Puget Sound Journalism and Local Issues : Ross Anderson : RossInk

      A hard-won tugboat reported for winter duty this week at Neah Bay, where the vessel stands ready to keep wayward oil tankers from running aground on Washington's coast.  The Barbara Foss gets her name from the Seattle tugboat dynasty that owns it. But if boats were named on the basis of tenacity rather than sentiment, this tug would have to be the Fred Felleman.
    It may have been the power of argument, or political pressure. Maybe it had to do with getting Felleman off somebody's case. But the word along the Seattle waterfront is that this 119-foot tugboat is on duty today, at a cost to federal taxpayers of more than $350,000 a month, because of Felleman.
    The only voice that disagrees is that of Felleman himself, who shares credit with other environmental groups and particularly the Makah Tribe, which also campaigned for the tug.
And, even as the tugboat moors at Neah Bay in Clallam County, despite opposition from the local shipping industry and skepticism from the U.S. Coast Guard, the scientist-turned-advocate grumbles that this tug is not enough.
    "I suppose something is better than nothing," he says, his voice brittle with tension. "But we're testing what the shipping industry wants to prove, which is that a relatively small tug will suffice."
There is another tug, bigger and better, that should be at Neah Bay, he says. And anybody who disagrees "is a fool."
   The long voyage to Neah Bay is a glimpse at the power of Washington's environmental movement and how a single-minded and tireless individual can marshal that power.
The issue dates back at least to 1989, when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude into Alaska's Prince William Sound. That spill re-charged environmentalists across the country, including Felleman.
    A native New Yorker, Felleman describes himself as an "aquatic personality" who yearned to be a marine scientist. At the University of Michigan, he studied orcas long before he ever saw one. Then he moved to Seattle, where he began photographing whales while studying them, and eventually earned a master's degree in fisheries from the University of Washington.  "Those were the best years, when I was actually spending time on the water," he says, "instead of the last 10 years, when I've been in offices talking to bureaucrats."
    The more he learned about local waters, the more he worried about their future. Washington had an active environmental movement, he says, but it was focused largely on trees and forests. Nobody was going to bat for the marine ecosystem.
    "I'd look through my camera lens at a whale, and I'd see a tanker steaming past in the background, and I wondered, `What's that doing here?' "
    Felleman first took on the oil industry by lobbying full time for a marine sanctuary on the Olympic coastline. Five years later, in 1994, the sanctuary was a reality - because, in part, of Felleman's work. "I was a pretty good photographer, but I was predisposed to advocate," he says. "That was what was different about me."
   The Exxon Valdez provided something to advocate. Within weeks after the spill, two other Exxon tankers lost power near the Washington coast. Neither went aground and neither spilled any oil, but people were alarmed.
   Fueled by the Valdez spill, the state passed legislation that required escort tugs for oil tankers from Port Angeles to Puget Sound refineries. But tankers were still left unescorted along the outside coast and 70 miles up the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
    "Washington is the only U.S. port where environmental protection begins 70 miles inland," Felleman argues. "We have less protection, and more to protect."
     That includes Cape Flattery, where notoriously rough seas pound a coastline relatively unspoiled by development - an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen, he says. In 1994, a citizens committee set up under the state oil-spill law agreed. It called for a full-time rescue tug at Neah Bay, capable of keeping tankers and other ships off the rocks.
   The shipping industry opposed the full-time tug, arguing it would be too expensive. "It doesn't make sense to spend $4 million to $6 million per year on a tug at Neah Bay when we have an existing fleet of tugs that can be used to respond to a wide range of events," says Harry Hutchins, director of the Puget Sound Steamship Operators, a maritime-trade group based in Seattle.
   The industry responded with its own plan - the "Tug of Opportunity" system, which uses more than 100 tugs working Northwest waters. Each is tracked electronically from Seattle so that, in an emergency, the closest can be dispatched quickly to a potential accident.
     Felleman has no use for that system. The tugs are too small, he says, and most operate far from the area most at risk - the Pacific coastline.
    With the passion of a Northwest environmentalist and the temperament of a New York cab driver, Felleman took on the tug issue with a full-time, full-court press aimed at state and federal decision makers and the media. During the past five years, he has fired off countless letters and e-mails, critiqued government reports and delivered scathing testimony at public hearings.  He has become a human database on oil spills around the world, on tankers and their failures, on tugboats and on the government agencies that are supposed to regulate them.
    He hounds elected officials - all the way up to Vice President Al Gore - until they agree to meet with him. And then he hounds them some more until they do what he wants them to do.  His tactics are fiercely combative. When a recent Coast Guard report suggested that a rescue tug would not be cost-effective, Felleman accused the agency of "cooking the books" and of "falsifying their reports." He routinely accuses his critics of conspiring with the oil industry.
    "Fred is a bright individual who pursues his ideals in a dogged fashion, and I respect that," says Hutchins, the shipping-industry spokesman. "But you either agree 100 percent with Fred, or you have to be crooked, and he will treat you accordingly. I obviously don't agree 100 percent, so he believes I'm a crook. That's the way he deals with the world."
   David Ortman, a veteran Seattle environmental activist who has worked with Felleman for many years, says he admires Felleman's tenacity - even though it offends people. "His passion is refreshing, but it gets in the way when he deals with institutions like the Coast Guard."
    Felleman concedes only that he feels no obligation to be "nice."  "This whole thing about niceness in Seattle is ridiculous," he says. "Yes, people are entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts."
   The Coast Guard, he says, is a law-enforcement agency that only reluctantly took on its environmental responsibilities after the Valdez spill. "They are incredibly bent on protecting the maritime industry," he says. "Somebody has to ride herd on both the industry and the agency that is supposed to regulate it."
   There are plenty of people, from environmental groups to members of Congress, who agree with Felleman's views.  The state Department of Ecology has applauded the rescue tug, pointing out that the risks of a spill have increased.
    The heart of the debate is not whether a full-time tug will diminish the risk of a spill; virtually everybody agrees it will. The argument is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Critics argue that taxpayers are being asked to spend $4 million or more per year to slightly diminish the risk of a catastrophe that is not likely to occur in the first place.
    Pat Jones, spokesman for the state ports association, fears the next step will be full-time tug escorts for all vessels, including more than 10,000 freighters that traverse the Strait of Juan de Fuca each year. Today's tug escorts from Port Angeles are paid for by the oil companies. But shipping companies would have to pay the costs of escorts for freighters, taking Northwest ports out of competition for Pacific Rim shipping, he says.
    "It's a question of how much risk we are willing to live with," Jones says.
     The recent Coast Guard report concludes the rescue tug or escort tugs reduce the risk, but at a cost far greater than the Tug of Opportunity system.
    Which makes Felleman ballistic. "Yes, it's all relativistic," he says. "A major oil spill is a digital experience; it's a `one' or a `zero.' "
   But he can't sit by and ignore the risk of one catastrophic spill, especially with increasing numbers of tankers and freighters navigating through channels crisscrossed by state ferries, naval ships and thousands of pleasure boats.
    "I have one of the world's finest pieces of marine habitat on my doorstep, and that's all I care about," Felleman says. "I can't do everything, so I made a strategic decision to focus my efforts on River City, right here at home."

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Return to the Klondike! Our Intrepid Reporter Retraces Route Carved By Restless Dreamer In 1897

Ross Anderson  Seattle Times Staff Reporter

One hundred years ago, Mont Hawthorne quit his job at a Puget Sound salmon cannery and went home to Astoria. He sat silently for a while in his favorite chair, gazing out the window at a steamship as it eased away from the docks and sailed off into the dusk. Then he announced to his aging mother: "Mama, I'm goin' Up North."

His mother was not surprised. She had been expecting this, now that the entire world knew about the steamer Portland and its "ton of gold" arriving in Seattle. That event had triggered a stampede north to the Klondike country, and Mont was bound to catch the fever.

So it was that Mont Hawthorne resumed the quest for fortune, adventure, elbow room or whatever it is that continues to lure Americans westward and, in Seattle's case, northward.

Now old Mont Hawthorne is goin' Up North again. And this time, I'm goin' with him. By the time you read this, Mont and I will be on our way to Alaska, the Yukon Territory and Dawson City, all in observance of the Klondike Gold Rush centennial.

The Klondike stampede, which began in July 1897, was perhaps the single most dramatic event in Pacific Northwest history. It made Seattle a household word around the world, luring an estimated 30,000 Klondike-bound fortune-seekers to these streets and transforming a frontier port into a booming metropolis.

For Mont, the journey is a return engagement. Like thousands of other men and women, he made the journey a century ago, hauling a ton of supplies onto a steamer and up the Inside Passage to Skagway, Alaska, over the snow-clogged Wrangell Mountains to Lake Bennett, then 500 miles down the mighty Yukon River to Dawson, the City of Gold.

And your reporter? A former editorial writer, worn-out but recovering, approaching his 50th birthday and yearning for an adventure. Like Mont a century ago, I've spent weeks collecting my gear, haunting the outfitters, trying to figure out what I need and what I don't. I have a comfortable backpack, a nylon tent that weighs 6 pounds, polypropylene fleece, freeze-dried foods and a miniature stove that weighs nothing and boils water faster than my kitchen range.

For company, I have old Mont Hawthorne in the form of a dog-eared copy of "The Trail Led North," long out of print, in which he tells the story of his Klondike adventure. OK, I'm well aware that he's been dead half a century. But Mont climbs out of those pages larger than life. So does his dog, Pedro. They will be fine company. And they don't eat much.

Why are we doing this? Good question.  First, some history:

In the early summer of 1897, the Klondike was little more than a rumor drifting south from the virtually unexplored wilderness surrounding the Yukon River. Nearly a year earlier, in August 1896, a couple of prospectors took a wrong turn in those rugged hills, some 1,500 miles from nowhere, and stumbled onto a stream. In the stream bed, they found a gold nugget, and then another. In the months to come, those few acres of wilderness were to become one of the richest gold fields in history.

Word spread up and down the river, and prospectors converged on the Klondike Country. But it took months for the news to find its way south to The Outside. Even then, the news was greeted with skepticism; most such reports turned out to be wild exaggerations, if not outright fabrications. That changed in July 1897, when two steamers from the Yukon arrived on the West Coast. On the 15th, the tiny Excelsior tied up at San Francisco with 40 prospectors carrying perhaps $750,000 worth of gold - a staggering statistic for its day. The larger Portland arrived July 17 in Seattle with even more - the storied "ton of gold."

