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. "We have it all - a small-town atmosphere, good schools, low crime," adds Tom Verge, a native who went away to law school, then came home to raise his family. "I don't see any downsides."
   This is Mount Vernon's secret, and folks here aren't sure they're ready to share it with anybody down south. To most Seattleites, Mount Vernon is where you turn left en route to the San Juan Islands. Seen from I-5, two images dominate: the Skagit River Delta and its vast green fields speckled with whitewashed farmhouses and big red barns; and the equally flat expanses of asphalt parking lots surrounding new strip malls and national retail outlets just north of town. Both are important facets of Greater Mount Vernon, and they add up to an inevitable collision between things urban and rural. American Demographics also lists Mount Vernon as one of the nation's fastest-growing small cities. The city grew by a staggering 30 percent in the 1990s -- three times the King County rate over the same period.
   Skagit County, which stretches from Anacortes to Sedro-Woolley, grew by 25 percent to 100,000 people. While most of the county remains rural, newcomers are arriving en masse in the hills east of Mount Vernon, where new housing developments bear a striking resemblance to King County's Sammamish Plateau.
   Inevitably, such growth brings problems - overloaded sewers, crowded schools, clashes over the state Growth Management Act. Despite the low crime rates, Skagitonians now hear about minimart stickups, even a drive-by shooting earlier this year. They worry about traffic jams and cellular-phone towers. Family farms face ever-increasing pressure to sell some of the world's most fertile land to those growing malls.
   At least some locals worry about how to bring the fast-growing Hispanic community - 7,700 strong countywide - into the mainstream. While hundreds of Hispanics work the fields, harvesting the tulips that are the local emblem, virtually none were evident at the festival kickoff event.
   Through these other tensions, Mount Vernon clings stubbornly to its small-town atmosphere, especially in that cluster of brick buildings sandwiched between I-5 and the Skagit River - downtown. Like most cities, downtown long ago lost its major retail stores like Sears and JCPenney. But the town has built up its government center and supported the renovation of the elegant, 70-year-old Lincoln Theater, a nonprofit venue for anything from film symposiums to Celtic string bands. Vacated stores have been filled by new ones, or by local-government offices, lawyers, accountants and other professionals who don't want to work in a mall. As a result, the vacancy rate is near zero.
   For the die-hard retailers, competition is tough. Less than two years ago, Rich Allen and his wife bought the well-established Collins Office Supply, where everything from staples to office desks and tulip-decorated stationery can be found in one small corner store. Since then two national chains, Office Max and Office Depot, have opened new stores at the nearby mall. "We saw an immediate decline in sales," Allen says. "We cut our prices, started buying directly from vendors, and now our prices are competitive." Customers are coming back, he says. They like the personal service and the familiarity - especially 72-year-old Betty Hauser, who has been selling supplies at Collins for 38 years and knows every customer by name.
   Mount Vernon is that kind of place. Locals can't cross the street without meeting a friend. It is a place where folks still think it's important to be active in Rotary or Kiwanis or the Moose Lodge. Stop by Coffee Corner, a clean little eatery across from the courthouse, and you find a classic lunch counter surrounded by a half-dozen Naugahyde booths, the largest of which is reserved for the daily lunchtime card game involving a city councilman, a local judge, the part-time prosecutor and anybody else with a yen for gin rummy or hearts.
   Steve Skelton, the judge, appears anything but judicial in his leather bomber jacket, full beard, dark glasses and diamond stud in one ear. "I live here because I chose to," Skelton says, his pals nodding their agreement while studying their cards. "I like practicing law in a place where I know who I'm working with - the lawyers and most of their clients."
   Skelton grew up in Seattle, flunked out of the University of Washington and worked three years as a Seattle cop before going back to school. This time he earned his law degree and got out of town, starting up a criminal-defense practice in Skagit County. That was 20 years ago, and he has never looked back.
    Next to him, City Councilman John Cheney is a retired architect who remains deeply involved in civic life - be it land-use disputes or weekly "roundtable discussions" over heady stuff such as "prehistory notions of evolution."
   Today, downtown's greatest fear may not be abandonment, but too much success. It hasn't happened yet, but locals figure it's a matter of time before the place is "LaConnerized," rendered altogether too cute by gift shops, trendy bars and Starbucks carts. One local businessman warns the jig is up "when the corner pharmacy becomes a Williams-Sonoma."
    Mount Vernon's real secret appears to be a local culture that values civic activism and can-do politics - or what Mayor Richendrfer calls "synergy."
   "People here still believe they can have an impact on their community, and so they do," he says.
   The proof comes with the periodic floods, when bankers and clerks leave the office and work elbow-to-elbow with housewives and field hands, piling up sandbag dikes. Voters are willing to tax themselves for public benefits. Local taxpayers recently approved $10 million in levies for two new schools and $4 million more for a police station. Senior citizens alone donate thousands of hours of volunteer time to 87 agencies. United Way just finished a record year of fund raising. Last year, American Demographics analyzed data on civic involvement in nonurban counties across the nation and Skagit County ranked in the top 20. "That ranking for civic engagement helps explain the No. 1 rating for our quality of life," says Wick.
   Local politics are moderate, bipartisan and positive. The county commissioners and auditor are Republican, the sheriff and state legislators Democrats. They all belong to the same civic clubs. They even seem to like each other.
    Richendrfer, whose job is nonpartisan, is a Bellingham native who moved to Mount Vernon years ago and started up a business developing accounting software. In 1995, he was the unknown candidate who used computer-assisted tactics to emerge from a field of six candidates for mayor.

   He has promoted public-private partnerships and high-tech innovations. The town has a brand-new Web site and is burying fiber-optic cable in the same ditches as new sewers. There is a new brew pub and a French restaurant and plans to redevelop the aging grain elevator that serves as a downtown landmark. The city is starting work on a milelong park along the river where old-timers have gathered for years, fishing for the elusive steelhead, with a thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts perched on the hood of a pickup truck.
   "We need to do a much better job of showing off what we have to offer," Richendrfer says. "We're playing catch-up with the rest of the state. We need parks, salmon fishing, a stern-wheeler on the river."
   Public relations aside, Richendrfer and others insist that the town's biggest challenge is to preserve its agricultural roots - a mission supported by an overwhelming majority of voters. While founded in the 1870s as a fur-trading post, the earliest settlers soon discovered the fertile soils deposited here by the Skagit River. By the 1930s, one journalist reported that the town consisted of about 4,000 souls, plus "two pea canneries, two milk condenseries, an egg and poultry plant, and a chicken and turkey hatchery."
   Sixty years later, the pea canneries have been replaced by climate-controlled warehouses and freezer plants. While the new neighborhoods sprawl eastward, one can still walk easily from downtown Mount Vernon across the aging iron bridge and into farm country. For this, locals can thank the river, which created the flats and still insists on overflowing its banks now and then - despite 100 years of dike construction. "The floods are a blessing," says Tom Verge, a local lawyer who grew up here. "Nobody wants to build on the flats, because they know it's a matter of time before they get flooded out."
   The pressures on farmers are well-known. No matter how rich the tulip crop, any given acre of land is far more valuable to a commercial developer. And folks here are firm believers in a citizen's right to do what he pleases with his property. As a result, the number of cultivated acres is shrinking. Just last week, local officials formally broke ground for a state-of-the-art hardwood mill, their ceremonial shovels turning over a rich, dark soil that most of the world's farmers can only dream about.
   Yet 100,000 acres continue to be farmed, mostly by individuals and families. And, thanks in part to the floods, the delta farmlands have escaped the worst of the development pressure, says EDA director Wick. Some leading farmers have organized Skagitonians to Protect Farmland, raising money to buy development rights to threatened farms and looking for ways to buy more. One possibility is a countywide bond issue, an example of the kind of public-private partnership that the mayor and others talk about.
   These are the strategies for preserving the town's "Norman Rockwell character," Richendrfer says. The nagging question is how much growth can be sustained without diluting the very quality that draws people here. "I think most of us agree about what we like here," he adds. "Now the challenge is to agree on how to not screw it up."

