Jess & Thomas A - Interview · 871 days ago by Julie Loyd
(We sat at The Bar, a beach kitchen facing Saturna at Sandy Point. There was talk about tea)
Julie: Plan A is to archive everything in the library. Plan B is to figure out what people are telling me and see if I can digest it and spit it out in some kind of big picture. But right now I’m just looking for details, one offs.
(talk about tea, dogs that look like bratwurst)
Thomas: So, have you been going all around the island?
Julie: Yes, I’ve interviewed Carol S, Bob W, Chuck L, the C’s.
Thomas: Turns out Bill C’s mom was really good friends with my dad’s mom. They were best friends over on Orcas. I just met Elaine and Bill recently. Elaine had some great stories about them. She said they were flappers.
Julie: That’s pretty funny.
Thomas: Yeah, totally. The short hair, flirting and smoking and drinking. (Jess arrives with tea) We were just talking about the C’s family, Elaine talking about flapper girls. (tea noises)
Jess: So, did you tell her about the eagle?
Thomas: We’ve been talking about social history, not natural history.
Jess: I bet there are a lot of other people besides us who probably have some interesting stories about the Point, like Chris, or Skye and Richard from when they lived here.
Thomas: Even our parents. Right up here, just back from the Cowlitz bluff, there’s been an eagle’s nest for probably as long as we were here, right?
Jess: Yeah.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s always been there.
Julie “As long as you were here” is how long?
Thomas: Which is since 1990, so, 17 years. Pretty much every year
Jess: Yeah.
Thomas: Is it, every year or every two years that they’ve had a baby?
Julie: The tradition is that they’re supposed to alternate nests, one year one place and another year another place, but they can surprise you.
Thomas: Well, whatever it was, it was fairly regular. Then this year, this spring I think in May, the adolescent, the immature from last year … First of all, there was a hatchling, a baby there that we could hear – that my mom could hear, crying and crying and doing its normal carrying on. Then one day the immature came from the year before, and there was a big flapping around, and it was flying around the nest, and there was all this squawking. When we next looked up there, the nest was about at a 45º angle, and no more baby calls. Probably about a week later, we didn’t see it happen, but the nest fell. It’s up there now, all the sticks and scraggly feathers and little animal bones and things, all up there.
Julie: I’d love to take a picture of that.
Thomas: Absolutely. I’ll take you up there.
Julie: Yeah, I’d love to. Nasty!
Thomas: Yeah. And then over the next weeks, the parents were still around. They actually came down here. They went down the beach that way, (Eastwards along the North side of Sandy Point) and it looked like they were starting a new nest there. We saw them carrying materials, sort of about by Chris W’s place, maybe in a little bit. Yeah, probably right around there, we could see them going back into the trees up on the cliff there. But right next to the old nest, there was another tree with big crags on it, a big branch that the eagles would always sit at, it was kind of their lookout. They would still go there but sometimes the immature would be there, and it seemed like there was territorial fighting going on.
Julie: Do you think this immature one was theirs, or was it coming in from some other place?
Thomas: That’s what we figured.
Julie: I guess it must have been, otherwise it wouldn’t dared.
Thomas: Yeah. It seemed like it was trying to come home, or trying to reclaim its territory, or push its parents out, or who knows. We always had thought that it was from the year before. And that eagle’s been around some. Sometimes we see it up in that tree still, sometimes down the beach in between here and … maybe about 50 yards down the beach, it’ll sit on a fallen tree.
Julie: Do you know what it likes to eat? Is it a fish eagle or a rabbit eagle or an anything?
Thomas: Don’t know.
Julie: Chickens.
Thomas: Chickens! Hopefully not. Today there were crows sitting up in the eagle tree and we haven’t seen many eagles lately up there. It seemed kind of like a regime change.
Julie: I woke up this morning to hysterical crow calls in my garden. I was too late looking out the window, but maybe the crows are doing something this time of year.
Thomas: Yeah. Well, I’ve definitely heard about lots of raven and crow activity this year. The B’s said they’ve seen a lot more ravens in general. The crows, maybe in June, the crows were going crazy. And I think Linnea said that that’s usually the immature crows sort of learning to be annoying.
Julie: Annoyingness training?
Thomas: It sounds sort of like people screaming. You’re going to make some tomato soup? Sounds good. So I think I made it through the eagle story. We’re going to go up at some point and look at the fallen nest.
Jess: Yeah, you should.
Thomas: There’s lots of … we get quite a few baby seals that die every summer out on the Point.
Julie: Do you get survivors?
Jess: David picked one up and took it to Friday Harbor. I don’t think we’ve been able to identify if there’ve been survivors or not.
Julie: Yeah, because if they survive, they’re gone.
Thomas: I think definitely, in the past couple years, there’se been at least …
Jess; I don’t remember it from before.
Thomas: Yeah, I don’t remember it really either. But definitely in the last three years. This year, last year, and the year before, there’s been two or three dead ones every summer.
Jess; Lots of otters. There’s been a sea lion this summer, creepin’ around.
Julie: Just hangin’?
Thomas: Yeah we saw it a couple nights ago just sort of coming up and ducking under, coming up and ducking under, slowly heading out towards Skipjack.
Jess: I saw it off Bare Rock. Yeah, I think it’s the same one.
Julie: Barry M saw an elephant seal a couple days ago. Have you ever seen any one like that here?
Thomas: What do they look like?
Julie: They’re ginormous. They’re the size of Volkswagens, and they have that …
Jess: That flop of skin? Funny thing?
Thomas: Where’d he see it?
Julie: Mittelstadt’s.
Thomas: Wow. I know Carla, a week or so ago, saw a Minke Whale coming just right off the beach, moving towards …
Jess: At Point Hammond. We used to see whales off the Point, but we haven’t recently.
Julie: Whales like Orca whales?
Thomas: Orcas.
Jess: Blowing out off the Point. There’s always tons of seal activity off the Point. A lot of fish slapping and side slapping, flirting or whatever it is they’re doing.
Thomas: Yeah, the mating call on this side and on Cowlitz side. A lot of that slapslap, slapslap.
Jess: At least one family of otters down …
Thomas: Yeah, do you think that’s the same one though?
Jess: That’s on the south side? I don’t know. I mean how far do otters travel in a day? Would they explore the whole Point area?
Julie: I don’t know, but one of my potential hats is Latrine Queen. Joe Gaydos, who’s the otter guy in the County, asked me to identify latrine sites with his GPS, which he has yet to give me. If you guys know where they poop, that’s of deep interest.
Jess: Really?Thomas: Do they usually poop in one area?
Julie: I guess. He has yet to brief me.
Jess: We know where they live.
Julie: He does care. One of the reasons is to collect the scat and analyze it for toxins. I don’t know why else. Where do they live?
Jess; They live about 300 yards that way. Not that far, a hundred yards that way.
Julie: On the beach?
Jess: On the beach, right up into the brush in the grass. There’s a tent up by North side there, and they live about sixty feet … The dogs have been very curious, which I’m scared of. I talked to someone on South side of Cowlitz, who said that their dogs are kind of having face-offs. I’m sure the otter will probably win. Especially with pups.
Thomas: Before I forget, I think it was the A’s, someone who used to live here, said that Orcas used to come and scratch their bellies on the sand on the Point. It goes out for quite a ways in the shallow end. It’s just shallow for dozens of feet out there. They said that they used to just come up and hang out there.
Julie: Wow. I wish I’d seen that!
Thomas: Yeah.
Jess: We saw a schooner just about hit the Point about ten minutes before you came. They were thirty feet off the shore …
Thomas: A little two-masted schooner, cruising along, and we were watching it, and someone went, “It’s going to hit the Point,” and it got up to the Point and suddenly they hauled hard to starboard …
Jess: Did a really abrupt …
Julie: Summer.
Jess: I heard there’s a boat reefed up in Quimper Sound.
Julie: Yeah. That would be embarrassing!
Jess: Well, the same lady hit two island boats in a week last week. This woman hit my dad’s boat and then hit Carson’s boat. She said, “Oh, do you know Derek A? I hit his boat.” In different places, one in Anacortes, and one in Deer Harbor.
Julie: Does she have a mission in life or is she extremely clumsy or is she a drunk or what?
Jess: No.
Thomas: I guess when she hit Carson’s, she said, “Oh no, oh no, where are you guys from?”
“W*.”
“Oh no, oh no, I just hit Derek Arndt, do you know him?”
(general laughter)
Jess: Bad day.
Thomas: Yeah. Well, are there any plant changes?
Jess: A lot of the trees are dying on the North side, all the way towards Glenn’s.
Thomas: All the way?
Jess: I mean, far down.
Julie: What do you think that’s all about?
Jess: My uncle’s friend was here, they’re involved in logging and stuff like that, and they said they thought that they were being choked out by the underbrush? But then …
Julie: Choked out by the underbrush?
Jess: Yeah
Thomas: Yeah.
Jess: That’s what they said.
Thomas. They’re getting all the salt water or …
Jess: It’s a lot of really little trees that are dead.
Thomas: Yeah. If you look, it’s just forty feet down the beach here on the right if you want to look.
Jess: But it could be something else. We tried to plant about 200 madronas about five years ago and maybe two of them made it. I’m curious about where madronas grow, or how they grow.
Because I know up on the Mountain, there’s groves of them. Up by Cindy Stern’s, there a road that, on either side, there’s tons of young madronas.
Julie: I think they like to start in shade. I don’t know about when they’re adult. I also think there’s two different kinds of … viruses?
Jess: I knew there was one, didn’t know about the other.
Julie: Yeah. There’s one that makes the black spots on its leaves, and there’s another one that makes the cankers on its trunk. And depending on who you talk to, either that’s normal or it’s new and very bad.
Jess: I can’t say we got them to grow at all. Maybe we could start them in shade.
Julie: Where did you put them?
Jess: Everywhere.
Julie: Also, I think two out of 200 isn’t necessarily bad. Some plants are like that, right?
Jess; I think primarily, some of them were put in sandy places and they probably didn’t like that. Maybe they would have liked more rocky soil.
Thomas: What did you plant them from?
Jess: Dad did it.
Thomas: From seeds?
Jess: He had little startlings.
Thomas: Another thing that’s interesting here is how the beach changes every year. Every winter, the whole beach is carved out and pushed up and pushed in different directions, and every year we come out here, it’s a totally different make up. Different slants, and different compositions.
Julie: It would be interesting to set a camera up someplace in a predetermined spot and just take a picture every month.
Thomas: Yeah. Well, this bank is definitely building up. Like there’s a table right over there that used to be this high and it’s now right at your feet.
Jess: On the North side.
Thomas: Yeah, on the North side. Well, Hammond all washes down this way. And then, my Dad’s pretty sure that it comes around into Cowlitz and then at some point gets blown back around, back to the North side. I don’t exactly know how he knows what exactly is going on.
Julie: Maybe an aerial shot while there’s a storm. Sounds dangerous, but something like when you can see drifts of sand. Because he might be right.
Thomas: It doesn’t seem like the Point is going away.
Julie: Chuck was saying that he’s lost about 15 feet in the 50 or 60 years that he’s been here, from his Southern bank. And that prior to that, there used to be a road … the Sandy Point road was along his bluffs. I’ll have to go over my notes, but my understanding is that it washed away. You know, the beach just …
Thomas: Yeah.
Julie: So you’re saying that on this side, it’s gaining. That’s really interesting.
Thomas: Yeah, very interesting. Should we go look at the eagle tree?
22:08 Julie: I’d also like to look at the dead trees.
Thomas: Oh yeah. Let’s go do that now.
Chuck L*, Summer 2007 · 875 days ago by Julie Loyd
Julie: ... I have to check it now and then because it’s going to run out of batteries …
Chuck: Do you want to have a stool in the middle here for it?
Julie: I came primed with some stuff. This comes from Russel Barsh and (this has nothing to do with the interview, this is just because I think it’s interesting). He just got the results. We’ve been trying to catch juvenile salmon around W**n and also other places. It turned out that a fish biologist mis-identified most of the salmon. The sample size was supposed to be 50 and there’s only nine of the kind he was looking for, the chinook. But, they ran genetic tags on them and found that they came from these rivers … and then drew a map of where they came from. So the Frazer ones came to W**n, and there’s a Hood River one that came to South Lopez. And then the Skagit River and the Stillaguamish too … This is amazing in a lot of ways. One is that it turns out that we feed the entire Sound.
Chuck: It’d be nice if we could feed ourselves.
1:53 Julie: Yeah. The herring may be coming back. We just saw a bunch of them in the bay this year and last year.
Chuck: There used to be jamillions of them out here. Now, I want you to review the purpose of the interview …
Julie: Okay. First I have to take a picture of you …
Chuck … so I have some idea of what we’re doing.