Within hours, the stampede had begun. Thanks to telegraph lines and an extraordinary advertising campaign, Seattle soon became the gateway to the Klondike, starting point for the steamships and chief supply center for the prospectors. A motley fleet of ramshackle steamers headed north loaded with fortune-seekers. They were men and women, white folks and black folks, old-timers and towheaded schoolboys. They were Seattle Mayor W.D. Wood and former Washington Gov. John McGraw, a promising young novelist named Jack London and a mediocre poet named Robert Service. They were Swedish boatbuilders and Chinese railroad workers, Russian sailors and British nobles, a great tide of humanity all determined to reach the same God-forsaken corner of a frozen Canadian wilderness.

Most of them never made it. If you were rich, it wasn't too rough; you could buy comfortable space on a steamer to St. Michaels, at the mouth of the Yukon, then travel by riverboat some 1,700 miles upstream to Dawson. Most, like Mont Hawthorne, were not rich. So they traveled the hard way. They collected up to a ton of supplies - clothing, tents, mining equipment, guns and ammunition, sacks of flour, sugar, beans, bacon . . . even horses, mules or dogs. They loaded their outfits onto crowded steamers or sailing ships and spent a couple of weeks beating into North Pacific storms to Skagway or other crude Alaskan ports.

Most crossed the Chilkoot or White passes in the dead of winter, enabling them to haul their gear much of the way on sleds. Temperatures dropped well-below zero and stayed there. Blizzards lasted for days. The summit of the Chilkoot was too steep for sleds, so many had to haul their outfits over one pack at a time - 20 or more trips hauling 100-pound loads up and over a rugged mountain pass. At Lake Bennett, they went to work sawing logs into planks for rudimentary boats. Mid-May, when the ice finally broke up, thousands launched their homemade boats onto the lakes and resumed the exodus - 600 miles across vast lakes, through whitewater rapids and mosquito-infested bogs. At each obstacle in the course, there were those who threw up their hands, sold their outfits and limped back home. Others persisted, endured. Hundreds died for their efforts - shipwrecked on the rocky Northwest coast, murdered for their outfits, buried in snow avalanches or frozen in their sleep, drowned in the Yukon River rapids or fallen by dysentery or other diseases in the muddy streets of Dawson.

Pierre Berton, a Canadian historian, figures 100,000 people set out for the Klondike in 1897-99. Of those, about one-third eventually reached it. Perhaps half of those actually worked in the gold fields, and a few hundred actually got rich. And most of those who found their fortunes squandered them on booze or bad investments before they made it back to civilization - if, indeed, they made it back.

Mont Hawthorne made it to Dawson, but he did not find much gold, barely enough to make his expenses.

And then he went home. What did he and thousands like him get for their efforts? Why this Herculean struggle to reach a virtually unmapped wilderness where the richest claims were staked out long before most fortune-seekers left home? What was this stampede about? That's why we're going back - me and Mont and Pedro. To see if we can figure that out.

Maybe it was simple greed, a need to get rich quick. Maybe it was desperation. Maybe it had to do with the raw beauty and challenge of Mother Nature, with that foggy notion of Frontier and The American West. Maybe it was the mystery of the unknown, an age-old love for adventure.

Whatever it was, Mont seemed to understand. It kept him moving for some 80 years - from the family farm in Pennsylvania to the plains of Nebraska. Then to the Black Hills country, on to the mines of Wyoming and across the continent to San Francisco. From there it turned him north, up the coast to Astoria and Puget Sound. And, finally, to Alaska, the Yukon and the Klondike.

It's a powerful thing, Mont says. But he can't explain it. He knows the feeling but not the words. Gotta go and see for yourself, he says. You gotta steam up the Inside Passage, where the glaciers slither down the mountains to meet the Pacific Ocean. Gotta step off the boat and resist the sinpots of Skagway, hoist a 60-pound backpack, climb Chilkoot Pass in a 40-mile-an hour gale. Gotta ride the big water through Five Finger Rapids.

You do it, says Mont. And then you'll understand why I did it.

So there you have it. Mama, we're goin' Up North.

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 Who Will Find Solace in the Soft Waters of Soap Lake?

   Autumn in Soap Lake arrives abruptly after Labor Day, signaled by empty beaches and "VACANCY" signs at the local motels. On a bright, midweek day in September, the silence is interrupted only by the odd hay truck, rumbling down Highway 17 and barely slowing down through town, where the innkeepers grimly contemplate the prospect of another long winter.
   This isn't right, says Gordon Tift as he hobbles through the town's lakefront park. Soap Lake deserves better. He has spent much of his 80 years along these sudsy shores, waiting for lightning to strike.
   Then, just a few weeks ago, it did. "I woke up in the middle of the night, sat straight up and had this . . . well, sort of a vision," Tift says, wide-eyed with excitement. "Think Stonehenge. Five statues, solid rock, maybe 25 or 30 feet tall, right here in the city park and looking out across the lake . . .
   "Only they're a rock band! The rhythm-guitar player is over here, the lead guitar there next to the female vocalist, the keyboard player and drummer back there. They're solid basalt, held together with rebar and epoxy, looking out over the lake. The biggest rock band in the world, right here! People would come from all over."
    And so it goes down at the bottom end of the Lower Grand Coulee, where a peculiar strain of hope springs eternal from the alkaline depths of Soap Lake. In most respects, this country village resembles scores of other small towns in Eastern Washington. There is one major intersection, a drive-in where you order your burger and fries by phone from vinyl-clad booths, a block-long main street with a smattering of bars and junk stores, a nasty squabble between the mayor and the City Council, and lots of clapboard houses with "FOR SALE" signs posted in front.
    But there is one important difference. Soap Lake has no grain elevator, no pulp mill, no fruit warehouses. Its biggest employer is the local school district. And its solitary industry is its lake, two miles long and filled with mineral water that turns to soapsuds when the wind blows down the coulee.
   "We have no tax base," says Tift. "We have a bunch of retired people like me, and some people on welfare and a few people who work hard trying to keep their businesses alive."
   Sad, but true, says Suzanne Lonn, a retired schoolteacher and part-time director of the local Chamber of Commerce. "What we have is our water."
    From the earliest days, it was about those waters, soft and slippery to the touch, salty to the tongue and - if you believe the believers - therapeutic to body and soul. Soap Lake is the southernmost of a chain of small to middlin' potholes at the bottom of a 20-mile-long basalt canyon, or "coulee," that once contained the Columbia River. Fed by groundwater from the surrounding basalt, the lake has no outlet. It is a geological dead end for minerals such as sodium, carbonate, bicarbonate, sulphate - 16 minerals in all - that leach from the surrounding rock.
   This tweaks the curiosity of scientists. University of Washington zoologist W.T. Edmondson and various students have been sampling its waters for nearly 50 years, bringing back a rogue's gallery of mostly microscopic creatures - segmented worms, drifting plankton and tiny, red, shrimp-like copepods that occasionally tint the waters. One species peculiar to Soap Lake - Hexarthra polyondona soaplakeiensis - is far too small to be seen by the naked eye, which is probably a good thing, because one glimpse at its blob-like body and creepy squid-like tentacles would turn tourists to stone.
    But those chilly, mineral-rich waters are of particular interest to spa-lovers from around the globe. For nearly a century, they have come here to soak in it, drink it, sunbathe on its beaches and coat their bodies with its mud. They do this in hopes of curing, or at least soothing, the symptoms of arthritis or psoriasis or eczema or a dozen other chronic ailments. And they believe those therapeutic values are concentrated in the black mud scooped from the bottom.
    This is nothing new. Stone artifacts and Native American tradition indicate that the local Indians were true believers, building lake-shore huts where the "healing waters" were poured over hot rocks. But they, too, were mostly short-timers; they had to make a living somewhere else.
Early explorers found the water of some interest, but were distinctly unimpressed by the surrounding country. "It's a vast, sandy plain, and even the most hopeful and sanguine can see no future for it," reported an Army engineer in 1878. Late in the century, ranchers bathed their stock in the lake to fend off parasites and saddle sores, and they are credited with giving the lake its prosaic name.
   Commercially speaking, Soap Lake arrived with the railroad in Ephrata, just four miles south. Suddenly those alkaline waters became the essence of a health spa. The first sanitarium, the Lombardy, was built on the lake shore in 1905. Then came the larger Siloam, so-named for Jerusalem's life-giving pool. It was three stories, with 45 guest rooms and a grand dining room that was converted to a dance floor at night. Within a decade, the southern lake shore had become the "Palm Springs of The North," with four hotels, rooming houses, excursion boats, restaurants and businesses renting tents, boats and bathing suits. The city installed a dual water system, one set of pipes carrying fresh water, the other mineral water from the lake.
   "It was impossible to walk down the street on summer nights because of the crowds of socializers promenading the sidewalks," wrote local historian Bennye Fiege. "Eventually the town would boast an open-air dance hall right on the beach. Big-name bands were brought from Spokane."
    For years, the town's name was in dispute. Maps labeled the resort as "Sanitarium Lake." But developers of the Siloam hoped to call it "Siloam." Alas, the neighbors confused Jerusalem's pool with Salome, the dancer who took the rap for the beheading of John the Baptist. Neither name stuck. "Soap" did.
   And for all the bands and dance halls, it was still about the water. Business picked up after World War I, when thousands of American soldiers came home from the trenches suffering from buerger's disease, a frightening ailment that rots the skin. Victims discovered that the waters of Soap Lake arrested the disease.
   That's how Gordon Tift got here. His stepfather had contracted buerger's in the trenches and moved to Soap Lake to deal with it. "People came out here by the trainload," he recalls. "They were sick, missing limbs, and their only relief was aspirin, prayer and Soap Lake. They'd soak in the lake and drink the water and they'd feel better. It's simple as that. The doctors may pooh-pooh it, but I know what I've seen with my own eyes."
   Soap Lake's heyday was painfully brief. The grand Siloam burned to the ground in the early 1920s, followed by the Thomas Hotel and the Lakeview Sanitarium. Hopes rose again in the 1930s, when the government launched construction of Grand Coulee Dam. But the economic benefits flowed largely to Coulee City or to the farming center at Ephrata; Soap Lake remained a backwater. "Every few years, somebody checks into town, looks around and decides: `I'm gonna put this place on the map,' " says one longtime resident. "Couple years later, they give up and move on."
   During the 1940s and '50s, the lake itself became a problem. The same life-giving irrigation that greened the nearby desert was seeping through the aquifer and draining into the lake, raising its level and diluting its famous water. A 1936 analysis showed 13,836 parts per million of sodium; by the late 1940s, the sodium content had been reduced by more than half, with comparable drops in 10 other minerals, including carbonate, bicarbonate, sulphide and chloride.
    Meanwhile, there was evidence of a declining interest in the mineral water itself. Americans were less interested in natural cures and spas, preferring antibiotics such as penicillin. Soap Lake was dying of a deadly combination of fresh water and modern medicine.
   But the lake, and its town, persist. The groundwater problem was solved by federal engineers, who dug wells at the south end that intercept most of that fresh water and pump it into a nearby canal. Many locals believe the dilution continues, that the lake is gradually turning to fresh water, but the sudsy buildup on windy days suggests that its soapiness endures.
   This town’s character and endurance are embodied largely by two local characters. One of these is Marina Romary, innkeeper extraordinaire, Greek matriarch and self-styled Curator of the Western Myth. Romary was born in Soap Lake, daughter of Greek immigrants who arrived in 1915 and ran a lake-shore hotel and tavern. In the 1960s, Marina Romary took over Don's Restaurant, which some insist is the finest eatery between Bellevue and Spokane.
   "From the time I was a kid, I always wanted to create something special right here in Soap Lake," she says as she holds court in her corner at Don's.