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Ross Anderson
   Sun City it is not. But for a certain breed of hardy Northwesterner, given to Douglas firs and stubborn independence, this was a pensioner's paradise.
   It was, at least, until that day a few years ago, when a fire burned the town's cafe and store to the ground, searing the soul of this remote retirement community. Since then, the community has been ripped into two warring camps, each with its own idea of how to rebuild. And not even the benevolence of billionaire Bill Gates, whose foundation offered to help, appears able to heal the wounds.
   Today, as always, only the most adventurous or hopelessly lost find their way to Ryderwood. It is at the end of a long, narrow road that snakes into the obscure, logged-out woods north of Longview. The unincorporated town consists of a block of community buildings surrounded by about 200 simple frame houses and double-wide mobile homes on small lots. There are no landmarks, no tourist attractions, no reason to come unless you know somebody.
   But to about 400 souls, it is home. Each Ryderwood resident made a conscious choice to live here. And most intend to die here. "We looked all over the Northwest for a place to retire," says Harold Barnes, a retired Boeing worker formerly of Edmonds. "Nothing felt right until somebody told us about Ryderwood. We drove into town and we knew we were home."
   It is a self-governing community, a cross between a modern condominium and a traditional New England town meeting. Residents collectively own the community buildings, including the church. Volunteers maintain the buildings, mow the lawn at the town park, run the town library and police their streets in the evenings. The average age of the volunteer fire department is around 70.
All of this worked pretty well, until recently.
   Ryderwood owes its existence to R.A. Long, the Midwest timber tycoon who bought a huge expanse of timberlands and moved his operations to Southwest Washington in the 1920s. Long, still referred to locally as "Mr. Long," built the world's largest lumber mill at Longview, plus a complete town in the woods to house his logging crews. Unlike most company towns, Ryderwood was built to accommodate families instead of single workers; most of the several hundred small frame houses have two bedrooms and a bath.
   "Mr. Long was a generous man," recalls Bud May, a retired newspaperman who grew up in Ryderwood at its peak in the 1940s and now lives in nearby Castle Rock. "We had our own water and sewer system, school, community hall, a big theater and a big mercantile store that sold groceries, hardware, drugs, clothing, everything you needed."
   Days began at 5 a.m. when a train whistle sounded to haul loggers into the woods. "It was risky work. Now and then, we'd be at school and hear that long, low train whistle, and we all wondered whose dad had died in the woods."
   By the early 1950s, those woods had been logged out, leaving Ryderwood an island in a vast landscape of stumps and slash. Most of the loggers moved on. A private developer bought the entire town for $90,000 and turned it into a retirement community open to people over age 55. Homes sold for as little as $2,500 - affordable to even low-income retirees.
   Eventually, the developer went broke, but the community survived. About 20 years ago, the residents' nonprofit Ryderwood Improvement and Service Association (RISA) bought the town. Each resident owns a home, plus a share in the community buildings. The water and sewer systems were turned over to the county.
   "A lot of people stay because it's affordable," says Barnes. "We pay $18 a month to RISA for garbage collection, street lights. The total budget is about $50,000 a year. No employees. Volunteers do everything."
   Housing prices have increased, of course. But even today, pensioners can buy a home for as little as $40,000.
   Many of the recent arrivals are relatively wealthy, and most are drawn because of the lifestyle. "I was struck by the quiet," says Tom Burris, 67, a former military officer and Boeing worker who retired here in 1996. "We're right on the edge of the forest. We get deer and elk wandering down Main Street. There are otter in the lake, birds and coyote music with every full moon."
   To pass the time, there are poker games or bingo at the community hall, weekend dances, church activities, a sewing circle and lots of volunteerism.
    "The key is feeling useful, like you're contributing to the community," says Burris. "You start declining when you don't feel the world needs you anymore."
    For years, life revolved around the Ryderwood Cafe and Store, the only private business in town, a western-style two-story building next door to the post office. Folks gathered there to sip coffee and exchange gossip. They did until the fire of Dec. 6, 1997. Nobody's sure how it started, but the 75-year-old wood-frame building burned "like a blowtorch."
   "All we could do was contain it," Burris recalls. "One local hero managed to attach a chain to the propane tank and pull it down the street; if that had gone up, it would have taken the whole block with it."
   Nobody was hurt, but Ryderwood is not the same without its cafe and store. And it's six miles of narrow road to the closest food store.
   Residents vowed to rebuild. Burris, newly elected to the RISA board of trustees, took control and contacted the Gates Foundation, the well-endowed charity of the Microsoft billionaire.
   Last April, 16 months after the fire, William H. Gates Sr. notified the town that the foundation would pick up the $300,000 cost. "The gift was made in hopes we could help solve a problem that might not otherwise be solved," said foundation spokesman Trevor Neilson. That should have been that. Instead, things have gone from bad to worse.
    Burris arranged for the purchase of the store lot from the former owners and started buying second-hand commercial kitchen equipment. Resident Glen Marchbanks, a retired architect from California, spent months drawing plans for a new, 7,800-square-foot cafe and store patterned after the old one.
   But some residents didn't like the design, or the undemocratic way it was drawn up. "It's too big," says Barnes. "They'd need two people to run the cafe, and they'd have to sell 100 meals a day; the old cafe served about 40. It won't work."
   "They tried to make a destination restaurant, and that's not what people want," adds 67-year-old Dan Alston, who moved here 10 years ago.
   Some residents went so far as to ask the Gates Foundation to withdraw the grant.
   Burris says it was all a misunderstanding. He posted the trustees' plan and a smaller alternative on the post office wall and called for a vote. His plan won with 58 percent of the votes. Opponents, however, say the vote wasn't fair, that Burris tries to run the town like a military camp. "He's a control freak," says Alston.
    Over time, the town has broken into two camps, each suspicious of the other. "We don't need this," says Barbara Alston, 71, who met and married her husband here five years ago. "I never lived anywhere where people are so nosy."
    Alarmed by the fight, the Gates Foundation has backed off from its promise. Burris and the trustees violated their trust, the elder Gates said in a letter to the town, by spending foundation money to purchase the land rather than on construction. "You have, in our view, misapplied some $43,000 of funds we placed under your control," Gates said in his sternly worded letter of Jan. 18.
   However, the foundation leaves a tiny crack in the door, a slim possibility of a new grant - but not unless Ryderwood residents reach some genuine consensus on what they want to build. That appears unlikely any time soon. In a stormy meeting last month, critics called for Burris and other trustees to resign. They refused, and instead formed a new committee to come up with one or more new construction plans. "This is as bad as it gets," says Burris. "We really need that grant. Otherwise, we're looking at five years of bake sales and garage sales."
    The board has asked residents to vote Feb. 21 whether to begin raising money on their own. "The option is to sit and look at that empty lot," says Burris.
   Ryderwood remains stalemated while aging residents drive 12 miles round-trip to get a loaf of bread or a hot lunch. Still, folks here expect to weather the storm. It's all part of a community learning how to govern itself. "I suppose it's par for the course," chuckles longtime resident Alston, "in a small town full of old coots like me."

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Still Standing: From fine art to the trinket trade, a Native tradition survives
By Ross Anderson

   Somewhere out there in America, Internet entrepreneurs are selling "Northwest Coast-style totem poles" on eBay for prices starting at about $30. These totems are hand-carved and hand-painted, 20 to 30 inches tall, and they look very Northwest. I know, because I bought one. And today it sits on my fireplace mantel with the rest of my growing collection of model totem poles. I like it.
   But it's worth noting that said totems are hand-carved by a family in Indonesia. They may be Northwest "style," but they are definitely not Northwest Coast. So it goes with the quintessential icon of the Pacific Northwest.

