RossInk

The Birds: Studying the Gulls on Protection Island

Ross Anderson — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:40:18 -0800

   In mid-afternoon, the word goes out across the eastern end of Protection Island – a cacophony of seagull cries that might translate as: “He’s back.”
   And here comes Jim Hayward, that scientist, armed as usual with a clipboard and a portable scale, stepping carefully through the grasses, peering into nests and meticulously recording what he sees.
   His reception is best described as mild annoyance. One by one, the gulls waddle off their rudimentary nests, turn and watch Hayward inspect their handiwork – one or more eggs the color of Army camouflage. If gulls could put their wings on their hips and roll their eyeballs like a Disney animation, they would. But then Hayward moves on, and they return to the nests
    Fact is, Hayward has become more or less part of the family. If seniority counts for anything, he has as much claim to this stretch of prime waterfront real estate as the gulls do. Each summer for 21 years, he has returned to resume his lifetime of research with glaucous-winged gulls, several thousand of which nest in the Protection Island National Wildlife Refuge.
    To most of us, the island is an alluring image, like Bali Hai, shrouded in offshore mist and strictly off limits to visitors. But to Hayward and his wife, both PhD professors at Andrews University in Michigan, it is a rare, outdoor laboratory, one of the best places on earth to study the biology and behavior of gulls and other seabirds. Each spring, they return to the island to resume that work.
    If it sounds idealic, consider the living conditions. For three months, home is a rustic cabin atop the island. They haul all their food, drinking water, fuel and anything else they need by boat from the Cape George marina. They sleep on a mattress on the floor, do all their own repairs and maintenance, and bounce around the island in a rickety pickup truck that is more rust than steel. And, for all this, you will never hear a single complaint. “We are grateful to be here,” Hayward says.
    In their own way, so are the gulls. These are the same birds you’ll see gliding in the slipstream of your Puget Sound ferry, or begging for French fries at McDonalds. And thousands of them, mostly glaucous-winged gulls, return each spring to nest on Protection Island – followed soon thereafter by Hayward and Henson.
    Funded by the National Science Foundation, they are studying the dynamics of breeding colonies – the factors that influence or govern gull populations. “We’re interested in patterns of behavior,” he says. “ What they do, and why they do it.”
    Gulls are ideal subjects for such work, Hayward says. They nest in large colonies and they’re comfortable around people. They’re larger than most birds, and they live in the open, where they can be monitored. They are active during the day. “And they have an interesting, complicated behavior, which has been studied for many years, so that it is fairly well understood.”
    They monitor gulls in several ways. First, they maintain an observation station from the top of the bluff, overlooking the grass-covered spit that extends half a mile to the east, toward Port Townsend. “This is one of the best places in the world to study gulls,” Hayward says. “You can see everything.”
   From that vantage point, they use high-powered spotting scopes to scan their research plots, carefully recording bird-by-bird what their subjects are doing at every hour of the day.
Meanwhile, they maintain banks of digital video cameras, trained on the same nesting areas, running continuously.
    When the birds begin to lay their eggs – usually in mid to late May – Hayward begins his daily tour of the research area, walking through designated plots, inspecting some 300 nests scrawled into the low grass near the shore, counting eggs. Each of hundreds of eggs is weighed, marked and recorded daily for two months – from mid-May to mid-July. Eventually, all this data is entered into Henson’s solar-powered laptop computer, where the number-crunching occurs.
    They’re trying to understand, and eventually predict, how gull numbers will fluctuate based on certain factors – sunlight, temperature, tides, predators and the like.
     For some years, Henson hoped to apply “chaos theory” to gull populations. Chaos is the idea, largely developed by the late Edward Lorenz, that attempts to use seemingly minute changes in biological systems to explain and even predict larger events that appear unrelated. To illustrate his theory, Lorenz suggested a butterfly that flaps its wings in Brazil and sets off a chain of events that leads to a tornado in Texas. Gulls seemed like logical candidates for chaos theory; in fact, Lorenz is said to have considered using the illustration of a gull, rather than a butterfly, flapping its wings.
    Years of work, however, now suggest that gull behavior is best understood not by chaos, but by synchrony, Henson says. Gulls lay their eggs in synchronized “pulses,” she says – lots of eggs on one day, far fewer the next day, then back to higher numbers the third day.
   “Why would birds lay their eggs in synchronization?” she asks. “That’s what we’re trying to determine.”
    Similarly, they used their data to create a mathematical model that uses tides and time of day to predict, for example, how many birds will perch on the pier at Protection Island. It worked.
     And so what? Why should we care about when gulls lay their eggs? Hayward offers some practical applications. Gulls, for example, tend to become pests around cities and airports. As scientists increase their understanding of behavior, they could come up with strategies for dealing with birds.
     In a broader sense, gulls provide models that help scientists understand other animals’ behavior. “We’re trying to develop new mathematical techniques to do hard science and ecological field counts,” Henson says. If science can learn to predict fluctuations in gull numbers on Protection Island, they are likely to learn something applicable to ecosystems.
     And, Hayward adds, “I’m just curious. I want to know why gulls are calling now and not later. I want to know why there are more birds in one plot than another. I want to know why they lay their eggs in synchronized pulses.”
     Besides , it brings them back to a place that, despite the rugged living conditions, has become something of a second home. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s also play,” Hayward says. “Later in the summer, when we’re not collecting data so intensively, there’s time to relax in a unique place, with no TV, no Internet, no stereo, no cellphones. It’s a sanctuary for us as well as for the gulls.”

( (From the Port Townsend Leader, July 2008.)

To Sail a Tall Ship

Ross Anderson — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:40:25 -0800

   Pushed by a fresh northerly and a stiff flood tide, the tall ships returned to Puget Sound this week, sailing one-by-one through Admiralty Inlet and continuing down the sound for a gathering of traditional tall ships.
   Last to arrive was the familiar Lady Washington, the Grays Harbor-based brigantine which tied up alongside the Hawaiian Chieftain and Lynx at the Northwest Maritime Center dock. “We always look forward to coming here,” said Ryan Meyer, skipper of the Lady.
   They are among some two dozen tall ships that are stopping off here in route to a spectacular gathering over the Fourth of July weekend on the Tacoma waterfront.
     Tall ships are hardly a novelty to Port Townsend. The waterfront is home to the historic schooners Adventuress and Martha, and the Lady Washington is a frequent visitor. Three years ago, a similar fleet dropped anchor here in route to Tacoma.
   Sailing ships are embedded in this town’s genetic material, like madrona trees and facial hair. Tall ships were the reason the town was established in the first place. Arriving sea captains dropped anchor here to wait for tugboats to take them down the sound to Seattle and beyond. All those handsome Victorians were built by people who expected the railroad to terminate at Port Townsend, so sailing ships could be unloaded without dealing with the sound’s whimsical winds and currents.
   Then, of course, came steamships, and the Age of Sail came to an abrupt end. Those elegant tall ships, with their billowing trapezoidal sails and spiderweb rigging, were suddenly obsolete. Grand old schooners and clipper ships were dismasted and converted to barges, or left to rot on the tideflats. By the early 1970s, only a handful were left.
   Since then, there has been a comeback, perhaps triggered by TV images of the tall ships gathering in New York’s harbor for the 1976 Bicentennial. Old boats like Martha and Adventuress were painstakingly nursed back to life. The Lady Washington was built in Grays Harbor and turned over to a non-profit.
    Today, depending on who’s counting, there are perhaps 200 ships of various classes, ranging from relatively small schooners to a few grand square-riggers. Most, like Adventuress and Martha, are operated by private non-profits and used for sail training. Others are available for charters.
    And Port Townsend is a favorite stopping point. In part it’s because of the cadre of shipwrights, sailmakers and riggers who have chosen to live and work here. But Port Townsend’s waterfront is also the right scale for a tall ship. They moor here comfortably without being dwarfed by skyscrapers, cruise ships and oil tankers. The town and the ships share a common heritage.
   The tall ship comeback could be mistaken for just another toy for sentimental hobbyists. But anybody who has ever sailed aboard one of these ships understands that they fire people’s imaginations, much as they did in the time of Columbus or Cook. It still seems amazing that these big, beautiful vehicles can move at all.
    And at a time of $4 gas and a looming energy crisis, we’re also reminded that they are triumphs of energy efficiency. How can we not admire an ancient technology that can traverse oceans without burning a drop of oil.

(From the Port Townsend Leader, July 2008)

Exodus NW: The Plague of the Jocks

Ross Anderson — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:53:16 -0800

    Now it has been written that, at the dawning of the Third Millennium, there was joy in the Land of Sasquatch. For, after years of famine and disappointment, the sports gods did smile upon the people.
   Behold, the Huskies won 11 games, and were victorious at the Bowl of Roses. And Ichiro the Quick and Edgar the Ancient led the lowly Mariners to a hundred victories and more, and they overthrew even the evil Yankees. And the Seahawks, led by Shawn the Sure-Footed, won many victories and were elevated to the Bowl of Bowls. And the lowly Sonics won, owing to the many heroic deeds of Gary the Glove.
     And the people of the Land of Sasquatch were most pleased, praising the shooters of basketballs and hitters of baseballs and carriers of footballs. And they built great Palaces iin honor of their champions, and paid for them by levying hotel taxes upon innocent visitors.
    Now it came to pass, in the reign of Gregory the XL, that there arose a new master of the Sonics, and his name was Clay the Philistine. And the Philistine desired that the players of basketball should journey from the Land of Sasquatch unto the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, which he believed to be somewhere in Oklahoma.
   But, yea verily, the Sonics had rendered a solemn oath to play many more years at the Basketball Palace, in the center of the Land of Sasquatch.
    So Clay said unto Gregory XL: “The Basketball Palace is no longer satisfactory, for the wealthy Pharisees demandeth to sit on high upon the skyboxes, but the Basketball Palace hath too few skyboxes. Therefore we beseech thee to construct a greater Basketball Palace.
    At this, Gregory the XL was confused. And he went before the people and asked of them: “Shall we build a greater Basketball Palace for Clay the Philistine?”
     And they people said with a loud voice: “Nay! A thousand times Nay! For verily we hath not yet paid for the old palace.”
   And so Gregory XL said unto the Philistine: There shall be no new palace.
   Now Clay the Philistine was greatly troubled. And he said unto Gregory XL: “Thou hast spurned by request. So therefore I shall take my players of basketball and travel through the wilderness to the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey.”
    But Gregory XL said: “Thou canst not violate thine oath.”
And the Philistine said: “I will make sacrifices and burnt offerings to the people, and thus satisfy my oath to play in the Basketball Palace.”
    But Gregory’s heart was hardened. And he said: “Send us not thy burnt offerings, but only thy players of basketball.”
    So the Philistine said unto him: “Therefore we shall journey to the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey. Let my players go!”
    But Gregory’s heart remained hardened, so that he spurned the Philistine’s entreaties.
    And so the Philistine became angrier so that he fell upon the ground and swooned. And he summoned his magicians for advice. And lo the Philistine held forth his staff, and waved it, and said onto the people of Sasquatch: “Woe upon thee, and especially upon thine sports palaces!”
   And it came to pass that a great cloud descended upon the Land of Sasquatch. And while the rest of the world became warmer, there were only dark clouds and cold rain across the land of Sasquatch, even unto the month of June.
   And Clay said: “Let my players go!” But Gregory’s heart remained hardened.
   So the Philistine waved his rod and caused a Plague of Jocks. And, lo, the Husky football coach bore false witness, so that he was banished into the wilderness. And the Husky players flunked beginning basketweaving, or were arrested for sundry crimes, and were disqualified so that the Huskies could not defeat the Beavers, much less the Trojans.
And the Philistine caused Shawn the Sure-footed to be injured, so that the Seahawks no longer journeyed to the Bowl of Bowls.
    And Jamie, He of the Slow Pitch, was banished to the Land of the Phillies. And Edgar the Ancient and Jay of the Bones retired to green pastures, so that only Ichiro the Quick remained. And the Mariners were victorious no more, but instead humiliated the people of the Land of Sasquatch.
   And the Players of Basketball were scattered asunder unto far-off lands, and were replaced by lesser players. And the people were humiliated further.
   Trouble and discontent spread across the Land of Sasquatch. And the people descended into the streets of the city and fell down to rend their T-shirts. And they erected a great burning altar among the sports palaces, and brought their Ms caps and Ichiro bobblehead dolls and Gary the Glove hooded sweatshirts, and cast them upon the fire, crying aloud: “Woe upon us, for these are indeed the darkest days ever in the Land of Sasquatch.”
    And they went unto the High Priest, and beseeched her to prevent the lesser players of basketball from journeying into the wilderness. And amongst the plaintiffs was one Sherman, the Poet, who said unto the High Priest: “We beseech thee to prevent our players of basketball from journeying to foreign lands. For unto us, the players of basketball are as Greek gods.”
    At this, the clouds parted, and a bright light shone from the Heavens. And the bright light produced a Very Deep Voice which said: “Greek Gods! What hath been wrought upon the Land of Sasquatch?”
   And the Very Deep Voice became deeper still, and said: “Verily I say unto you, people of Sasquatch: Get thee a life.”