   She created it across the street - the Notares Inn, a complex of rustic cabins constructed of huge spruce logs - enough virgin timber to make a Sierra Clubber cry. Each of its 23 warm rooms has its own unique floor plan and theme. There is the John Wayne Room, with arrows in the walls, a rope swing and a loft; the Charlie Russell Room, for the Western artist, decorated with Russell prints, petrified wood and agates; the Outlaw Room, with prison bars and wanted posters; and so forth.
   Next door is the Soap Lake Businessman's Club, the state's last members-only "bottle club," a throwback to post-Prohibition blue laws. Romary decorated the club in the same Western motif, then lured the perfect headliner to its stage. Bonnie Guitar, the country crooner whose 1950s hit "Dark Moon" made her a celebrity, found true happiness performing a permanent gig at the south end of Soap Lake. The singer retired recently after 12 years on that stage, having helped turn it into a regional institution.
   Romary's multifaceted business continues to draw loyal fans from across the state, breathing new life into an old resort. Recently, a Seattle-area couple has renovated a handsome river-rock building next door to Marina's place, and opened the equally charming Inn at Soap Lake. There are a couple of other clean motels in town, plus a larger resort on the north end of the lake, catering mostly to Winnebagos.
   "Soap Lake can now offer comfortable rooms and good food year-round," Romary says. "You start with that, but we still need something more - a real resort-quality spa."
   If Romary is the  town's first citizen, its second was the ultimate eccentric - Sam Israel. The late Jewish immigrant spent a lifetime leveraging a cobbler's skills into a vast real-estate empire that spans much of the state. He already owned buildings in downtown Seattle when he discovered Soap Lake, whose dramatic landscape reminded him of his native Isle of Rhodes. He started buying land and in 1961 moved to a ranch on a hill overlooking the lake.
   In time, Israel became a legend, driving around town in a war-surplus Jeep, living in a gloomy one-room shack instead of the never-completed ranch house next door, his vast acreage littered with rusting vehicles and stacks of seemingly useless stuff bought from government surplus sales. By the time he died at age 95, Israel owned 17,000 acres of Eastern Washington - wheat fields, scab land, the entire western shore of Soap Lake and more than one-third of the land in the town itself.
    Today, Israel's legacy is a huge question mark. On one hand, all those acres of mostly dormant land contribute to the local sense of despair, but they also pose a rare opportunity. The latter is what excites Charles Wilson, a Bellevue consultant who has been assessing that property for Samis Land Company, which now controls Israel's real-estate empire. Wilson has combed through records, explored hundreds of parcels and conjured up a vision: Washington state's first, highfalutin destination resort, sprawling along the sudsy shores of, yup, Soap Lake.
   OK, even some locals are skeptical. The guy suffers from an overdose of mineral water, buerger's disease of the brain. Yet, holding forth with Marina Romary at a corner table at Don's, Wilson is persuasive. Washington state is flanked by world-class resorts like Sun Valley and Whistler Mountain, he says. But none in our own state. A successful destination resort requires lots of land within three hours' drive of a major market. It needs a "contemplative environment," with plenty of sunshine, and a variety of amenities such as golf, skiing, water sports. It needs a sense of place, plus all the requisite sewers and electricity and water. "And," Wilson adds, "it should have differentness."
   Sites west of the Cascades are too wet, too gray and too seasonal, he says. Soap Lake, however, has a desert climate - 7 inches of rain per year (about the same as Phoenix) and 300 days of sun. It has hot summers, cold winters and mild temperatures in the shoulder seasons. It is just three hours' drive from Seattle, with an Ephrata airport capable of handling big jets. It is not ski country, but the coulee topography begs for a unique, world-class golf course. It has a real town, with real people, real history and that all-important infrastructure.
   "And you want differentness? WOW!" Wilson exclaims. "This could be one of the world's great spas! Glass atriums with heated mineral water, steam baths, people sunbathing in February."
   Equally important, the developer does not need to assemble any land. Sam Israel has taken care of that. Wilson sees Soap Lake as a mecca for aging boomers, groping for something to soothe their arthritis or psoriasis. "You build a destination resort for tomorrow's market, not today's," he says."People are getting older. The market is changing."
   So maybe Wilson is just another city slicker who drives into town and thinks he hears voices: "Build it and they will come." But Wilson is in the development business, and he works for an outfit that owns half the lake and a third of the town. Samis has made no decisions, but they're listening.
   A few days later, Darrell Sanders of Olympia helps his 70-year-old wife, Marguerite, into her wheelchair and wheels her gently out of their room at the Notares Inn, down the walkway and onto the same empty beach where Gordon Tift envisions the world's biggest rock band. At the edge of Soap Lake, he helps her to her feet, then escorts her out into the shallows.

   Marguerite suffers terribly from arthritis and psoriasis, he says. They saw an ad for Soap Lake in a magazine about psoriasis and decided it was worth a try. "The doctor wasn't for it or against it; he just told us to come on over and enjoy the sunshine," Sanders says. "Her arthritis is no better, but I swear her skin is clearing up for the first time in four or five years . . ."
   As ever, it's about that water. Magic or medicine, nature or psychosemantics. Who cares? It feels good.

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    A lifetime after the fact, the events of that terrible day linger like an old family feud, gnawing at the soul of this all-American small town. You stroll across the town park, beneath the autumn maples, and find yourself confronted by larger-than-life memorials to men who, 80 years ago today, died violent deaths on these quiet streets.
   You step into a downtown bookstore and listen to an impromptu debate about who did what and when, and who is to blame for what historians call the Centralia Massacre. And you wonder: Doesn't this handsome old town have enough problems - a shrinking resource economy and a lack of family-wage jobs - without re-fighting an 90-year-old fight?
    "There was a time when I was fascinated with that terrible day," recalls Dave Carver as he gazes soberly across the city park. "I thought I'd gotten over it. But it keeps coming back."
     Carver is something of an amateur historian, one of many who have asked questions, then become obsessed with the events of Veterans Day 1919. As a veteran and a union man, he feels he understands a period of Washington's history marked by wild-eyed clashes between loggers and timber bosses, haves and have-nots.
   "It shouldn't have happened," he says, sadly. "None of those things should have happened."
    On a drizzly November afternoon, Carver revisits the tree-lined streets where events unfolded on a similarly gray day so long ago.
     In 1919, Washington was a rough-edged pioneer state blessed with seemingly endless resources. Thousands of Americans had come home from the trenches of Europe, eager to enjoy the fruits of victory. But populist labor unions were beginning to resist the excesses of the market economy; strikes sometimes erupted into violence. The conflict was particularly acute in mill towns like Centralia, where it was hard to ignore the enormous gap between wealthy timber barons and hapless loggers.
     It started as a peaceful parade. Members of the local American Legion, including young war veterans, marched up Tower Avenue to observe the first anniversary of the Armistice that ended the War to End All Wars.
    "Things went wrong right here," Carver says, pointing to a block of aging single-story businesses. At this intersection, the American Legion contingent stopped in front of the Roderick Hotel, which served as a local union hall for the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW, or "Wobblies," were the left wing of the Northwest labor movement, considered radical because they supported worker ownership of factories, a 40-hour work week and sanitary conditions in logging camps. Whether it was the union itself or the ideas it supported, the IWW was seen as a threat to the local establishment.
    The union had been warned that the Legionnaires would attack their hall. It had happened before, the previous year. A lawyer advised they were entitled to defend their property. So they armed themselves.
    What happened next goes to the heart of the debate: Who fired first and why? Within minutes, four young Legionnaires lay dead or dying on the street.
    The town went crazy. Citizens become vigilantes and descended on Wobblies and other union members, arresting them in their halls or homes and throwing them in jail.

   Wesley Everest, a 31-year-old logger and IWW member who had fired some of the fatal shots, was pursued through the streets, cornered, beaten and thrown in jail with the rest. Later that night, the city lights went out. An angry mob dragged Everest out of jail, drove him to a bridge across the Chehalis River and hanged him. Witnesses said he had been castrated.
    Just 10 weeks later, 11 union members were put on trial for the murder of Warren Grimm, one of the Legion members. After a stormy trial, tainted by the presence of troops, seven were convicted and sentenced to 25 years. Many observers, and even some jurors, complained the trial and sentences were unfair.
     The convictions only deepened passions in a state already known for its populism. The tragedy was revisited by appeals courts, by John Dos Passos in his novel "1919," and by a panel from the Federal Council of Churches. It has been the topic of countless books, pamphlets and magazine articles.
    Of the seven men convicted, one died in prison, five were paroled in 1930 and the last, Ray Becker, saw his sentence commuted in 1939 after 19 years in prison.