   Once upon a time, the people who lived in this soggy corner of the continent whittled away at native cedar logs and created exquisite renditions of Northwest creatures, real and mythical — bears and orcas and frogs and the obligatory, spread-winged Thunderbird. Painted in blacks and earthy reds, those sculptures were instantly recognized as distinctly us. To appreciate their artistry, stop by the Burke Museum or Ye Olde Curiosity Shop on the waterfront.

     Click onto eBay and search for "totem," and you will get hundreds of hits. You will find Navajo totems, Iroquois totems and Seminole totems. You will find totems made of plastic or cast iron or cardboard, painted in every imaginable hue including phosphorescent yellow and pink. You will find totem pole salt-and-pepper shakers, made in China. You will find totem-shaped whiskey or perfume bottles, spoons and candles and door knockers and bottle openers. You will find Muppet totems, and Winnie the Pooh totems and, yes, Mickey Mouse totems, with Mickey sitting atop Goofy, selling for $25 or more.
   Here and there, you may find the odd legitimate Northwest model totem — skillfully carved from red or yellow cedar, in symmetrical forms and signed by the artist. And it's nice to know that totems carved or believed to be carved by Northwest Native Americans still bring the best prices — frequently into three and four digits.   But most of what's for sale out there is about as Northwest as pepperoni pizza. The totem pole has been yanked from the bosom of the Northwest. It has been borrowed, altered, derived and effectively corrupted into terrible things that bear no real resemblance to the little model totem poles we know and love.
   And somehow it doesn't seem right.
   And somehow it seems perfectly appropriate, because we started it. The desecration of the Northwest Coast totem pole started right here at home. Consider:
   • Totem poles are not native to Puget Sound Country. Historians tell us that totems as we know them were part of the culture of just three coastal tribes — the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian — who lived hundreds of miles north of here in British Columbia and Alaska. Puget Sound Indians did not traditionally carve totems, and it is unlikely that Chief Seattle ever saw one.
   • Even those northern people carved big totems exclusively. The much smaller model totems were produced only when the tourists began to show up, shopping for souvenirs.
   • Even the word "totem" is not Northwest. It was borrowed from the Algonquian language of the Ojibwa people some 2,000 miles east of here.
    Over the past century, totem poles have traveled from the shores of the Pacific to the shelves of airport gift shops and to the brink of extinction — and back again. To a great extent, that cultural journey mirrors the recent history of the people who created the enduring art form in the first place.
     AUTHORITIES AREN'T sure how long those northern Native peoples had been carving totems. The raw material being highly biodegradable, old totems have long since deteriorated, leaving little evidence of what was carved before European contact. Some early European explorers collected samples of Northwest carving, and those artifacts remain in European museums. But other explorers such as George Vancouver did not report seeing totems, leading some authorities to believe that totems were rather scarce until the newcomers arrived with iron carving tools.
   Still, carving was clearly an essential part of the Northwest culture, says Robin Wright, a UW art historian who works with the Northwest collections at the Burke Museum. Their purpose was "to display family crests," Wright explains. "They were heraldic crests that belonged to noble families." Their most important function may have been to denote the clan association of a particular household.
   The shape and style of the art varied from one culture to the next, she says. While the northern Haidas and Tlingits carved the familiar totems, other tribes such as the Kwakiutl, who lived along the central British Columbia coast, produced handsome carvings that doubled as house posts. The Puget Sound Salish people were more likely to produce carved panels, few of which have survived.
   By the mid-19th century, as whites arrived and controlled the region, they brought the iron tools that enabled coastal artists to carve deeper and faster. But they also brought epidemics of smallpox and other diseases that killed thousands of people, sometimes entire villages. Then the white governments banned the "potlatch" ceremonies; the gift-giving feasts were believed to undermine the community work ethic. Since totem poles were closely related to the potlatch, they, too, were prohibited.
    Meanwhile, pioneer anthropologists and tourists descended on coastal villages and began to collect artifacts for East Coast museums. In 1899, some Seattle businessmen, touring the Alaska coast, sawed down a giant totem in the southeastern village of Tongass, shipped it home to Seattle and raised it with great fanfare in Pioneer Square. A replica of that pole still stands there.
But the same invaders who stole and outlawed totems may also have helped save them — albeit inadvertently. By the late 19th century, steamships full of tourists were sailing through the spectacular Inside Passage, stopping in coastal villages to snap photos of the Natives. The Canadian Pacific Railroad went so far as to turn one village's totems to face passing tourists.
The tourists, in turn, wanted souvenirs, and the Natives obliged.
    "Most people couldn't pack up a full-sized totem," explains Bill McLennan, a curator at the British Columbia Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. "They wanted something portable."
    The first models were produced by Haida carvers — and not from wood, but argillite, a soft, black, soapstone-like mineral found exclusively at a single quarry in the Queen Charlotte Islands, McLennan says. Initially, argillite was carved for trade with visiting sailors, but eventually they were sold to tourists as well.
   In time, the small sculptures proved so popular, and profitable, that neighboring tribes resumed carving. The model totems took the same characteristic forms — stylized bears, birds, whales and other regional creatures, usually painted in deep reds, blacks and greens. The government officials and missionaries who had banned the potlatch considered this enterprise to be industrious, and encouraged it.
    "There was more travel, leading to an exchange of ideas," Wright says. "Gradually, the custom moved southward."  And beyond. The 1893 Chicago World's Fair included an elaborate display of Northwest arts — not just model totems, but entire villages with model houses and model canoes, all commissioned by Franz Boaz, the pioneer anthropologist who had collected countless coastal artifacts for Eastern museums.
   Eventually, Native Americans across the country were producing their own totems. Skilled carvers were sought out by museums and subsidized by both the U.S. and Canadian governments — especially during the Great Depression. Eventually, totems were being mass-produced in small factories.
   The market has moved overseas as well. Dorothy Martin, manager of Hill's Native Art in Vancouver, B.C., sees a steady flow of German tourists in her shop. "They're very sophisticated and interested in it," she says. "I'm told it started with German children's stories about Canada and First Nations people. Now they have clubs and perform Native dances and ceremonies."
    NATIVE ART has become big business, supporting scores of artists and shops from Anchorage to San Francisco and beyond. A Vancouver company called Boma, founded by a Russian-Swiss immigrant, has been manufacturing resin copies of traditional argillite totems for four decades. They've expanded into prints and other artifacts, and founder Boris Mange reports they're doing just fine.
   Given today's technology, totems are relatively easy to reproduce — legally or otherwise. One well-known Makah artist sued and won when he discovered that Alaska shops were selling model totems with his counterfeit signature. A few years ago, two Seattle merchants paid $40,000 in fines for selling thousands of pieces of art advertised as Native-made when they were not.
   If globalization has watered down the original arts, it has also had benefits. Wright and other authorities emphasize that it was the tourist traffic in model totems and other Northwest arts that enabled coastal carvers to survive the grim years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Canadian artists such as Charlie James, Ellen Neel, Mungo Martin and Ray Williams were able to make a living with their carving. They, in turn, passed their skills along to the next generation of carvers such as Bill Reid of Canada.
   Model totems from that period are scarce, and in great demand. A Charlie James totem, if it could be found, would sell for the price of a decent car.
   Robin Wright, at Seattle's Burke Museum, is trying to track down the carvings from the 1893 Fair, which were scattered across the art world. Some were preserved at the Field Museum in Chicago, but she's found others as far-flung as Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Vienna. And she's still hunting.
    Today, model totems remain a standard souvenir for visitors to this region. To sample the fare, take a stroll down First Avenue and the waterfront. Start with the gift shops around the Pike Place Market, where you'll find 6- or 8-inch totems lined up like canned goods right next to the T-shirts and miniature Space Needles. The thunderbird wings may swivel, and it may look like it was carved with a chainsaw, but that's what you get for $50 to $100.
   Look a little farther and you'll find The Legacy, which has been selling high-end regional Native American art since the 1930s. Here you can buy a 10-inch totem signed by the carver for $1,200, or a 9-foot, full-sized model for $25,000.
    The middlebrow market is a short walk down the hill at Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, a family-owned landmark that has been selling model totems since the 1890s. Here the door itself is framed in totems. And inside you need to get past the glass-encased mummies and plastic trinkets to find an entire corner devoted to model totems, standing wingtip-to-wingtip against the back wall.
    "I think my great grandfather had a lot of influence on the art," says Andy James, the latest of four generations who have sold totems here. "He cut pictures from a big anthropology book, loaned them to Native artists and told them: 'If you can carve this, I can sell it.' And he did."
    James won't hazard a guess at how many totems his family has sold, except to say "thousands" — everything from 4-inch Boma replicas to 6-foot originals, at prices ranging from $10 to $1,000 or more.  "Years ago, we had a carver who called himself Chief White Eagle who carved small totems and painted them in fluorescent colors — mainly because he had a lot of that paint," James says. "They were really awful. But we couldn't get enough of them. People came in, looked at the good stuff, then turned around and spotted those fluorescent totems, and that's what they wanted."
   Behind the counter, Jim Breen specializes in totems. He sold them here in the 1960s, and has been collecting them ever since. The clientele, he says, is a mix of souvenir-hunters and serious collectors, and he can satisfy both.  Given the opportunity, however, he pushes the work of a select few artists — particularly Rick Williams, who comes from a Canadian Nitinaht family that has been carving for generations.
   These days, Williams lives with his wife and three sons in the old industrial town of Concrete in the Upper Skagit Valley. He says he's been carving for 41 years, since he was 6. He works long days, either in his shop or, weather permitting, alongside Highway 20, where he sells his work to passersby. When I talked to him, he was sharpening his Old Timer pocket knife, and packing up a 30-inch, $1,000 totem for shipment to a gallery in Switzerland.
    To this point, Williams' work does not qualify as museum art — perhaps because he is so prolific. Like all art, the value of totems is based in large part on supply, and there is no scarcity of Rick Williams totems. After all those years, he has "no clue" how many he has produced. On a good day, he can carve an 18-inch totem, or a couple of 12-inchers.
    He's aware of the competition — the molded resin copies and the overseas knock-offs. "Some guy keeps calling me, wanting to make molds and do some mass marketing or something," Williams says. "But that doesn't feel right.
   "Besides, there are plenty of people out there who want to buy my work. I don't have any trouble selling what I carve, and I'm supporting my family. What else can I ask?"
    To a casual collector, his totems are skillfully rendered, intricate and handsome. They would stand up well to those museum pieces up at the Burke. But what do I know? I'm the guy whose mantel is graced by a totem pole carved in Northwest Indonesia.
   I know this: That a few regional artists like Rick Williams are helping keep alive something important, an art form that helps distinguish this soggy coastline from the great sweep of homogenized American culture. Yes, totem poles can be copied from pictures in magazines and popped from resin molds. They can depict Apache warriors, or Mickey Mouse and Goofy. They can be sold for $10 or $10,000 and displayed in living rooms in Seattle or Switzerland.
But our regional icon is safe as long as Williams is out there, sitting beside the highway and using a pocket knife to transform a block of clear-grained cedar into a mythical montage of Northwest orcas and brown bears topped off by a spread-winged thunderbird.

