By midmorning, four, five, sometimes six or more bees would be buzzing, huzzing, hizzing above my shoulders.

And the bees weren’t only flying. They were also crawling: across the beige carpet in my office, across the white linoleum in my bathroom (making it impossible for me to step out of the shower without first being sure nothing was moving between the bath mat and my slippers), and—to my horror—across my bed.

Noblesse oblige collapsed before raw survival instinct. The basement’s spiders and I could share the same habitat thanks to mutually exclusive niches. The bumble bees were invading my space. I wanted them gone from my life. But I didn’t want them killed…”

“This will be the most disgusting thing you ever do,” I warned my husband as we drove into Smallwood Park. During the two-hour drive south to the Nisqually River, first down I-5 from Seattle, then along the strip malls of State Route 167 and from there to the rural roads and open fields of State Route 161 heading into Eatonville, I’d kept my legs stretched across the Camry’s backseat. It was a few weeks past Hanukkah, that time of light breaking the winter darkness, and I was in my second trimester of pregnancy and weeks past a threatened miscarriage that could have ended our daughter’s life before it even started.

The high blood pressure that accompanied my pregnancy had meant I had to pull back from monitoring at Longfellow, and this was the first winter in years that I’d spent without a single trip to any other salmon stream. Except for medical appointments and rare outings, I’d spent my early pregnancy in a doctor-ordered, fear-enforced bed rest.

Jim usually spent Saturdays running three miles, shopping at the farmers’ market, and checking Medline for studies on high blood pressure during pregnancy. He knew I was stir-crazy from the bed rest. I yearned to be back in the literal woods and hoped we were out of the metaphorical woods of pregnancy disasters. The first trimester was over. My blood pressure was again normal. I knew this might be my last time outdoors once the baby arrived. What better way to spend it than by restoring a salmon run—even if it meant flinging fish carcasses.

For Jim, salmon restoration was more abstract than the data sets he analyzed as a research scientist. He didn’t know that by returning to their natal streams, spawning salmon sustain hundreds of species— from mallards, which eat salmon eggs, to mergansers, which prey upon juvenile salmon, to seals and whales in the Pacific, which feed on immature salmon schools. Once the salmon are back in freshwater, eagles, shrews, and coyotes are but a few of the species that feed on the returning fish. In the Nisqually region alone, some 137 species of insects, mammals, and birds are fed through the annual return of salmon. Among the dozens of creatures attending the feast are the aquatic insects that will in turn be eaten by next season’s juvenile salmon…

As in so many of the region’s rivers, however, too few salmon were returning to sustain the Nisqually’s flora and fauna…The result is a sustained nutrient deficit, as it’s called, which fish flings help rectify by seeding a river with salmon carcasses…

“This is something I never planned to do,” said Jim as he maneuvered around SUVs to find a parking space. Smallwood Park was filled with families coming for the fish fling.

“Remember that C-section the doctors say is in my future?” I said. “If I complain about it, you can say, ‘I drove sixty-odd miles so you could toss dead fish.’”