Thanks God for rain

Say what you want about all the rain we have had lately but we need it. High water in the rivers cleans the gravel where the salmon spawn.  A flood washes more gravel down the river in soft beds that are easy digging for the salmon to build their nests in. 

The rain acts like a filter in the atmosphere giving us some of the purest air on the planet.  Living on the Olympic Peninsula, we tend to take clean air and water for granted, that is until it’s gone.

 You can go without water for a few days but we will not last long without air.

The American Lung Association says that 64,000 Americans die prematurely every year from breathing polluted air. That might be just another meaningless national statistic until you watch it happen to a friend firsthand.

He had kicked cancer but, as the old saying goes, “You should have seen his foot.” Beating cancer gave him pneumonia. Things did not look good.   He wanted to go fishing. Maybe it was part of what they call the bucket list since he was due to kick it at any time.

He traveled with a van load of oxygen bottles but he said he didn’t need one that morning. The air was clean and he was breathing fine. We were going fishing.

We launched on the Hoh River on one of those fall mornings when the sky was blue and crystal clear.

We caught a big bright silver right off the bat.  I was taking a picture of my friend with his fish when I noticed a small white cloud on a distant ridgetop. It was no big deal at the time but along about noon the cloud had turned brown and ugly.

It sank into the valley and turned the air into a blue haze. We found ourselves under a thick blanket of a toxic fog of burning stumps, plastic and earth that soon had my friend choking to near death.

We got off the river. He never came back.

Within a day the smoke of this and many other fires had traveled east to cover the high Olympics. Standing on a peak on the upper Dungeness you could get a hazy view of Seattle, swathed in a brown cloud of smoke that a temperature inversion had trapped in the Puget Sound Basin. 

Seattle was suffering from air pollution. It was just lucky they had no idea where it came from. They would have blamed the loggers.

Before you blame loggers for air pollution remember, you are reading this in a newspaper made of wood in a house made of wood. We need wood and besides, our forests have been catching on fire ever since they started growing, sometime after the last Ice Age. 

Once we started logging the slash or leftovers of the operation would catch on fire and burn entire watersheds.  Controlled slash burns are part of an effort to keep the rest of the woods from catching on fire. Large piles of wood waste are routinely covered with plastic to keep them dry, then ignited with a variety of fossil fuels.

Fires are an inevitable part of the forest ecology whether there are loggers involved. 

Would you like the fires out in the open where they pollute an entire region? Or in a biomass facility that filters the pollution out of the atmosphere?

It is not a perfect solution but this is not a perfect world. It is a choice that we can make.

Until then, thank God for the rain.

Meat fever

Pat's 50-pound king

’Tis the season, when salmon run up river in waves so thick grandma could catch one with her trout rod.  That’s when the meat fever hits. 

It’s a common affliction that is often brought on by the sight of many large silver fish rolling and splashing their way up the river. This can trigger a psychotic reaction in individuals with a genetic predisposition to fish. 

I am one of them. This is my story.

I was just another freelance wilderness gossip columnist late for a deadline on a story about … well I had no idea so I thought I might as well be fishing since I was on the river anyway.

Writing is a lot like fishing. You need a good line, a sharp hook and the right bait or lure. You throw the whole mess into a medium where you cannot see beneath the surface and wait for something to bite.

Then you set the hook, drag it in and beat it over the head with a club. 

Or not.

Sometimes you can catch and release and they’ll get caught all over again, or read the column every week.

All I know is I was minding my own business, trying to write a column about fishing.  I saw a salmon jump out of the river with a plug in its mouth. It was on the end of my line.  

By the time I got the fish on to the shore there were four other guys, casting like demons where I had hooked the fish. They all had one thing in common they had drifted from the evil cities across the water to fish in the solitude of the Olympic Peninsula.

One look told me they were suffering from meat fever too. Each had his own way to cope.

One of the anglers was flossing. This is a sophisticated and effective form of snagging where the fish take the line in their mouths as they swim upriver. As the fish reaches the end of the line it is snagged in the mouth and it’s fish on!