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    "The region . . . seemed nearly destitute of human beings. . . . The brute creation also had deserted the shores. The tracks of deer were no longer to be seen, nor was there an aquatic bird in the whole extent of the canal. Animated nature seemed nearly exhausted, and her awful silence was only now and then interrupted by the croaking of a raven or the scream of an eagle. Even these solitary sounds were so seldom heard that the rustling of the breeze . . . gave rise to ridiculous suspicions in our seamen of hearing rattlesnakes and other hideous monsters. . . ." Capt. George Vancouver, 1792 

     In the evening shadow of a forested ridge, we steer the sloop Velella into a bay near the Hood Canal floating bridge and drop our anchor, which instantly disappears into a green, unenticing soup. We can hear the rumble and groan of the nearby highway and the shouts of a group of teenagers at a rowdy beach party, complete with firecrackers. It will not be a quiet evening on Hood Canal.
   Safely anchored, I settle back with a glass of wine while Keith Benson, skipper and science consultant, talks about the disappearing anchor. Even a century ago, he says, scientists understood that water quality and water clarity are linked. To measure clarity, then and now, they lower a white disk about a size of a long-play phonograph record into the water and note the depth at which it becomes invisible. That link between clarity and quality is complicated, however, Benson warns.

    With this in mind I revisit my trusty copy of George Vancouver's journal. In the first week of May 1792, Vancouver and a small company rowed their launch south into Hood Canal, stopping when the tide turned against them, then resuming exploration. It was to be his first experience with the Northwest's glacial fjords, some of which lead somewhere, most of which don't.  In his journal, he noted the change in landscape - steep, forested walls plunging into the bottomless channel - and the eerie silence of the place.
   The whistle of the wind in the trees frightened the crew, he wrote, conjuring fears of "rattlesnakes" and "hideous monsters." In an odd and accidental way, the superstitious sailors were right. For, unknown to the captain and company, they were floating above a veritable explosion of life forms completely foreign to them, and to most of us today.
    Puget Sound's springtime boom begins with untold trillions of microscopic plants and animals collectively called plankton, the primordial soup that is the basis for all life in the oceans. The explosion begins innocently enough with diatoms - microscopic, single-celled plants shaped like aspirin tablets, but so tiny that a million would fit inside a single pill. During the winter, they drift in a state similar to hibernation, deep in the sea.
    In April or May increased sunlight and warmer water trigger photosynthesis and the silent explosion begins. Fed by nutrients from decaying plants and animals, the diatoms begin to reproduce. Each divides into two identical offspring, which promptly divide again. If this binary fission occurs daily, which is not uncommon, it will take only a month for one diatom to become one billion. Scientists call this a plankton bloom, and it will be the first of many. The water in channels like Hood Canal, relatively clear during the winter, suddenly turns murky and green and may remain so all summer. The murkiness is an indicator of life. The ecosystem is shifting into a higher gear.
   Nobody has ever seen a diatom without the aid of a microscope. Yet their massive blooms can be seen from airplanes and, in at least one case, from the space shuttle. Other phytoplankton - the plantlike organisms that can create oxygen - have similarly dramatic effects, such as the "red tides" and shellfish poisoning that proved fatal to one of Vancouver's crew. Plankton also provide the marvelous bioluminescence that adds sparkle to a moonless night.
    Within a few weeks, the initial bloom sets off more biological explosions as all those diatoms become food for larger organisms - especially shrimplike copepods. Copepods are among the zooplankton, tiny animals rather than plants. Viewed through a microscope, copepods, with segmented shells and a dinosaur-like head complete with flailing antenna, resemble the hideous monsters so feared by Vancouver's crew.
    As one of the oldest forms of life on Earth, plankton exist in all the world's oceans. But Puget Sound is particularly friendly. In his 1983 book, "The Fertile Fjord: Plankton in Puget Sound," University of Washington oceanographer Richard Strickland wrote: "Puget Sound is to plankton what Florida is to oranges, what Iowa is to corn, and what the Cascades are to Douglas fir." Never mind Boeing 747s and Windows 98. From a biological point of view, at least, plankton is our primary product. 
    When the UW research ship Thompson cruised around Puget Sound, one of its missions was to test for plankton at each of 39 stations, including places in Hood Canal. To do this, oceanographers lowered a gazebo-shaped frame holding remote-controlled bottles that close at various depths, capturing water samples to return to the ship.
   "We're less interested in how much than in where they are - depth and location," explained Jan Newton, a Department of Ecology oceanographer who also teaches at the UW. "We know, for example, that the bloom occurs earlier in Hood Canal and the South Sound, later in the main basin." By early summer, she says, the diatoms will burn themselves out and be replaced by dinoflagellates, smaller plants that use whiplike flagella to propel themselves.
   She and others are interested in plankton for a variety of reasons. Phytoplankton produce about half the world's oxygen. They are key players in delivering the sun's energy to virtually every other creature in the sea.
    But for Puget Sound, their abundance can become a serious problem. When plankton do well, they tend to overdo it. Eventually the zooplankton prevail, consuming all the available oxygen and ultimately self-destructing. That's where people enter the equation. Phytoplankton mostly subsist on nitrogen and phosphorous, referred to by scientists as nutrients, familiar to the rest of us as, among other things, municipal sewage, farm fertilizers and the leftovers of any number of human enterprises.
   "Too much agricultural runoff or undertreated sewage, and we essentially tip the natural system out of balance," Newton says.
    Scientists call this eutrophication, or over-enrichment. That is what went wrong 35 years ago in Lake Washington. Sewage, rich in phosphorous and nitrogen, didn't poison the lake; it fertilized it, breeding a phenomenal growth of algae, another form of plankton. The algae consumed too much oxygen in the water, making the lake unhealthy for salmon and other fish.
    In the 1980s, concerns about potential over-enrichment prompted Puget Sound cities to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on upgraded sewage treatment. It is also what kept Newton and her colleagues busy in Hood Canal last month. Their method was to take water samples, plankton and all, add small amounts of nutrients to some of the samples, then leave them in a plexiglass tank on the deck of the Thompson. The rate of photosynthesis in the samples would provide a clue as to whether an area faced potential trouble.
    There are signs or indications of declining amounts of oxygen in the water in Hood Canal, the kind of dead-end fjord that is a prime candidate for over-enrichment. If the amount of oxygen available in Lower Hood Canal declines dramatically, Newton says, it suggests an overabundance of plankton. That could be a monster of a different order than Vancouver's shipmates feared.
Would too much plankton implicate some human activity ashore? "As scientists, we don't like to say anything until we have proof positive," Newton says.
   By the wee small hours, the teenagers across the bay are partied out and Hood Canal falls silent. I lie in my bunk, listening to water lapping rhythmically against the wooden hull of the Velella.
   For me, as with most people, Puget Sound has always conjured images of silvery salmon in sparkling water. But inevitably it's more complicated than that. The regional totem is ultimately dependent on invisible organisms in a soupy green sea.
    It's time to move on and learn more about the curious link between the two.