Shake Hands (ALL of 'em) with O.Dofleini the Great

Ross Anderson — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:16:40 -0800

   Somewhere in the basement of the Seattle Aquarium, six Port Townsenders gather around a utilitarian saltwater tank, lift the top hatch, and peer into the watery blackness. “Hello, Harry,” somebody says. “ Come on out and see us.”
   A mottled-red tentacle slithers to the surface, up and out of the hatch. It keeps on coming, groping for something – food, or love, or just contact with another intelligent being. Another tentacle follows, finds a humanoid hand and wraps itself around it. The hand recoils, and the rubbery suckers break loose with a bubblewrap-like crackle.
   “Meet Harry,” says our aquarium guide. “Harry Potter.”
    For 20 minutes or so, we stand around that inelegant tank, shaking hands with a slimey critter named for a wizard and equipped with enough limbs to greet us all at the same time.
    Harry, of course, is not just your everyday octopus. He is O. dofleini -- a giant Pacific Octopus – the world’s largest known octopus species. In addition, he is the aquarium’s octopus in waiting; soon he will be moved upstairs to the main octopus display tank, replacing the present occupant, who is about to be released into Elliott Bay.
     Port Townsend is home to lots of giant Pacific octopus. They can be found living in the rock jetty at Point Hudson. A single shipwreck in Discovery Bay once proved to a rocky condominium for at least eight big guys. Steve Blazina, a Marrowstone Island diver with a longtime affinity for O.dofleini – recently found one living in a log just offshore from Swain’s ; that critter now resides at the Marine Science Center in Pousbo.
   But, for those without scuba tanks, the Seattle aquarium remains the best place around to get up close and personal. Staff biologist Roland Anderson has been caring for and studying local octopus for some 30 years, and he probably knows them better than anyone.
    At about 30 pounds, Harry is no monster. Giant Pacifics are rumored to exceed 100 pounds, measuring more than 12 feet from the tip of one tentacle to another. (Their smaller cousins, O. rubescens or "red octopuses," are teacup sized.) But most “giants” are more or less Harry’s size.
   Large or small, the octopus is a physiological masterpiece - eight tentacles, each of which can operate independently or in graceful synchrony with the others, all emerging from beneath a soft, hoodlike mantle topped by two eyes that seem to size up visitors with profound skepticism.
   Nothing else on earth moves quite like an octopus. Most of time, they move on the bottom, not so much walking as flowing and oozing, each tentacle doing its share of the work. But, when inspired to do so, they become jet-propelled, ingesting sea water and ejecting it at will through a flexible funnel, hurtling through the water like guided missiles.
   They are masters of disguise, instantly flashing from red to orange to brown to white – reflecting the whim or emotion of the moment, or the color of their environment. Unburdened by a skeleton, they are expert contortionists, squeezing through impossibly small spaces. They are strong enough to lift more than their own weight; if Harry’s tank weren’t latched, he would slither out and across the concrete, searching for an ocean.
    And they are very, very smart -- at least by invertebrate standards. Anderson has spent years studying and illustrating their intelligence.
   Octopuses are born, appropriately enough, under rocks, which is where mom deposits some 50,000 to 75,000 eggs, each the size of a grain of rice, and guards the nest four to six months. Once hatched, the newborn octopus floats with the currents, feeding on plankton, gaining as much as 2 percent of its body weight per day. Most will be gobbled up by larger creatures, but the fortunate few who reach maturity will live three to five years.
   As adults, they live in rocky dens and crevices, in shipwrecks or discarded tires or even beer bottles - any place they can squeeze themselves for protection from predators. Their strictly carnivorous diet soon graduates to crabs, clams and fish.
   Their feeding strategy is unique, Anderson says. Octopus have a rasping tongue, much like a small file. They may just pull a clam apart, or they may use that tongue to drill a pinhole in the shell of a clam and inject a saliva that kills the organism within seconds.
    Anderson has recently learned that they are smart enough to seek the easiest method available. But, given the opportunity, they relish their clams pre-processed – on the halfshell.
    The octopus has a parrotliike beak which, in combination with its venom, gives it a nasty bite. Anderson has never been bitten, but some of his colleagues have been. The toxin causes pain and swelling comparable with a bee sting, he says, and may leave a scar. Ironically, the smaller red octopus is more likely to bite than the giants, whom Anderson describes as "pussycats."
   They are somewhat transient creatures, moving from den to den, staying a month or so until it has depleted the local food supply. In some cases, octopuses will stay in their dens, wait for something tasty to swim by and snag it. Or they may venture out to hunt, gallumphing along the bottom on all eights until they find a crab and surround it. As adults, they use their jets only in emergencies - to chase meals or avoid becoming one.
   There is no reliable data on their populations, but Anderson is confident they’re faring well. Each year, he organizes an informal daylong survey, during which amateur divers are asked to look for octopus and report what they find. The results have been fairly consistent, he says – about 200 divers reporting a total of 70 or so octopus sightings. That suggests there are plenty of O. dofleini out there.
    This despite a rather Spartan sex life. They spawn just once, the male using its specialized tentacle to deliver a "spermatophore," or packet of sperm, to the female, who tucks it away for future use. When she's ready, she uses the sperm to fertilize her thousands of eggs and deposits them under a rock.
   That’s where the fun ends. After mating, the male "goes a little crazy," stops eating and abandons its den, which frees up space for his mate. Then he dies. The female hangs on, guards her brood for several months, manipulating the eggs, using her funnel to keep them clean. She, too, stops eating, her body shrinking until the eggs hatch. And then she dies as well.
    People have been fishing for octopus for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks simply lowered clay pots to known octopus habitat and left them there a day or so; when they hauled them back to the surface, the newly resident octopus became tomorrow's calamari. The strategy still works. Octopuses can be caught with a rubber tire tied to a rope.
    Anderson prefers to catch them by hand, scuba-diving into known "octopus holes" such as Neah Bay, Hood Canal, Tacoma Narrows. Collectors entice them out of their dens, grab a tentacle or two and stuff them into a plastic bag.
    Anderson has spent years figuring out how to keep them in captivity. They are comfortable in small spaces, and don’t seem to mind being handled, he says. And they’ll eat just about anything they are offered. But, if left in the main tank, an octopus will reject frozen herring and other handouts in favor of its live neighbors.
    But perhaps Anderson’s biggest discovery is that octopuses have emotions, and wear them on all eight sleeves. "Color changes seem to be linked to behavior," he says. "We're investigating how and why, but they seem to have a range of messages: `I'm ready to mate now,' or `Predator coming!' or "Leave me alone, I'm taking a nap."
    With its mammallike eyes and brains, the octopus exhibits un-invertebrate behaviors such as sleep. The journal Science recently reported Anderson's research on octopus "play." Each of eight octopuses was provided with a white pill bottle. Some ignored it. Some used their funnels to blow it away. Still others shot it around the tank, retrieved it, and shot it again, and again. Anderson sees this as "repetitive, long-term behavior with no apparent function - except that it feels good, which is the definition of `play.' "
    Maybe that’s what Harry had on his mind the other day when he reached out and touched his Port Townsend visitors.

Plugged-in PT

Ross Anderson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:09:51 -0800

Nobody killed the electric car. They all got fed up with the traffic in cities like Seattle and moved to Port Townsend, at Puget Sound's entrance, where they are living happily ever after, humming up and down Water Street, doing what cars are supposed to do.. This spring, a small fleet was parked fender-to-fender at the foot of the high school football scoreboard for an impromptu electric car convention – ten of them, which took about the same space as a bicycle rack. But that was still more electric cars in one place than most people have ever seen.

It was an odd display of colorful, teardrop-shaped new models and local conversions, all designed to get you from A to B without emitting the slightest whiff of carbon dioxide. Judging by the buzz on the football field, local drivers were charged by the idea. The state reports 26 electric cars registered in the Port Townsend neighborhood. That’s one for every 1,100 people, compared to 1 per 7,600 statewide and 1 per 5,700 in Seattle. That’s an impressive statistic for a small town, given that those little cars start at $12,000, and can easily cost $30,000 or more.

But Port Townsend roads and driving distances lend themselves to electric cars. Steve Evans, a former Californian who recently bought his second-hand GEM (Global Electric Motors), drove it down to the recent gathering. “We already use it to run most of our errands,” he said. Another owner observed that, compared to conventional cars, her electric is “ a little rattley-bang… But you adjust your expectations.”

That means: Expect to drive slower, over shorter distances. You will not be taking your electric onto freeways. And you won’t be driving it to Seattle. But, then again, the car doesn't want to go there anyway.

This, however, will change, says Steve Mayeda, of MC Electric Vehicles in Seattle, who trailered two of his electric cars to Port Townsend for the gathering.

The key factor is batteries. Electric cars are fueled by stored electricity, and at present that means banks of deep-cycle lead batteries not unlike the battery in your conventional car. Instead of refueling, drivers must recharge those batteries by plugging them into household power circuits. To run a tiny car at about 35 mph and up to 50 miles between plug-ins requires at least six conventional batteries, which are stored behind and under the seats. To travel further, you have to add more heavy batteries, which increases the vehicle weight, which gobbles still more power, and so forth. And there lies the rub.

But rising gas prices and environmental awareness have recharged efforts to invent a new battery that can store more energy in a smaller, lighter package, Mayeda says. “We’re on the verge of that breakthrough.” The result could be a technological leap comparable with the development of lithium batteries for cellular phones, which were virtually inconceivable a generation ago.