Julie: I’m not certain of the purpose. But as a rough draft, what I’d like to do is to paint a picture of the natural history changes that have taken place on W**n over the decades. The ideal would be to know how many of each species were around W**n every day of every year, and what they were doing. Obviously we can’t even come close to that. But there are some big changes that are happening now. For example, in the last few weeks, people have been noticing Heerman’s Gulls, and I don’t know what those are, but everyone thinks that’s really astonishing.
Chuck: I’m not good at identifying birds by name. I generally know the Bonaparte’s Gulls. I think the Heerman’s, aren’t they the ones that have big (sounds of dishwashing) Do you have a bird book?
3:44 Julie: Yeah. I brought … But, I realize that not everyone is capable of or even interested in identifying every single thing by name. ...okay, I didn’t bring one.
Chuck: My problem is, that I forget names faster than I ingest them. (he goes to get bird books)
4:23 Julie: Yeah. But I think what I’m most interested in, realistically, is to talk about the change in feel of the island. For example, Bill C* says that when he first came as a boy, just walking around in the water meant that you were surrounded by swarms of fish, and now you’re not.
Chuck: Babies, or big ones?
Julie: I don’t know. But that’s one of the things that Bill C* remembers as a big difference, is that when you go out in the water, it isn’t abundant anymore, and it used to be.
Chuck: Yeah, I think that’s true. Well, where do you want to start?
Julie: How about with herring?
Chuck: I remember when we were first here, there were herring balls out here all the time. You know what a herring ball is, don’t you?
5:54 Julie: Yeah, but for the sake of our tape recorder ….
Chuck: A herring ball can generally be identified by the fact that there are hundreds of gulls flying around this location, and apparently what happens is, you’ve got a large number of herring, fish and seal, and so forth, and they all start to attack them, so they go up to the surface, and the birds start to attack them, and that’s how you recognize them. There used to be a lot of herring balls out there, but you very rarely see any now.
I don’t know whether you’ve talked to Bob W* yet, but he used to go out and get herring. He could get all he wanted, he’d find where the herring were and he’d jig for them.
Julie: Did you do any fishing?
Chuck: Very little. I think in my life, I’ve caught one salmon. I don’t know what else I’ve gotten, not much of a fisherman.
Julie: How about clamming?
Chuck: I used to dig clams quite a bit. There used to be more clams. The best clamming is over there close to the dock, a little bit Southeast of Frances’ Cove on the bay out there, and then out towards Point Hammond. My son would pick quahogs out here, we don’t have any trouble with them. But butter clams are harder to find.
Julie: Those are at the zero tideline?
Chuck: Well, you have to wait until the tide goes out. The cockles generally put out their little foot or whatever they call it, it’s sort of like a little flower, and the seagulls have learned if you see one of those, they jump in the air and dive down in.
Julie: I never knew what they were doing.
Chuck: Yeah. Seagulls are not diving birds, but that’s one way they do dive. One thing that’s sort of remarkable to me is how few seagulls there are around compared to when we came. My idea of why that is when we first moved here, there were many open garbage dumps on the mainland, and they were just breeding places for seagulls. There’d just be thousands of them around the se dumps, and when they closed up the dumps, I think they lost the easy living. But when we first came here, Point Disney was a seagull rookery. They actually laid their eggs there. You could see the little baby seagulls when they hatched. But that didn’t last too long, I think it might have been there were more cats and dogs around.
10:04 Julie: When did you first come?
Chuck: We first moved to W**n in 1949. I first came to W**n a year before that.
10:24 Julie: Some people have speculated that maybe it’s there’s more eagles than there used to be.
Chuck: Oh, yeah, there’s a lot more here than there were for a while. After the eggs started to thin out from all that DDT, it really went down.
Julie: So before that, they were about what they are now?
Chuck: Yeah, I think there about what they were when we first came to W**n. They’ve been nesting on W**n I think since eagles first came to this country. Peregrine falcons have been here for a long time too.
11:23 Julie: Let’s go back to shellfish. Somebody was saying that there used to be a lot of abalones?
Chuck: I never noticed that there were a lot of them, but there was the possibility of getting them. I went out to ,,, I forget whether it was Gull Rock or White Rock out there, they were fastened on to the rocks. Unfortunately, when I pried the abalone off, I got into a sea urchin and the spine went into my finger and it took me a while to get it out. So that sort of discouraged me. The abalone here never been large like they get in California where they’re six or eight inches. Here they’re usually around four inches. I don’t remember ever seeing abalone on W**n.
Julie: What about the seals? The harbor seals? You mentioned White Rock, which is covered with seals now.
Chuck: Well, there have always been seals around. I think seals used to use Bare Rock, you know where that is? You know where Skipjack is?
13:16 Julie: Is it right off of Hammond?
Chuck: Yeah, North of Hammond, East of Skipjack, that little rock there, I think it was either seals or sea lions that had their young there. I haven’t noticed that lately, but of course, I haven’t been around there. There’ve always been some sea lions around. Occasionally you see one, ... it’s something to talk about. There are sea elephants here, if you know what they are.
Julie: Yeah, Barry M* just saw one off of the Farm, M*’s Farm, day before yesterday.
Chuck: They’ve been here since I’ve been here. Now, it’s oh, fifty years, getting close to sixty. Of course, river otters have been around all the time. They don’t seem to either go up or down, they The island will support a certain number of them, they don’t seem to increase or decrease in population. (unintelligible) ... one of these other little animals …
Julie: Minks?
Chuck: No, it’ll come to me tonight at midnight.
Julie: Yesterday, you were talking about how the whales used to come by a lot more …
Chuck: Yeah, hardly a week would go by but you’d hear their … They’d slap their fins on the water, you could hear the bang. I’ve hardly noticed them at all recently.
18:05 Julie: Betty said just twice in the last ten years?
Betty: Yeah, just twice I saw them going by, and I’d holler, “The whales are coming,” so we’d rush, because …
Chuck: There are other whales around here. I know once I went to Friday Harbor and I saw this … I think it was a grey whale. It came up, practically stood on its tail and slapped down to the water. I think it was trying of barnacles. That was quite a sight! I haven’t noticed that lately here.
Julie: This grey whale thing, was that in the 60’s?
Chuck: That was probably in the 50’s, before you were born probably.
Julie: I was born in ’56. Spring chicken.
Chuck: You weren’t looking for grey whales!
Of course the great Blue Heron has been here all the time. Occasionally they’ll come up here, and I’ve seen them right outside the house here. Lots of times when the field gets full of water, night crawlers come up to the surface, they like to (unintelligible, something about hunting for worms).
Julie: So you have clay underneath? Our land never has standing water on it, we’re all sand there.
Chuck: Yeah, well, there is a clay layer. I think it comes in under our … out to here, but when you go over this way, it’s almost pure sand. You look at the cliffs, you can see there’s clay in the banks here, and there’s sand as you go west. Apparently there was a sheet of clay laid down here.
18:52 Julie: Maybe from the swamp?
Chuck: Clay from the swamp? I think most of what was laid down here came from the glacier, when the glacier melted. That’s when Sandy Point was created. You know that on Point Hammond there’s this place where there’s sort of cockle shells in the bank there. They are not exactly fossils, but they’ve been there for several thousand years. It shows that (unintelligible, something about the land rising after the glacier melted).
One thing I’ve noticed, I’ve dug a couple wells on W**n. This well up here by the log house, only forty feet deep, and it was just the same sort of fine silty clay we have. I didn’t even have to bank it up as I went down.
Julie: It just held up by itself?
Chuck: Yeah. Then I made a concrete perimeter around it. It’s pretty stable. But then I dug one other well. You know where the M*’s house is?
Julie: On North Beach?
Chuck: Yeah. When the D*’s owned that, I dug a well in their back yard. When I got down to the water, I think 12 feet down and I noticed there was a clay layer there. It had all the earmarks of clay at low tide, it had shells in it and all that kind of stuff, as if at some point it was below water and then got covered up. I was kind of amazed at that. But there is a clay layer there. I know when Bob W* dug the well for the S*’s, he dug down and when he got through that clay layer, all of a sudden the water just came up, it was almost like a little artesian well.
Julie: Yeah, like under pressure from somewhere?
22:32 Chuck: Generally speaking, I think our water here comes from the center of the island, in a Southwesterly direction here. When Bob wanted to dig his original well there, I pointed out to him that there were places down on the beach where at low tide the fresh water runs off. So he dug his well there and it’s served him well for a number of years. He’s getting another well dug now.
Julie: Is he hoping for fewer chlorides or why does he want another one?
Chuck: I think he thought it was a little high in chlorides. He has a feeling that he wants to set up his place so his heirs won’t have to bother with it. And then, the probable increase in water level would make it difficult to keep a well down there by the water …
Julie: Somebody said that you know everything there is to know about surfactants.
Chuck: Who told you that lie?
Julie: I don’t know, but we were talking about Russel Barsh’s water quality talk, and how surfactants have been found in some people’s water and not in other people’s, and people were wondering who to ask about that, what does it mean?
Chuck: Do you know what the term means?
Julie: It’s like soap? It bonds to oil on one side and water on the other?
1:00 Chuck: The name implies the fact that it acts on surfaces between oily and water surface. It’s acting on the surface, it’s a surface actant. The way it does that, it has a hydrophilic end and a hydrophobic chain. And there are a lot of different ways to make a hydrophilic end. The traditional way is to just take some lard or something, put sodium in it, get a sodium carboxylic acid, a long chain. The trouble with that is if you put it in hard water, the calcium salt is insoluble. So, then people came up with the bright idea of putting sulphonic acid on the end. That’s much more prone to ionize, so that even in hard water, even with the calcium there, the calcium will be separate from it instead of glomming on to it and making it no longer hydrophilic, it will be separated, so both the calcium and the soap are in solution. That’s where you get things like Tide and that kind of surfactant.
There are other kinds of surfactants. There are surfactants that have a positive instead of a negative end. They can be made by putting a quatenary amine on the end of the chain instead of a sulphonic group or a carboxylic group, which is negative. An amine is a nitrogen with three things hitched to it. If you hitch a fourth to it, it’ll become positive. The advantage is, if you want to have a hydrophobic surface on something that is negatively charged, you put this stuff on it then the positive stuff is going to hitch on to the negative and then you’re going to have a non-polar surface. It’s the kind of thing that’s used in softeners. You ever used softeners in the wash?
4:30 Julie: No, but I know they exist.
Chuck: You put softeners in the water, they hitch on to the clothes. It’s hard to keep the clothes from having a charge, causing them to be kind of stuck together instead of free flowing. Some of these conditioners that people put on their hair do a similar thing.
5:11 Julie: So if you drank a surfactant, what would happen?
Chuck: I think people are drinking them all the time. Are you talking about something like Tide?
Julie: Well, people have been asking me, “If I have a high surfactant level in my water, should I stop drinking it?” And I can’t answer them.
Chuck: Probably the surfactant they would have in their water would be a negatively charged surfactant. I think the main thing it would cause problems with would be the food that you eat, hitching on to that, probably making it hydrophobic instead of hydrophilic. Depends on how much there is and so forth. A lot of these things … you know, water is poisonous if you drink too much of it, you die. Almost anything you can think of, you can think of as a poison. The quantity makes a lot of difference. I think ideally, it would be best not to have surfactants in the water, but the amounts make a lot of difference. Probably if somebody washes dishes and doesn’t really get the dishes rinsed well, and they eat off a dish, they probably get a lot more that way than they would out of drinking the water.
I checked the amounts of chloride that Bob W* had in his water when Mary was still alive, he was worried about it. I figured that if Mary would drink a gallon of that water in a day, she’d get about as much sodium as if she ate one slice of bread. So, you got to think of quantities as well as whatever the material is.
We try to minimize the sodium in our diet. Generally speaking, when you eat an American diet, you pick up enough sodium. You don’t have to worry about not having enough. We try to minimize it. Betty had a heart attack some time ago, so we try to keep it down. What we do is substitute what we call “no salt” or “new salt”, it’s mostly potassium chloride.
Julie: Do you get that from kelp?
Chuck: Well, there is potassium chloride in kelp.
8:58 Julie: I’ve been collecting kelp and grinding it up and using that as salt.
Chuck: I’ve been getting dried kelp from D* and we use some of that, just put it in the blender. People think that seaweed would have a lot of sodium chloride, but generally it’s pretty rich in potassium chloride.
I think it’s important to not overdo the sodium. What happens, is your osmotic pressure at your cell membrane is such that if you get too much sodium in your diet, the sodium tends to get into your cells and replace the potassium, and that’s not good.
10:00 Julie: Sodium and potassium are above each other in the periodic table?
Chuck: Potassium is one lower down than sodium, I think, one or two, something like that. It’s in the same family. It’s a lot heavier than sodium. ...
To get back to birds, I think one of the more interesting type of bird on W**n are the owls. Of course, you don’t often see them but you hear them quite often at night. I think they are responsible for keeping us from getting completely overrun by rats. Rats tend to be nocturnal and these owls, they can notice any kind of little rustling noise.
See, this is a Snow Owl? (an Inuit soapstone carving) Once in a while, Snow Owls come to W**n. I’ve seen them here.