Another fisherman was using bait. Bait fishermen look down upon the flossers but they should talk. Bait fishing is a dead end road to nowhere since fish eggs are the best bait.

You have to catch fish with fish eggs to get more eggs so you can catch fish.  Meanwhile, you and everything you own becomes covered with the sludge of rotting fish eggs that make you smell like the dumpster behind the fish market.

One of the guys was using spinners. Spin fishers look down upon the flosser and the bait fisher and why not. 

Spinners are technological wonders made of shiny metal alloys and flashing paint colors that can have a hypnotic effect on someone shopping for lures.

Like the kid in the candy shop the spinner fisher in a tackle store will fill up a basket with shiny trinkets designed to catch the angler’s eye. The spinners are then thrown into trees along the river’s edge, one after the other until the place looks like it was decorated for Christmas.

Then there was a fly fisherman, casting his heart out at the head of the hole. Fly fishers shun the flosser, bait and spinner fishers for good reason.  They made a movie of Brad Pitt fly fishing. 

Many fly fishermen suffer the delusion that they are Brad Pitt.

I fish plugs, a method despised by other anglers who say it’s just a couple of dummies, one on each end of the line.

I’m sure that’s just the meat fever talking.

A Hoh River Lavender Festival

Let’s just say the first annual Hoh River Lavender Festival was a qualified success if measured in terms of cultural significance, environmental stewardship and fine cuisine.

What is success anyway but significant progress toward a laudable goal?  Mine happens to be a dream of turning the Hoh River Valley into the lavender capital of the West End. 

It all began with one man’s vision and one little lavender plant in a four inch pot that would in time, with a lot of hard work and global warming transform the rainforest into the next Sequim.  It’s a town so full of tourists the locals have to beat them off with clubs just to find a parking spot.  

Why lavender?  Lavender is hard to grow and a lot of people are allergic to it, but I can think of a lot of worse plants like, scotch broom. 

Lately this invasive species has become so prolific that it’s formed dense stands of abrasive, noxious vegetation that almost nothing can eat.  Scotch Broom is choking the life out of our river bottoms and that is a real shame. 

Maybe some of you old timers can remember what the bottom land was like in the old days.

The river was like a gardener, plowing the soil with a flood every year. The virgin land was planted with seeds washed down or blown in from the four winds.

The birds and bears did their part by broadcasting the remains of every seed they ate. Soon the flood zone would become a garden with lupine washed down from the high alpine country and wild strawberries growing on a carpet of thick moss.

There were blackberries, flowering thistles, native red top grass and a wild flowering pea that animals could winter on when they migrated down from the high country.

The air smelled of nectar. It was good, too good to last. 

Even back in the 1920s some of the old pioneers along the Quinault noticed the river was changing. That was back before there were many loggers to blame. 

The riverbed was filling up with gravel. The channel became more braided. Something was increasing the sediment load being carried downstream by the river. 

Even stranger, the same thing was happening on the other rivers that all had one thing in common.  They originated in the glaciers of the Olympics. 

Native American legends mention a rumbling sound that came from far up in the mountains. This was ascribed to the thunderbird who plucked whales from the ocean and dropped them back at the nest up on the glacier.

Early pioneers mention the same rumbling but they said it was the sound of massive blocks of ice falling off the glacier. These days either the thunderbird is gone or the glacier has melted back but no one has heard that rumbling from the mountains lately.

Then and now photographs of the Olympic Mountain glaciers tell the tale. They have been melting fast for 100 years.  This exposes fresh sediments that are soon washed downriver by the effects  10 or 20 feet of freezing and thawing precipitation on an unstable, near vertical slope. 

This fills the river channel with gravel and floods the valley with a moving sheet of water that makes more gravel bars that begin to sprout scotch broom almost immediately after the flood waters subside.    

That was my excuse anyway, when the river came up and washed my lavender farm away. It may have been only one plant but that is not the point.

It is better to plant lavender than curse the scotch broom.