Meanwhile, Mayeda finds himself adjusting the expectations of prospective buyers. “Guarantee me that this car will make it to Seattle and back, and I’ll buy one,” said one woman as she inspected one of his electric models.

“It won’t,” Mayeda responded. “Maybe in a couple of years. But not now.”

Remembering Bobby: What if, what if.......

Ross Anderson — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:35:26 -0800

   Forty years ago today, I spent the day on a packed airliner over the Atlantic, bound from Glasgow to New York’s John F Kennedy Airport.
    The world was stumbling through a turbulent year. During my year’s study at Edinburgh University, I had glimpsed my society from abroad. I’d watched the news clips of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and of the rioting that followed. I’d watched the Johnson Administration drawn ever deeper into a war that made no sense. My British friends were astounded that America in the 20th century seemed determined to repeat each and every mistake that the British had made in the 19th.
    For these and other reasons, I had mixed feelings about coming home. When we landed at JFK and filed off the airplane, the airport was strangely silent, funereal. Passengers and airline employees wept openly. We soon learned the reason.
    While we were in flight, Robert F. Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles.
    Less than five years after the death of John Kennedy, and just weeks after the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr., the nation had lost another young voice of promise and hope. And Bobby, with his tousled hair and weathered smile, had seemed the greatest promise of them all.
     Dazed by the news, I wandered into a coffee shop and stopped at the door to gawk at the back of a New York cop, sitting at the counter, his service revolver hanging in its holster. During my year in the UK, where handguns are banned and shootings are rare, my only experience with guns was in museums.
     But now I was home.
     At first, the murder felt like another shot fired by that same evil, rightwing conspiracy that killed King and JFK. But the conspiracy theories never worked. Like his brother, Bobby Kennedy was killed by a young wacko with a gun.
    So it became a commentary on guns. How can a society continue to operate while allowing crazy people to carry loaded weapons designed only to kill other people? Yet, even then, I was aware that we are not Olde England, that we are shaped by revolution and the mythology of the Wild West, and that you can’t blithely ban handguns unless you have a practical way to deal with the countless millions already in circulation; and nobody knows how to do that.
   So, if we’ll never know why Bobby Kennedy was killed, we can still ask: What if he had not been? What if Sirhan Sirhan had decided on that fateful day to watch the speech on TV, or to take a day at the beach?
    Given the tight margin in the fall of 1968,, Kennedy probably would have been nominated and elected in November. There would have been no President Nixon, no Spiro Agnew, no Watergate plumbers.
     We can never know what Kennedy would have done with the office. We assume he would have got the nation out of Southeast Asia; but we also know that Bobby had been a staunch cold warrior who worried about Communist China’s influence in the region. To some degree, he had helped get us into Vietnam, making it far more difficult to pull us out.
    I would like to believe he would have pursued racial segregation and women’s rights and universal health insurance. But Bobby’s politics had been shifting, so who knows?
      Perhaps the lesson to be drawn this remarkable week, as a transcendent Barack Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee for President, is that elections matter. Forty years ago, it mattered a great deal that Bobby Kennedy was not elected President, and that Richard Nixon was.
    This year, nobody knows what Obama or John McCain would do in the White House. But it still matters which of them is elected. In 2008, much like 1968, the nation yearns to extricate itself from an overseas war and focus on what’s happening at home. Wherever we sit on the ideological spectrum, we yearn for new vision and direction. For many, Obama seems to offer the same charisma and intelligence and eloquence that RFK promised in ’68.
   And, as a nation, we are quietly, desperately afraid we will squander the opportunity.

Mystery Bay: The Case of the Disappearing Coliforms

Ross Anderson — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:23:03 -0800

   Out on Mystery Bay, the nautical small talk usually revolves around winds and waves and tidal currents – the crucial factors to spending a day on Puget Sound.
   These days, a new topic has been added to the mix – fecal coliforms. And these microscopic bacteria, usually associated with four-letter words, could become the most significant maritime variable of all.
   Mystery Bay is the pastoral cove on Marrowstone Island, tucked deep in Kilisut Harbor. It has to be one of the lovelier bays in the area, surrounded by treed shores and broad oyster beds. In recent years, it’s also become a popular, year-round anchorage, home to dozens of pleasure craft whose owners have fled the rising moorage rates in Port Townsend.
    And thereby hangs our tale. State officials who regularly test the water quality in Mystery Bay and other shellfish areas recently downgraded the bay from “approved” to “conditionally approved” for shellfish.
    What this means is that the Department of Health is concerned that the number of boats will cause an increase in fecal coliform counts around the bay. And this, in turn, could affect the shellfish, including the family-owned Marrowstone Island Shellfish Co, which owns and leases tidelands in the area.
   Boatowners are worried. Most keep their boats attached to buoys which may or may not have up-to-date state and county permits, on tidelands managed by the state Department of Natural Resources. If they get kicked out, it’s not at all clear where else they could go.
   “This is ridiculous,’ grumbles one boat-owner who does not want to be identified, and who keeps his sailboat on a Mystery Bay buoy. “ I don’t know of anybody who is dumping their waste into the bay. This isn’t a problem.”
    He’s right. State health reports make it clear that there is no fecal coliform problem in Mystery Bay. The state regularly tests the water at five stations in the bay and the results range from 1.7 to 33 bacteria per 100 mililiters. The average count is just two critters per 100 ml -- well below the state imposed limit. It is as good or better than test results from Port Townsend Bay, or even from the famous oyster beds down in Quilcene Bay.
   All five stations in Mystery Bay meet the state standard, and the station considered most suspect – Mystery Bay State Park – was among the cleanest.
   So what’s the beef?
    “It’s not about fecal coliforms,” says Al Scalf, of Jefferson County Community Development. “It’s about too many boats.”
    State officials acknowledged this. Any place where ten or more boats are gathered together must be considered a “marina.” When I checked last week, there were about 45 boats of every size and shape scattered across Mystery Bay, and many of them near the dock at the state park, the area that state officials are watching closely.
     The conditional approval is based on “the potential for discharge from vessels,” according to Scott Berbells of the state Department of Health. If people start dumping their waste, the bacteria could begin to accumulate in local shellfish, with dire consequences.
    But people don’t dump their sewage in the bay, my friend insists. If they use their onboard head, they discharge the sewage at a pumpout station at the park. No problemo.
    Still, the flap become the subject of a meeting involving four different government agencies, shellfish growers and local Native American tribes who have shellfish rights. “We’re trying to come up with a plan,” says Scalf.
    State officials reiterated their concern that all those boats could create a pollution problem. OK, but so far they haven’t, local officials argued. And evicting the boats would create major problems in a region where boat moorage is scarce and expensive. Kick them out of Mystery Bay, and some of these boatowners might find something new. But why put them through all that if there is no problem?
   Mystery Bay’s little predicament appears to be much ado about nothing. But it is symptomatic of the broader challenge of restoring and protecting Puget Sound. Virtually everybody here understands that our inland sea is in trouble, and most are willing to spend whatever is necessary to fix it.
    But what exactly is the problem, and what can we do about it? I’ve been writing about these things for three decades, and every few years the conventional wisdom changes. At one time or another, it has been a problem of overfishing, or of suburban sprawl, or of urban sewage, or industrial wastes, or rural septic tanks, or of too much asphalt, or not enough eelgrass. It’s probably safe to say it’s all of the above, but that doesn’t help shape a smart set of solutions.
     In September, we’ll start over when the new Puget Sound Partnership issues its recommendations for a new strategy. Who knows what they’ll ask for?
   But here’s some free advice. If you want to preserve Puget Sound, start by NOT wasting time and energy attacking water quality problems that don’t exist.

Baseball Anonymous

Ross Anderson — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:27:11 -0800

    This is the year to quit. This is the season to kick the habit. No patches, no pills, no support groups. Just say no.
   To baseball, that is. It’s time to kick it, and the hometown team – God bless their mediocre souls -- is making it easy.
    Face it, being a fan has always been an utter waste of time and energy. Even if you rarely made it to Safeco Field (and I was a twice-a-year guy), you were planting yourself in front of the tube, poring over box scores, resenting A-Rod’s defection. All this for a roster of guys who are not very interesting people who live somewhere else, who played for another team last year and will probably play for yet another next year, and who make more money in a year than I’ll make in my career – all because they theoretically can hit or toss a baseball better than the next guy.
   I’ve always understood this made no sense, but I got sucked in. For a long time, it was a bonding experience with my son. Now he’s been on his own for a decade, and I realize I turned him into an addict as well. Then came those few good years, with Edgar and Buhner and Moyer – guys who actually lived here and had personalities as well as being good ballplayers. It was fun.
    So much for history. The thrill of the grass has long since been displaced by steroids, seven-digit salaries, dwi arrests and transient ballplayers. These days, I look at the box scores and, regardless of the score, I barely recognize the names. Only one of their starting pitchers came up through their organization. It’s a team of free agents. And, whatever their stats say, they’re a miserable, forgettable bunch of ballplayers, probably the worst in the Mariners’ grim history, certainly the worst when measured against what they’re being paid.
   So this is the year to switch. Baseball Anonymous. Do not take me out to the ballpark. Buy me some carrot and celery sticks. This is the summer to read novels, take up gardening, or sailing or kayaking. Go volunteer for a political candidate. Adopt a homeless family. …
   Anything but baseball. Yup, my name is Ross, and I’m a recovering baseball fan. And I’m over it.
                                                               {Published on Crosscut.com, May 2008)