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   "The serenity of the climate, the innumerable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, cottages and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined. . . ." Capt. George Vancouver, 1792

    On a gray July morning, we steer the sloop Velella south along the east shore of Bainbridge Island, past beach cottages and million-dollar mansions huddled nearly wall-to-wall along the narrow ledge between island and sea. Across Puget Sound, the glass towers of downtown Seattle glisten like an artist's overstated rendition of a futuristic city.

   We wonder if this is what Capt. George Vancouver had in mind when he suggested all Puget Sound needed was "the industry of man."
   Two hundred years ago, Vancouver followed a similar course before dropping anchor at the southeast corner of Bainbridge Island. Here the Discovery stayed for 12 days while the ship's company set out in small boats to explore the south Sound.
   We cruise past Vancouver's anchorage and across to Manchester, mooring the Velella offshore from a nondescript compound of frame buildings and floating pens on the shallow bay. These are the Manchester labs of the federal Northwest Fisheries Science Center, where some of Puget Sound's smartest scientists are busily trying to apply the industry of man to problems created in large part by the industry of man.
   Over the next several hours, we peer into perhaps a dozen prosaic, 20-foot diameter tanks, each containing marine creatures - copper rockfish, sablefish, halibut and more. But the stars of this show are in two tanks marked "Redfish Lake sockeye." These are the prized progeny of the last 16 sockeye that struggled up the Columbia and Snake rivers to an Idaho lake whose salmon run teeters on the brink of extinction.
   "They're about ready to spawn," explains biologist Tom Flagg, peering over the edge of the tank.

     He speaks much as a proud father would at the graduation of his first-born son.
    How these Idaho sockeye came to rural Kitsap County is a story about innovation and technology in the marine environment. It may also be a glimpse into the future of Puget Sound chinook salmon, the runs considered to be most at risk of extinction. Puget Sound salmon always have been highly cyclical. A century of harvest data looks like a statistical roller coaster of good years plummeting to bad and back again. To offset the low years, the government long ago began trying to hatch and grow salmon artificially, removing eggs from female fish, hatching them under controlled conditions, then releasing them into the Sound or Pacific Ocean so fishermen could catch them. In the past four decades, salmon hatcheries have grown like crazy from Puget Sound to Japan, releasing 5.5 billion juvenile salmon a year to the Pacific, including nearly 1 billion to the waters around Washington.
    But while hatcheries pump out juvenile fish, natural-salmon populations have plummeted. Several Columbia River runs already are formally listed as endangered, and Puget Sound runs are likely to be next. Confronted by this growing crisis, scientists such as Flagg started working on another strategy. They began breeding Pacific salmon in captivity. Eventually, they applied what they had learned to Atlantic salmon, which were dwindling even faster in New England.
Atlantic salmon proved to be easier to "domesticate," and the project worked. The result is a salmon-farming industry that now reaches from Norway and Scotland to Chile and is as close as Bainbridge Island. Just across the channel from Manchester, Global Aquaculture plans to harvest and sell 6 million pounds of Atlantic salmon this year.
    Now, as Puget Sound runs dwindle, the scientists at Manchester are trying to invent strategies for preserving fish at their doorstep. The concept is simple. In their natural environment, a spawning salmon will produce thousands of eggs, Flagg says. The vast majority of those eggs will die or be eaten by other fish. If just one-tenth of 1 percent of them survive to spawn again, the run will be considered successful.
    In the controlled environment at Manchester and other labs, they can achieve success rates of 50 percent to 70 percent. "Even if we only have a few spawners, we can take thousands of eggs and amplify them to thousands of adults," Flagg says.
    And if it works with salmon, why not copper rockfish or sablefish?
     So today we have two alternatives to Mother Nature: hatcheries that produce juvenile fish and release them into the ocean to be caught later by fishermen; and floating farms that hatch and raise salmon much like chickens. On the surface, at least, both strategies appear to have been hugely successful. About 65 government and tribal-owned hatcheries produce salmon in Puget Sound. There are far fewer salmon farms in local waters, but dozens along the British Columbia coast.
    These days, however, each of those technologies is increasingly suspected of contributing to the demise of Puget Sound's wild salmon. Critics say hatchery fish mingling with wild salmon weaken the gene pool or spread disease among wild stocks. They compete for food, and the younger wild fish frequently are the losers. One Oregon study suggests that in some cases larger hatchery fish feed on wild juveniles. Flagg recently co-authored an academic paper that asks whether releasing 5.5 billion hatchery fish every year is taxing the ecosystem not just of Puget Sound but of the North Pacific. While there is no conclusive evidence, the risks should be enough to cause governments to rethink how many fish they are adding to the environment, he and his colleagues say.
   Bern Shanks, the former state fisheries director, came under fire in part because he listened to biologists who argued that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hatcheries may have done salmon runs more harm than good. Under his leadership, the state adopted a controversial policy requiring that sports and commercial fishing be regulated in a way that prevents depletion of wild runs. Putting that policy into effect may require cutting back or even closing hatcheries whose fish compete with wild runs.
    Salmon farms, on the other hand, are attacked for introducing pollution, including fish feces, to the environment. And the escape of 300,000 Atlantic salmon from the Global Aquaculture farm at South Bainbridge last year raised fears of East Coast salmon interbreeding with Puget Sound stocks.
    There is no evidence, however, to support those fears, says Dayton Lee Alverson, a Seattle consultant and respected authority on marine sciences. It might be accomplished in laboratory conditions, but the chances of it occurring in the wild are slim, he says.
    These fears are not new to the biologists at Manchester, and Flagg thinks some of them are legitimate. Fish raised in hatcheries or pens are not the equal of those raised in their natural environment, he says. To offset the problems of captivity, Flagg and his colleagues find themselves in the odd position of teaching salmon to behave like salmon. Before releasing mature fish they expose them to the scents of potential predators or even to the predators themselves. They even constructed an artificial raceway that emulates a natural stream with real gravel, logs and other obstacles likely to be encountered in nature.
    And there's good reason they're keeping rockfish and other less familiar in nearby tanks: They're learning how to breed these species in captivity just in case they, too, become threatened.
    Back on the sloop we sit with Alverson, who years ago served as teacher and mentor to many of the scientists now trying to rescue Puget Sound's wildlife. The wild-salmon debate is interesting, he says. In a complex ecosystem like Puget Sound, nature is bound to be affected by the genetics of hatcheries and salmon farms. Scientists call this genetic drift, the tendency for organisms to undergo genetic change when isolated from their natural environment.
   "But out here, the issues of genetics are subordinate to habitat," he says, nodding across the Sound toward the Seattle skyline. "Puget Sound's population has doubled in a generation, and it will have doubled again in the next generation. I don't see how we can sustain that growth without substantially changing the ecosystem."
   The scientists here are trying to anticipate those changes, much as Vancouver surveyed this seascape, conjured images of cities and towns, and made a map for those who would follow to apply the industry of man. 
  