    Meanwhile, the people of Centralia resumed their lives. The American Legion erected a war memorial to the four Legionnaires, depicting them as innocent martyrs; the statue still dominates the city park.
    But while the episode became a national cause celebre, it was virtually banned in Centralia. For years, there was not a written word about the episode in the town library, and it was not discussed in local schools.
    "I'm a native of this town," Carver says. "When I joined the military, I was amazed how many people asked me about the Centralia Massacre. I couldn't tell them anything, because nobody ever told me."
     Still, the debate continued, mostly in hushed tones. Roger Stewart, a bookstore owner who moved here in 1964, recalls hearing stories from aging witnesses. "The feelings were made all the more intense by the Cold War," he recalls. "To them, it was all clear-cut. The Legionnaires were victims and the Wobblies were the guilty party."
   These days, Centralia remains a tidy, well-preserved and unpretentious town of 12,000 alongside the Chehalis River. It is best known for its winter floods, antique shops that fill aging downtown storefronts, and for its conservative politics.  The town struggles with many of the same economic woes experienced by other resource-based communities. All three of Lewis County's economic mainstays - timber, mining and farming - are in decline, says Bill Lotto of the county Economic Development Commission.
   The Wal-Mart and factory outlet stores that have sprouted alongside I-5 generate low-wage jobs that don't begin to compensate for the loss of well-paying mill or logging jobs, Lotto says.
"Our average wage has gone from 97 percent of the state average in 1970 to 73 percent in 1998," he says. "It has been a constant, long-term decline, and it hurts."
      But the city and county have some things going for them: the huge coal-fired generating plant outside town that employs 670 people, a regional hospital with 700 jobs and a new Fred Meyer distribution warehouse. And the county has plans for a new industrial park on the site of the former coal mine. "This community has a tremendous sense of pride and of history," Lotto says.
    And the events of 1919 now are formally part of that history. The library now maintains a collection of material on the tragedy, and the local antique mall sells copies of John McClelland's "Wobbly War: The Centralia Story," the most thorough historical account.
     Perhaps the most visible change is the two-story mural, painted two years ago on the wall facing the park. It depicts Wesley Everest as the martyr, arms outstretched, breaking his chains while corporate pigs sneer and pollute the air. The mural, erected by a local antique dealer, is designed to offset the one-sided message of the Legion statue, says Stewart, the bookstore operator.
    "It's painted in a kind of socialist style that a lot of people find offensive," he says.
     Still, people put up with it, suggesting that Centralia is coming to grips with its past.
It's even addressed in school now
    In 1987, the local school district published a pamphlet that even-handedly explores the episode, so teachers could discuss it with classes.
     "It's different now from when I grew up here," says Ron Breckenridge, the middle-school history teacher who co-authored the pamphlet. "The people who had the strongest feelings are gone now."
    The pamphlet drops the word massacre, referring instead to "The Centralia Tragedy," which seems more suitable.
     And what is the lesson to be learned? If history assigns blame for the violence, Breckenridge says, it must be spread among the Legionnaires, who planned to attack the IWW; the Wobblies, who overreacted with deadly force; local police, who refused to protect people they didn't like; and the public that became a mob.
     "The Centralia Tragedy might never have happened if each individual involved had exercised his responsibility as a lawful citizen," the pamphlet reads. "Anyone who allows anger, prejudice or extreme patriotism to cloud his judgment leaves himself open to be swept up in the mood of the mob. . . . Human emotion unchecked by reason may lead to tragedy."

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 Bill Cumming: Seattle in the '30s
By Ross Anderson

   Bill Cumming steps gingerly across the cobblestones of Occidental Park, pauses to steady himself beside a lamppost, and examines the streetscape at First Avenue and South Washington Street. Behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses and the floppy brim of his cap, 84-year-old eyes study images of brick and iron that trigger memories of a turbulent decade.
   "Up there was the Trotskyite headquarters," he says, pointing to the top of the Maynard Building. "Up at the other end of the block was the Washington Pension Union, headed up by Bill Pennoch, and I suppose he was the best-known Communist in town."
    A bit tottery without his cane, the venerable painter and teacher — last of the famous "Northwest School" of artists that included friends Mark Tobey and Morris Graves — takes a few more steps down South Washington.
     He points to where a charismatic preacher evangelized by day and reputedly "ran a string of girls" by night. He points to where he heard Charles Lindbergh speak to a huge crowd on his cross-country barnstorming tour in the "Spirit of St. Louis." He recalls the Skid Road flophouses and greasy-spoon cafes "where you could get a decent meal for 35 cents, unless you wanted pie." 
      Seattle in the 1930s occupied a damp, remote corner of a young, broad-shouldered nation. It was an adolescent city with 350,000 people and a colonial economy based on harvesting its trees and fish and Eastern Washington wheat and shipping them off to distant places. It had been just 80 years, one healthy lifetime, since the Denny Party landed at Alki Beach, and there were still Seattle residents who had known those pioneers.
   "This was mostly a city of lumpy, dusty people — the people I paint," Cumming recalls. "It was a city of working stiffs trying to make a living. There was a wonderful small townness. Tree-lined streets and family homes. People sitting in the cabbage patch above Sicks' Stadium, watching minor-league baseball."
   To most of us, the years of the Great Depression seem almost as distant as the Denny Party. But we all have neighbors who lived through and perhaps came of age during that troubled decade. Their experiences were vastly different, but they share one observation: The 1930s was the last hurrah of "Old Seattle."
   "The day after Pearl Harbor, there were sentries on station at Boeing," Cumming recalls. "The city would never be the same again."
    Seattle would be changed profoundly by thousands of servicemen, plus welders and steelworkers and engineers from around the nation who came to build bombers and warships — and stayed here. It would be changed by megawatts of surplus hydropower from the new Grand Coulee Dam, by automobiles and Interstate highways, by television and a World's Fair. It would be changed by the Lake Washington floating bridge, which opened the Eastside to a suburban boom.

   Seattle's seniors recall this transformation with some nostalgia, but little regret. For most, life in the '30s was hard. Like most cities, Seattle was clobbered by the stock-market crash in 1929. By late 1931, wages had fallen 35 percent, and as many as 20,000 were out of work. Retail sales were off by 17 percent, construction down by 70 percent. The official unemployment rate was 7 percent, but the reality was far worse. Shipping and shipbuilding ground to a halt. Forty Northwest lumber mills closed. Hundreds of men lived in a shantytown known as "Hooverville," a few blocks south of Pioneer Square, where the unemployed picked their own mayor, enforced their own rules and tweaked the establishment.
   The climate was ripe for radical politics. Seattle already was known across the country as a haven for left-wing politics — the Pacific Northwest "soviet" where, in 1919, the revolutionary Wobblies had led a citywide general strike.
   "It was terrible," Cumming explains. "Good men felt guilty because they couldn't support their families. The system had failed. We all believed: There must be something better than this."
   In his 84 years, Cumming has seen the best and the worst of his times. He was born in Montana and raised in Tukwila, where his father owned a share of a Chrysler dealership. "The crash blew it all away," he says. "My father lost his business, and his partner took off with what was left. It took years for him to pay off the debts."
   Cumming graduated in 1934 and headed for Seattle. Eventually, he landed a job with the Federal Art Project, where he met Morris Graves and Kenneth Callahan — already established Northwest artists. At age 21, Cumming was hooked by the world of art and artists, of social ideals and revolution. For a time, he roamed the city, sketching. His favored subjects were at the State Burlesque on Skid Road, dockworkers and ditch diggers, dancers and prostitutes.

    "I made $66 a month. Carpenters made $96, which gives you an idea where art sat on the federal totem pole."
   Seattle was highly class- conscious, quietly racist, a city "ruled by a bunch of real-estate people," he says. "Eventually, I became a Red. ... We were naïve. We talked about things we knew nothing about, and we believed it. So, when the Revolution turned into an outburst of murder, I went through the usual disillusionment."
   Today, Cumming lives with his wife in a modest home with beamed ceilings and Persian carpets on oak floors, tucked into the woods in Lake Forest Park. He teaches painting three days a week at the Art Institute of Seattle and has staged a remarkable comeback as one of Seattle's best-known painters.
    And he still paints several hours a day in a small studio, surrounded by his work — canvas rectangles painted in wandering lines and deep oranges and yellows, warm silhouettes of the lumpy people who populated a time and place that have long since faded away.

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NW Places: Port Angeles born again
By Ross Anderson 

     When the big Rayonier pulp mill closed down here in 1997, Fred Michalscheck now admits, he almost panicked at losing his job. "After 22 years working in the same place, you begin to wonder if you can do anything else," he says.
    Today, Michalscheck runs a successful used-car business, The Other Guys, alongside Highway 101 east of town. And he wouldn't think of going back to the mill - even if he could.
     Much the same goes for his friends in this handsome town perched dramatically on its narrow ledge between the Olympics and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When Rayonier moved away and laid off 360 workers, many asked openly: What is a mill town without its biggest mill?
    Four years later, Port Angeles is still groping for its identity. But the town has fared surprisingly well without Rayonier's jobs and industrial-strength influence.
    This is no boomtown. There are no new office buildings or malls. At 19,000, its population hasn't changed much since 1980, and its 7.5 percent unemployment is nearly twice the state rate. The average home price of $200,000 is $50,000 lower than neighboring Sequim.
   And the economics could get worse. There are recurring rumors - firmly denied by the company - that the town could lose its other major mill, Daishowa, because of rising electricity prices.
Yet the community is amazingly upbeat.
     "People didn't spend a lot of time wringing their hands," says Bart Phillips, former director of the local economic-development commission.
    They owe their survival in part to Daishowa, which employs 300 people. But much of Port Angeles' resilience can be traced to a gradual shift in the local economy - from a blue-collar town dependent on timber, salmon and farming to a more recession-proof economy rooted in government and service jobs.
   As the Clallam County seat and service provider for the northern Olympic Peninsula, Port Angeles has a solid base of living-wage jobs. Its largest employers, other than Daishowa, are a hospital, the school district, the county, the Coast Guard and Olympic National Park.
The town also benefits from its chemistry of history, geography and civic character.
   Port Angeles owes its name to a little-known Spanish explorer, Don Francisco Elisa, who sailed by in 1791 and was so impressed with its natural harbor that he named it for the angels - Porto de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles.
   Its character can be traced in part to a failed experiment. In the 1880s, a charismatic lawyer, George Venable Smith, organized a cooperative colony, promising "free land, water and light" and "equal pay for women." By 1890, the colony had a working lumber mill and a dairy herd, and was advertising nationally for settlers. By 1900, the commune had failed, and Port Angeles became a more traditional town heavily dependent on the lumber and pulp mills that lined its harbor. At one point, the mills employed nearly 1,000 people - one of every 10 residents.
     Now the mills are succumbing, one by one, to a combination of factors: environmental restrictions, rising power costs, international competition and more. Some of the Rayonier millworkers found jobs at Daishowa or in Port Townsend. Others took welding classes and went to work at a new shipyard. Another took an auto-mechanics course and started a bicycle shop downtown. "The millworkers had a strong support system," says Patty Hannah, who runs the local United Way. "The mill offered counseling and retraining, alcoholism treatment, family planning. And those things made a difference."
    The town prides itself in its community spirit. Two years ago, people rallied behind a local doctor who had been accused of killing an infant child in his care. Last year, they rushed to help the family of a deputy sheriff shot to death by a mentally ill gunman.
    Those qualities attract newcomers. Alan Turner was a corporate manager from New Jersey when he passed through about 20 years ago. Several years later, he bagged the corporate life and opened a downtown bookstore, Port Books and News, where he sells both new and used books, luring authors from around the region for evening readings. "We'd only been here a couple of years when we had a fire at our house," Turner recalls. "Word got out, and people we'd never met stepped forward to help."
    Employers such as the National Park Service, the schools and a community college attract a better-read work force than the mills, Turner notes.
    As the mills have declined, Port Angeles has reclaimed much of its waterfront with a new harbor complex and park. Local officials have remodeled the old courthouse and built a new library.
The town still offers some unusual cultural life: lectures at the community college, a 60-year-old symphony, a fine-arts center. And Turner loves to take the ferry across the strait to Victoria, B.C., for the theater.
     Still, locals readily acknowledge that Port Angeles is struggling to maintain its identity - or to find a new one.