All that Glitters: Puget Sound in Bloom

Ross Anderson — Sun, 25 May 2008 02:42:30 -0800

   For most folks hereabouts, spring translates to some combination of flower gardens and sun. They revel in their tulips and rhodies and poppies. And that’s fair enough. But for f us saltwater souls, it’s all about the glitter. We look forward to that first warm, moonless night, when Puget Sound is flat and dark so we can launch a kayak, escape the city’s incandescent glow, and enjoy an all-organic light show.
   It’s a splendid display. Each paddle stroke ignites thousands of tiny explosions of bioluminescent light, reminding us that Puget Sound, for all its ecological woes, still sizzles with life. Puget Sound may be better known for bigger and more charismatic critters – leaping king salmon and frolicking orcas. But the real star power out there belongs to those ever-lovin’, dazzling dinoflagellates.
   Dino-who? OK, they’re microscopic, far too small to be seen by the naked eye. But what they lack in size and grandeur they make up for in numbers – thousands to the cup-full of Puget Sound seawater. And sparkle, because these are the invisible “bugs” which, on warm summer nights, flash an LED-like green across the surface of the sound.
   They’re best-known to kayakers, who ride closer the surface, the better to enjoy one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular displays. But other boaters see the sparkle in their bow wave, or when porpoise swim past, leaving a trail of glitter reminiscent of Tinkerbell in Neverland.
   It happens every year, when the sound awakens from its winter slumber. As the days become longer and warmer, sunlight triggers what scientists sometimes call the “spring bloom.” Countless trillions of microscopic plankton which have overwintered in semi-hibernation in the depths rise in the water column, and begin to feed, or to photosynthesize, and to reproduce like crazy.    By early summer, they dominate the ecosystem, clouding the water, triggering a feeding frenzy that sustains virtually everything that lives out there.
   The largest of these organisms are about the size of these periods...... The vast majority are much smaller.   The explosion is triggered by diatoms, wondrous, single-celled algae enclosed in an exquisite shell of silicon. Fed by sunlight, the diatoms begin to reproduce, one diatom becoming a million within a month. While an individual diatom is quite invisible, their massive blooms can be seen from the air or, in some cases, from space.
   The diatoms, in turn, provide food for zooplankton. There are euphausiids and copepods, which are essentially tiny shrimp, and trillions of chaetognaths, needlelike critters that can actually grow big enough to see with the naked eye. The same bloom includes countless newly-hatched fish and crabs and octopus and other sealife that spend their first weeks and months drifting with the plankton, feeding and being fed upon.
   In a rich ecosystem like Puget Sound, the result is a vast soup. Scoop a cup of water from the sound and it looks like, OK, water. But take a drop of that water and slide it under a low-powered microscope, and that droplet is transformed into a throbbing menagerie of copepods and chaetognaths and diatoms and everything in between. Watch long enough, and you’ll find the bigger guys feeding on the little guys.
   Given the opportunity, and perhaps a reason, some of those guys will sparkle. Hundreds of organisms, from the fireflies back east to deep-water fish, have the ability to glow in the dark or, in scientific terms, “bioluminesce.” It’s a chemical reaction that takes place either as a continuous glow or an instantaneous flash.
   Dr. Claudia Mills, a biologist at the University of Washington marine labs in Friday Harbor, studies some 60 to 70 Northwest species of jellyfish, about half of which are bioluminescent. When she paddles at night, she’ll occasionally glimpse the warm glow of a jelly.
   But most of what we see at the surface are those everlovin’ dinoflagellates, she says.
Dinoflagellates are actually a diverse family of single-celled organisms, all microscopic, that drift with the rest of the plankton. Each consists of two transluscent cones, joined at the base, with a whip-like appendage that causes it to spin, like a top, according to Richard Strickland, the University of Washington biologist who literally wrote the book – “The Fertile Fjord” – on Puget Sound plankton.
   Dinoflagellates don’t qualify as either plants, nor animals, but as algae. They photosynthesize like plants, converting the sun’s energy to food. But they also use those tiny flagella to propel themselves vertically in the water column. During the winter, they’re less active and less abundant. But as the days lengthen, they multiply and move closer to the surface, soaking up energy by day and, when stimulated, glowing by night.
   By midsummer, it’s showtime. In most cases, they only glitter at night, employing a circadian rhythm so they don’t waste energy during daylight. Reversing the cycle in a laboratory might take a week or more.
   Scientists understand how the process works, Mills says. But why do they glitter? Some years ago, I toured the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, and spent a couple of hours with a researcher who was trying to answer that question. “We understand the chemistry pretty well,” she said. “But we’re still trying to figure out the function.”
   They’re still working on that, says Mills. The prevailing theory is that the luminescence is defensive, serving as a natural burglar alarm or “startle response.” When threatened by larger predators, the dinos flash green, which may attract even larger predators that hopefully will eat their predators, sparing the dino.
   Then again, maybe they’re just showing off, treating the rest of us to a glimpse of Mother Nature’s springtime brilliance.

Puget Sound Perennial: Here we go not again

Ross Anderson — Sun, 25 May 2008 02:29:08 -0800

   Last week it was the Seattle Times’ turn to crank out the obligatory series on the ecological demise of Puget Sound. Several of their finest reporters and artists donned their rubber boots and waded into the challenge, delivering new tales of woe from the shores of Washington’s inland sea.
   It was good, smart, important journalism. Alas, each year it gets more difficult to find new ways to say: Gee folks, Puget Sound ain’t getting any better. I know, because I’ve been there. Over my 30 years at the Times, I worked on several Save-the-Sound series, most recently with some of the same reporters who delivered last week. I continue to write about it because the sound remains the primary reason I choose to live here.
   Still, one gets discouraged. Consider the comments of selected experts in the concluding installment in the Times series. David Dicks, director the Puget Sound Partnership: “We have a lot of studies, a lot of information… but we have to knit it together into a strategy….” Or Kathy Fletcher, director of People for Puget Sound: “We are in a race against time…We need to grab the urgency of the problem and deal with the fact that there is a lot of disbelief that we are going to make a difference…”
   These are genuine expressions of concern that also underscore the problem -- a complete lack of specifics, with utterly no agreement about what’s wrong and what we need to do about it. What is it about Puget Sound that seems to defy solutions?
   The list of suspects begins with us, the people who live here and lack the political will to fix it -- or so goes the argument. But wait a second! Public opinion surveys suggest that people understand that the sound is in trouble, that it will cost money to fix it, and they are willing to pay. And we have payed. Over the past three decades or more, state and local taxpayers have coughed up billions of dollars for salmon restoration, pollution controls, sewage treatment plants, research, and more.
    A precedent was set in the 1960s, when government cleaned up Lake Washington, which had been turned into a cesspool by countless sewage outfalls around its perimeter. The solution was Metro, which started as a regional sewer agency empowered to build a sewer system around the lake and ship the crap elsewhere – to Puget Sound.
   In the mid-1980s, when I worked on my first Puget Sound crusade, local government decided to spend a billion dollars to build a modern sewage treatment plant at West Point, on the Magnolia waterfront. The feds had said we didn’t have to, because the sound is so deep and its currents so powerful that sewage is efficiently diluted. But local pols decided to build it anyway, and homeowners paid for it. Now the merged King County Metro plans to build another treatment plant – at roughly three times the cost. And ratepayers are going along with the program.
   We can always blame the other guys, the cigar-chomping special interests who call the shots in Olympia. But that doesn’t seem to be the problem, either. The state has cut back commercial and sports fishing, despite the lobbyists’ protests. Pulp mills and other waterfront industries have been shut down, and those that remain are under tougher scrutiny.
   So maybe the problem is, as Fletcher puts it, the “fragmentation of decision making.” While Puget Sound is governed mostly by the state, it’s also affected by at least eight counties, scores of cities, hundreds of special utility districts and more. And we’ve learned that it is part of a larger “Salish Sea” that includes the San Juan Islands, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Canadian waters.

  The greatest obstacle is not political, but rather the biological complexity of the sound, and the scientific uncertainty that comes with it. It is not just an ecosystem, but a web of overlapping ecosystems that invite oversimplification and defy understanding. For all our best efforts, Puget Sound remains something of a black box. We assess its health by taking water samples and counting fish pulled up on hooks or nets. Sparkling blue at the surface, it turns pitch dark less than 100 feet down. And just offshore from downtown Seattle, the depths reach 900 feet. We have very little understanding of what lives there, or how the ecosystem works.
   A generation ago, people were energized in part by accounts of gray whales washing up dead on Northwest beaches. Those images helped fuel the efforts to upgrade sewage treatment plants. Only later did we learn that the whales’ deaths probably had nothing to do with pollution, and that gray whale populations were healthy and increasing.
    More recently, scientists have paid more attention to what’s happening on and near the shores of the sound – shopping malls and suburban developments that pave over wetlands believed to be crucial to the saltwater ecology. But those linkages are not well understood.
All these uncertainties contribute to a breakdown between science and politics. Marine biologists and oceanographers are comfortable with uncertainty; they understand that the scientific process is endless, that whatever they learn merely becomes a hypothesis for the next round of investigation.
   This does not work well for governors or legislators who need to decide how to spend the next billion dollars on Puget Sound restoration.
    And it drives the rest of us nuts. We yearn for understandable causes and effects, heroes and villains. We want science to provide us the evidence we need to ban that next shopping mall, to shut down fishing altogether, to build better sewage treatment plants, or preserve wetlands.
And the darned scientists simply won’t provide that convenient road map. On the contrary, with each new breakthrough, each new level of understanding, Puget Sound appears more complex and the solutions less obvious.

Copper River Blues: One part oil, two parts hype

Ross Anderson — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:49:39 -0800

    The Copper River snakes across the Alaskan wilderness, cuts through the glacier-clad Wrangell Mountains, tumbles down to tidewater just east of Cordova, and ultimately flows into the seafood department at your local supermarket.
    Or so the spring marketing blitz would have us believe. That, along with the idea that it makes sense to pay 50 bucks or more for a slab of sockeye, or “red” salmon — and twice that for a king. But I don’t believe that either.
    Still, lots of perfectly reasonable people do. Witness the folks lining up at the local supermarkets buy a Copper River red for the weekend barbecue. My favorite fishmonger, down at the local QFC, can barely keep up with the demand for sockeyes, on sale at $10 a pound. “These are absolutely el primo,” she says breathlessly.
     They know their pitch: The Copper River reds and kings are the year’s first major wild salmon fishery, arriving weeks or months ahead of most. And these fish store up extra fat – good fat, loaded with Omega 3 fatty acids, whatever those are – to fuel their long migrations upriver to their spawning grounds. Hence the annual feeding frenzy.
    But not everybody buys in. Rick Ottman, the seasoned Port Townsend-based fisherman who sells his own Cape Cleare salmon, sighs when he’s asked what he thinks of the Copper Rivers. “It all depends,” he says. “It depends on what they’re eating. It depends where they are caught, and how they are caught and how they are handled. And you can’t see all that at the supermarket.”
    And so it goes every year in late May, when the ads hit the newspapers, trumpeting the arrival of the first Copper River kings and reds.
    All this for a fish that, not all that long ago, died in a gillnet and sloshed around in used crankcase oil for a few days before being stuffed into a tin can and shipped off to England to be processed into fish cakes and fried in batter.
    Whatever else you say about them, Copper River salmon are a case study of how far the Northwest salmon business has come in a couple of decades.
    The Copper is just one of Alaska’s long wilderness rivers that serve as perfect habitat for the fabled wild Pacific salmon. It emerges from the mountains just east of Cordova, the funky coastal fishing village which has been living off salmon for generations.
     It’s best known for its kings and sockeye, which live very different life cycles but which return each spring to the broad, intricate river delta known as the Copper River Flats.
     Fifteen years ago, I crewed with a grizzled fisherman named Tom Copeland, who had been fishing the flats since he was a teenager. On the night before the season opening, we climbed aboard his small fiberglass bowpicker and headed for the flats, bucking into an ugly rainstorm driven by 20-knot winds. Two miserable hours later, we anchored in the lee of one of the grassy sandbars that make up the river delta.
      We fished for several days, spreading that shallow gillnet across one of those braided channels, drifting downstream, retrieving the net, collecting those gorgeous, silvery sockeyes and the occasional king, stowing them on shaved ice, then repeating the process. My fingers ached from picking through nylon gillnet, and from yanking the gills so the fish would quickly bleed to death.
     As we drifted, Tom filled the time with stories of fishermen lost in the treacherous currents, of wild storms screaming off the Gulf of Alaska, of boats that sank from the weight of their sockeye catch, and of perennial price wars between fishermen and canneries.
     For most of a century, the canneries monopolized Alaska salmon. Remote fishing grounds, poor transportation and a red-meat-eating American public left few choices for Alaska fishermen. Whatever they caught, from humpies to kings, went into cans – mostly for export to Europe.
    Down on the flats, those gourmet fish were gillnetted by the thousands, then tossed into the bilge along with the crankcase oil, and eventually sold to a Cordova cannery for a few cents a pound.
    In the 1980s, that began to change. The Japanese invested heavily in Alaska fisheries, and they had no desire to eat wild salmon from a tin can. So, from Ketchikan to the Bering Sea, fishermen learned to treat salmon the way it deserved to be treated. They installed chilled storage tanks, separate from the bilges. They cleaned and bled their fish on board. They learned how to air-freight fresh or frozen fish. These days, a Copper River red can be netted at 6 a.m. on the Flats, and served in Seattle the same evening.
    Seattle marketing guru Jon Rowley took it a step further. He figured out how to use advertising and good public relations to create demand for a good product.
   And the Copper Rivers were ripe for marketing. Alaska has other early salmon fisheries – such as False Pass in the Aleutians. But Rowley figured nobody’s going to shell out $20 a pound for a “False Pass fillet.”
    And thus was born the Copper River Mystique.    But are they the world’s best salmon?
     “The fish is fabulous, and the folklore is even more fabulous,” says Ken Davies at Key City Fish in Port Townsend. “You put a Copper River red alongside a Quinault red, or a Fraser River red, and you won’t know the difference.”
    The Copper River migration is no longer or more challenging than migrations up the Yukon, the Fraser, or our own Columbia River.
     Some businesses say it's just too spendy.   The seafood manager at my local Safeway is holding off a few weeks until the prices drop a little. “I’d have to sell the kings for $23 a pound, and that’s too much,” he says.
     That’s my strategy too. I’m ready for my first Alaska salmon, never mind which river. But I can wait a few weeks. Don’t give me a fish. And don’t teach me to fish. Just sell me one at a price that doesn’t require me to dip into the grandkids’ college fund.