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   `In the southwest corner of the cove was a small village among the trees. Beyond the termination, the country had the appearance of a level forest . . . We pulled in towards the village and observed a canoe paddling from it . . . They lay about twenty yards from us, continually pointing eastward, expressive of a wish that our departure would be more agreeable than our visit.' - Peter Puget, Vancouver's lieutenant, at Burley Lagoon in May 1792

   A few miles north, they stopped at Raft Island, whose "only inhabitants were an astonishing quantity of crows," Puget wrote. Today, as suburbs creep around the South Sound, the birds are supplanted by homes occupying virtually every square foot of waterfront.
   Further north, at Burley Lagoon, the Englishmen encountered a larger village - and a less-hospitable reception. Three Natives in a dugout canoe approached them, clearly gesturing their preference that "our departure would be more agreeable than our visit." Under strict orders to avoid conflicts, Puget sailed on to explore the opposite shore.
    Today we anchor the Velella offshore, probably within a few feet of that encounter. We take the dingy through the narrow cut under a low highway bridge and into Burley Lagoon, a 2-mile-long inlet nearly enclosed by a spit across the entrance. We tie up at a ramshackle dock alongside Western Oyster Co., which occupies a point of land behind a supermarket and strip mall in Purdy.
    Our arrival appears agreeable to Jerry Yamashita, the pioneer oysterman who runs Western Oyster. The wiry 75-year-old shuffles down the dock to meet us wearing a cotton work shirt, worn boots, snow-white hair tucked beneath a weathered baseball cap, and a warm grin. Excuse the mess, he says, shaking his head. He has long since moved his processing to Thurston County. All that's left here are a half-million oysters.
    He shepherds us onto a small, outboard-powered barge, which ferries us across the lagoon to a complex of wooden floats - horizontal rectangles constructed of heavy beams, spanned by narrow planks some 12 inches apart. This is Yamashita's farm. On the beach he appeared frail and tottering, but out here he steps sure-footedly from one plank to the next.
    He stoops, pulls a 3-foot-long cluster of oysters and seaweed from the water and plucks a 4-inch shell from the mass. A shucking knife appears magically in his other hand and the shell pops open like a spring-loaded pocket watch. Smiling, he hands over the prize.
    One sloshed oyster, and I know the flavor of Paradise. 

   Never mind chinook salmon. From Samish Bay up north to Eld Inlet near Olympia, Puget Sound is oyster country. While the salmon flounder, local oysters flourish, catering to a fast-growing, nationwide market for oysters on the half shell.
   In the wild, oysters begin life as drifting larvae that attach themselves to hard surfaces, preferably fellow oysters, in shallow water. Then they get on with the serious business of pumping water - some 40 gallons a day for mature oysters - in and out of their shells, filtering out the plankton along the way.
   Puget Sound being a natural plankton factory, it stands to reason it would favor plankton-gobbling oysters.
   Oysters are not only ravenous bivalves, they're also prolific. For the first year they are males, fertilizing the eggs of female oysters, explains Keith Benson, the Velella's skipper and my scientific mentor. Then they conveniently switch sexes. Eventually, each mature oyster will produce some 50 million eggs, most of which will be eaten by other creatures - a classic example of the scattergun strategy that feeds the world's oceans.
   "When things get tough, they switch back to males," Benson adds. "It takes far more energy to produce eggs than sperm."
   Puget Sound's native oyster is the Olympia. Vancouver, whose crew sampled the Olympias at Discovery Bay in 1792, found them mushy. ("Probably spawning," Yamashita speculates.)
   Half a century later, the miners of the California Gold Rush made no such complaint. They paid $20 a plate for Olympias shipped from Washington, spinning off a sort of "gray rush" in Puget Sound. By the Depression, the Olympias had been depleted.
   So along came Yamashita - not Jerry but his father, Masahide Yamashita, a first-generation Japanese immigrant. The elder Yamashita leased some tidelands on Samish Bay, near Bellingham, imported Pacific oyster seed from Yokohama, and the rest is history.
    "By the time it arrived, most of the seed was shot," recalls Jerry Yamashita as he pops another Pacific. "But they planted it anyway and, much to their surprise, it grew. And grew. And grew. "It was quite amazing. It had to be the water temperature, or the nutrients, or something."
   The larger, faster-growing Pacific oysters, now known under grower names such as Shoalwaters or Wescott Bays, soon dominated the Puget Sound market.
    Still, the Yamashitas encountered daunting obstacles. They challenged the Japanese seafood conglomerates for a piece of the Japanese market, and lost. Then came Pearl Harbor; the Yamashita company was "liquidated," and the family sent to an internment camp.
    After the war, they started over in South Puget Sound, eventually purchasing part of Burley Lagoon. "It's quite rich and there were no pulp mills," he says. "In Samish Bay, the Bellingham pulp mill was a big problem."
   The industry took off with new growing techniques - particularly the suspended culture that Yamashita employs. Discarded shells are suspended on strings a few inches apart, seeded with larvae, then hung from rafts in warm, shallow water - a sort of oyster condominium that allows hundreds of shellfish per square foot. With this technique, Pacifics reach maturity in 15 to 18 months, he says.
    To achieve this, though, shellfish need clean water. In the mid-1980s, scores of shellfish operations, including Yamashita's, were closed down. State health officials cited pollution, apparently from shoreside sewers or septic tanks. Yamashita moved his oysters elsewhere, which, he says, "took all the profit." That lasted 12 long years.
    Now they're back. Thanks to tougher pollution laws and sewage treatment, water quality has improved. Throughout the Sound, shellfish beds that had been closed for years are being re-opened. In 1995, Puget Sound growers produced 431,000 gallons of Pacific oysters (or 1.3 million dozen) worth $6.4 million - their best year since 1984. This year, Yamashita hopes to produce 20,000 gallons, most of which will be sold in California.
   Other shellfish - clams, geoducks, crab, shrimp - also appear to be prospering while salmon and other fin fish dwindle.
    Benson suggests several reasons nature might favor oysters and friends. Shellfish don't rely as  heavily on freshwater habitat, nor on conditions in the open ocean, he says. And they don't appear to be affected by the infamous El Nino weather; if anything, they may benefit from warmer water.
Still, Yamashita's problems are far from over. Health authorities warn that Burley Lagoon still has borderline pollution problems. Yamashita suspects some combination of Canada geese droppings and leaky septics beneath the houses that ring the lagoon. And Yamashita knows some neighbors consider his farm to be unsightly. They would like to see him take his oysters and go away.
   Back on shore, Benson and I walk up to the supermarket to restock our galley. The minimall is a rude interruption to our voyage. The store is busy; out on the highway afternoon commuters are backed up a half-mile toward Tacoma. Waiting in line, we overhear one woman ask her friend how she plans to celebrate the Fourth of July.
    "Maybe we'll burn down the oyster company," the other laughs.
    Benson shakes his head. "Jerry's oysters are their best friends," he says. Purdy's suburban sprawl, complete with leaky septic tanks, lawn fertilizers, animal feces and oily runoff from the supermarket parking lot, inevitably pollutes the lagoon. At 40 gallons a day, each of Yamashita's oysters is working round-the-clock, filtering the waters of Burley Lagoon, removing the plankton and anything else floating out there, Benson says. What Vancouver called "the industry of man" created the oyster farm, and now, once again, threatens to destroy it. Yamashita's farm is not the polluter; it's the pollutee.
    "You look down into those floats, and the water is perfectly clear," Benson says. "You couldn't ask for a cleaner organism than an oyster."
    We make it back to the Velella and pull anchor, suddenly imbued with a nagging suspicion that our departure would be more agreeable than a visit.