The Red-tail hawks are a raptor. I can remember, I used to have a little dory and I was going around Point Disney, and I saw this Red-tail Hawk just dive down to the ground, get a rabbit, fly up difficultly about thirty, forty, fifty feet, then drop the rabbit, and then pounce on it.
12:37 Julie: Like a cat!
Chuck: That’s one less rabbit.
I can remember the eagles. According to Kurt, I suppose you’ve heard this, the first meal of the baby eaglet like in the picture here has to be red meat. They won’t take anything that isn’t red. As a result, the eagle has to get ahold of something that’s red meat, like a duck or rabbit or something. You can see there’s the remains of something red there.
I remember watching out here in front, an eagle just circling around, circling around. A duck would come up and he’d pounce right on it. He just kept on doing that until the duck drowned. I think it was at a time when he needed to have that red meat. Because the eagles, they get by with fish very well.
13:58 Julie: What we found in the salmon catching, we looked in their stomachs by stomach pumping, and we found that in one catch, we’d take maybe five different salmon, pump their stomachs, and they would each have something completely different in them.
Chuck: These are the babies?
Julie: Yeah, they were about four or five inches long. Out of two of them, we pulled baby sand lances that were two thirds the length of the salmon. And then the other three had plankton, but they’d gone after different things. So one had little black dots, and the other one had big pink things, and another one had kind of yellowish things. There were enough in them, so we figured they were looking for those things and not other things. So I’m thinking that if baby salmon can have personal tastes, so can eagles.
Chuck: Oh yeah. So can people.
15:11 Julie: So when we hear about what a certain species eats, I’m not as confident anymore that that’s all they eat. I think that you can find individuals that will differ.
Chuck: An individual might differ from day to day, too. That’s pretty hard to tell. I don’t imagine you caught those salmon, the same ones day after day.
Julie: No, our technique is not very good yet. Occasionally we’ll kill one. Nobody wants to do that twice.
What about deer?
Chuck: Deer? I know there’s records of deer on W**n.
16:18 Julie: Individuals or herds?
Chuck: Well, at one point, one of the remarks that some of the earliest European settlers made about W**n was that it was so clear. There was no brush, sort of like Stuart is now. Then there were many deer on W**n, I imagine they would get overpopulated and strip everything down. I heard that this logger in the 1920’s had a crew here logging and he fed them venison. He had a dog, and would chase the deer out in the water where he could shoot them. He finished off the deer on W**n, which I’m happy he did. Anyway, there’s very good evidence that there were lots of deer on W**n at one point.
17:27 Julie: Elk?
Chuck: Yeah, there’s evidence that there were elk here too. I haven’t heard of anybody who actually saw an elk, but I know Ryan is sure that there were remains of elks up there. I’m pretty sure there were elk on W**n.
I suppose that the original deer must have swum over here. It’s possible that Native Americans might have planted some deer here. They did things like that. They used to burn off the island once in a while here, to make good grazing.
I remember, as far as fishing is concerned, Ralph Wood ….
Julie: His name keeps coming up. He must have been a character.
Chuck: Yeah, he was. He had been a soldier during World War I, and a mule kicked him in the testicle. It sort of limited his testosterone. So anyway, he got a disability pension. He used to do a lot of fishing. I remember one time he brought us a whole washed up (unintelligible) rock, we used to call them. Anyway, they’re what’s generally referred to as rock fish. He used to be able to go out and get fish any time he wanted. I think you’d have a hard time if you go out there to Mouatt Reef, where they ought to be, I don’t think you’d find very many.
Julie: Tristan and Camilla and I dropped an underwater camera down by Mouatt. We did see some rock cod. They were about maybe six inches. But no schools of fish, and nothing that big.
20:44 Chuck: Well, they say that it’s a mistake with bottom fish, at least in Minnesota, to throw back the small ones all the time. What happens is, the small ones are not necessarily young, they’re just a smaller breed of the fish. So what happens is that the small ones reproduce and you get smaller fish all the time. I think rock fish, it takes them years to mature to the point where they can reproduce. Once they get decimated, it’s pretty hard to bring them back. Do you know if there are some studies of how the rockfish are recuperating now that they’ve protected some areas?
Julie: Yes. I’ve heard the results but I’ve forgotten what they were. What I’m remembering is that Lingcod have been coming back, and they’re worried about that because they’re predatory and they might eat the other ones. But I think the other kind seem to be having some recovery success in the places where they’re protected. They didn’t know that would be the case because they didn’t know if you protected fish in some places, how mobile are they, and does it matter at all. I seem to remember that it does. But there’s not that many protected places.
Chuck: Well, it wasn’t uncommon when we were first here for a person to fish for rock fish, and then a ling cod would come along and eat the rock fish and you’d get a Lingcod.
Julie: Yeah. David did that once, when we first moved here, he brought me a ling cod and half a rock fish.
Chuck: When I first came here after I retired, I used to jog around the Point. On at least four or five occasions, I found these rockfish on the beach. I think it was otter that had eaten all their insides and they were all clean, ready to go, so I’d just bring them home and …
Julie: That’s called kleptoparasitism. Eagles do that too. The klepto part means stealing.
Chuck: When I was in college, my last year, they found the guy that was the lockup man was a kleptomaniac. They found his closet was full of typewriters and stuff. So they decided he wasn’t a good person to luck up, so they hired me to lock up. That’s how I know what klepto means.
Julie: The first and last salmon that I ever caught, I was kleptoparasiting on a harbor seal. It was out at M*’s beach and it was banging the salmon back and forth. I got in the dinghy and rowed out to see what had happened. The seal left the fish and it started to sink, and I took it home and ate it.
Chuck: You should have caught that seal and trained it to do it for you.
Julie: There’s your geese going by.
Chuck: That’s one thing that’s increased since we were first here. There weren’t any local geese like there are now. It was sort of a rare thing to see the Canada Goose on the island.
Julie: Well, here’s another thing that a lot of people have been saying. The most dramatic person talking about this was on Shaw. He said that there used to be acres and acres of grebes, like fifty acres worth of grebes out on the water.
Chuck: Yeah, there certainly used to be a lot more.
Julie: I didn’t get to ask “What does that mean?” A fish (I meant to say “grebe”) per square foot? A fish per ten feet? I mean, how much is an acre of grebes?
Chuck: A grebe is a bird. You mean, you’re trying to count how many fish there would have to be to support that many grebes or what?
Julie: No, I’m just wondering, when he says, “There were seventy acres of grebes out on the water,” what does he mean?
Chuck: I would think they would be floating around, roughly in contact with each other. There’d have to be a lot of herring or something to support them.
Julie: Do you remember anything like that?
Chuck: I don’t remember seventy acres of them, but I can remember a lot of them. I can remember looking out in Bellingham Bay and seeing … (4:29 unintelligible) one of those birds with the crest on their head.
Julie: Merganser?
Chuck: I think there used to be more of them around too.
The cormorants used to nest at Disney. When they would nest, they would just build this year’s nest on top of the old nest. There would be places there where there was a little ledge, there’d be six or eight nests on top of each other, right on the edge of the cliffs there.
Julie: On the rocks?
Chuck: Yeah, right on the edge, practically perpendicular to the rock. I often wondered what it must feel like, the first flight for the baby cormorant. To be way up there, and to have to take off with enough confidence that you’d not smash on the rocks below. You’d have to really be to a certain stage of development. I remember those nests, they were really dramatic. Some of them looked like they were six feet high.
7:11 Julie: I wonder where the cormorants nest now? I think there used to be cormorants nesting in Mail Bay. Maybe they still do.
Chuck: Yeah, it’s possible. I think they’re pretty hesitant to be around people.
Julie: Strange.
Chuck: I know there were mergansers around here, probably ten years ago. I used to have my car there where I had to pick up the W**n Freight boat at Cormorant Bay. I was sitting there, and six or eight of these mergansers sailed right by. I think that if a person were to sit on a beach without moving for a while, you could notice quite a bit.
Julie: What I found is that I can hardly see things that I don’t already know about. The other day, I was walking to Point Hammond. I can identify maybe five of the kinds of birds that you see there. Dan C* was coming the other way, and he said, “Oh, did you see all the sandpipers?” They didn’t even cross my vision, even though I was looking for birds.
Chuck: Have you ever seen one of them pretending to be wounded? If you get close to their nest, the hen will act like its wing was broken and start hopping away from the nest so that, trying to get you to follow her instead of noticing the nest.
Julie: That’s noble. Have you seen that here?
Chuck: Oh yeah. I remember seeing that on several occasions. (Long pause) It’s sort of hard to drum up visions of things when I don’t know what you’re about.
Julie: Yeah. Well, let’s go back to owls. I’ve been told by some people that Barred Owls have been moving across the country. There may be some Barred Owls on W**n that are new. I can’t identify one so I don’t know.
Chuck: I can’t help you with that. I can’t even tell you what kind of owls I’ve been hearing.
Julie: Well, there’s all kinds of interesting shrieks. But the only one I know, is the hoot, the Great Horned.
Chuck: Yeah. Do you think that all things that have to do with people are unnatural? You say you’re interested in the natural history of W**n. I was wondering whether that includes or excludes people.
Julie: I’m working under a grant, it’s from the R* Foundation. The way I wrote it, was to talk about plants and animals. Personally, I’m also interested in people, but it’s not part of the grant.
Chuck: I was just wondering whether people were considered to be natural or not.
Julie: I think that’s a really interesting question.
Chuck: Well, lots of times when you hear the term “unnatural,” you think it must have been made by people.
Julie: Yeah.
Chuck: A question like, “Is this house natural, or is it unnatural?”
Julie: Well, it’s your nest. It’s a six foot tall cormorant nest, or a beehive, or … It’s more elaborate than what you would see if there weren’t people around. I think what you’re implying is that people are natural too, I think you’re right.
Chuck: It’s sort of hard to really make a fine line between natural and unnatural. Something like an earthquake is considered to be natural. Doesn’t seem exactly organic.
Julie: Yeah.
Chuck: Would earthquakes come under your grant, or not?
Julie: Yeah, I think so. Earthquakes and volcanoes, sure. Tsunamis.
Chuck: The first earthquake I heard about on W**n was that San Francisco one. They claim that some of the chimneys on W**n, which weren’t too well built, crumbled down.
Also I heard that, ... you know what these coyote holes are? Well, when they had the quarry going, what they would do would be to drill a hole about four feet by four feet, about forty feet into the cliff, and they’d drill this way and drill that way, and fill all that with black powder and they’d put a big fuse, blow it off and the whole side of the cliff would fall.
Julie: Wow.
Chuck: Anyway, these coyote holes, I heard during the earthquake, somebody was in them, way inside of the mountain. When he came out his hair was whiter than it had been. He’d heard all that grunting and groaning. See, there’s fissures all over Disney. That’s why people can get water up there, because it isn’t solid rock, it’s rock with a whole bunch of cracks and stuff in it. There’s fissures all over. Imagine being inside the mountain during an earthquake, it’d be an interesting experience. You never crawled into one of those kind of holes? There’s one in there that’s still about 30, 40 feet. I crawled back into it once just out of curiosity. It’s sort of an eerie feeling, just to be in there in the middle of a mountain.
Julie: Where is it?
Chuck: You can see the entrances, if you go around Point Disney, you can see it close to the bank, you can see a couple places where there’s obvious rectangular holes in the rock, and one of them’s quite deep.
Julie: And they’re up the cliff?
Chuck: Yeah, I’d say they’d probably be 20, 30 feet up from the water.
17:50 Julie: Yeah, I’d love to go in.
Chuck: Well, if you’re interested in the natural history of W**n, it’s one way to get the feeling of the innards. It’s a strange feeling to get back in there. It gets darker and darker, everything gets kind of wet. I don’t know whether the thing is still … whether you’re still able to get in there or not.
Julie: Do you know if there’s any pictures of the cliffs before the blasting?
Chuck: I don’t know if there is, but I’ve heard that there is. I heard that the University of Washington had some. I went down there and tried to get ahold of them, but their system of keeping track of things isn’t the best. It’s pretty hard. You’d think you’d be able to poke “W**n” and something else on their computer and it’d tell you just where it is. It’d be fun to get down there and ask about it.
Julie: Yeah, I went to the Burke Museum and asked about that little Indian piece that they found on Hammond, but it wasn’t available.
Chuck: I’ve heard that it is available.
Julie: Yeah, it is. You just have to know the correct person to ask, and the person that knows has to be there.
Chuck: Well, I think it’s generally characterized as the “W**n Man.” Have you ever seen it? You’ve seen pictures of it, haven’t you?
Julie: Probably, but I think it was pretty forgettable. It’s not a Venus of Willendorf.
Chuck: Oh, it’s about so big. I have a photograph somewhere. I think the best guess is that it was sort of an amulet. I don’t know whether it got damage and somebody just tossed it, or what. Ruth L* found it, you know, when she owned that property.
You know why they quarried this stone on W**n?
