(To recap part I-
We put in to the River in Kent and had to abort the trip in Tukwila. Incoming tide, exhaustion, sinking boat, etc. For those of you keeping track, SeaScum is no
longer water-worthy {still looking for recycling ideas} SeaScum II has become
the main media platform. Yes, a used
kayak has joined the fleet. You can send
your ideas for a name with your kayak recycling thoughts. I was toying naming it after a character in my books. That still might happen)
Deep thinker, adventure
buddy, and Supervising Adult Craig had a great idea- Launch from our destination in West Seattle
and paddle to the mouth of the Duwamish arriving at low tide. That way we would be going up the river as
the tide came in and we could paddle to the bail-out point completing our trip
in a Zen, one hand clapping (remember it’s the journey, not the destination)
kind of way.
Of course, pretty
much as long as humans have traveled on the sea, they’ve known how to use the
tides to move about. Tides are not something
most of us think about, human hubris tends to believe we are no longer at the
mercy of our environment.
We are.
The Green River/Duwamish watershed is parched. The rivers are very low for this time of year. Water is being held back in reservoirs, our snow pack is already gone and the only thing trickling down the mountains is the ancient waters of glaciers.
And, it goes both ways- the environment is at our mercy.
Case in point, in order for our expedition to get where we were going we had to paddle through a Superfund site. The lower Duwamish was a place we humans threw away things we didn’t want. In the really olden times if you lived by a river, all manner of waste went into the water and was carried away. Which, I’m sure helped prevent disease, since so much of what was thrown away was toxic in one way or another. I’m sure the practice helped those people flourish for generations…. Until somebody moved in upstream and started doing the same thing.
But, we’ve begun
to see the error of our ways and started to clean up our messes. I don’t think most people know how bad it was
before we passed environmental laws and started to clean out our sandbox. People complain about excess regulation, it is the nature of people to complain, I do it myself. But, whenever I hear complaints on this subject
I remember the bad old days- The Los Angeles basin in the
‘60’s with its perpetual shroud of smog or Houston at the same time with
airborne chemicals from unregulated refineries so thick the trees dripped black
ichor and to park under one was to have the paint on your car dissolve. But, like I said, we decided to mend our air, land and waters and so came the Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund Site, what they couldn’t clean up they buried.
It is still very
much a working river and an integral part of the port. Bodies of water were our first super highways
and frankly, without working ports, we couldn’t live the lives we live. However, we can learn to respect the water,
the shores and, the fact that, as it says on the bumper sticker, “everybody can’t
live upstream”. 
As things have become less toxic the animals have started to return, living in the shadows of long abandoned enterprises. Which stirs your heart more? The sight of an Osprey soaring over a shore covered in old-growth or the same bird flying over what once was a toxic wasteland?
The latter gives me hope that we can undo some of the damage. That maybe we are evolving beyond the Boom and Bust, take it (gold, timber, fish, etc.) and leave the mess history of the Western United States.