Streetcar Envy: Seattle goes gah-gah for choo-choos

Ross Anderson — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:48:15 -0800

      We have seen the future of Seattle mass transit, and it looks suspiciously like the past. It is shiny and red and goes clackity-clack between South Lake Union and Westlake. It travels at a maximum speed of 20 mph and costs about $40 million per mile to build.
      Seattle, it seems, has gone downright gah-gah over choo-choos. Whatever the price in dollars and aggravation, the city is determined to take the A-Train. We haven’t yet completed that $2.7 billion-dollar rail line to Sea-Tac, but Sound Transit is desperately seeking more billions to extend that line to Northgate. We have the new South Lake Union Streetcar. And this week, planners unveiled their sketchy visions for streetcar lines in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and the University District. If the rail buffs have their way, we’ll soon be looking at and living in a cityscape reminiscent of another century -- the 19th.
    The operative map for Seattle’s transit vision is about a century old. You can go back to 1910, when Gramma and Grampa got around town just fine on a system of about 70 miles of streetcar tracks, including the legendary Interurban trolley that rumbled all the way to Everett and Tacoma. It was a fine system, and we probably should have kept it.
     But we didn’t. The tide turned in about 1911, when the city hired a smart fellow (read “consultant”) named Virgil Bogue to come out and draw up a bold new plan for Seattle. Bogue looked around, hired a crew of draftsmen, and produced an inch-thick document calling for an elaborate, New York-style transit system, with subways and elevated trains and a tunnel under Lake Washington.
     Put to a popular vote, the Bogue Plan lost by nearly 2-1. That was the beginning of the end. By the 1930s, the city was ripping up tracks and replacing streetcars with buses. The Interurban made its last run in 1939, just as engineers were completing the first floating bridge across the lake. By the beginning of the War, the transition was complete; Seattle had banked its future on the automobile.
    Rail buffs blame a nationwide conspiracy by General Motors to sell more buses. But rail transit was always geographically challenged in Seattle. All those picturesque hills and lakes serve as significant obstacles to streetcars that don’t climb hills, and don’t float.
    In any event, things haven’t worked out well. In the late 60s and early 70s, voters rejected plans for new freeways and for a proposed rapid transit system. So the city had to grow and prosper without any major expansion of its transportation system. For some time, the preferred strategy was buses, or more precisely “bus rapid transit,” which uses express buses in exclusive transit-only lanes, including the downtown bus tunnel.
      By the 1990s, the city was gridlocked. Drivers rolled down their car windows, shook their collective fists and bellowed something like “Do something. Do anything. But fix this mess!”
      And that’s more or less what’s happening. Government is doing something and anything -- digging holes, pouring concrete, laying rails, buying railcars – in a desperate attempt to rebuild what it dismantled 70 years ago. It’s system development by committee, or by many committees. Sound Transit builds light rail and operates those commuter trains to Tacoma and Everett. King County Metro builds and runs the new streetcar, along with the existing bus system. The state is adding HOV and transit lanes to the freeways. For a while, we had yet another agency building a monorail, until it collapsed on itself.
       Which is what skeptics expect to happen with some or all of those other railroad-builders. Critics of rail trail transit scored a huge victory last fall when voters rejected Sound Transit’s bid for billions more tax dollars. Yet the streetcar fad suggests that somebody out there is still determined to ride those rails.
      Rail critics point to a different conspiracy.. Randal O’Toole is an Oregon economist and self-styled libertarian who argues that Seattle is about to join dozens of cities that have got little or no benefits from the billions spent on light rail. Trolleys and streetcars are 19th century technology that is too slow, too dangerous and too expensive, he says. “Light rail is simply one more way to take money from the pockets of ordinary taxpayers and put it in the pockets of wealthy businesses.”
     Coalition for Effective Transportation Alternatives, a citizen group opposed to light rail, argues that Seattle had built one of the world’s best bus systems, and could adapt HOV lanes and traffic lights to move express buses more efficiently than light rail.
     But for every O’Toole there is a Todd Litman, a Victoria, BC, consultant who travels the world advising cities from Dubai to Valparaiso to San Jose how to build rail transit systems. And Litman is pro-streetcar. “Seattle originally developed around streetcars and railways,” Litman says. “It doesn’t make sense to argue that it can’t work again.”
     Litman learned his way around transportation issues as a volunteer bicycle advocate in Olympia, and eventually studied transit issues at Evergreen State College. He frequently finds himself at odds with the likes of O’Toole.
     Ultimately, the choice between rail transit and bus transit is made by passengers, he says. “There is a bias out there. People will pay more for a Mercedes than for a Chevy. There is nothing wrong with people wanting something more prestigious, and they view light rail and streetcars as more comfortable and more prestigious.”
    But is a little prestige really worth $40 million per mile?
     John Niles, a transportation consultant and critic of light rail, is a little kinder toward streetcars. They're not cost effective, he says, “but the scale of the error is so much smaller than with light rail.”
    Streetcars have a few things going for them, he says. South Lake Union businesses are picking up part of the costs of the new line, and hopefully that would be the case with other lines, he says. They may attract some tourists.    “As transportation, they don’t make much sense,” he says. “But they’re nice. They’re an amenity. They’re street candy.”

The Way North: Five Routes up the Passage

Ross Anderson — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:27:41 -0800

   Alaska beckons. Down at the Boat Haven, you hear its siren song, whispering through the shrouds of the schooners and seiners: It’s time to head North.
   You wander the boatyard, absorbing the sights and smells of sawdust and fresh varnish and $200-a-gallon copper bottom paint. People are aching to get back on the water, stock up the galley, fire up that diesel and point the bow north by northwest.
So it has been for well over a century – that deep, maritime bond between Port Townsend and isolated fishing ports from Ketchikan to Dutch Harbor. As far back as John Muir and Jack London, adventure-hungry Americans have stepped aboard steamers or fishing boats or private yachts to explore the Inside Passage.
    For some of our neighbors, it’s an annual migration. Each fall, they deliver the last of their salmon or halibut and limp south for the winter. They hunker down for a few months, wondering if they want to do it again, until that spring day when they hear that call of the North like the howl of a gray wolf. So they haul their boats for a coat of fresh paint, new zincs, a reconditioned prop… and the cycle is renewed.
   I feel the same tug. I don’t own an Alaska boat, and it might be years between trips north, but I hear it all the same. My first trip was some 35 years ago, when a couple of pals and I took the Alaska ferry to Skagway, hiked the Chilkoot Pass and floated the Yukon River to Dawson City. Since then I’ve cruised the Inside Passage many times – via Alaska ferry, BC ferry, private yacht, commercial fishing boats and, yes, a big cruise ship.
   It never gets old. From Admiralty Inlet to Glacier Bay, there’s enough grand geography and character and adventure to fill a lifetime. And I’m always amazed to learn how many people have lived here for decades, yet never cruised the Inside Passage, never laid eyes on those 5,000-foot mountain ranges partially submerged in 1,000-foot deep seas, never watched a humpback whale breach the surface of a deep, green fjord.
   For all its remoteness, the Inside Passage is amazingly accessible. Most people, of course, see it from the deck of one of those gigantic cruise ships. For $1,000 and up, you can sit in a comfy, sip something pink, read some John Muir or Jack London, and watch the wilderness float by. I took a mini-cruise some years ago – along with some 2,000 other people, plus crew. When we steamed to the top of Desolation Sound, the clouds parted and treated us to one of the world’s most spectacular views. And I practically had it to myself, because most of my shipmates were down below, pumping quarters into slot machines.
There are better ways to cruise the passage – lots of them, in fact. Last year, I travelled with an old friend at the helm of his 46-foot Monk. We took two weeks to make the passage to Ketchikan, counting sidetrips up places like Kingcome Inlet, BC. Several times, we relaxed in wilderness hot springs that we had to ourselves, caught enough crab to gorge ourselves.
    People make the trip in small craft, but most prefer a bigger boat – say, 30 to 40 feet or more. While most of the route is “protected,” it is also an uphill course, where most days are spent cruising into the teeth of the prevailing wind and seas. And there are three major crossings, where boats are exposed to the open ocean.
   The most popular option is the Alaska ferry, the Columbia, which remains one of the great cruising bargains. It’s essentially a small cruise ship, which leaves Bellingham at 6pm each Friday, year round, steaming the Passage to Southeast Alaska. The one-way passenger fare is $240 to Ketchikan, which takes two full days; $325 to Juneau or Sitka, which is another full day. Kids 6-11 sail for half price, under six for free. (The vehicle fare is much stiffer -- $740 to Juneau. But what would you do with a car up there, anyway?)
The hitch, of course, is accommodations. There are a few cabins, but they’re pricey and they’re usually booked months in advance. So most travelers bring backpacking tents and inflatable mattresses, and set them up on the stern deck. I’ve always done it that way; the last time, I counted 80 tents, lashed to each other to keep them from blowing away in the slipstream.
There is a decent restaurant, a bar and a coffee shop on board. But no casino, no dancing girls. Entertainment is provided by the scenery, a good book, or the Alaskan in the next tent.
   Then there is the BC ferry, another small cruise ship that runs between Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and Prince Rupert, near the Alaska border. This route takes in some of the most spectacular stretches of the Inside Passage, with the added advantage of being able to transfer to other boats for travel into the BC fjords.
The boat leaves Port Hardy at 7:30 am every other day and arrives Prince Rupert at close to midnight, so travelers need to book accommodations at both ends in advance. The one-way fare is $125, and kids sail for half fare. The drive to Port Hardy takes a very long day, or there are fast buses that run from Victoria.
   For Port Townsend folks, there may be yet another alternative. My most memorable cruise north was on an aging steel-hulled purse seiner run by a crusty Yugoslavian who agreed to let me tag along. Like most fishermen, he cruised straight through, day and night, without stopping, taking four days to reach Ketchikan. The skipper was short-handed; a couple of crew planned to catch up with him in Ketchikan. So, by the second day, the skipper had me standing a regular watch at the helm, steering this big, throaty seineboat through the night, guided by radar and the stars.
   Each summer, a small fleet of commercial boats leaves Port Townsend and returns to the Alaska fishing grounds. Often they travel with few crew, or none at all. I’ve often wondered why they don’t sell berths to adventure-seeking passengers, who would rather see the Passage from the bridge of a purse seiner than from the windows of a floating casino.