Chuck: I don’t know that that’s true. I heard that several of the streets in Tacoma are paved with it. The company that actually did the work was a Tacoma company, and I heard that Skid Road, in Seattle, what’s the name of that street, anyway, that was supposed to be paved with it. The reason that they chose this sandstone was that it was unusually hard sandstone. Generally speaking, sandstone doesn’t make good paving. It’s too soft. I talked with somebody that had watched them when they were cutting these paving stones. He said that it was amazing, that these Swedish stonecutters, they’d know just where to whack these stones so that a big sheet would come off it and they could turn it into blocks. You’d look at it and you wouldn’t see any seam or anything, but they’d just look at it and knack!
I guess you know how Chinaman’s Ditch got named? You know what I’m talking about?
Julie: Yeah, the ditch that goes from the H*’s, to TNC beach.
Chuck: Yeah, John Brown, he built that little cabin that used to be there. He hired local natives and Chinese and anybody he could get ahold of for 25 cents a day or whatever, to dig that ditch. They just had wooden wheelbarrows and shovels and picks and stuff. They dug a ditch that would empty that swamp there, because he figured that would make good agriculture. Of course, over the years it caused a big canyon there. When we were first here, you used to be able to see the poles from the bridge that used to go across there. There used to be a road that went right along the bank, and along the edge of the tule, off along the edge of the bank of what is now the Nature Conservancy to get to the dock. It was the path that …
Julie: The road went along the cliff top?
Chuck: It went along the edge here. When John T* came here ….
Julie: Like, right outside your house?
Chuck: It would be closer to the bank. John T said there was the remains of a fence there, (gestures out his window towards the beach) that had been this side of the road, and the road had eroded away to the fence line. Anyway, the road went from Sandy Point all the way along, and when it came to Chinaman’s Ditch, they had a bridge over it. It went on to cross Frances’ Land, and so forth.
Julie: So that would be in a place that’s now under water at high tide. Would it be?Chuck: No, this would be on top of the (unintelligible) This wasn’t on the beach. See, the fence was there, but this much land just was washed away. There’s probably been, just since I’ve been here, there’s probably been ten or fifteen feet of that bank gone. We’re losing that. Between the time that that road was along there, and we got here, that whole road was all washed away. It went along and then it would go along the tule there. You know what I mean by the tule? The little swamp in front of the A*’s. It went on the water side of that, and it went along that and kept going, and kept going right along the edge of the cliff, above the cliff, and when it got to Chinaman’s Ditch, they had a bridge across it, all the way at the top. That’s the way people used to get to the dock. See, before they built the County roads, there wasn’t too much easy way to get through the island. There were always paths. People generally went along the edge of the island, either by water or by land. It was the simplest way to go.
Julie: That’s pretty interesting, to have this whole, kind of urban system, vanished.
Chuck: To have this …
Julie: The whole road is gone. I had no idea.
Chuck: Yeah. Well, things happen.
Betty: It’s a long time.
Julie: I just got an e-mail from my son Peter, who just flew from Prague to Paris. I’ve never been in Paris, but I have been in Prague, and things don’t vanish like that. You have some kind of thing that was built in 1800, or by the Turks, or something, and now it’s still there, you can go see it.
Chuck: Well, there’s a few old … of course, the C*k’s place, and then there’s the C*r place, that was the first frame house on the island.
Julie: You mean the one above the Post Office?
Chuck: No.
Julie: The one next to B*’s beach?
Chuck: Yeah. That was the first frame house on the island. I remember Doe G* telling me about when she was a girl in this shake shack. In winter the snow would come right through the shakes onto their bed. Primitive living. But her father, old Graignic, he was enterprising. Smoked herring and sold them in Victoria. Made enough money so he could take a trip to Paris to see where he came from.
Julie: How do you spell his name?
Chuck: Graignic. He and Ed C*, I think they were both French Canadian, skipped ship over in Victoria, picked up a couple wives down there in La Conner, brought them up here to W**n and established themselves.
Julie: Their wives were Indian?
Chuck: Yeah. Lena Graignic and Margaret S*’s mother …
Chuck: You’re aware of the old cemetery on the Point, I suppose?
Julie: Yeah, I visited it, but you need a guide.
Chuck: Yeah. I always thought it would be nice to do a little bit more research on that. Some of those names don’t mean anything. For a while, that was sort of the Indian cemetery, and this one up here was, I understand, the white folks’. Kertula, who was a Finn, is buried up here, and his wife was buried there.
Julie: Is that just old-fashioned racism, or was there some Indian reason?
Chuck: Oh, I think it was racism. It wasn’t complete, because Evan Wood was down there too. But at the time he was buried, I don’t think they even had this cemetery. But once this cemetery got established, there was this “them and us” kind of a feeling.
Julie: So, is anything known about the Indians that used to be around here? Russel Barsh speculates that there was a longhouse down where the junipers are, near the swamp. There’s a midden there, and some plants.
Chuck: A lot of the artifacts are there down along the beach. Bob W* has some of them. Of course, Ryan D* is quite convinced that there was year-round habitation on W**n on the Point. But I don’t … He gives evidence of camas fields and stuff like that, as reasons to believe in that.
I can remember going to Skipjack, and the center of Skipjack was just solid camas. It was really beautiful. I suspect that the natives kept it going. It was almost solid camas in the middle of Skipjack there. They used to dig the camas bulbs and bring them over, dig a big pit. You can see some of the pits that came from that by Point Hammond. Where they’d build a big fire in a big pit, get it all heated up in there, they’d have in some rocks in there, and put in a bunch of seaweed, throw in this camas, and steam it, put in some more seaweed, build a fire on top, and just cook it. Then they’d pack it tight when it was steaming, in bags, that’s the way they’d keep their carbohydrates for the winter. I don’t know how tasty it was, but they seemed to like it.
Julie: If you have no other options, I guess you have to like it! People like Margaret S*’s mother, were they still part of that, or had they lost it by then?
Chuck: Well, even Margaret had a lot of the knowledge of the natives. When we first visited her, she had this little sort of root cellar, and she had things like crocks full of salted down fish. All kinds of preserved food for the winter. She seemed to … you had a feeling that she was a part of the place.
Her mother happened to be an alcoholic, which was unfortunate. I heard that she died by falling into a puddle on the road when she was drunk. The first census that I saw that included Kertula, included him, as a rumor, or something, with Margaret’s mother. Margaret was already born, so I don’t know when they were married. Apparently they got married and Margaret became a Kertula. Her father used to say, “You’ll never starve on W**n if you could just wait for the tide to go out.”
Well, do you have anything you want to know about?
Julie: I’ll let you know at midnight. You know how that goes. I’ll wake up and say, “Why don’t I just ask him …. whatever it was?”
Bill and Elaine C*, Summer 2007 · 875 days ago by Julie Loyd
(We chatted about the phone company and their pond chemistry, which may be high in phenols and cadmium. Then the talk turned to fish and I turned on the digital recorder.)
Elaine: ... they were in residence during that period of time. It seemed to me that they were noticeable pretty well before sunset. Anywhere from about 5 in the afternoon, through that latter part of the afternoon. This of course, was the longest days of the year so we could be looking at it at 9:00 at night. But it seemed to me it was sort of an evening feeding time phenomenon.
I was not down there in the morning, so I don’t know. Would be willing to go down there in the mornings and look, next May and early June. It might be interesting to see if you could see them then. It always seemed to be an evening thing, but that’s when we would wander down, you see?
But I thought that it was very noticeable and that they were, as I say, in residence. It didn’t seem like just a pass-through thing. Because it was pretty all-over action. There were places where there was a … not a school, but like a little herring ball or something in miniature. It was very charming, I thought, all those little guys just out there sort of fluffing through the water, it was very nice. I don’t know whey I wasn’t as aware of it this year. but I think maybe we just weren’t down there as much. We were doing other things. Because I didn’t have it as an assignment, it wasn’t part of my active conscious, which is very limited a lot of the time. (laughs) But I’d be willing to look carefully next spring. There’s nothing out there right now.
Bill: You know, Julie, when I was a kid, there were an awful lot more creatures out there. Not just salmon, but cod looking at your toes, skates. You look down now …
Elaine; I remember a lot more snapper. The red color was very noticeable. Yeah, even a lot more recently than his childhood, I remember a lot of snapper. Oh, in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. The color was very glamorous and so it was easy to see. And there was cod all over at West Beach.
Bill: I hear that the no catch zone around Bear Island is coming back pretty well.
Elaine: Who told you that?
Bill: Derek A*. Saw all kinds of stuff out there. Like the old days.
Julie: I was talking to Carol S* who said that your two points used to have kelp forests out, out from the points?
Bill: Boy. She goes back a long way.
Elaine. She goes back further than we do. Did you say kelp?
Julie: Yeah.
Elaine. Oh yes. I remember kelp from not too far out here. Because Colin went after kelp in Souvenir in about 1968 or so. And he didn’t have to go out very far at all. He overloaded the boat, I remember that, and he got scared and he screamed for John. John went out in another boat and helped pull it in, because he had overloaded the boat.
Julie: What did he want? Why did he want the kelp?
Bill: To grow corn.
Elaine: For his garden. He used to grow corn every summer, and he was very good at it, because he cared about it.
Julie: John?
Elaine: No, this was Colin, our younger son. He was born in 1963, and he would have been … no later than 1970.
Bill: Julie, are kelp beds dying off too?
Julie: People have been very interested in eelgrass, so they’ve noticed that. Just recently they realized that up here there’s certain fish that don’t like eelgrass, they like kelp.
Elaine: As in kelp cod.
Julie: Yeah, so now they’re noticing that some kelp beds, like yours out here, are gone. But nobody has officially looked at them yet. Friends of the San Juans are doing a survey, trying to say what there is now.
Bill: I guess there probably is less kelp.
Elaine: Oh, there is less kelp. I know that. Colin would remember that, because he used to row around out there.
We had a brief discussion about phenols and surfactants in pond water
Julie: One of the things that I’m doing is interviewing people about stuff like the fish that used to be out here. Would you guys be willing?
Elaine: Oh, I don’t remember like Bill does, but I can remember maybe more than other people. I’ve been coming to W***n since ’62. And he’s been coming to W***n since, what, 1940? I think, around in there.
Bill: Would you ask the question again? I didn’t hear you.
Julie: Would you be willing to be interviewed about the stuff that used to be here and the changes that you’ve seen?
Bill: I would. We’re not going to go into sexual histories.
Julie: Yeah. I’m talking about natural history.
Elaine: She means natural history, bless her heart. She’s not writing a …
Julie: Which can get pretty sexy.
Elaine: Well, I guess. It can get racy at least.
9:53 Bill: I don’t really know that I have noticed very much. I wouldn’t even have noticed that the kelp was gone until it came up.
Elaine: I’ve been aware of that one. My memory is just what you would see if you looked down out of a boat or something like that.
Bill: There used to be a lot more stuff. Everything …
Elaine: I will agree with that. More of everything.
Bill: Sand dabs. It would look like the bottom of the bay and all of a sudden it would move and you knew it was the back of tiny little sand dabs. But yes, I would be willing to do that.
Elaine: I don’t any faith in the fact that I was looking very carefully.
Bill: Isn’t it true that the white spot on Skipjack where the seagull dung is, is smaller than it used to be?
Elaine: I don’t remember that. You may be right.
Bill: I think there’s less seagulls out there and that’s why the spot is shrinking in size.
Elaine: I saw something this morning that I have seen very few times. And that was that most all the gulls were on the beach instead of on the water. Now that may seem like a strange thing to observe but that’s what I saw this morning, and I thought, “What on earth? They’re up on the beach.” They were up on the beach right near Carol’s place.
Bill: Oh, but you see that sometimes.
Elaine: Not often. I mean, there were dozens. It was like a herring ball only they were up on the sand instead of out on the water.
Bill: Lunch was on the sand instead of out on the water.
Elaine: I don’t know what they were eating, I don’t know.
(more pond talk)
Julie: One of the things that Carol said was that the blackfish used to come every August.
Elaine: Oh, she was right. And the last of the blackfish … I might be able to give a date for, that I have seen. Let me think … I think it was ’96.
12:56 Julie: That’s relatively recent.
Elaine: Um hmm, that’s my point.
Julie: Dan C* remembers blackfish as being different than Orcas because they wasn’t any white on them. Carol says, well, they did have white.
Elaline: Oh, I remember white.
Bill: They’ve all got white spots. All the Orcas have white spots on their bellies.
Elaine: I remember white. Sometimes they were pretty far away but they were very unmistakable. You could hear them, you could see them, you could see the water spouts. The whole thing was very apparent, you weren’t mistaken. They might be out as far out as say the other side of Skipjack from our beach. That’s quite a ways to see the white always. I can’t remember ever seeing them when they didn’t have the white.
Bill: I stood on Skipjack once when an Orca went by and you could see the white very clearly. There’s a huge increase in seals and otters. You never used to see any.