   Pushed by a stiff south wind, we cruise the jagged shores of South Puget Sound, bound for Burley Lagoon. This maze of channels, inlets and islands would be confounding, except for Peter Puget's 200-year-old sailing directions lying beside us in the cockpit of the sloop Velella.
   In May 1792, Puget and company were on a weeklong voyage in a small, open boat, charting these intricate waterways, tracing each inlet to its conclusion. At Wollochet Bay, south of Gig Harbor, they visited with a group of Natives "drying clams, fish, etc., which they readily parted with for buttons and trinkets."

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   "Having passed round the point, we found the inlet to terminate here in an extensive, circular, compact bay whose waters washed the base of Mount Rainier . . . The forest trees, and the several shades of verdure that covered the hills gradually decreased in point of beauty until they became invisible . . . the whole producing a most grand, picturesque effect." - George Vancouver at Commencement Bay, May 16, 1792

   To Vancouver and his crew of Englishmen, the sheer scale of Mount Rainier was beyond comprehension. The captain figured the base of the mountain was just beyond the "circular, compact bay" on which he floated. Archibald Menzies, the expedition's scientist, guessed it to be "10 to 12 leagues off" - about 30 miles.

    In reality, it is 45 miles. Whatever the distance, they were captivated by what Menzies called the "most beautiful and majestic mountain of great elevation, whose line of ascent appeared equally smooth and gradual on every side, with a round obtuse summit covered with perpetual snow."
   Two centuries later, we sail on an ebb tide from South Puget Sound through the Tacoma Narrows and around Point Defiance. To the southeast, the mountain is enveloped in meteorological concrete. Still, we drift for a while just off the point, comparing our view with Vancouver's engraving of Commencement Bay lapping at the base of Mount Rainier. No question: The scene was sketched from within a few feet of Point Defiance.
    Today, however, the focus of the picture is not The Mountain. It is The Mill. For decades, the huge pulp mill at the mouth of the Puyallup River loomed over Commencement Bay like a grim, medieval castle, its towering smokestacks serving as symbols of a sick Puget Sound. The mill belched smoke and steam that produced the legendary "Aroma of Tacoma," and spewed a witch's brew of pollutants into the bay, helping put Commencement Bay at the top of the federal government's list of toxic-waste hot spots.
   Today, as we tour the site, Commencement Bay is in the midst of a comeback. The arsenic plant across the bay has disappeared. Tacoma has renovated much of its waterfront. And this once-notorious mill, which produces 1,200 tons a day of pulp used mostly for packaging, is now deemed one of the heroes.
    "It's a real success story," says Allison Hiltner, Superfund manager for the Environmental Protection Agency. "In fact, it is one of the first sites in the country to be partially deleted from the Superfund list."
   How this occurred may hold some lessons for shaping the future of Puget Sound, says Dave McEntee, environmental manager at Simpson Tacoma Kraft. McEntee is a friendly, clean-cut biologist who looks like he should be teaching high-school biology and coaching the tennis team. 

   He cheerfully walks us through the sprawling 55-acre plant, which is not a pretty sight.
But that was never the point. Puget Sound's pulp mills are classic examples of what Capt. Vancouver foresaw as the "industry of man" that would tame this soggy Pacific Northwest wilderness. Waterfront sites made it easy to acquire the softwood logs, then to ship the product to markets. Early in this century, Puget Sound's shore was home to hundreds of pulp, paper and sawmills. Tacoma's mill was the largest, and one of the oldest.
    But the mills were also prime targets of the popular uprising against water pollution in the 1970s and 1980s. Reducing logs to pulp and paper generates huge volumes of effluent - woody waste mixed with water and various chemicals. While that waste is mostly organic, feeding the microscopic plankton that live in sea water, it also tends to over-fertilize and throw the ecosystem out of balance. Worse still, when Seattle-based Simpson Timber bought the aging mill in 1985, it learned that the mill's effluent also included dangerous quantities of copper and phenols not usually found in pulp waste. "Big problems," says McEntee.
   So Simpson met with its neighbors and critics, and went to work. The company attacked its air emissions by upgrading its gas-collection system throughout the mill, reducing emissions by more than 90 percent, McEntee says. Meanwhile, it agreed to cut production, if necessary, to achieve agreed-upon standards. Water pollution was curtailed by recycling the lignin, the natural "glue" in the raw wood; the stuff is now isolated and burned to generate 75 percent of the mill's power needs. And the mill's waste outfall, which had dumped millions of gallons of pollutants onto the beach, was extended 600 feet out into deep water, where it is not considered a problem.
   Still, those things did nothing to address 80 years of putrid residue already lying on the bottom off the bay just offshore from the plant. After studying the alternatives, Simpson and environmental officials agreed on a novel strategy. They would not dredge and remove those poisoned sediments, for fear of disturbing the toxins and creating new problems. Instead they would cap them, dumping clean, new sediments on top of the old. Using clean mud from the nearby Puyallup River, they created a new bottom spanning 17 acres of the bay, the cap ranging from 6 to 40 feet deep. Of the 17 acres, seven are new "intertidal habitat" - mud flats, complete with rocks and contours that are dry at low tide and submerged at high tide, thereby recreating a "a nursery area," McEntee says, for juvenile salmon and other marine life.
   That was in 1988. Ten years later, the company celebrated it success. . McEntee walked us down to the seawall to show off the results. Near low tide, it resembled what Vancouver might have seen two centuries ago. The imported rocks are encrusted with barnacles, the mud flats strewn with shiny orange bull kelp. A harbor seal patrols deeper water and a great blue heron struts across the flats, scouring the shallows for fish.
   "We added contours and tide pools and texture," says McEntee. "The idea was basically, `Build it and they will come.' And they came! Our sampling shows a natural bottom-dwelling community that looks healthy. There are adult salmon feeding in the shallows. We find dungeness crab, shrimp, copepods . . ."
   Simpson's success has been noted elsewhere. Several toxic sites in Seattle's Elliott Bay have been capped in recent years. Similar projects are under way as far away as New York City's harbor.
     "Capping is pretty low-tech," says Hiltner of the EPA. "But Commencement Bay tells us that, in the right environment, it works. Marine organisms are happy to recolonize in new sediments."
   The cleanup of Commencement Bay is far from finished, she adds. Work at nearby sites such as the Thea Foss Waterway and the Hylebos Waterway has barely begun. And most private companies are reluctant, or unable, to spend the $250 million Simpson says it has spent on new technology, cleanup and restoration.
    McEntee points out that restoring the 17 acres of habitat was the cheapest item on the list - about $5 million. The other expenses made the operation more efficient as well as cleaner.
Most of Puget Sound's mills failed because they were inefficient, he says. "It had little or nothing to do with the environmental costs. The successful companies today are the ones that take a long-term view. And a lot of companies outside the Northwest haven't learned that."
    As we resume Vancouver's route up Colvos Passage, I wonder what makes the difference on Commencement Bay. Is it a simple question of environmental virtue, of good guys and bad guys? Of long and short-term perspectives? Is it as simple as seeing the mountain on a cloudy day, or calculating its distance on a clear one? Maybe we'll find some clues in Elliott Bay, Seattle's front door and our next port of call.