   Just up the hill from the waterfront is a retail landmark known across the peninsula as Swain's General Store. It's a bright-blue, supermarket-size emporium that sells logging shirts, jeans, rifle ammunition, fasteners by the bin, insulated boots, 100 kinds of hardware snaps and fireproof safes priced as high as $1,600.  After 50 years, Swains' future looked grim when a Wal-Mart opened a few blocks east.
   So far, the local favorite is faring well, says Mike Mudd, who has worked there more than 20 years. "We adjusted." Swains turned more to brand-name merchandise such as Pendleton, Woolrich and Levis, relying on quality and service while surrendering the low-end sales to the new competition.
    Port Angeles' struggle, like its best-known store, is to adjust to the New Economy without selling its soul. "The town is on a plateau," says John Brewer, publisher of the Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles. "Obviously, the old days, when you could drop out of school, marry your high-school sweetheart and make a good living at the mill, are long gone. But people don't really know what they want to do next."
    The town remains the gateway to Olympic National Park and its 4 million-plus annual visitors. Nearby Sequim has attracted increasing numbers of retirees. Local entrepreneurs are promoting sea kayaking and other "adventure tourism." But tourism remains highly seasonal, not the kind of work likely to replace year-round jobs at the mills. Besides, Port Angeles is not sure it wants to be a tourist attraction.
    That economic limbo is one of the reasons Bart Phillips left his job at the economic-development commission and took a similar job in Vancouver, Wash. "Vancouver is finally coming into its own," he says. "There is enormous growth here.
   "Port Angeles hasn't hit that point yet. There is a new-car dealership, a new cinema. They have a great cadre of professionals. But there's never enough money to do what needs to be done. Port Angeles is on the cusp."

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   In the spring of 1792, Captain George Vancouver and some 145 sea-weary crew members in two ships sailed around Cape Flattery and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, searching for the “expansive Mediterranean ocean” rumored to exist in this largely uncharted corner of the Pacific.
   As they entered Puget Sound and surveyed the landscape, the stern and often crotchety Englishman sang its praises. “The surface of the sea was perfectly smooth,” he wrote in his journal. :”And the country before us exhibited everything that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view.”
   There was little time for poetry, however. Over the next six weeks, Vancouver and company sailed and rowed through much of this int4ricate inland sea, meticulously charting its length and breadth and depth, assigning names to its islands, channels and bays, and ultimately compiling the first map of Puget Sound. It was a remarkable achievement. Published in 1799, Vancouver’s charts of the Northwest coast quickly circulated throughout Europe, luring more sthips to this newly discovered land.
   Two centuries later, Puget Sound is home to 4 million people in a dozen cities from Bellingham to Olympia and Bremerton. Its waters are spanned by bridges, cables and super ferries.. Yet the map Vancouver started inking remains very much a work in progress. Much of the thousand miles of shoreline he sketched from his vessel, Discovery, has been reshaped or obliterated by everything from timbered bulkheads to world-class seaports. And only recently have scientists devised ways to peer beneath the surface, adding a third, all-important dimension to this map.
    Earlier this month, the University of Washington research ship Thompson set out on much the same voyage – from Admiralty Inlet, down Hood Canal and back out into the southern fjords, then north into the San Juans. For five days, some 20 oceanographers and students worked around the clock, probing the sound, carefully drawing water samples from its depths and rushing them into the on-board laboratory.
    It was, said oceanographer Mark Warner, the first time in 40 years that scientists have attempted a comprehensive assessment of Puget Sound in a single voyage. Their objective: To gather data on currents, water quality, temperatures and productivity at some 30 specific stations – data demanded by a powerful new UW computer program called the Puget Sound Regional Synthesis Model, or PRISM.
   UW researcher Jeff Richey, who heads the PRISM project, and his colleagues are today’s Vancouver’s, pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and compiling it into a dynamic, “virtual Puget Sound” available to researchers, teachers, planners and policy-makers.
   The oceanographers are not the only ones retracing Vancouver’s 200-year-old course. Today, The Seattle Times begins its own exploration of Puget Sound. We are a crew of two or three – this reporter and UW historian of science Keith Benson, joined from time to time by photographer Tom Reese – aboard Benson’s 32-foot sailboat, “Velella.”
   Over the month to come, we will retrace the voyage of the Discovery, and of the Thompson. Our mission is to re-explore a place that is both familiar and foreign. What Vancouver saw freshly, we will see through the eyes of scientists gradually learning some of Puget Sound’s secrets. Unlike our predecessor, we will not have to wait seven years to share our findings. With a laptop computer linked to a cellular phone, we will be able to bring readers with us, reporting what we learn as we learn it.
   First, a few basics: Puget Sound is an inland sea or estuary, of about 2,000 square miles, containing about 1 trillion cubic meters of water, give or take a few billion. It is an extremely complex body of water, due to factors such as its extreme depth (an average of 600 feet), its intricate shoreline, its fierce tides and currents, and its maze of fjord-like channels. It is both one ecosystem and a collection of ecosystems that may or may not be linked. The water itself is complicates – layers of salt water imported from the North Pacific and huge volumes of fresh water delivered by rivers such as the Nisqually, Skagit and Dosewallips.
    For these and other reasons, Puget Sound is also one of the world’s most productive inland seas. Its cloudy waters are an indication not of sickness, but of dense concentrations of marine life ranging from microscopic plants to orca whales.
    Yet, the Sound is also a troubled sea. Once-healthy populations of salmon, herring, rockfish and other species have dwindled. Something out there is not working right. Fifteen years ago, the region launched a concerted effort to preserve Puget Sound. Billions of dollars have been spent building sewage-treatment plants and addressing polluted bays. New laws have made it more difficult to build on the waterfront. Commercial and sports fishing have been cut back dramatically.
   There has been some payoff. Earlier this year, the state Puget Sound Water Quality Action Team reported that water quality has improved in most places. Previously closed shellfish beds have been reopened. But nobody believes the sound is fixed. The federal government recently warned that it intends to formally list Puget Sound Chinook salmon runs as endangered, potentially invoking restrictions on cities, businesses and homeowners from the shores of the Sound to the crest of the Cascades.
    And most people seem amazingly willing to swallow their medicine. Surveyed last month by pollster Stuart Elway, 74 percent of Puget Sound voters contacted said they were aware of the salmon problem. Four out of five agreed that salmon are an indicator of environmental health and that government should do what is necessary to save them – whatever ithe costs.
   So what now? Polls suggest that people blame some combination of pollution, sprawl, over-fishing, poor management, logging, dams, agriculture and El Nino. The rogue’s gallery of culprits may suggest confusion, but it also reflects reality. If science can provide any answers, we certainly are in the right place. Puget Sound is home to thousands of marine biologists and oceanographers working for dozens of institutions. Yet most scientists are deeply reluctant to assign blame or to prescribe solutions for the state of our waters. There are too many uncertainties. For all our efforts to understand, the sound remains an enormous black box. On one hand, its waters are transparent; yet they are also dark, apaque and seemingly impenetrable. Ten feet beneath the surface, light begins to dim; at 100 feet, it is virtually gone.
   Still, confronted by declining salmon runs, taxpayers long for simple diagnoses and simple solutions. Ban gill nets. Shoot sea lions. Tear down dams. End logging. Trouble is, instant analysis doesn’t work out there. The one thing we know about marine biology is that it is profoundly different from the biology in our back yard. Take reproduction: Most fish produce thousands, even millions of eggs and larvae during their lives. Those offspring are immediately left to fend for themselves, drifting in a fluid environment where most are eaten by larger fish – possibly Mom or Dad. Nature’s strategy is a massive smorgasbord that allows only one in a thousand to reach maturity and perpetuate the lineage.
   Scientists believe that a minute change in the environment – water temperature, currents or an upwelling of microscopic plankton thousands of miles away – can profoundly affect which creatures survive and which don’t Unraveling that web is a daunting challenge. Consider, for example, the perspectives of just two of the oceanographers who worked aboard the Thompson this month. Jan Newton, who works for the state Department of Ecology, studies diatoms –microscopic, single-celled plants that drift beneath the surface of the sea. To her, water samples crqwn from the depths of the Sound are pure gold, a micro-world that supports all other life in the sea. The rate at which diatoms provides critical clues to the health of the sound, she says.
   UW oceanographer Mitsuhiro Kawase sees the same ecosystem very differently. His view is global. As a computer modeler at Princeton, he studied oceans for 15 years without ever going to sea. At the UW, his focus has narrowed to Puget Sound as a marine system composed of tides and currents, deep water and shallow water, layers of salt water and fresh, seasonal fluctuations and more. Kawase studies the sound as displayed on a computer monitor. The same spaceshiplike gadget that collects Jan Newton’s water samples carries an array of instruments that measure water temperature, salinity and oxygen content at different depths and transmit that data directly into the computer.
   “The data provides an opportunity to test the model,” he says. “So far, it has done a pretty god job of predictions circulation, layering fresh water and salt water. But it is not perfect. We haven’t been able to factor for wind.” He steps across the room and calls up PRISM, clicking his mouse to take a simulated flight over a simulated sea, clicking again for an animated display of undulating arrows that show tide cycles in Admiralty Inlet or Tacoma Narrows. “It’s working pretty well so far,” he says. “Our main limitation is memory.”
   To most Sound dwellers, Puget Sound conjures up images of leaping salmon and killer whales. But these are only the marquee players in a vast cast that also includes untold trillions of microscopic plankton, millions of herring and unknown numbers of 10-foot, bottom-dwelling sharks we rarely, if ever, see. As the Elway poll shows, the collective will already exists to preserve our regional sea. But effective strategies must be based on the best science, the broadest data available. We need wisdom, but first we need more memory.
   This is our modest mission – to add a little more data to the collective memory. Before leaving the dock in Seattle, we equipped the good ship Velella with an odd cargo -- journals from Vancouver’s voyage, cardboard boxes jammed with inter view3 notes and biological studies of Puget Sound We have a laptop computer linked via cellphone to The Times newsroom. We have lightweight kayaks on deck, a hand-held GPS device and, for diving, a drysuit, mask and snorkel.
     Over the next few weeks, we will sail to Discovery Bay, where Vancouver began his exploration, then down the Kitsap Peninsula and to the soughern inlets, back north along the urbanized shores of Taoma and Seattle and finally into the San Juans. Along the way we will visit with scientists and others who endeavor to peer beneath the surface. We will visit the notorious toxic hot spots and a couple of environmental success stories, and try to explore some puzzling questions: What in the world are diatoms and why should we care? Why are salmon and other fin fish declining while oysters and crab and other shellfish seem to be doing very well, thank you? Why are harbor seal populations growing while their food supply dwindles? Are expensive sewage-treatment plants worth the expense?
    We have an itinerary, but no agenda. We sail with no intention of making rand discoveries or scientific breakthroughs. We have no interest in pointing fingers, nor in preaching ecological virtue. Instead our job is to take a fresh look at this grand inland sea through the eyes of both Vancouver, who explored these waters when they were supposedly undisturbed, and through the eyes of today’s scientists, Vancouver’s intellectual descendants, who are still trying to finish his map.