Elaine: Well, now that’s sort of true and sort of not true. It’s very true about the increase in seals. And the increase in otters has all come … It was up and then it went way down and then it’s gone up again, straight up. And that, I think, had to do with, there was a bounty on them when we were first here in the ‘60’s.
Bitte Baer M*, the great “conservationist,” lobbied to get the bounty removed. When the bounty was removed the population just immediately started to rise. You can get the date on that, I don’t know it specifically. I thought it was in the ‘70’s but I could be wrong.
Julie: And the bounty was there because they eat fish, or ?
Elaine: Yeah, they ate salmon.
Bill: It was also a way to make a little money.
Elaine: It was a way to make a little money, that’s very true. But the philosophical reason was that they ate salmon. That was how I think the bounty was legitimated. I don’t know what the bounty was, I don’t think it was a whole lot, but I people were glad to get the money. I don’t know how long the bounty had been on, I assume for quite a while. But I’m sure that that is something that is on the records: When did the bounty go on, what are the records about how the otter population went down?
Then when the ‘60s came along and people got very sentimental about preservation of species etc, and Bitte being the person she was, she was a very dynamic, forceful person, she just said, “Why this is ridiculous, we want these darling otters.” She very quickly got the thing … I assume it was quick. I heard all this. This is all hearsay. Who knows what really happened? It would have to be researched. The county ought to have some record of it, you’d think they would. But there was a very noticeable rise when the bounty went off. They were never a problem when we first came here in the ‘60’s. The boats stayed clean.
Bill: We never even saw an otter.
Elaine: We didn’t see otters.
Bill: Obviously the mom and dad were lurking around in some obscure place because the population came back.
Elaine: Yeah, but believe me, they were not apparent. Of course, they’re a nightmare now as far as we’re concerned, absolute nightmare.
Julie: Because of the boat?
Elaine: The boats are filthy all the time. I would love to have the bounty go back on. I would love it. I have no love for them. I used to. They were cute, and all that, but to hell with them as far as I’m concerned. They’re smelly, they’re dirty, they’re filthy, they get into everything.
17:46 Bill: Everybody in Cowlitz Bay has got them. You go out there and there’s four or five fish heads.
Elaine: You have to clean the boats out and it makes you want to vomit, it’s just sickening. And then of course they come up on the land and they want to get in under your house. We’ve had to put wire around that little cabin down there, completely, so they wouldn’t … It’s a horrible little cabin with no basement of course, it’s filthy. The otters had lived in there when we first bought it.
Bill: They had their babies.
Elaine: They had their babies. They tried to get in up here, they tried to get in the woodshed. There was one in the barn, Bill panicked, he came in and he said, “There’s an otter, a mother otter in the barn,” He was scared to death she was going to “foal,” or whatever you call it (general laughter), up in the barn. So they really are not pleasant. I’d love to see them cut back. I don’t want to have the whole outfit killed off, but then there’s a line in there and it’s obviously very brittle.
Bill: I saw a mink at the Cut (the Ditch) once.
Elaine: That’s what you said. I’ve never seen mink around here, by the way.
Bill: I’ve never seen mink around here.
Elaine: We saw a lot of mink up off the coast of British Columbia. We went up to …
Bill: Barclay Sound.
Elaine: Barclay Sound one summer when our kids were young. We had a wonderful trip. But believe me, the mink were breeding like mink. They were all over and cute as could be. They had the funniest little high toned voice, it was just an amazing little sound. But boy, they took the place.
Bill: Julie, there used to be herring about that long.
Elaine: Oh yeah.
Julie: Like a foot?
Elaine: No, 8 inches.
Bill: Eight inches. It would have been a flood tide, we went out between Skipjack and little Skippy out there on flood. You could just fill up a washtub in no time.
Elaine: Give her the dates on that, because it was before my time.
20:24 Bill: I did it with my dad.
Elaine: Well, I know, so it was probably the 1940’s.
Bill: Something like that. Are these stories you’ve heard a thousand times? Are we boring the hell out of you?
20:39 Julie: They dovetail with the other stories but they’re new.
Bill: Who was the old guy who lived off of … jigged herring over there in Cowlitz Bay … was a water witcher and commiserated with me because I couldn’t make the stick work and said, “Bill, you’re the first man I’ve known who has no electricity?”
Elaine: Oh … His name was Wood.
Bill: Ralph Wood. He used to live off these same herring, jigging them in Cowlitz. I think he went out to, there’s a little rock out there. He would jig these things, I guess he smoked them and sold them.
21:30 Elaine: Well, Norman got them out here in the late 1950’s. Norman McDonald, and smoked them. After they were smoked, they’d shrink a little, so they were 7 to 8 inches, I’d say.
He had us to a lunch one day. He had gotten them out here, the place you’re talking about, I think. He’d smoked them up here. He built a pit down in under the ground, in a tunnel kind of, and then he smoked them, with the smoke coming out of that tunnel, on a screen. He served them to us for lunch.
That would have been … It was in 1958.
Julie: You’re good!
Bill: She’s real good on dates.
Elaine: I’m good on dates.
Bill: You’d have maybe eight or nine bright hooks.
Elaine: Right, I’ve seen those.
Bill: Jigs. And you’d put that thing down, you’d move it up and down a couple of times, and by god, there’d be six or eight fish on it.
Elaine: And your daddy used to polish those hooks with a felt treated thing that you were supposed to clean silver with. I watched him do it, shining the hooks. Glitter, that was the lure.
23:21 Bill: And then there used to be a run of white king. I keep talking about that run of white king.
Elaine: That was pretty late in the summer. White king, we got a huge one and smoked it in this little … what we now call the box house, which originally was a smoke house thing. We smoked that in … I can get the year on that one too …
Bill: Do you realize what you’re witnessing here?
Elaine: Wait a minute … I can tell you by how old the kids were, is what I’m going on. That would have been in … pretty close to ’64. That was a white king run.
24:17 Bill: It was August or September.
Elaine: It was August I’d say, because we had people in school. We would have had to be back in town by Labor Day. It was August.
Bill: It had to be August. It was an unusual time for a king run, it was a very definite phenomenon.
Elaine: It was the best salmon I’ve ever tasted, the white kings.
Bill: Very fat.
Elaine: You’ve probably had them. You still get them. I mean, the fish buyers can get them. I don’t know about Mr. von R* but I imagine he gets them sometimes.
24: 55 Bill: Well, I don’t know. That run has disappeared.
Elaine: Well, that’s what they say.
Bill: It’s not out there anymore. I don’t know what river it went up. The Fraser River?
Elaine: May have been, or the Nooksack, I don’t know that either. That would be interesting to find out, if the Nooksack had had anything like that.
Bill: We ran into a guy in Bellingham, who said that he was running a hatchery and he had white king.
Elaine: He was trying to get them going again.
25:29 Bill: I don’t think there’s any fewer eagles now than there were, I think there are more.
Elaine: They’re more, a lot more.
Bill: I don’t know why more eagles.
Elaine: I think that has to do with the eggs being protected from chemicals, among other things. I don’t know what Julie thinks about it. You probably know more than I do about that.
25:50 Julie: No, I think you’re right.
Elaine. I think that was it. We could see it happen. After they took that off the market …
Bill: What was it, DN whatever it was …
Julie: DDT.
Elaine: Yeah.
Bill: ... it was supposed to thin the shells of birds, DND, or whatever it was? Didn’t there used to be more of those little birds that have red feet?
Elaine: Oh, the Puffins. Tufted Puffins. Absolutely. Loads more.
Julie: I’ve never seen one here.
Elaine: Well, they were gorgeous. Not gorgeous, they were just stunning, charming. They had the most wonderful way of moving across the water. Not on it, and not in it. They literally could skim. They were wonderfully colored, and they had the remarkably noticeable beaks. They were really handsome little creatures, and there were a lot of them. They were abundant in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. And then, I think the changes there came pretty early. They were fewer, and then I think you could see a few, maybe into the early ‘80’s, but I’m not sure that it was very many. It might have been the ‘70’s when they really began to wane. But they were still very abundant in the ‘60’s when we first brought the children up here. The most were in the ‘50’s, because I’d never seen them in my life before, until we used to fish over at Orcas, when we were still staying with your folks in the summertime. They were charmers.
27:57 Bill: If anything we’ve got more owls than we used to.
Elaine: I don’t know. We have an awful lot of Barred Owls, which we didn’t even have five years ago, over here. You may notice those at your place. They’re very abundant. I’m surprised at how they’ve multiplied, but I guess that’s a move from the East Coast all the way across the continent, from what I’ve read. Can you imagine? What a trip, what a trip!
Julie: I haven’t done that trip, it’s too far.
Elaine: What a trip! Too good! I love to think about it! They’re moving out! As Jean V* told me about three years ago, that they had barred owls in their backyards where they live in Maryland. So they’re all the way across the continent now, and I think pretty well spread.
Bill: I imagine too, that there’s nowhere near as many dogfish as there used to be.
Elaine: Did you ever tell Julie about your great war effort?
29:05 Bill: About to. You may know that the dogfish liver … At the time of World War II, there was no oil that would hold up in the North. Airplanes needed oil in very cold temperatures. They used dogfish livers to make that oil. Probably this was a little window of time, and I imagine that shortly after that they came up with another way of making this oil. Anyway, for a while during the war you could catch dogfish and sell them. You ended up making about 35 cents a dogfish or something. Ralph Wood had one up in Cowlitz Bay, and I had one over … there were a lot of them … I had one on the West side of Orcas. You put down a hundred hooks and you would get about 90 dogfish. I mean, just every hook was taken. Then I used to see schools of dogfish when we were just messing around with the boats. I haven’t seen one in years and years and years.
Elaine: I can remember in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, going fishing for salmon, and caching nothing but what you called “doggies,” all the time you were out. You were incessantly having to pull them up, get them off the hook, throw them back, and get rid of them, because you really wanted a salmon for supper. So they were very abundant, and I have no idea what’s happened to them. Do you hear about it? Does David run into it?
Julie: No, no one’s talked about it.
Elaine: See? That’s just a huge difference.
Bill: I’m wondering if there aren’t more Dungeness Crab out there than there used to be.
30:55 Elaine: I do too.
Julie: Carol said that they never ate crab. They just weren’t interested.
Bill: I know it. Did she think they were there?
Julie: I didn’t ask.
Bill: Apparently there’s all kinds of them out there, as David knows.
Elaine: I would even think that David has noticed a difference since he has been working these waters. Because from my observation, they’ve greatly increased in the last five to ten years, and he’s been there all that time.
Bill: You’d think that if there had been a crab fishery, as there is now, we would have seen it. I mean, now, we see crab pots out there …
Elaine: I think that Carol S* is on to something. It was simply not a de rigeur food as much back when she was young, ‘cause she’s even older than I am, poor darling. My memory is not of hearing a lot about it, people eating crab. Now, they ate crab in San Francisco and Charleston and Baltimore and so on.
Bill: Maybe you’re right.
Elaine: But I don’t think our native people were very interested in eating crab. I could be wrong about that. Carol’s grandmother was really an Indian woman, wasn’t she? Do you remember her at all? I don’t. Margaret’s mother, Mrs. L*, isn’t it?
32:38 Bill: She was dead before I …
Elaine: Yeah. So, there’s a true Indian precedent for food ideas, perhaps. Although Margaret, gosh, she was just a good cook. She made the best maple bars you ever put in your mouth.
Bill: I think Margaret’s second husband …
Elaine: No, you’re not talking about her second husband, she only had one. Mrs. L*’s second whatever.
Bill: The guy who fed the quarry from halibut caught out here …
Elaine: Well, that was Margaret’s father. His name was … he was Finnish, what was his name?
Bill: K*.
Elaine: K*, that would be Carol’s grandfather. Did Carol go into any of this?
Julie: It was a very short interview.
Bill: Well, Margaret’s father would take halibut down to the quarrymen. There was a hole out here, quite a ways out, somewhere West of Skipjack.
Elaine: Well, Lynn D* knew about that hole, and I’m sure that Bill C* did too. But Lynn D* knew about that hole because I remember him talking about it. A halibut hole. I never remember that going on when Lynn and Mary were still living in Danni’s house. It was their house, not Danni’s, but anyhow, it was their house then. But he talked about it as a younger person, getting halibut there quite readily.
Bill: It sounded to me as though Margaret’s father ..
Elaine; I think he had access to a lot of halibut. Absolutely. That’s what they said.
Bill: It seems to me that nobody one even tried here lately. I don’t even know where the hole is.
Elaine: You were trying to get Lynne to describe it to you years ago.
Bill: And I didn’t get very far.
Elaine: You didn’t get very far. We felt that there was some private material. The people, the old folks didn’t want to spread the word to all the young interlopers. We were interlopers at that point.
Bill: You could find it with a depth finder now.
Elaine: Um hm. It’s possible that some of the C* boys would know from their dad.
I think that the fish situation has really changed tremendously, just since I’ve been coming, which was from ’62 on.