The Fishing Gene vs the Giant, Cross-eyed Flatfish

Ross Anderson — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:48:55 -0800

From the picture windows along Port Townsend’s North Shore, the Saturday morning seascape must have resembled the Normandy Invasion… or, perhaps, the beaches of Dunkirk.

It started at first light, with a dozen or so small boats scattered across the horizon about a mile offshore between Protection Island and Admiralty Inlet. By 9 am, the fleet had grown to well over 75 and counting – flecks of white fiberglass set against a deep blue Strait of Juan de Fuca, with a hazy silhouette of Mount Baker as a backdrop.

It was a motley fleet. There were big white cabin cruisers and sleek speedboats and 18-foot aluminum skiffs and a couple of inflatable dingies. Each carried at least a couple of Jefferson County souls – from grampas in overalls to 20-something Bubbas in Eddie Bauer parkas. And then there was Cape George fisherman extraordinaire Jack Scherting, assisted by your waterfront correspondent.

We were all out there early on a Saturday morning for the same reason – the continuing quest for the ever-elusive, Giant Cross-eyed Flatfish.

In case you missed it, halibut season is back again. That’s the annual rite during which hundreds of us landlubbers set aside whatever else they’re doing and put to sea with an armful of fishing gear and a thermos of black coffee in hopes of snagging that prized 150-pound slab of whitefish.

This occurs in many places, but one of the favorites is off Port Townsend’s north shore, where halibut are reputed to feed on a long, wide “halibut hump”, about 150 feet below the surface roughly parallel to the shoreline.

There is something a bit odd about the halibut mystique. One can understand the appeal of Northwest salmon. They’re sleek and silvery and quite pleasant on the eyes as well as the tastebuds.

But the halibut is ridiculously asymmetrical and, to put it bluntly, butt ugly It is mottled brown on one side, white on the other, with a sideways mouth frozen into a permanent frown, and two beady eyes crammed onto one side that sort of stare at each other in disbelief. Its lifestyle is even less romantic; it lives on the ocean bottom, blending with the detritus, waiting for something edible to swim past.

For years, halibut were caught almost exclusively by Norwegian fishermen in prosaic wooden boats, and sold for pennies per pound, mostly to other Norwegians.

No more. Today those ugly bottom-feeders have risen to the top of the Northwest seafood ladder. Something called Individual Fishing Quotas have made a few commercial halibut fishermen very wealthy. And your local fishmonger sells halibut filets for upwards of $15 a pound – more than salmon or ahi tuna or, for that matter, the gourmet steak at the other end of the supermarket case.

Last year, some 65 million pounds of halibut were caught on the Northwest Coast , mostly by commercial boats using miles of longline gear. Most of that was in Alaskan waters, but local fishermen reported about 2,500 halibut, averaging about 25 pounds each.

How halibut get ugly is an interesting tale. Hatched in the depths of the Pacific, they begin life like any other fish. But at some point, as they approach maturity, a very strange thing happens. The halibut turns on its side and spends the rest of its life hugging the sea bottom. Since the lower eye is now useless, it undertakes an anatomical journey, migrating across the snout to the other side of the head, where it takes up residence alongside the upper eye. The result ain’t pretty.

Fishermen have grown to like them because, while the typical halibut comes in at about 25 to 30 pounds, there are stories of halibut weighing 150 pounds or more. My friend Jack caught one of those just off North Beach a couple of years ago. I once watched a couple of fishermen land a 250-pounder in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

And, of course, when it comes to fishing, size matters a great deal.

The fish is solid muscle and a fierce fighter. There are legends of commercial fishermen being battered to death by oversized halibut that kept fighting long after being pulled on deck.

But something else was at work on the Strait the other day. It’s been a long winter, marked by ugly, wind-whipped seas and no fishing. Eavesdropping on the marine radio channels, one sensed a throbbing pent-up demand, an urgent need to satisfy the needs of the fishing gene. This is the gene that drives otherwise-rational people to spend great sums of money and time on boats and gear in order to drag themselves out of bed at 4 a.m. and spend more time and more money on the water trying to hook a fish that could be purchased for a fraction of that investment at the local QFC.

My friend, Jack, carries this gene. When the state and the seas are favorable, he is out fishing for salmon or halibut or crab. When he’s not fishing, he’s dragging his bride out to the ocean beaches to go clamming. When he takes a vacation, it is to the Baja, where he fishes for tuna and swordfish and brings it home to the freezer – except when he heads north to Alaska or British Columbia to fish for king salmon, or halibut.

I do not carry this gene. Each year, I faithfully buy my fishing license, which I consider a charitable contribution to the governor. Now and then, I venture out with Jack. But the fish know me, and laugh at me. Mostly I take notes, trying to figure out the nature of a subculture I still don’t fully understand.

But most of the people floating on the straits for the season opener were carriers. You could tell by listening to the radio. “God, it’s great to be out here….. Not a bite yet, just a couple of dogfish, but it’s worth it just to be out here…. Nothing biting here either, but that’s okay….” And so forth.

So went the day. The fishing gene consumed hundreds of gallons of fuel, approximately 100 jugs of black coffee, 200 frozen herring, and countless sea stories of dubious credibility. All this for half a dozen Middlin’-Sized, Cross-eyed Flatfish, none of which landed on our boat.

I don’t get it. I called Jack to ask what it was all about. But he was gone fishing.

Whither the Beleaguered Times: Go Weekly?

Ross Anderson — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:39:03 -0800

(News item: The Seattle Times announces some 200 layoffs, including dozens in news and other editorial departments.)

    I made two excellent decisions during my 30-year newspaper career. The first was to go into daily newspapering in 1970 – just before the Watergate scandal launched newspapers into one last glory period of prosperity and professional prestige. The second was to bail out in 2001 and move to Port Townsend – so I would not have to stay and watch them die.
     The death spiral at the Seattle Times and other metro dailies carries an air of inevitability. But it’s worth noting the economics of some 7,000 American newspapers, mostly small town weeklies, which are doing just fine. Take, for example, the weekly Port Townsend Leader, where I write a now-and-then column. Each week, the Leader sells 8,400 papers in a county of 30,000 people and 12,000 households – an amazing market penetration of 70 percent. And it makes money.
    Maybe the economic grim reaper is taking a little longer to find us out here in the provinces. Or perhaps weeklies are providing something not found in metro dailies, nor the Internet. Weeklies, after all, face the same competition. Most of us out here in the boonies now have cable TV and computers with high-speed Internet. Many of us get a Seattle daily or the New York Times delivered as well. So why pay six bits a week for the local weekly?
    Because weekly newspapers understand that journalism, like politics, starts at home. The Leader offers no national or world news; that we get from NPR, CNN, or online. But it makes itself indispensible by printing the information people need – high school sports and movie times, agendas for this week’s school board and city council meetings, ferry schedules and tide tables, calendars of upcoming lectures and charity auctions and upcoming night classes on diesel maintenance or Internet marketing.
    And then there are the ads. The dailies are not losing readers nearly as fast as they lose advertisers. This is because metro dailies long ago raised ad rates beyond the reach of most local merchants, relying instead on national advertisers; now they’re losing those national ads as well. But community papers like the Leader still rely on stacks of ads for local hardware and feed stores, barber shops and realtors.
   What’s the lesson here for the Seattle Times and other metro dailies? Think local.   Most readers already know who won last night’s ballgame, or the Pennsylvania primary. But who will tell me what the Seattle City Council is up to? Or how the port is spending all those easy tax dollars? Or why the state ferry system is in disarray?
    The greater challenge is, of course, how to lure back those ads. Can dailies break up their product into packages that can be priced within reach of local merchants? Years ago, The Times tried going local with zoned editions north, south and east. Alas, zone staffers are at the top of this week’s list of layoffs.
     Somehow, an organization that has been trying to think big and regional, has to think small and local. And maybe that simply is not do-able, unless you are already small and local, and you’ve learned to like it.

Discovery Bay: Due for Rediscovery

Ross Anderson — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:28:27 -0800

     An unusual phenomenon appeared on the surface of Discovery Bay the other day -- Boats.   Not just one or two, but a veritable fleet of a dozen or so sailboats, their sails framed by the forested shores and snowy Olympic peaks.
   They weren’t exactly racing yachts, but a rather motley assemblage of local sailors who turned out for the first-ever Cape George Regatta. But that was still more sails at one time than anybody has seen on Discovery Bay in a very long time. This happened weeks ago, and people here still talk about it.
   Fact is, not much happens out here on Disco Bay. There are homes and barns scattered along 16 miles of shoreline, from Cape George down to old Port Discovery and back to Diamond Point. Highway 101 skirts its southern shores. And there’s that fellow at the south end who likes to blow things up now and then.
   But most of the time, the closest thing to excitement out here are the seagulls and pigeon guillemots who show up each spring to nest on Protection Island. Compared to big cities like Port Townsend, Discovery Bay is something of a backwater. It’s a deep, glacial fjord between forested walls, extending eight miles to the foothills of the Olympic Mountains, its entrance guarded by Protection Island.
   Every year, thousands of boaters cruise through Admiralty Inlet, just five miles to the east. But few venture into the bay. We’re just a bit out of the way and, when boats do pass nearby, they’re usually in a hurry to get somewhere else before the weather turns.
   This wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, Discovery Bay was more or less the Center of the Puget Sound Universe. This is because, in the spring of 1792, George Vancouver and his sea-weary crew sailed off the Pacific into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, making their way along the starboard shore until, on May 2, they anchored in a deep, broad harbor that he named Port Discovery, for his trusty ship.
    “A picture so pleasing could not fail to call to our remembrance certain delightful and beloved situations in Old England,” he wrote in his journal. “A variety of stately forest trees pleasingly clothed its eminences and chequered the valleys, presenting extensive spaces that wore the appearance of having been cleared by art.”
    He was particularly impressed by the strategic placement of the island. “Had this insular production of nature been designed by the most able engineer, it could not have been placed more happily.”
    For nearly three weeks the ship remained at anchor near Carr Point, halfway down the bay. While much of the crew worked at repairing sails and spars, the skipper and others set out in small boats, exploring Port Townsend, Hood Canal and beyond. Still others set up camp at the mouth of a stream, taking celestial sightings and brewing “spruce beer,” a concoction of fir needles, water, molasses and yeast.
    Eventually, of course, they sailed on. But Vancouver’s published journals and maps placed the world’s spotlight on what became Discovery Bay, which offered safe anchorage and ample timber and steep shores that enabled giant logs to be moved down to the water. By the 1850s, there was a major mill at Port Discovery, with scores of workers, saloons and more. In one year, that mill produced some 18 million board feet of fir and cedar, most of it bound for the Bay Area, where old San Francisco was framed with our timber.
    In time, however, the trees were gone and the loggers moved on. In the 1890s, the government built a quarantine station at Diamond Point, which was the subject of recurring rumors of escaped lepers orbubonic plague. That station continued to inspect arriving ships well into the 1920s.
Then things got very quiet.
   For those of us who live here, that’s fine. Even at the height of boating season, this “picture so pleasing” is all ours. But, for the record, boaters are welcome. There is decent holding ground in about 30 feet of water along the western shores, next to a small and under-used boat ramp at Gardiner; or on the eastern shore in the lee of Beckett Point. These are fair-weather anchorages, because either spot is prone to stiff southerlies. There is good beachcombing at low tide, especially at extreme low tides, when folks make their way out to “Glass Beach,” the old city dump near McCurdy Point.
     While here, you’ll want to circumnavigate Protection Island. It’s strictly off-limits to visitors, but the adjacent waters are rich with whimsical puffins and rhinoceros auklets, harbor seals and the occasional elephant seal. Keep an eye out for the rustic cabin perched atop the southwest bluff, where Marty Bluewater holds out as the last resident of an island otherwise restored to Mother Nature. But be aware: There is virtually no public shoreline here. The tiny Cape George Marina is strictly private, and its entrance is dangerously shallow at low tides. There is no fuel, no restaurant, no pub to be found.
     So why come at all? Because it’s here, and nobody else is. And because, with the aid of Vancouver’s journals, a voyage into Discovery Bay is a journey in time. Vancouver and company anchored here longer than any other spot on Puget Sound, and the journals offer detailed descriptions of the land and seascape as it looked for untold thousands of years before we started to change it.
    Archibald Menzies, the Scottish naturalist who sailed with Vancouver, explored the shoreline and forest floor, and offered the first descriptions of the Douglas fir, madrona, Olympic oyster and scores more plants and animals. His descriptions, and those of Vancouver, offer a sort of biological baseline by which to assess the impacts of two centuries of development that have profoundly changed most of Puget Sound….
     But not Discovery Bay.