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Plots, Plats and Panoramas: Mapping Seattle

By Ross Anderson

   George Vancouver was not impressed. He said so with his map. In 1792, the English explorer and his crew spent several weeks exploring Puget Sound, eventually producing the first-ever map of this corner of the continent. The map, so accurate that one could follow it down the Sound today, shows Tacoma's Commencement Bay in some detail, and the skipper was so impressed with the future site of Everett that he went ashore and claimed it for His Majesty. But halfway between them, what we now know as Seattle shows as a mere dimple in a complex shoreline; it wasn't even worth a name.

   Still, Vancouver's map provided the world's first look at the place that, 60 years later, became Seattle. Since then, Seattle has inspired countless hundreds of maps — from plat maps to gas-station maps, from panoramic views to satellite images. Like Vancouver, each mapmaker selected which features to show or not show, delivering its own geographical and editorial comment on the city that now prepares to observe the 150th anniversary of its founding.

   The other day, I asked 20 of my colleagues to sketch a quick map of their fair city. Their sketches had one common characteristic: Each was oriented with North at the top of the page. Beyond that they were, well, all over the map. A manager sketched a neat, tidy city, like a corporate organizational chart. A columnist offered a people-oriented tour of Seattle neighborhoods. An Eastsider depicted Seattle as an insignificant island just offshore from Bellevue.

   A few themes emerged. Most started with Seattle's unique hourglass figure — defined by Puget Sound on one side and Lake Washington on the other, wide at the top and bottom, skinny in the middle. And virtually everyone's map included I-5 or a Lake Washington bridge — their routes from home to work and back.

   Not surprising, perhaps, since most Americans view maps merely as tools for finding the shortest distance from here to there. But they are much more than that. Maps and mapmakers weave science and geometry, language and art into documents that people like me see as a high form of literature. Vancouver's maps, 200 years out of date, line my stairway at home, and hardly a day passes that I don't stop to admire them.

   City maps have especially rich genes The oldest known map, scrawled on a wall in Turkey and depicting a long-forgotten town at the foot of a volcano, has been carbon-dated to about 6,200 B.C. And long before anybody decided the earth was round, there were artful renditions of Jerusalemand Rome and other ancient cities.

   The history of Seattle's map is far more prosaic. Yet, like Rome or Jerusalem, our culture remains deeply rooted in our geography. List a local issue — rapid transit or declining salmon, earthquakes or energy shortages — and chances are it can be explained in large part by looking at a map. The first views were crude plats drawn by the founders, essentially legal documents establishing their land claims. 

   The first Seattle map seen by the outside world was produced in 1854 by a U.S. naval crew that dropped anchor in "Duwamish Bay" to chart its shoreline, part of the government's effort to survey thousands of miles of mostly-uncharted Pacific Northwest coastline. That chart shows a kidney-shaped inlet, half of it mudflats shielded by the roughly rectangular Alki peninsula. Midway down the eastern shore of the bay, at the edge of the mudflats, is a minor point of land with a spattering of about 10 dots representing buildings. The dots are labeled "Seattle," the name pioneers gave to the place where they built rustic homes on the site of an old Indian village.

   That's about it. The next two decades were virtually mapless in Seattle. The village grew slowly to 250 people in 1860, then 1,100 in 1870 — too small to need a map. Regional maps and atlases from the period were more likely to show Victoria, B.C., Olympia or Portland.

   But in 1878, an itinerant artist named E.S. Glover strode ashore and struck a deal to draw the definitive "bird's-eye view" of the city. Like dozens of other traveling artists of his day, Glover's mission was partly about art but mostly about business. The idea was to find a newspaper or a real-estate salesman to finance the job, then produce a detailed and handsome view of the city from some theoretical place up there, and sell the prints. Glover was a busy artist; in the previous year, he had drawn cities from San Diego to Victoria. The bird's-eye artist began with an accurate layout of the town's topography and streets, picked his point of view, then toured the streets, sketching buildings, streets, docks — anything that seemed to matter. "They had to be accurate," says local historian Greg Lange. "People wanted their businesses and homes to be on the map — or they wouldn't buy them!"

   The Seattle Glover drew in 1878 was a village of about 3,000 people, still focused on the lumber mill and dock at the foot of Yesler Street. Just south of Jackson, the town turned to mudflats. The tiny business district consisted of about six blocks; houses clustered between Seventh Avenue and the waterfront and north to Pine Street.

   The town began to boom in the early 1880s, spurred by the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad in Tacoma, providing transportation for Puget Sound resources. Streetcars opened new residential areas. Real-estate speculators filed plats, which required new maps. The city needed topographical maps to design water and sewer lines.

   It's easy to see the speculators at work in a map from 1891, says Richard Morrill, longtime geography professor at the University of Washington. They're filing plats on steep slopes, bogs, even the tideflats off Magnolia.

   Meanwhile, along came another birds-eye artist, Augustus Koch, who drew a very different city. By 1891, Seattle's population had exploded to 50,000. Pioneer Square was a bustling commercial crossroads of ships and trains that crossed the mudflats on a network of trestles. Streetcar neighborhoods were booming along Madison Street, the Rainier Valley, up the slopes of Queen Anne Hill and out to Fremont and Ballard — about a dozen streetcar lines in all.

   As the turn of the century approached, birds-eye views were falling out of fashion, victims of photography. Why pay for an artist's rendition when you can get a photograph? Too bad. Photographs may be more accurate, but the camera has no point of view. It can't edit the extraneous.

   Thankfully, enough folks kept faith with the old ways, and maps persisted. Redick McKee's "Correct Road Map of Seattle and Vicinity" in 1894 attempted to identify the city's every business and residence, from the waterfront mills to the suburban homes of Columbia City and Latona — the cartographer's version of the aerial photo.

   Even as that map was being drawn, Seattle's boom stalled briefly with the financial panic of 1893. But business took off again with the arrival of the Great Northern Railroad, the Klondike Gold Rush and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909. By 1911, Seattle was bursting its seams, in more ways than one. The population had multiplied to 240,000. Business, including real estate, was thriving. But the city's famous hills and lakes and waterways became obstacles. Seattle was fast becoming mired in its own geography.

   So City Hall hired Virgil Bogue, a well-known engineer and planner, to draw up a bold makeover. Bogue's Grand Plan called for a broad boulevard, lined with classical architecture, extending from downtown to Lake Union. He designed an ambitious mass-transit system with subways, elevated trains, bridges and tunnels. And he attempted to sell the idea with an inch-thick document composed largely of maps.

   Condemning it as too ambitious and costly, voters defeated Bogue's Plan. Ninety years later, there is a double irony to that decision. The plan would have given the city the transit system it now yearns for. But, had it been built, it almost certainly would have been dismantled, replaced by cars. Streetcar lines were shut down in 1940, the rails sold as scrap to Japan.

   Instead of building transit, the city had moved earth, leveling hills and using the dirt to fill the mudflats, digging a ship canal that linked Puget Sound to the lakes, straightening the Duwamish River and building a huge artificial island at its mouth to accommodate shipping. By 1915, Seattle had literally reconstructed its own landscape.

   Meanwhile, roads and road maps were beginning to define the American landscape, including Seattle's. Able to grow in only two directions, the city spread quickly to its present-day limits, and the market was for maps that helped drivers navigate from Point A to Point B.  Instead of streetcar lines, roads would direct the city's dynamics. Up to 1940, the Eastside had been virtually irrelevant. Kirkland, linked to Seattle by ferry, shows up on maps from the 1930s, but Bellevue was still populated by berry farmers.

   Then, in 1940, came the Lake Washington Floating Bridge. The rest is history.

    The Age of the Automobile has not done much for the art of maps. From the 1930s to the present, little has been added to the Seattle map — I-5, a few bridges, Seattle Center. One could drive much of today's Seattle with a 1940 map.  "The natural environment and topography have virtually disappeared," Lange says. "The only residue are the waterways and shorelines."

   But maps remain imbedded in American culture. Dog-eared city maps are stuffed into our desk drawers and under our car seats. Pocket maps are for sale alongside the Bic lighters at the supermarket checkstand. Maps are in the telephone book, on the office wall, spilling out of the new National Geographic.  Rand McNally, which has been publishing maps for some 130 years, runs a little shop downtown that sells seven different maps of Seattle, six Seattle guidebooks with maps, 10 various state and regional atlases, plus maps for virtually any major city around the globe. Internet sites will print you a map of any given address, and show you how to get there. Rand McNally is heavily into the business of selling handheld computers and software that will do much the same — and more.

   For map nuts like me, there is something numbing about all this. The Internet spits out a map virtually identical to the one you see at Rand McNally. Seattle in white, suburbs in pastel pink, all overlaid with red and yellow and black lines designating streets and highways. There is no landscape, no contour, no geography, no art and no new perspective. Just roads.

   These are not maps. They are wiring diagrams. Where is Augustus Koch when we really need him? We yearn for a mapmaker with a strong point of view. Consider Saul Steinberg's famous 1976 New Yorker cover, "View of the World from Ninth Avenue," a Manhattan street scene in the foreground, then east to the Hudson River, Jersey, a vague smattering of mountains out west.

     But computers also do marvelous things. David Finlayson and his colleagues at the University of Washington have compiled 100 years of land and marine surveys, millions of bits of information on elevations and depths from Mount Rainier to the deepest point in Puget Sound, and fed it into one powerful computer.

   The result is a cartographic gem, the most thorough and detailed rendition of our landscape ever produced. Man's handiwork is present in the form of Harbor Island and the Ship Canal. Otherwise, the computer shows us a Seattle stripped of our steel and asphalt interference. It is a map biased toward geography, depicting narrow ridges and valleys running north to south, tracks of the Vashon Glacier that, 14,000 years ago, covered what we know as Seattle with a mile of ice. Study this map and you're liable to hear the glacier grinding its way south, carving the landscape. This is a map with perspective. It uses Seattle's most up-to-date digital technology to reveal its most ancient information.