35:44 Julie: I think those were the really bad years for wildlife.
Elaine: Oh, they were. It was terrible, sure.
Bill: Julie, you act as though things were better since then.
Julie: I think some things have improved and the things that have gone extinct are gone. There’s more eagles and more otters, there’s herring in Cowlitz.
Bill: You have herring in Cowlitz? Little ones or big ones? (Julie gestures 5”) You got them that big? I think they are a different species from the …
Elaine: I didn’t know that. That’s interesting.
Julie: Yeah, we did a net pull, four days ago, something like that. We got maybe 1,000 fish. There were about 400 or 500 herring, and 40 pinks …
Bill: Forty pink salmon?
Julie: Little ones, and a number of chinook, but I didn’t stay long enough to get the count on the chinook. And then the other, maybe 400 fish got away. The net was just full of them.
37:14 Bill: This is a beach seine. It’s only legal for scientific purposes. You can’t do it to eat.
Julie: No. There were lots of fish. Some people said that was new.
Bill: That’s good. Yeah, I would say that’s new, but not that we’ve really tried.
Elaine: I was going to say, we used to fish, and we don’t fish any more. Unless you’re out there pretty often fishing, you don’t get a picture.
Bill: We quit fishing when … they say that there were two layers of salmon. There were the salmon that you could catch when you put on, say, up to 6 or 8 ounces of lead so that your line might be … oh, at most 15 feet below the surface. And then below that, there was another …. all the time that we were up here fishing, there were these deeper salmon, which then people had to go after with these great big balls of lead that would bounce along the bottom and got caught on rocks all the time. So I never really got into that deep strata, and it wasn’t really necessary until we began to run out of the shallower stuff.
38:45 Elaine: ’84.
Bill: That about it?
Elaine: Right on. I know that. Because that was the last summer we got a lot of good fish. That was the summer that David B* stayed with us.
Bill: Yeah. You know, as I’ve said many, many times, if you had a lot of salmon in these waters, it would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. They were a terrific boon, and they were also a big economic factor. There were people running resorts, and it was marvelous. A lot of fun!
Now, the C*’s, we here talk about beach seining. They just used to leave a net out. It may have been legal then. At night, and then in the morning the tide went out and there’d be a salmon or two in the net. You didn’t even have to get in the boat.
39:59 Elaine: I would like to have seen that. I never saw that. I heard people talk about it, but I’ve never seen it.
Bill: I wonder if there’s any pheasants left on Orcas Island? We used to go pheasant hunting.
Elaine: Pheasants? I haven’t heard of them. I wouldn’t know, you could ask.
Julie: Is that something they stocked there, or were they natural?
Bill: These were wild, they were wild pheasants, They were in Crow Valley then.
Elaine: You don’t think they got away from a domestic …
Bill: They might have.
Elaine: How many would there have been? Do you want to come up with a wild guess?
Bill: Oh, I would have no way of putting a number on it. But every old countryman would take his shotgun and go out and get … Wonderful meat. And a nice thing to do on a September day.
Just thinking about the various dimensions of wildlife. We used to see more Orcas. We would see an occasional true whale. I don’t know that the porpoise population is different.
Elaine: I don’t think it’s very different, but I don’t know. Just going between here and the Cut, which a lot of people call The Ditch, Brant’s landing, that’s where David takes us and picks us up when we come and go with our big loads. I can’t tell any difference in that. It’s pretty steady, pretty steady. And I don’t know why that would be steady whereas the bigger guys keep failing. Whether it’s food … must be just food. Who knows? I’m sure people have ideas about it.
Bill: Then along South of West Beach, there along those rocks on the way to …
Elaine: Deer Harbor
Bill Well, I was trying to think of the name of that point, that first point down there.
Elaine: Soderburg.
Bill: Soderburg Point, yeah. There used to be ling cod that long (just under three feet). I gather those things are 40 years old, some of them. Those are very very old fish.
Elaine: Well, Walter H* used to pull those ling cod up the beach. He’d get them and then he’d get them out of his boat somehow and pull them up the beach. I’ve seen him pulling them like that.
Bill: Just huge things. And then he’d can them, and if you can think of anything worse than cod canned by …
Elaine: Well, I can’t think of anything worse than canned cod, but anyhow. (general laughter) But there was a lot of meat. And when anybody would bring in a ling cod down at the resort down there, well, that was usually cut up and shared, people staying in the cabins.
Bill: It was too much for one person.
Elaine: Unless they were going to can them, it was an inedible amount of fish.
Bill: I think it weighed forty or fifty pounds, a lot of them.
Elaine: Yeah, there were a lot of ling cod.
Bill: Now, they’re rare, because they do get so old. You’re using up fifty years of living if you catch ling cod that big.
Elaine; So that was just overfishing, is what you’re saying. They fished those things out.
Bob W*, Summer 2007 · 875 days ago by Julie Loyd
Bob: I think this was one of the better places in the entire Northwest for herring. Of course, they fished it out.
:14 Julie: You remember that boat that came in, the Blue Horizon?
Bob: Oh yeah, The Blue Pacific. I’d row out there and the gulls would be around this boat, oh just a thousand gulls diving around there, it was rather an exciting time. I’d row out there and they’d say, “You want some herring?” and I’d say, “I just happened to have this washtub with me here.” They’d give me a bucket full of herring, they had herring just spilling out all over the boat.
:49 Julie: So now, the herring I’ve seen are about 6 inches.
Bob: That’s what I understand now. They were nice herring, about ten inches, something like that. Maybe a little longer, some of them. They were not huge. But boy, it was more fun fishing for those than anything else. You didn’t use any bait, you just had a little shiny hook, no barbs, and you’d just have a little short leader about five or six inches long and you’d tie them up on a leader, a fish line.
1:25 Julie: Lots of different hooks.
Bob: Yeah, oh, about seven or eight, that was about the standard number, far enough apart so they don’t catch into each other. The reason you’d have that short leader on there, when you jig the line up and down, the little short leader will flash the hook. You had a weight on the end of the line and you’d just go down to the bottom of the bay and then reel up a ways and jig a while there, and reel up a little farther. After a while you’d get in them and you just leave it in there when they’re biting like that. Once in a while you’d get a full house. But normally around two, three, four, something like that.
I used to have the dog with me, and he learned to know that when I was reeling up, there was something was going to happen. He’d put his feet right up there on the gunnels, watching those fish coming out of the water, he thought that was great stuff.
2:29 Julie: I bet you did too.
Bob: Then you’d be out of the herring, they would leave where you were. We’d start in fishing usually the big tides in June, those were the best herring tides. We’d start in up at Disney. There’d be a tide line approximately from Point Disney going towards in the general direction of Sandy Point.
You’d just stay on that tide line and watch for the gulls. Billy C*, he called them “bugs,” they were in the water, I think they were copepods, there were just jillions of them. There’d be a big brown cloud of these creatures. And then the herring’d be right in there, and then the gulls would be there and then these diving ducks that were down below, and it was a big turmoil.
Do you remember when those little fish were in down at the dock a few years ago? Just little guys?
3:52 Julie: Sand lance, candlefish? Tubesnouts? Eulachon? Anchovy?
Bob: Yeah, I think that was it. There were jillions of those too, a big cloud of anchovies, and there’d be a seal down there, just wallowing right through them, and then those diving ducks and the seagulls were there. Right down there where the dock meets the land, it was right close to shore.
4:33 Julie: I haven’t seen any diving ducks for a few years now.
Bob: They’re the ones that bring the herring up. When you have a herring ball, it’s the ducks that bring them up There might be just two ducks down there, and every time they move their wings, they got some white on the fore part of their wings, and with every stroke of their wings the fish just go like that, you know.
5:01 Julie: Up. That’s really clever.
Bob: Well, they fished the bay out of herring of course. That was in the 60’s, so it’s been quite a while for them to come back, if in fact that’s what they’re doing. I think you guys are right. I think you’re probably observing it correctly.
5:27 Julie: The last time we did a beach seine, we caught chinook, little ones, and Tina Wyllie-Echeverria says there are also lots of herring. The herring are on the bottom and the chinook are on the top.
Bob: I remember looking over the side of the boat and if the herring were up near the surface, it was just a big flashing silver mirror down there, just continuous, just everywhere, they were just right next to each other (laughs)
The old timers, you know, at Fishery Point, that’s where they smoked herring a lot. TheC*rbunch, there was somebody else over at Fishery Point, I can’t remember their name. But they took the smoked herring over to Victoria by sailboat, that’s where they sold them. They might have gone to Bellingham too, I don’t know, but they did go to Victoria.
I think North Bay was also a big herring bay, but I’m not as familiar with that bay over there for herring.
6:51 Julie It’s not as cupped.
Bob: What else did they have around here that we don’t have anymore?
7:01 Julie: How about the whales?
Bob: I’ve not seen as many whales, we used to see the Orca. When the A*’s lived down here at the Point, they saw some of the bigger whales. Minke? There used to be a lot of Orca here in the bay here. They’d slap around and occasionally you’d see one clear the water completely, when they come up. I was out there in a little rowboat one time the first year we were here …
7:44 Julie: Which was when?
Bob: Oh, in the fall of ’55. I was out there, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by these fish, these blackfish. I was positively … I was really frightened, I tell you. I just sat there, they were just cavorting around, all around the boat. These monsters, you know, they’d come up and they’d blow their breath out …
8:15 Julie: Can you smell that?
Bob: I guess you could, but I can’t say that I have, but I think that you could if you were in the right … They blow out just a little bit before they surface. That’s what the spout is. The spout is the compressed air picking up the sea water when they blow. They don’t have that moisture in their lungs of course. They start exhaling just before they get to the top and the moment they’re out, they’re inhaling. So they get it quick enough, so they don’t get a mug full of saltwater.
9:06 Julie: They were here for herring probably?
Bob: I think so. I’m sort of ignorant about what the whales do. I know they eat seal. I think when they’re in the abundance of herring, when they’re in a pack of herring, they probably take them in.
Julie: It’s hard to imagine them. Looking out your window, it’s hard to imagine whales out there.
Bob: Yeah. We were coming from Indiana, it was pretty startling, being among a bunch of whales.
9:51 Julie: Were you able to tie the disappearance of the whales to any event?
Bob. No, I don’t really know why they don’t show up here anymore. The last several years I’ve just not heard any … We used to hear them slapping around frequently. I guess they slap with their side fins. Probably upon occasion with their tail too.
10:24 Julie: The diving ducks you mentioned, do you have any idea what kind?
Bob: No I don’t, I’ve not been very excited about looking them up. When you see them, they really can cover the territory rapidly underneath the water.
Julie: You can look down and see them?
Bob: Well yeah, when they’re amongst fish. They just go like a dart. They have to be streamlined so that when they bring their wings forward it doesn’t block them off, their stroke is backstroke to make them go forward. They’re streamlined for that. It’s sort of like a design on a big ship. You got a sort of bulbous bow and the tail goes back. Like a fish. They have the least resistance that way, I guess.
Well, that isn’t very much information about …
11:43 Julie: It’s just right. Another thing I know you’re really interested in is gardening. You can talk about that.
Bob: I came from a long line of gardeners. I come from the Mennonites, they always settled where the soil is good. They went to the Ukraine in Russia. They went there because they were opposed to war and they wanted to get out of Austria. Catherine the Great let them come up there. They got this black dirt in the Ukraine. In fact, there’s a commemorative stamp of them bringing that wheat over here. It’s what they call the Turkey Red wheat. It’s real heavy. A sack of that wheat will weigh 145 pounds, it’s real dense. Anyway, they brought it over here from Russia. They finally got annihilated over there during the rise of the Communists. They had big farms in Russia.
And then they’re settled in Pennsylvania of course, where the black dirt is. There’s some spots in Colorado. Of course, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois. They dealt with the soil. They were farmers.
I don’t think much about what I’m doing in the garden, I just kind of do it like my dad did or my mom. My mom was the gardener for the kitchen table, but my dad raised the corn and potatoes and the cabbage, in pretty big quantities. The gardeners here on the island, B* and Rebecca and those guys, they got to know what they’re doing or they’ll go broke.
13:58 Julie: Yeah, but there’s traditional things that people do that a scientist would never think of studying, that turns out to be just right.
Bob: Yeah, my dad had what they called a shovel plow. He had two blades on it, and it made a furrow in which you could plant potatoes. He’d just plant potatoes in that trench, it’s just about the right depth for planting potatoes.
Of course then, we had the old corn cultivator, the same kind that Ken A* had for his horses. You’d straddle a row and you’d have your feet in a couple of stirrups and you can turn the wheels a little bit with your feet. You can dodge past the corn plants so you don’t wipe ‘em out. They used to plant what they call a check row corn. They’d have a wire stretched across the field that would have knots in it about every three feet. Then the corn planter, when it come to one of those knots, it’d plant the corn. When you got to the end of the field and got ahold of this wire, you had a big stake on it. You got to stretch the wire just about the same way each time. And then you’d go back and the wire was placed a certain distance over every time. Then you could cultivate both ways. Nowadays they don’t cultivate anymore, they use spray to keep the weeds down.