Cape George: Life with the Seniors

Ross Anderson — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:11:15 -0800

Okay, I'll say it: life's good out here with the old folks. It's taken a couple of years to admit it, but there it is.
Last year my wife and I, both of sound mind and body and still a few years shy of 60, willfully sold our home in a very nice Seattle neighborhood and moved to a senior enclave a few miles outside Port Townsend. Cape George Colony, our new neighborhood, is not exclusive; a few forty and fifty somethings do live here, and some actually appear to have day jobs. There's no minimum age, no rule against kids or baggy pants or spiky haircuts.

   But there are no spiky haircuts here, and the closest things to baggy pants are Sears overalls with pockets full of screwdrivers. Port Townsend is gray and getting grayer; nearly a quarter of its population is over 65, twice Seattle's senior quotient. The figure for Cape George must be at least 75 percent.
    What possessed us to make a premature transition to senior citizenship? Economics, for starters. Thirty years of newspaper work were lots of fun but not very lucrative. We faced a choice: keep working to support that big old house, or sell the monster, downsize and reinvent ourselves on a budget.
     So we were out of there - but on to where? I'd been drawn to Port Townsend for some 35 years. Initially it had to do with those charming Victorians on Water Street. But the more I visited, the more I learned there was soul behind the brick facades - a town of fewer than 10,000 that supports two good movie theaters, a dozen decent restaurants, blues and country music festivals, a damned good local newspaper, a lovely city park, two brewpubs and three excellent bookstores.
    Nothing happened until Mary and I visited an old friend, a college prof who had built her retirement cottage at Cape George. Our first impression was of a 1960s development: middle-class ranch houses on quarter-acre lots strewn along winding streets and cul-de-sacs. Definitely not our style.
     But then there were the "amenities": the full-size indoor pool and exercise room, the little marina where I keep my old Monk motor cruiser for a fraction of the cost of a Seattle slip. There are greenbelts and two miles of community-owned beach overlooking Discovery Bay and Protection Island. Mary could have ample room to garden in the middle of the Olympic rain shadow, with twice the sunshine and half the rainfall of Seattle.

   So we took the plunge, bought a lot and built a three-bedroom shingled cottage with a broad deck and a filtered view of the water-all for about one-quarter of what we got for our Madrona house.
    There are downsides. When we asked permission to exceed the building height limit by a few feet, I found myself facing a grim panel of elders who would have none of my nonsense. We witnessed a gurgling community fight over trees and views, and heard the usual elderly worries about security. Every neighborhood has its cranks and whiners, but seniors seem to have more to be cranky about and more time to whine about it.
     Still, we're a diverse group of people living diverse lives. Take our street: a retired airline pilot, a former history professor, a nurse-turned-part-time gardener, a software engineer, a retired physics professor who runs a small technology company in town, a couple of ex-schoolteachers, and Mary and me. One of my friends is a former Fulbright Scholar who's written a novel about revolutionary China. Another spent 30 years building Boeing airplanes.
     Some of us have PhDs, and others barely got out of high school; I forget which is which, because it really doesn't matter anymore. Some have plenty of money; others don't. Conventional wisdom has it that aging gracefully depends on income, but life at Cape George suggests otherwise. You need to pay the bills, but beyond that income seems irrelevant Quality of life hinges on more important matters; how people work and play, how they treat each other and how they cooperate. Cape George is a community of about 480 homes and good people run almost completely by volunteers from the board of directors to the marina committee and block watch captains.
    After just six months as full-time Cape George residents, we already know our neighbors better here than we ever knew them in Seattle. We have keys to their houses, and vice versa. We meet them for impromptu barbecues and pilgrimages to the brewpub for $2 pints. When Home Depot delivered a truckload of drywall to my back door, three neighbors showed up unsolicited to help
    We have seen the future, and it is grayer. Get used to it. Keep building those 401K accounts. Find yourself a good financial planner. But most important, find a community of people you'd want as neighbors.

The Chief Seattle Speech that Wasn't

Ross Anderson — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:02:25 -0800

   Yes, there was a Chief Seattle. And, by all reports, he was a very fine fellow indeed. But, no,he did not say: "The earth is our mother."
    In fact, the earth-mother quote is just one of many ecological observations, widely attributed to Chief Seattle, that are pure, unadulterated myth - and relatively recent myth at that. Try these:
   * "We are a part of the earth and it is part of us." Chief Seattle might have believed this, but there is no evidence he ever said it.
   * "Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste." Yuk! No Way.
   * "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train." Get serious. Chief Seattle never left Puget Sound, so he never saw a railroad, nor a buffalo - dead or alive.
   For at least a generation, local historians and Native Americans have been trying to correct these and other myths surrounding the native patriarch who gave Seattle its name. But myth dies hard. Especially a myth that serves the ends of a vibrant environmental movement.
   Here, according to Seattle’s Museum of Science and Industry, is what is known: In 1854, an aging Chief Seattle attended a reception for territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens, who was trying to buy Puget Sound lands from the Indians. The chief, who spoke no English, delivered a speech, which supposedly was translated by pioneer Dr. Henry A. Smith. And in 1887, Smith published the speech in a Seattle newspaper.
    "There was a time when our people covered the whole land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea covers its shell-paved floor," Seattle was reported to have said in his native Duwamish language.     "But that time has long since passed away...I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers for hastening it, for we too may have been somewhat to blame...
   "Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding rivers, its great mountains and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in tenderest affection over the lonely-hearted living, and often return to visit and comfort them...
   "Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory."
   And so forth. Nice speech. But even that translation is questionable, at best. Smith claimed to speak Duwamish, but it’s a difficult language and he had only been in the Northwest for a year. So his fluency was dubious.

Still, Smith's has been the authorized version, accepted by local historians from Clarence Bagley to Roger Sale.
Then, some 20 years ago, comes the "green" version, with Chief Seattle waxing eloquent, and at great length, about the earth mother and the buffalo and contaminating one's bed. Sometimes it is a letter from the Great White Father, who happened to be Franklin Pierce. Sometimes it is a poem.

    In 1974, the speech droned from the mouth of a Chief Seattle statue at the Spokane World's Fair. It has been reprinted hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in books, films posters and brochures, published by groups ranging from Friends of the Earth to the Southern Baptists.
   Skeptics cried foul. In 1975, Janice Krenmayr wrote an article for The Seattle Times, warning that "Chief Seattle must be turning over in his grave." Bill Holm, curator at the Burke Museum, pleaded for environmentalists to step forward and admit they had made it up.
    But myth is more resilient than history. It persists. Where did it come from? It took a West German historian named Rudolph Kaiser to figure that out. A student of the American Indian, Kaiser tracked it down to an environmental film documentary that was aired on national television in 1971. The script had been written by Ted Perry, an East Coast scriptwriter who composed the new version, composed that soupy prose about rotting buffalo, and attributed it all to Chief Seattle.
   So what's the difference? The unauthorized version is a passionate call to ecological responsibility, a plea to halt the slaughter of an animal Chief Seattle had never seen. It reads like it was written by a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club - which it was.
   The original speech was something else again. Chief Seattle was a strong and well-respected leader who helped smooth the transition in Puget Sound from native control to Western control. Unfortunately, he did that by accepting promises of compensation – promises made by people who didn't keep promises very well.
   Chief Seattle valued the land not because it was inherently sacred, but because it was the dwelling place of his ancestors, MOHAI says. His speech was essentially a surrender to the advance of Western civilization, an invasion his people could no longer resist.

Historylink: Seattle's Memory

Ross Anderson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:21:31 -0800

(Note: This profile, published in 2001, focuses on the late Seattle writer and popular historian Walt Crowley. Walt died of cancer in 2007, and this writer hopes this piece contributes to a community’s appreciation of what has been lost…)

    History unfolds in odd ways and unexpected places, such as the corner table at the Elephant and Castle pub in downtown Seattle. Thursday afternoons, a motley crew of Seattleites - a resurfaced underground artist, a former cop, a Boeing software engineer, a computer-game designer and more - gathers there to nurse a few beers while brainstorming their obsession with the history of Seattle and environs.
    "I'll take Ballard and Pioneer Square," says convener Walt Crowley at one recent session. "Who's taking Lake City?"
    "What about May 14?" somebody asks. "Is it possible that nothing has ever happened in Seattle on May 14!"
     "Did you realize that the Columbia Tower, at 910 feet, is less than one-third the height of the Vashon Glacier 14,000 years ago?"
     What sounds like trivia is, in fact, history in the making. These are the writers and Webmasters at History Ink, the Seattle nonprofit which produces the Web site HistoryLink.org. HistoryLink is to local history what eBay is to online auctions. With countless millions of "hits" in its brief existence, this burgeoning site has made itself an indispensable resource to users ranging from seventh-grade essayists to Ph.D. candidates and, yes, more than the occasional Northwest journalist.
    Visitors who log on at www.historylink.org are greeted by thousands of essays, nicely illustrated, on topics ranging from the Vashon Glacier to the Nisqually Earthquake. For the uninitiated, there is a 10-minute tour of Seattle history, or an interactive map that allows visitors to zoom in on their own block. There are thumbnail histories of key people, towns, neighborhoods and institutions. You can read Chief Seattle's famous speech, along with an essay questioning its authenticity. You can browse through photos and maps and documents and more - all linked by an efficient, electronic search engine.
   The site, which went online in 1998, gets rave reviews even from its more traditional competition. They're telling history in a way that is more accessible than ever," says Leonard Garfield, director of Seattle's Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI). "The Web provides an amazing ability to flip back and forth and connect the dots in a way that allows one to see the bigger picture."
   And this site is also uniquely Seattle's. There are countless historical Web sites, ranging from Historychannel.com to the Library of Congress site and more. But none approaches HistoryLink's focus on a single city and its environs.
   While the brainstorming occurs at the pub, the Webmastering occurs a block away, in a tiny seventh-story office crammed with second-hand desks, computers, wall maps, an overflowing bookcase, a 1950s fallout-shelter sign, a folded scooter and, at any given time, at least a couple of self-styled historians. Tucked in a corner closet is the server, the computer that actually stores the gigabytes of data that would fill a 15,000-page set of encyclopedias.
   Which was the original idea behind HistoryLink, according to the late founder Walt Crowley. "We were supposed to be a book."
    Crowley, who died in 2007, was a much-loved Seattle journalist and one-time bureaucrat perhaps best known for his seven years as a liberal sparring mate to conservative spokesman John Carlson on KIRO-TV News. He was an unlikely Webmaster. For years, he resisted using a computer for anything.
    Yet his personal biography reads like a synopsis of recent Seattle history. Crowley arrived in Seattle with his family in 1961 when his father took an engineering job at Boeing. Crowley thought he had "dropped off the edge of the Earth."
   Graduating from high school in 1965, he went on to the University of Washington, where he was "seduced into the underground press" - the weekly "Helix," founded by one Paul Dorpat. Instead of writing, Crowley drew the outrageous covers and cartoons that made Helix locally famous.