   And it is beautiful. Soon Finlayson's map of where I live will take its rightful place on my wall — right alongside those of Koch and Bogue and George Vancouver.

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     The world keeps passing this place by, riding the daily ebbs and floods, bound for somewhere else.  In the spring of 1792, Capt. George Vancouver stopped for just a couple of hours. He and a handpicked crew had packed a week's worth of supplies, left their ships anchored in Discovery Bay and set out in a boat no bigger than ours, determined to explore the foggy "inlet" that turned out to be Puget Sound. At Point Wilson, the northeast tip of Port Townsend, they beached the boat and stepped ashore, waiting for the "heavy vapour" to lift.
   "The shores here are sandy and pebbly," wrote Archibald Menzies, the Scottish botanist who traveled with Vancouver. "The point we came to was low and flat with some marshy ground behind it, and a pond of water surrounded with willows and tall bulrushes. Behind this a green bank stretched to the southward a little distance from the shore, which was marked with the beaten paths of deer and other animals. I ascended this bank and strolled over an extensive lawn, where solitude, rich pasture and rural prospects prevailed."
   Judging from their journals, the visitors were taken not just by the natural beauty of Puget Sound, but by its potential for exploitation. Menzies remarked on a land "where the plough might enter at once without the least obstruction and where the soil . . . appeared capable of yielding in this temperate climate luxuriant crops of European grains or of rearing herds of cattle . . ."
    Meanwhile, the crew set a small seine net, trying to catch some fish, but "without the least success." So they got back into their boat and rowed on south into the sound.
    Two centuries later, this windblown peninsula, with its green lawns and evergreens atop weathered bluffs, closely resembles what Menzies described. We stand on the same pebbly beach, gazing across Admiralty Inlet, Puget Sound's grand entryway, watching the world go by. Inbound is the Princess Marguerite with its load of tourists, and an ominous Trident submarine; outbound is a trio of purse seiners steaming toward the Alaska salmon grounds, and a massive grain freighter - all setting course to or from the Puget Sound seaports that Port Townsend once aspired to be but never became.
    But people here don't seem to care about this. They may raise a few cows, but Port Townsend's passion is the sea. Scores of businesses build or repair fishing boats, kayaks, traditional wood-hulled boats, sails or a thousand other things that link a terrestrial species to the inland sea that virtually surrounds them. At low tide on a Sunday afternoon, there must be 20 kids scattered across the tideflats, peering into pools and shouting for mom to come look. Others walk their dogs, sail along the waterfront or sit in folding chairs next to motor homes, drinking in the seascape.
    Down at the boat harbor, we berth the Velella near the Brendan D. II, the weathered, 48-foot vessel from which Jim Norris conducts his ongoing investigation of Puget Sound. "I wish I could tell you what's going on out there," he says wistfully, nodding toward the broad, shallow bay that is Port Townsend's front yard. "We know more than we did 10 years ago, but that's not saying much."
   Norris is not your usual scientist. He launched his career 25 years ago on the deck of a gill-net boat, chasing the elusive salmon. Ten years later, he returned to the University of Washington and fished his way to a Ph.D. in marine biology. Since then, he has refitted his boat to serve double duty as a floating platform to study Puget Sound's fisheries as well as to harvest them. Working with middle-school students and volunteers at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, Norris helps the state monitor water quality, eelgrass growth, weather and wildlife in Port Townsend's bay. Last week, he conducted his annual "trawl survey," dragging a small trawlnet through the bay, one section at a time, then carefully documenting what it brought to the surface.
   After nearly a decade of surveys, "there doesn't seem to be any consistent pattern," he says. "Some species show a downward trend, but others are going up." He runs his finger down a computer printout listing yearly counts of Pacific tomcod, snake prickleback, walleye pollock, Pacific herring, sculpin and many more.
   Last month, he says, some Oregon biologists came to Port Townsend looking for signs of pollock, a cod-like fish whose numbers appear to have dwindled in Northwest waters. They found fewer than 50 - not good. Last week, trawling in the same bay, Norris caught 150 pollock - the second highest recorded by his surveys. The same nets brought up more young cod than all previous years combined, he says.
   "As a fisherman, nothing surprises me," he says. "We'll have great luck at a certain place year after year, so you go back the next year expecting it to happen again. And you come up empty."
Norris wonders if he isn't seeing evidence of what is called the decadal oscillation, an emerging theory that fish populations vary dramatically in long-term cycles that may be linked to ocean temperatures. A growing number of adherents believe that, for some 20 years, Mother Nature has favored fish in Alaskan waters over the Pacific Northwest, and that the oscillation, if it exists, is beginning to oscillate back in favor of Puget Sound.
   So goes the theory. Alas, the same scientists warn that the most predictable law of the sea is its unpredictability, the cycles and variables they still don't understand. Like the ocean at large, Puget Sound is simply not the homogenous monoculture many people think it is, Norris says. Its habitat and wildlife vary dramatically from year to year, place to place.
   Even Port Townsend's bay, only about five miles long, appears to be comprised of two ecosystems, he says. The northeast half is dominated by rock sole, Pacific sand dab, spotted rockfish; the southwest by pricklebacks, tomcod and herring. The apparent boundary is a riptide that runs north to south from the marina to Indian Island. East of that rip, Norris says, water temperatures drop by two degrees, a significant difference in the marine environment. Why the difference? Probably because the water in the southwest is relatively stable, while the northeast is in constant turmoil, agitated by the powerful currents of Admiralty Inlet.
   Sorting out Puget Sound's complex ecosystem will take many years, Norris says. Scientists need long-term data in order to recognize and begin to study its biological cycles. "We need a 100-year database," he says. "And in this bay, we only have 10 years."
   But if it is daunting, it need not be costly. Norris and the local marine-science center operate on a shoestring budget, using mostly volunteer assistants. Water-quality data is gathered by eighth-grade students from local schools. Norris' crew last week was comprised of schoolteachers taking a summer course. Still more volunteers conducted wildlife tours along the seashore.
   Port Townsend is not the only place where citizens have become invested in the health of Puget Sound. Communities from Skagit County to Hood Canal and South Puget Sound have demonstrated that there is a payoff in making marine science accessible to nonscientists.
   "You don't need a Ph.D. to read the meters, only to interpret them," he says. "I believe we're producing research-quality data at a fraction of the normal cost."
    Encouraged by those words of encouragement, we cast off our lines and point our sloop southward toward the foggy vapours of Puget Sound.

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Dutiful Servant, Brutal Barrier

   MY FIRST VIEW OF SEATTLE was from the back seat of the family Ford, rumbling northward on the Alaskan Way Viaduct. For a 14-year-old, the view from the top deck was a midsummer's dream — on the left, white ferries and the sawtooth Olympic Mountains set against an impossibly blue Puget Sound, on the right that handsome, pre-skyscraper cityscape, with the Smith Tower glowing orange in the late afternoon sun.

   That was in 1962, the summer of the World's Fair. And that is when I decided I would live here. Forty years later, every journey along that concrete esplanade reminds me that I made a good decision.

   It also reminds me why the viaduct has got to go. After 30 years of civic debate over the relative benefits and risks of the elevated viaduct, that conclusion is fast becoming conventional wisdom. Last year's Nisqually Earthquake shook its dubious footings, closing it to traffic while makeshift repairs were made. Had the quake been a bit closer, or more violent, it would have been worse.

   "There are at least a couple of ways it can fail in a heavier quake," says Tom Madden, project engineer with the state Department of Transportation. He stands beneath the viaduct, pointing up into its suspect underpinnings, seeing things I don't. "Maybe it's not an emergency," he says. "But you might say we're in an emphatic hurry. We have an opportunity to learn from other people's mistakes, and to do this right."

   The opportunity goes beyond that. If Seattle gets its act together, replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct could be the project that reconnects Seattle with its waterfront and links urban landmarks from Safeco Field and Pioneer Square to Pike Place Market, Seattle Center and even South Lake Union.

   With this in mind, a team of state and city engineers has been examining the alternatives — a new elevated freeway, a covered trench, a deep tunnel or some combination of the above. But taxpayers are grumpy. Nobody really knows what it would cost, but think billions. Replacing the viaduct is likely to be the most costly project in Seattle history, more than the I-90 bridge, the Convention Center, both sports stadiums — combined!

   Boston's notorious "Big Dig," which set out to replace a similar, 1950s, elevated freeway, has turned into a fiasco with a price tag of $14 billion — and counting. And Seattle's recent record of building big projects is dubious. This is the city that built a domed stadium, then blew it up because it didn't have enough bathrooms. This is the city that has already spent $1 billion on a mass-transit system that has yet to begin construction.

   To make matters worse, the tax revolt leaves city leaders scratching for some way to pay the tab in the midst of a local and national recession — and a continuing tax revolt. Even as they study ways to replace it, these leaders have no certainty they will get the $30 million or so they need for preliminary planning.

   It looks like there will be no way around the dreaded "T" word — "tolls." That's how recent freeways in Southern California have been financed. But officials here find it nearly impossible to even mouth the word.

   All this to replace a venerable highway that may be drop-dead ugly but still carries 110,000 cars and trucks a day through the guts of the city.

   THE ALASKAN WAY VIADUCT dates to those heady years after World War II, when Seattle was riding one of its periodic booms. Thousands of engineers and skilled workers had migrated here to build Boeing bombers and warships. Wages were good, and the quality of life was even better.

   But all those people created hopeless traffic jams in a city where water closes in on two sides and virtually every road of consequence converged on downtown Seattle. The jobs were in the South End while a lot of folks were seeking housing in the north. There was no I-5, and Aurora Avenue, the closest thing to a north-south highway, stopped at Denny Way. Commuters had to make their way along Fourth Avenue, the bottleneck in Seattle's hourglass. Something had to be done.

   So engineers went to work, looking for some way to get traffic not to but through downtown. They looked at turning Sixth Avenue into a highway, but ultimately, in 1948, rejected that idea in favor of an elevated highway — the region's first "freeway" — right along the waterfront, connecting with Alaskan Way on the south and with a new tunnel under Broad Street, which in turn connected with Aurora.

   From the outset, planners considered the aesthetics of the project. City Engineer R.W. Finke promised that the structure would "achieve good architectural lines without any sacrifice in economy." However, he warned the City Council, "it is not beautiful. The requirements of rigid economy have dictated a slenderness of line that is not in harmony with the overall proportions."  Which was City Hall's way of saying: Well, it will create a concrete wall along the waterfront — but it's worth it. The waterfront was dying anyway, as shipping moved south to Harbor Island, which could handle the huge vessels and cranes needed for containerized cargo.  "I am very strongly of the opinion that the structure will not depreciate the appearance of Alaskan Way and the waterfront," Finke persisted. "On the contrary, I am sure that it will improve it."