16:17 Julie: Unless they’re organic.
Bob: I don’t know what the organic ones do. All through the years you had to keep changing your machinery to go with what was coming up. Your older stuff was not economical to have just a two row corn planter, you had to have a four row corn planter. And then you had to have a picker-sheller. And then you had to have a kiln (?) to dry the corn. All this stuff, you just can’t keep up with it. I don’t know how the agriculture people can manage.
17:04 Julie: I think Big Business, they’ve just got a lot of capital.
Bob. The big guys, they just get a lot of subsidies. They get subsidies for crops that are over-abundant.
Anyway, I’ve always been interested in putting stuff in the ground and having it grow. That was just something you did. I don’t get down in the garden as much as I should be.
17:45 Julie: If our gardens had a contest, yours would win.
Bob: Back east, we had thunderstorms, usually, that would … We didn’t use irrigation on our farm. Of course now and then, we’d get drouthed out. Now all the big guys, they’ve got huge irrigation systems, big pipes and a great circle thing that makes a big circle of irrigated territory. You could see those from the airplanes when you’re flying across the country, you see these big green circles.
18:22 Julie: They’re really dramatic, aren’t they?
Bob: It takes a lot of money to get that stuff operating. And a big fat fuss too. There’s always something going wrong with it.
I was in the milk business for quite a while, I was a sanitarian that inspected the farms. The farmers those days, they were going through a big transition period of going into getting refrigerated bulk tanks in their milk houses. That milk is kept at about, oh, 34, 36 degrees, and when there were bacteria in the milk, when it’s milk, they don’t multiply, and when you get it in the milk house that is at low temperature, they just don’t multiply. ‘Course, that’s not the best philosophy of keeping clean milk. You should have the milk that goes in there clean too. But it’s my philosophy that there’s hardly any milk that doesn’t have cow manure in it. The very second that it comes out of the cow, there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip on that stuff. That’s when it gets contaminated right away.
19:48 Julie: I used to keep goats. I don’t think we ever had milk without hair in it.
Bob: They’re cleaner than cows, though. Cows have got this slimy manure. You just have to have good management to keep from lying down in it, and so on and so on. Subsequently just about all of them gets some manure on that udder. And then the washing job is always relative. These guys in the milking parlor, they got a hundred cows, they got to run through there quick as they can. You know the washing job on that udder is pretty sketchy. But, pasteurization easily kills the pathogens from that source. The ones pasteurization doesn’t kill are from dirty equipment. Where you got residues of dirty milk, left in a rubber hose or something, that bacteria count is .. See, that hose and what-not goes through a washing process, and those bugs that’re in there, they become resistant to heat. These are the thermodurics, they call them, they can withstand heat. You can pasteurize milk that’s got those in it, and they’re still there. So when you test milk, you have two tests, raw count and pasteurized count. If the raw count is high, that’s not so tricky. You can have a raw count on the milk but the pasteurized count will be pretty good. But that shows you that the pasteurization gets rid of those that don’t have that thermoduric capability. But the big thing is, milk ought to be pretty clean before it’s pasteurized.
I noticed on the computer yesterday they had an article about drinking raw milk somewhere. I wanted to put a note on the thing, I couldn’t get it to come up right so I gave up on it. It’s sort of startling to realize that just about all milk has cow manure in it. But if it’s produced fairly well, refrigerated and pasteurized, it’s not too dangerous.
22:45 Julie: What we’d try to do, we made cheese and we’d just take it straight from the goat and into the cheese pot and make it right then and there. The theory was that whatever awful things it had in it didn’t have a chance to multiply.
Bob: Aged cheese, it looses its potential for causing trouble. I think it’s got to be aged six months, this is for these hard cheeses, aged cheese. Isa down there, she produces some cheese. I’ve tasted, boy it’s really good stuff. She’s got various bacterial strains, starters.
Well, we’re getting off our subject here.
Bob: Chuck L* was trying to clue me in about how you have to operate out here. We just came out here, we didn’t have the slightest idea how you function on this island. We didn’t know where to get water, we didn’t know whether we could have a garden. For the fuel business, Chuck said we could get bark for our fuel. We lived where the M*’s house is now, that first year we were here, we rented that.
Julie: On the North Beach?
Bob: Yeah. We had this stove, it had a special draft thing on the door, it was automatic. It was a very popular stove. There wasn’t any insulation in that house, you could see out about anywhere, through the boards. We had a little pile of bark outside, oh, about six feet high. It was a sizable amount of bark, Chuck thought that might do us through the winter. Well, we had four Northeasters that winter and it just piled through that house. We were always standing right around this stove.
1:27 Julie: That was like living at M*’s.
Bob: Oh, that gets it right straight there. You’ve experienced that then.
1:37: Julie: Yeah. It was cold.
Bob: Anyway we got our fuel mainly by just chipping the bark off of stumps. Now and then we could pull the bark off of a snag. Sometimes you’d remove the bark on the lower part of a snag, the whole bunch would fall out and you had to watch out so you didn’t get clobbered. There was a great big snag right near where the airport is now. It had loose bark around the bottom, big slabs of loose bark. I cleared a little place in the brush where I could run. I had a long pole and I shoved it in that bark and then I had a pretty good lever. I started running up that trail that I’d blazed and all of a sudden this whole thing came down in just one great crash. It was a very foolish move that I made there. But I had four great big trailerloads of bark, this great heavy dense of dense bark, that was just dry as a bone.
2:52: Julie: So when you’re saying “big snag” ...
Bob; Oh, this was a tree, what’ll I say, three feet in diameter, something like that, it was a big tree, thick bark. I did get a winter’s supply of wood out of that one. That was a dangerous thing to do. And I had no experience with … The first couple years we were here we didn’t have a chainsaw, I just had a crosscut saw. When I built this house here I didn’t have any machinery, I just had a saw and a hatchet and an axe and a wedge. I had one of those big crosscut saws you know when you’re supposed to have a person on each end. Well, the kids would get on the other end. One of them would tucker out and the next one would try it and that’s the way we got the wood cut. Of course, now everything’s chainsaw. Dangerous arrangement. That’s about the most dangerous tool that anybody has ever devised. Now I don’t have enough strength in my arms to start the silly thing. I guess that’s a good thing.
4:13 Julie Most people I know have had some kind of near miss with their chain saw.
Bob: Coming over on the mail boat, all the specialized little things it takes to do on an island were very new to us. ‘Course we don’t think anything about it now, the mail, the boat … We used to have a better service on the water for freight than we do now. Bill C*r had a big Bristol which was 64 feet long, It was an Alaska fish boat. He’d get cement and lumber and stuff, they’d have it on pallets and he’d just hoist it up with his winch over the top and swing it over and drop it on the dock. Well, we didn’t have to lug stuff around, we’d just … Of course, when that boat sank, we had to change to different arrangements.
5:25: Julie: It sank?
Bob: Yeah, he had an automatic pilot on it. Oh, it was a grand old boat, it was a very old boat. It had a big galley. You could seat maybe 12 people around the table in the galley, and it had a stove in there going all the time. The deck hand, Dutch A* was his name, he was a real good cook, he’d serve you up stuff. They brought the mail. They were written up in Sunset Magazine about that freight boat. And then people’d start coming up. They had a big afterdeck, a big open space. They had chairs all around on that thing. People were coming up from California and whatnot to go on this old funky fish boat on this mail run and they’d make the tour around the islands. I think they even went to Stuart upon occasion. Now and then Billy would have a fast little boat, he would park the Bristol here and then he’d buzz over to Stuart on his little fast boat. Maybe he’d stop out here and catch a few herring on the way. (laughs)
But anyway, he had an automatic pilot on the boat. I think it was the night before Thanksgiving, I can’t remember the exact situation but there was a holiday right there. It was in the dark. He was going back to Anacortes with the mail on that boat. It was a round trip to Anacortes. He was in that big channel …
7:31 Julie: Rosario?
Bob: Yeah, Rosario. I think it was anyway. I think it was near an island called Sinclair maybe, within that region. Of course it was dark. He stepped outside, he had the radar going. This boat had a great big diesel engine. He got an oil can, I think so he could lubricate some valve, something about the valves, from just standing beside the engine. He looked out there and just right smack dab in front of the boat was this great big barge full of sawdust. It was actually the second barge. The tug that was pulling this thing had two barges on it, and Billy hit the second one. He made a dive for the wheelhouse. He was just right beside the wheelhouse when he looked up there and saw that barge.
8:39:‘Course he couldn’t do anything, the boat just hit the barge at full blast. I think the whole bow fell off the thing. The boat sank very quickly. They had a little old dinghy on the boat, it was not a very substantial thing. Well anyway, it was all shattered. Both Dutch and Billy got ahold a couple of the strakes off that boat to hold them up. Well, the guy on the tugboat, he realized that the barge got hit somehow, I don’t know how he knew that, maybe he saw them coming. It took him quite a while to release his cable from those barges. He had to try and come around and get these guys.
That took about 30 minutes. Dutch A* was a thin guy but Billy, he had a little stuff under his skin everywhere. He had to keep encouraging Dutch to hang in there, “Hang in there, stay up, he’s gonna get us, he’s gonna get us.” I guess they made it, but Dutch A* said he was never gonna take a bath again. (laughs) But there they were in that cold water for about a half hour. Of course, all the mail went down. This was some time before Christmas, and there was a bunch of mail going out, it was was going to go to Europe and so on, it was people sending stuff over there to their relatives or whatever. These mail bags they kept rising up over down by the bottom end of Lopez down there somewhere somebody would find a mailbag somewhere, days, weeks, later. I don’t know all the details but that was quite a story about all these mailbags and all the stuff that got lost.
So the Postal Department they said no more boats, so they started flying the mail in. Then after a while, we subsequently had this ruckus with Bill C*n. He was going to have a plat over on the airport, the Airport Plat, and we worked on the Commissioners rather unmercifully. (laughs) It was the first plat they ever turned down. Bill C*n got pissed at that and he shut the airstrip down. That’s where our mail was coming from.
So I told Tony, Tony’s dad knew the postmaster over at Anacortes, and I said, “Tony, why don’t you get that job of bringing the mail over?” Well, the Postal Department, they went back to boats again. So Tony got that job after Billy shut off the airport. Of course, that’s sort of a historic event.
12: 27 Julie: It’s all good.
Bob: It was a big thing when it happened. Franny L* was Billy C*r’s wife when the Bristol went down. Jim L*, we were living in the school cottage at that time, he just burst in the door that day and said, “Billy lost the Bristol.” You see, Jim was a sea captain and he would use that terminology, “Billy lost the Bristol.” It was a big thing. ‘Course, it was a big thing. It was pretty nice riding on that boat. We got all our big iron stoves, all our heavy stuff, we got it on the Bristol. ‘Cause they could pick it up, they didn’t have to wrassle with stuff, they could pick it up on the pallets.
And, one thing we used to do, there were very few people on the island, and in the fall like right now we’d start stealing apples. You know, up there behind the old airstrip, I think that was the old Raehorst farm, there were a couple of old-time Gravenstein apples up there, and boy, they were just beauties. Nobody was … they were not being harvested at all.
Julie: That’s my favorite apple.
Bob: The Tiburgers, they had some special trees here and there that nobody else knew about, some apricots and whatnot, and hazlenuts. (laugh)
Julie: It’s like mushrooms.
Bob: But that’s the way we used to get our apples, scrounge through the woods, off the beach. Bark and whatnot. We used to get a lot of wood up on the mountain. We’d go way up there from that logging operation. Now and then you’d find an old downed tree that had been there for a long time that still had a lot of bark on it.
14:46 Julie: When you say “go,” did you have a truck?
Bob: I had a car with a big trailer. That trailer now is used for the local bar here at the … The words, they just escape me anymore, I want to say something and I can’t say the word. That’s my old-timer’s disease.
15:22 Julie: I’ve been noticing that in myself.
Bob: You’re too young for that.
Julie: Yeah, that’s what I tell myself.
Bob: I like the outfit that Camilla had at that little play. She had that long scarf or something around her neck, draping down to the floor. I thought that was rather unique.
15:47 Julie: She likes drama in her clothing.
Bob: Yeah, yeah. Well, she can carry it off, too. It works okay with her.
One thing I’ve been noticing this year is that … Chris noticed it too on the north side. You know, the kids, they used to have bed shakes over on the north side, there’d be a little plateau of sand up above high tide. Quite a bit of territory. Boy, it’s not there anymore. I don’t know if that’s just a little brief interlude here and it’ll go back to the way it was or not. I had a house guest here the other day and he went down to the Point and he had difficulty getting back on this side.
It always used to be, even at the high tide, there’d still be some sand to walk on. But not now. I don’t know if this is a current thing about the ocean rising or a great big chunk of ice broke off down at the south pole, just a huge thing, oh, it would be as big as several states.
