Chuck L*, Summer 2007 · 16 October 2007, 17:34 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?”
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