   And so the viaduct was built — 8,070 lineal feet of concrete roadway, two levels, 24,000 cubic yards of concrete reinforced by 10,000 tons of steel. It was a project only an engineer could love — a brutalist barricade, 60 feet tall, that blocked views and broadcast traffic noise for blocks around.   From an engineering standpoint, the viaduct was impressive — big, solid, efficient and, at less than $4 million, a bargain. When it opened in 1952, it was heralded as a civic asset, a "motorists' dream," and a tourist attraction on a par with Mount Rainier and the Lake Washington Floating Bridge. Soon it was carrying an average of 50,000 cars a day past downtown Seattle.

   But the engineers blew it on two counts. First, they built on landfill — dirt from the various "regrades" that sought to flatten downtown streets. To make matters worse, the dirt is contained by a makeshift seawall of logs and concrete slabs, some of which dated as far back as 1905. That works fine under normal conditions, but in an earthquake, there is a risk of liquefaction — hard ground turning to mud. Finke's pitch to the Council never mentioned that.

   It was to be only the first crucial piece of a web of concrete that would crisscross the city. Interstate 5 came along in the early '60s, closely following that Sixth Avenue route Finke had studied 20 years earlier. Plans called for yet another north-south freeway, the R.H. Thomson, that would slice along the ridge overlooking Lake Washington, plus east-west freeways to link them all into a regional grid. Planners even had the foresight to build elaborate concrete interchanges that would save the taxpayers money later.

   And then came the revolution. Perhaps it began with transplanted Californians, who had seen what freeways did to Los Angeles. Maybe it was the Lesser Seattle movement, which argued that freeways are self-fulfilling prophecies that immediately fill with cars. And maybe it was that slab of concrete, strewn along the waterfront — a rude reminder of the consequences of our infatuation with the automobile.

   Whatever the reasons, Seattle in the 1970s turned thumbs down on freeways. The Bay Freeway across South Lake Union was wiped off the books. So was the R.H. Thomson. Critics almost killed plans for the new I-90 bridge across the lake; only an agreement to cover much of the thing saved it. Those orphaned interchanges remained ramps to nowhere, waiting for some future civilization to dig them up and speculate on their religious functions.

   The viaduct was becoming a metaphor for whatever was wrong with Seattle. In 1975, a tanker truck crashed on the upper deck, spilling burning gas onto the street below, almost trapping 150 people in a Pioneer Square nightclub. The critics winced and wagged their fingers. But the Alaskan Way Viaduct stood firm, sucking cars in and out of the city, blocking views, barricading city from Puget Sound, and providing crude shelter for the homeless.

   By the late '70s, the contraption had fallen so far out of favor that two councilmen — Bruce Chapman and John Miller — proposed tearing it down and replacing it with a tunnel. Then along came an upstart, Austrian architect Klaus Bodenmueller, who argued that the structure should be recycled into something better — an elongated 2 million-square-foot urban village with shops, condos, a new art museum and a grand galleria with sweeping views across Elliott Bay. Bodenmueller became obsessed with the idea, peddling it to anyone who would listen. Eventually, he went home to build a similar project over an old railroad yard in Vienna.    In 1985, a local developer got no further with his proposal to turn the viaduct into a parking garage. In the early '90s, another group of businessmen proposed to replace the viaduct with a series of tunnels, paid for by tolls.

   None of these ideas went anywhere. Seattle was intent on building other things — sports stadiums, a convention center, an art museum and a symphony hall. After 80 years of failed proposals, the region approved a plan for a mass-transit system — but no new highways.

   Then came Feb. 28, 2001. A severe quake, centered 50 miles to the south in the Nisqually Delta, rattled the city's foundations — and the viaduct's. There were isolated cases of soil liquefaction, many of them in the Duwamish area just south of downtown — some in the virtual shadow of the viaduct. The highway remained standing, but with cracked columns and weakened joints. Four months later, engineers released a report warning there is a 1-in-20 chance the structure would fail in a more severe quake in the next 10 years. They recommended replacing it.

   That report conjures images of similar structures — San Francisco's Embarcadero and Oakland's Cypress Freeway — parts of which collapsed in the 1989 earthquake. "In our case, it has more to do with the soils and with that seawall," explains Bob Chandler, viaduct project manager for the City of Seattle. "In a heavy quake, the fear is that the seawall would fail . . . and everything on it is in jeopardy."

   Any major structure on the waterfront should be on foundations that carry down to bedrock, some 100 feet below, as was done with the stadiums, he says.

   Chandler represents the city, and Madden the state, in the joint effort to draft plans for repairing or, more likely, replacing the structure. They've hired a big-league team of experts — a San Francisco planner who worked on reshaping that city's obsolete highways, an Australian authority on tunnels and risk analysis, engineers, meeting facilitators and more. So far it's been a surprisingly public process, with open meetings, lots of citizen involvement and a Web site that delivers useful information. All this is designed to minimize the conflict in hopes of speeding up the process.

   In a day-long tour of the corridor, Chandler and Madden reviewed the constraints they're working under. They have one major advantage: The government already owns the corridor up the Duwamish, along the waterfront, and up Battery Street to Aurora. That helps.

But problems abound. For starters, the viaduct has to remain open while it is replaced. That's what got Boston into trouble, trying to replace an urban freeway without closing it — at the cost of untold billions. They need to leave room for access ramps — something the 1940s builders barely thought about. Lanes need to be wider to accommodate trucks and emergency shoulders. They need to be equipped with ventilation, fire suppressants.

   And the corridor has huge limitations. It must allow for a major rail line for freight and passenger trains. Chandler points to the existing viaduct just north of the Pike Place Market, where new buildings have gone up just inches from viaduct ramps. The Battery Street Tunnel is equally narrow, allowing little or no room for more lanes. And a few blocks north, neighbors such as KING Broadcasting and Holiday Inns have built right up to the property line, so expanding the corridor may mean running a lane through existing hotel rooms, or through KING anchor Jean Enersen's dressing room.

  In February, the team unveiled a set of alternative plans. Plan A was perhaps the simplest and least expensive. It would replace the existing viaduct with a new one, plus a two-level tunnel connecting Alaskan Way with Aurora.

   Plan B was a combination — an elevated highway for southbound lanes and an underground, cut-and-cover trench for northbound lanes, connecting with a deep tunnel beneath the existing Battery Street tunnel.  Plan C would have replaced the viaduct with a cut-and-cover trench, which would be tied into a new downtown seawall, eventually leaving the surface open for parks, a waterfront boulevard, transit or whatever.

   Many of the listeners wanted to drop Plans A and B altogether. After years of looking at one ugly viaduct, who wants another one? Waterfront real estate has become far too valuable to turn over to cars. Instead, they gushed over the prospects of eliminating the wall and reconnecting Seattle with the waterfront that made it a great city. "Instead of just thinking about the costs, we need to think about the return-on-investment," said City Councilman Richard Conlin.

   Others talked about possibilities for public transit — a new monorail, or an extended streetcar line. Still others yearn to extend the project even farther, creating a grand, sweeping parkway from Safeco Field to South Lake Union.

   But there was an unspoken sense of the ethereal in that meeting room. While civic leaders entertained grand visions, each had to be wondering: Get real! This is the city that inspired Tim Eyman to launch a tax revolt, a city that Boeing dumped in favor of Chicago, a city where dot-coms have collapsed right and left, a city that already blew its civic wad on a transit system that may or may not get built, on a new City Hall and a convention center, on two sports stadiums and an aging second baseman from Cincinnati who had one good year. What are the chances that taxpayers will spend billions to tear down a perfectly good viaduct and replace it with a tunnel and a waterfront park?

   Once upon a time, Seattle's civic leaders hired yet another nationally-known engineer, Virgil Bogue, and assigned him to craft a bold development plan appropriate to a new century. Bogue set up shop downtown and spent a year studying the city before producing a thick document that called for a new civic center, new parks, parkways and highways, tunnels and an elaborate mass-transit system. He didn't know what it would cost, but he promised a rich return on the investment.   When the Bogue Plan was put to a popular vote, it lost nearly 2-to-1. That was in 1911. Instead of following his plan, Seattle leveled some hills and used the dirt as landfill behind a slapdash seawall.

   A generation later, the city built a "motorists' dream" along that hastily-built waterfront. And the rest is history.

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   When 500 folks assembled for Mount Vernon’s biggest party one spring weekend, the only building big enough was a massive flower warehouse somewhere out in the tulip fields. Dressed in everything from folk-dance costumes to tuxedos and evening gowns, Skagit County's finest parked along a narrow road, promenaded through the din of evening frogs and into the cavernous warehouse, where the scents of perfume and after-shave blended with resident aromas more, well, agricultural.

    Inside, they lined up at the bar and traded gossip while Skye Richendrfer, the town mayor, paraded around the hall in his kilt and bagpiper's regalia, serenading constituents.
The community bash kicked off the Tulip Festival, during which up to 1 million visitors from Seattle and beyond converge on this town of 22,000 and its lush river delta now splendidly arrayed in springtime blooms.
   To the locals, the festival is good news: Organizers project millions of dollars to be spent by visitors eager to glimpse the tulip fields. And bad news: two weeks of traffic jams to rival Seattle's evening commute. These things cause Skagitonians to worry that their best-kept community secret is getting out.

    Recently, the magazine American Demographics, which turns statistics into stories on trends, rated 193 small American cities (between 15,000 and 50,000 and outside major metropolitan areas) based on quality-of-life factors ranging from climate to crime rates. Better-known places such as Bozeman, Mont., Bend, Ore., and Hilton Head, S.C., all rated high. But, when the data was all compiled, Mount Vernon emerged at the top of the list.
   Author Kevin Heubusch explained that Mount Vernon rated particularly high in personal income, parks and proximity to urban amenities, while enjoying lower-than-average property taxes and crime rates. Most of all, the town rated high in "community investment;" folks here are willing to spend money on public goods such as schools and farmland preservation.
   Of course, people here already knew that Mount Vernon is the best little city in America. "We're at the foot of the Cascades and the doorstep of the San Juans," says Don Wick, director of the local Economic Development Association. "We're halfway between two of the finest cities in the world, but we don't have to live in either of them."
   Like many of his neighbors, Wick is a refugee. He grew up in Ballard and took a job 15 years ago as a disc jockey at the local radio station. "I expected to stay two years MAX! And here I am."
   The economy, still heavily agricultural, is healthy, he says. While incomes lag slightly behind King County and the state, housing costs lag much further; you can still buy a three-bedroom rambler for $200,000. Unemployment is higher than Seattle's, but it's declining.