   After three years, he decided "there was not going to be a revolution," and defected to the establishment: Seattle City Hall. As an adviser to then-Mayor Wes Uhlman, Crowley worked on neighborhood and employment programs, where "we revolutionized city government."
   In 1979, he made an unsuccessful bid for City Council, then teamed up with his soon-to-be wife Marie McCaffrey to make a living from free-lance journalism and graphics. This, in turn, launched his journey into local history, when he agreed to write a history of the Seattle Municipal League "as a community service to pay off several years of unpaid parking tickets."
   "I got the bug," Crowley recalled many years later. "I thought I knew all about the Muny League. But then you learn: Everything is connected by history, and it's important to understand that hidden infrastructure of relationships and experiences and personalities."
   Meanwhile, he auditioned for the job of countering conservative Carlson on the KIRO evening news, a job that raised his profile while he attracted more history clients: the ultra-establishment Rainier Club, Seattle University, Metro Transit, Group Health and more.
    "Contract history has never been a problem for me," he said. "I've found that each client, whether it's the Rainier Club or Group Health, truly wants to know its own story. All history is interpretation. The writer has to protect the factual integrity of the information. And I suppose the interpretation is always open to discussion, but that has never been a problem."
   Meanwhile, he found time to deliver his own memoir of the 1960s, "Rites of Passage." For that project, he worked closely with Dorpat, his old "Helix" friend who already had established himself as a popular historian with his weekly "Now and Then" feature in Pacific Northwest, the Seattle Times Sunday magazine. "Seattle was just about to turn 150, and there was a need to lay down a new historical baseline," Crowley recalled. "The last comprehensive history of King County was written in the 1920s, so we kicked around the idea of a local encyclopedia."
   It was McCaffrey, his wife, who suggested in 1997 that a book was a quaint and perhaps anachronistic idea, that they should be constructing a Web site instead. So they did..
   HistoryLink became a nonprofit conceived as a one-stop source for local history that would be all "original content, nothing scammed from other sources," Crowley recalled. And, as a longtime free-lancer himself, he was determined to pay his writers real money - $30 an hour for work accepted for the site.

They met with an experienced Web designer who assured them it would be feasible but very expensive, about $1 million for starters. They lighted on a domain name, and got a critical start-up grant from local philanthropist Patsy Bullitt Collins, who told them, "I've never even seen a Web site, but I love history and I respect you guys." In time this was followed by grants from the city of Seattle, King County and a long list of benefactors ranging from AT&T to the Gates Foundation.

    Ninety percent of History Ink's income is used to pay the staff writers.
    That team is no ivory tower jammed with pointy-headed academics. In addition to Dorpat and McCaffrey, there is Chris Goodman, a twenty-something graphic artist who previously designed computer games; Cassandra Tate, another middle-aged baby-boomer who actually has a doctorate in history; and Alan Stein, a former Boeing software engineer with a passion for history and museums.
    "After 13 years at Boeing, I was ready to make less money doing something I love to do," says Stein. "I've never looked back."
    Meanwhile, Crowley kept his liberal politics off his Web site, says Carlson, his former conservative counterpart. "For Walt, history is a greater passion than politics," he says.
   But Crowley was sucked into an occasional turf battle. At one point, he complained publicly that Mayor Paul Schell was favoring MOHAI over HistoryLink, and downplaying Seattle's upcoming birthday.
   All this for a city which some believe is too young to have much of a history.
   Not so, Crowley argued. "The history of any American city is not much more than 150 years, because they are all creatures of the Industrial Revolution. We don't have that pre-industrial substrata of colonial rule. As far as recorded history, events begin in 1851 with a group of people who came out here with the specific intention of building a city."
     So what's next for HistoryLink? Expansion, of course. Crowley and company are gradually going statewide, determined to become the unofficial online historical source for Spokane and Walla Walla and Centralia and more. They've reserved the domain name "WashingtonLink," and they muse over the prospect of the "Linkabego," a traveling Internet room to introduce their site to schools and towns across the region, and to collect the personal stories of its people.
    All that will cost money. But then history suggests this is well within the realm of possibility.

Rush and Me: How I missed my own moment of infamy

Ross Anderson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:29:49 -0800

    Before the storm, there is that familiar, electronic "brrrrrring" that musically alerts me to e-mail.
I click on "Inbox," and find the top of a message from North Carolina. Subject: "Your paper is a liberal rag."
     Hmmmm. What's that about? I'll find out later. Back to the task at hand.
      Another musical "brrrring." Click. Subject: "Disgusting!"
      And another, this one from somebody who calls himself "Rightwinger." Subject: "You Commie Bastard!"
       Who could resist that one? Click on the icon. Full message: "You Commie Bastard!"
      Huh?
     Within minutes, my trusty computer is ringing like an old-time coffee percolator. I watch the messages pop up on my Inbox screen until I spot one from a familiar e-mail address - my older sister in Texas.
       "Gosh, little brother. I am soooooo impressed," she writes. "You made the Rush Limbaugh Show!"
      Wow! Your mild-mannered reporter makes the big time. Rush Limbaugh, King of Talk Radio, conservative "Doctor of Democracy," nationally syndicated Voice of Right-Thinking People.
I've listened to this guy, and he's very good at what he does. But how can I be on national radio and not know it?
     I tune to KVI radio. Rats. He's talking about something else. I've missed my own moment. But at least I'm figuring out what it's all about. Two days earlier, The Seattle Times published my story on Seattle's top-10 electricity-users - including the residential users. Based on information obtained from Seattle City Light, the top-10 residential consumers use up to 50 times the city's average household consumption. We named names.
      And Limbaugh didn't like it. His Web site calls it "probably one of the most outrageous articles I've seen on any subject in a long, long time."
     The wealthy homeowners in the "Soviet of Seattle" are portrayed "as though they're guilty of something for buying power," he says. "These people pay for every kilowatt they use. It's as though they're scofflaws who haven't paid their parking tickets for the past 10 years. We're told to blame the eeeeevil rich owners of big houses for this fix. We've got to string them up or send them to sensitivity seminars and make them feel guilty.
     "There's a real Soviet feel to this piece," he goes on. "And what really bothers me is that these people apologized for using electricity, as if they've committed some crime, for crying out loud. This illustrates just how successful the left's hate-the-rich propaganda has been."
    California's energy crisis, he says, was caused by "environmentalist wackos" who "have insisted that not a single new power plant be built."
     Then comes a link to The Times story and my e-mail address - the marvels of the Internet.
Speaking of which, the messages continue to crackle onto my computer screen. They come from across the nation, from California and Maine, Florida and Minnesota. A few actually come from Seattle.
      "Heard Rush talking about your rag today and your slanted/stupid/liberal (one and the same) article," writes my North Carolina correspondent. "Thank God for the Internet. Hopefully it will allow people more access to the truth and eventually we can eliminate papers like yours."
     They come in waves, apparently responding as the radio show is rebroadcast on different stations at different times.
      "These 10 people are also probably 10 of the biggest philanthropists in Seattle," writes another. "More power to them, and I could care less about their electric bill."
       Caleb, an 18-year-old college student from Texas, has just finished reading Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," and sizes me up as one of those "weak-minded people who are always supporting the actions of the weak minds in power, blaming the industrialists for everything."
    "What are you, a Nazi?" asks another e-mailer. "It is vermin-spewing socialists like you that will bring back the Vigilantes of the old West. May you choke on your Latte. ... Too bad your mom did not believe or have access to abortions. She would have done us all a favor."
    The response is impressive. By the end of the following day, my computer counts more than 300 e-mails, most of them unprintable in a family newspaper. Despite slight variations in the vulgarities, each reflects the guru's tone: These people paid for their power, and printing their names is a vicious, socialistic, left-wing device.
    I try responding to a few of my new friends.
    "The issue of privacy is legitimate, and we debated the issue before going to press," I write. "But we decided that the right to privacy was outweighed by the nature of our regional electricity shortage."
      Seattle owns its own electric utility, which provides clean hydro-power at the lowest rates in the nation. Alas, we are experiencing a drought. The reservoirs are dry, and there isn't enough hydro to run the generators. So City Light has to buy replacement power on the open market at 20, 40, sometimes 100 times the cost of our own hydro. So, when our neighbors waste electricity, we all share the costs of that replacement power. ... And so forth.
     "Anderson," responds Jerry from Texas. "Spoken like a true fascist.... I just love to see you socialist liberals foam at the mouth about private industry and individuals being in control of their lives. ... I know what side you are on and I am your enemy, buddy. You Left Coast intellectuals are going to get what you asked for."
      Huh?
      Sean, of Palo Alto, Calif., stands his ground. "I still think you should take issue with your elected officials," he says. "I have a difficult time believing this empty-reservoir problem came out of nowhere. Even a city the size of Seattle can't run through that much water overnight, can it?"
     Still, Sean says he's "frankly amazed" that I responded. "I also respect your point of view," he says.
     Caleb, the young Texan, is even more generous. "Thanks for a humbling lesson," he writes. "I guess a kid like me shouldn't be writing such vehement letters to people when we have heard only one side of the story."
     Thus emboldened, I fire off a one-pager to Limbaugh. Dear Rush: We have never met, but I am a now-and-then listener and, more to the point, the object of your wrath on March 20. ... The response was truly impressive.
      I walk through the argument - the Northwest energy crisis, the city-owned utility, the empty reservoirs, the costly replacement power, rights of the individual vs. rights of the community.... Nobody proposes to outlaw wasting electricity. But if people know that wasting electricity may lead to some embarrassing publicity, perhaps they'll look for ways to conserve. ...
     I urge him to visit our little "soviet." You'll find we walk and talk, love our kids, pay the mortgage, drink our beer from the bottle and see the world much the same way you do - except from the opposite coast.
    No response yet. But that's OK. As I told my new buddy Rush, I might have chosen another way to spend my 15 minutes of fame. But I'll take it as it comes.