17:10 Julie: The latest thing I heard was that they expect 3 feet in 50 years.
Bob: Really? Three feet?
Julie: Yeah, but it keeps changing, so I don’t know if we should trust that.
Bob. That’s pretty drastic Bangladesh, they’re only about six inches above water level.
Julie Holland has dikes.
Bob: Yeah. The Dutch, they’re sort of like the Mennonites. They go to over where the low lands are there. See, over by Mt. Vernon, they’re always fighting the salt water over there too. I think that’s the worlds’ largest bulb production there in the world. A bunch of Hollanders came in there because that was their environment over there.
Julie: Yet to me, it looks American because there’s kind of sloppiness around the edges whereas when I flew over Holland everything was completely crisp. At least from the air it doesn’t look like they have any wavy lines.
Bob: They’re very tidy. It might be because they’re so close together. These guys over here, they use that big equipment on that, see, it’s all river silt, that whole flat area around this side of Mt Vernon, it’s all river silt. They’re using this heavy equipment on it. Some of those places are getting cloddy now, they’re getting clods in that stuff. That shouldn’t happen that way, they ought to keep putting enough greenery back in to keep that tilth nice. Because oh, that’s wonderful soil. You can raise broccoli over there like you wouldn’t believe. Broccoli or any of that stuff, just huge stuff.
1930 Julie: Dave and I, when we want to start a new garden area, the first thing we do is put potatoes right on top of the grass and then add dirt on top. On the theory that that will do something.
Bob: How’d it work?
Julie: It does something. I think it works, I think the potatoes kind of dig into the …
Bob: Yeah? Well, there’s another theory that the potatoes form between where the seed potato is and the top of the ground. One of our former County Commissioners, he was a writer. He was author of a gardening column in some Northwest publication or some magazine, I can’t remember the name of the thing, it was very popular. He said you could put a little dirt in the bottom of a barrel, and put your potato in there, put a little dirt over it and it’ll sprout and start up. You keep adding dirt around this green part that’s growing, you keep adding dirt and keep it coming up. He said you’d have a barrel full of potatoes in the fall.
20:45 Julie: Have you tried that?
Bob: No but, Bitte, she worked for a while. The type of potato he had was one from South America somewhere. And it was a terrific potato but the flavor was not so hot. But it was very productive. Bitte called them the pink-eyed Peruvians because it had sort of a pink sprout where it would come out. She called it the pink-eyed Peruvian. You could get a lot of potatoes that way. They’d keep coming out all along the way, I guess.
My potato vines are all dead right now and I should be digging potatoes, it doesn’t hurt them to be in the ground, even in the warm ground because it hardens up their skins. But I wish I had them in my, pit. I have a pit up here in the woods where I put my potatoes. I wish I had them in there instead of out there. I’ll do that maybe next week.
Julie: When you dig them, do you wipe them off or anything?
Bob: Leave the dirt on. You shouldn’t wash them. That’s what I read, anyway.
Now and then you get a potato that looks great on the outside and you cut it open and it’s almost entirely rotten on the inside. I mean, it’ll have a great big black void in there. I don’t know whether it’s some organism or some creature. I don’t know what it is. I took three potatoes up to Bitte’s the other day, she cut one of them open and it was positively useless, it was no good at all. But you don’t get very many of those.
I just raise two varieties. I raise Kennebecs, which are the main potato, and then the Nooksack, which is a western potato, it was bred out here somewhere. But the Nooksack is like an Idaho baker, something like that. Of course, the Kennebec is a white-skinned potato, light colored. It’s a productive variety too.
This year I’m planting my corn in … I do like B* and Glen R*, both of them, they don’t plant all their corn at once. They might even stick with just one variety and plant it every ten days, you plant another setting. I used to raise all my corn at once. Then I’d have a whole pile of roasting ears to give. I couldn’t use them all, so I’d have to trot around delivering all this corn. So this year I’ve got these successive plantings.
Julie: Your microclimate is different than ours. I don’t even bother with corn, it doesn’t get ready in time.
Bob: That’s right, you don’t have enough sunlight. Corn requires warmth, it requires calories. Where’d you come from?
24:23 Julie: L.A.
Bob: L.A? Back east, they have the warm nights, because the Gulf air comes all the way up. Everywhere East of the Rockies in this country you got the Gulf air. That’s where you sweat like a dog.
The corn will grow faster at nighttime that it does in the daytime, because light inhibits plant growth. You have a plant on the windowsill and it’ll turn towards the glass, to the light. What it’s doing is, the cells on the shadow side of the plant are growing faster than those on the light side and it pushes the plant over. Well, people say, “The plant is seeking light.” The plant doesn’t know what it’s seeking, light or not. It’s just that the cells over there on the back side are pushing it over. I think that’s why the fir limbs tilt up. Light is a big factor in plant growth. It’s a strong thing. Put milk out in the light, and it changes its chemical structure.
26:04: Julie: It has some kind of tinny taste.
Bob: Of course you know, you better not leave it out there very long, it’ll go sour. Other foods … you wouldn’t want to put your wine out in the light. It’d get rancid real quick.
Well, I think we’re getting off the historic situation here.
Bob: Well, I dug a well down here just above the high drift. I got into the aquifer in one day, just digging with a shovel. This was about a four foot square hole.
Julie: How did you keep the sides from …
Bob: Well, it’s all tight earth here. You get down below this upper stuff and you get into the … I got into one area of this blue clay, real pale blue clay, real pretty stuff. Then when I got into the sand, the water rose up about 18 inches up into the clay, the area that I cleared out. That shows that the water was under pressure. Well, the pressure was produced by coming down off the mountain. I mean, that’s the only place that you could get any pressure around here.
I was stumping around there with my boots, and the water was all turbid from the clay right at the top of the aquifer. I looked down in the water and it would clear up on the land side, you could see it getting clear from the land side. Pretty soon, if you left it idle, you wouldn’t mess it up, it would clear up the whole thing, pretty soon.. Subsequently when I pumped water out of that well with a slow pump, I couldn’t drain the well. But if I had a fast pump, it would pump it out, maybe 40 minutes or something like that. There’s a lot of water moving through here.
The best well on the island for a dug well is over at S*’s. That water comes in just like a creek and if you go down at real low tide below the S*’s, you’ll see that water coming right out of the aquifer right just above the sea water level. It’s just very rapid. And it doesn’t have any salt in it at all.
2:32 Julie: Why do you have salt? Or do you?
Bob: Well, they say it’s infiltration, but do you know what I think it is? I think it’s the salt that falls on the soil in a storm. The tops of the waves that are blown off by the wind in the wintertime when we have a windstorm, our windows are all salty. I have to clean them off several times during the winter because you can’t see out. I think that salt is seeping down in through the centuries, you got salt going down all the time.
We don’t have fast infiltration in the soil because it’s so tight. There are interstices in between the clay molecules. Clay is pretty fine stuff, you know. But there are little crevasses. If you dig down in the clay, you’ll see a whole bunch of roots coming down, little tiny hair roots coming down in a little tiny crack in the clay. To put water through that thing it’d be almost impossible, but you get some. You get some infiltration.
Maybe I am getting some infiltration from the sea, I’m not sure.
I shouldn’t be drinking any more sodium than I get in my food. My food I get enough, the salt I put on my potatoes, I have plenty of sodium there and I don’t need any more when I’m drinking water. And I’m supposed to drink a lot of water every day.
But up in here, I think the sodium content would be pretty low. They measure chlorides. Of course, that’s sodium chloride.
Down below, on low tide down here, the reason I put the well where I did, there’s a big patch of wet moist sand, even when the tide’s been out for hours, there’d be a big area on the sand that’s wet. Well, Chuck L* says if you dig right above that wet spot, you’ll hit the water you’ll hit the water pretty quick, and sure enough.
There’s another good place where you could dig a dug well, and that’s as you’re going around the corner going down to the dock from the P.O, there’s a little ditch on the land side there, and there’s water coming out of that ditch and right above that ditch, there’s a whole bunch of horsetail growing, Equisetum. Well, they grow only in a moist spot, that’s the only place they grow. If you dig down there, you’d get fresh water.
The well for the old Lv* house, the old structure is still up there, just above the dock. The water’s going through that thing just like a river almost. It’s not tight on top. It’d be more work to fix that thing up than it would be to dig a new well. Well, I dug a new well right close by that thing, I thought I’d be sure to get that same big bunch of water, but it didn’t work out. Water is sort of like gold, it’s where you find it. There are some indications on the surface that tell you where the water might be.
I don’t go for the dousing bit, but some people …. Fred A* does. There was a book called Henry Gross and his Divining Rod. He became famous because he found water down in some island down in the West Indies, where they didn’t have any water, he found a copious amount of water. Well, he became very popular. He got so popular that he would take a map and he’d douse the map, some foreign country or something, and tell you where the water was. Well, that turned out to be a big, fat farce.
But there might be some electrical connections somehow with water. I don’t know what all the gadgets are that might determine that, but I’m sure there’s something. You know, Larry W*, he was a douser for oil. He wasn’t a douser, he was a scientific guy, an oil geologist. I think it was a pretty lucrative business for a while.
7:40 Julie: I’m sure it still is.
Bob: I see the crows are in my transparent apples. (laughs) They just flew away.
Bob: One year we were at Neah Bay, and Mary was teaching. She had 42 second-graders. Half of them were Air Force kids and half of them were Makahs. Well, there was a certain amount of friction there all the time, between the air force and … Even among the adults. For example, some of the women from the Air Force, they’d go out on the Makah beaches and pick up these Japanese net floats that would normally be picked up by the Indians. Then they’d take them down to Portland or somewhere and sell them for some money and the Indians … When we first went out there, the beaches were closed to white people.
And in the school … See, the Indians of Neah Bay, the ones that are on the First Street, right next to the water, they’re the king pins, they’re the top flight. You get back a street or two behind, and they’re the descendants of slaves. And this still carries through. In school, Chris had friends with the number ones and friends with the number threes, too. But she got along with them, but every now and then there’d be a big fight between her girl friends. Now and then there’d be a big cat fight where they’d scratch and tear into each other. It was a difference in their culture.
1:35 Julie: Yeah, it’s still going on.
Bob: The Makahs, they used to go on down to Clallam Bay and whatnot and come back with a bunch of heads in the canoe. And that wasn’t just too awful long ago. That was in this last century. Pretty rough stuff. The Makahs, they were the top ones on the coast. I guess the Haidas, they were the big ones up north farther, but the Makahs were the ones down here. These guys in here, they were inferior, the Samish and so on, they were inferior to the Makahs. And the Makahs, they still know this.
2: 29 Julie; It’s interesting that you would measure superiority or inferiority by how warrior-like you are.
Bob: Yeah. Well, they were the whale hunters. They lived out there where the whale was. That was a pretty risky business. They got honor for that, being after the whale.
But that was Mary’s first year of teaching, after she got her degree. She didn’t get the degree until late summer and of course these jobs were all taken up everywhere around nearby, but there was that one out Neah Bay and by gosh they took her, just like that.
Julie: Yeah, my first job was like that too, they In a district where they hadn’t even got any applicants for the position. And I showed up the week before school started. I should have known.
Bob: However, Mary got along well, and Chris got along well too. We should have stayed another year because we were just getting kind of close to them, closer to them. We lived in a compound that was surrounded by a fence around the school. See, at Neah Bay the livestock run at large. Every night there’d be herd of horses tearing through the town, just ker-bang! There were a bunch of cattle, a bunch of bulls, and whatnot. So the school, they had a fence around that place. They had some cabins where we stayed and some of the other teachers stayed.
Julie: That’s like the mid ‘50’s?
Bob: No, that was later than that. That was ’65, ’66. I built the other half of this house that summer. That spring Mary was still out there in ’66. Quite a commute here. That was an interesting year.
One day I was walking home from the P.O. over there and I was walking with an Indian. They have this cemetery down there right next to the beach, and they have a little barbed wire around the thing, just one strand of barbed wire around the cemetery. And the reason the cemetery was there is because when they had the smallpox epidemic, they were dying so fast they just had people laid out on the beach. Then they drug them up just to the closest soil they could find to bury them. Anyway this Indian that I was walking with, he said,
“If it hadn’t have been for the Norwegian fisherman,” he said, “we’d’ve been out of luck completely, because we got some blue-eyed Makahs.” I don’t know which eyes are dominant. For color of eyes, one color is dominant and I don’t know whether it’s blue or not. But he claimed there were blue-eyed Makahs. But it was one of those fishermen that also brought the smallpox. It just about wiped them out. It just about wiped them out.
It’s sort of like the Indians, they can’t stand alcohol very well. That’s from the way their genes are, I suppose. Alcohol is in our culture way back when. I guess we can get by with a certain amount of it. Some of us can.
6:40 Julie: Not me.
Bob. Well, it’s pretty limited, even those that can get by with it, it’s very limited about what they can get by with. As any fool can plainly see, now and then. You better turn that thing off.