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"The men remained in their canoes, bartering their bows and arrows, garments and a very few indifferent sea-otter skins. . . . These they exchanged in a very fair and honest manner for copper, hawk's bells and buttons. . . . Their merchandise would have been infinitely more valuable to us had it been comprised of edibles such as venison, wild fowl or fish, as our sportsmen and fishermen had little success in these pursuits." - Capt. George Vancouver, May 21, 1792, near West Seattle

   Vancouver never found his way into Seattle's bay. Must have been the traffic. Instead, they anchored off the southern tip of Bainbridge Island, where the crew went to work. Some set off on small-boat explorations or felled trees to be fashioned into new spars for His Majesty's Ship Discovery. Still others engaged in friendly commerce with the natives, trading buttons and beads for bows and arrows and, if they were lucky, food.
    Two centuries later, we sail the sloop Velella into an Elliott Bay ruled by a higher level of commerce - hundreds of human enterprises, large and small, ranging from world-class shipyards and cement plants to marinas and seafood restaurants. The effects on Puget Sound - docks, bulkheads, huge landfills, sewers, pollution and more - could hardly be more profound. Elliott Bay bears little resemblance to what Vancouver viewed from afar.
    B.J. Cummings' job is to check that dramatic rate of change. As an environmental organizer who works for Seattle's nonprofit Puget Soundkeepers Alliance, she leads a team of volunteer kayakers, scuba divers, lawyers and other self-styled pollution vigilantes, tracking down polluters and blowing the whistle on them.
   Cummings steps aboard the Velella carrying the tools of her trade - a plastic crate full of files and documents and a pair of binoculars. We have invited her aboard to guide us through the ecological inferno of Elliott Bay and the lower Duwamish River. For the next three hours, we cruise the industrial waterfront, Cummings pointing to the shipyards and cement plants and sewer outfalls that the Soundkeepers have caught dumping illegally.
    "There are 24 Superfund sites here," she says as we enter the lower Duwamish River. "The Port of Seattle promises to clean them up, but we'll be watching that very closely." 
   Yet. in 1998, the alliance reported that half the Puget Sound companies that hold government permits to discharge pollutants exceeded their legal limits, that a third of those violators are repeat offenders and that fewer than 10 percent were fined for their violations.
    In Seattle the risk is not just biological. A recent King County study shows that thousands of people fish in Elliott Bay for Dungeness crab and other bottom-dwelling seafood. Like other shellfish, crab tend to accumulate toxic chemicals in their tissues - a health risk to people. People will not put up with this, Cummings says. When companies resist, the alliance has been known to file lawsuits. More frequently, they rely on the threat of publicity and environmental outrage to enforce the laws. "Our greatest ally is public opinion," she says. "Public opinion will take us where we want to go."
   Lincoln Loehr is a trained oceanographer who monitors Puget Sound from a very different perspective - high in the Columbia Tower, where he works as an environmental analyst for a local law firm. The Soundkeeper concept works by drawing attention to polluters, he says. But public opinion is a poor substitute for good science. In principle at least, nobody would argue with that. In practice, however, science sometimes collides head-on with popular wisdom, he says. And when that happens, science usually loses.
   The best example, Loehr says, is Seattle's brand new, $500-million sewage-treatment plant at West Point, the northern tip of Elliott Bay. In the early 1980s, the federal government required most U.S. cities to upgrade their sewage plants from primary treatment, which mostly dilutes and removes solids, to far more costly secondary treatment, which removes most of the organic material. Seattle, however, asked for and was given an exemption, or "waiver," from that requirement. Scientists and engineers at Metro, the regional sewer agency, cited evidence that sewage was quickly diluted and flushed away by Puget Sound's powerful tides. Secondary treatment, they said, would be a waste of tax dollars.
   Instead, Loehr and others argued that the region should focus its efforts and money on controlling sewer overflows. Like most cities, Seattle's rainwater drains in its sewer system. During heavy rains, the sewers tend to overload, dumping huge amounts of raw sewage into overflow pipes that spill into local waters - especially Puget Sound. Even one such overflow probably pollutes the sound more than a consistent stream of primary-treated sewage, Loehr argues. So he and many other marine scientists suggested that, for the same amount of money,     Puget Sound would derive far greater benefits by redesigning its sewer system.
   Seattle and other Puget Sound cities debated the issue in the early 1980s, and public opinion shifted in favor of secondary treatment - despite the costs. In the end, the issue was swayed largely by politics 3,000 miles away in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. In 1984, congressmen from New Jersey wanted the federal government to force New York City to install secondary sewage treatment. To make their pressure appear even-handed, they needed another region to help force the issue. Seattle fit the bill, and the law was amended to take away Seattle's waiver, along with New York's.
   The next problem was the Magnolia neighborhood, which supported secondary treatment - but not at its front door at West Point. Neighbors relented only when local government sweetened the pot with promises of a beachfront park.
    "Ultimately, science was irrelevant to the decision," Loehr says. "So what do we get for $500 million? A state-of-the-art treatment plant that was not necessary and a $100 million beach for the people in Magnolia."
   This, he adds, is the price of public outrage.
    Fourteen years later, few complain about the treatment plant, the beach or even the price tag. But is secondary treatment making a difference to the ecology of Puget Sound?
   Probably not, says Alan Mearns, a fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. The main ingredients in sewage are nitrates and phosphates that actually fertilize the sea, feeding the microscopic plankton that are, in turn, fed upon by fish. Mearns wonders aloud if the new plant actually diminishes the food supply for salmon and other wildlife.
    But there is no hard evidence one way or the other. The science of Puget Sound is laced with uncertainty. For every Mearns who argues that West Point was a waste of money, there is another who will argue that it was a wise, long-term investment. Among these is Keith Benson, skipper and scientific adviser to our Puget Sound voyage. In Asia, Benson says, rice farmers dump their sewage into the rice paddies to fertilize the fields and feed the carp. "That works fine in a rural village, but in Seattle?" He shudders.
    "Maybe we overshoot the mark on some environmental projects, but I'd rather err on the side of caution."
     Cummings guides us into the shallows of Kellogg Island, the last remnant of the original, twisting Duwamish River. Once scheduled for development of yet another seaport terminal, the tiny island has instead been preserved in something resembling its natural state. Great blue herons nest in the trees and stalk proudly along its muddy banks, all in the shadow of giant container ships and loading equipment.

    "So much of Puget Sound is so beautiful, it's hard to convince people that we have real problems out there," says Cummings. "That's frustrating, but it's also encouraging. I don't think I'd want to do this job in a place where there was no hope."
   With this thought, we sail north, tracing Capt. Vancouver's incomplete map, fueled by a gentle summer wind and prospects of finding a smarter balance between science and popular wisdom.

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"The sandy beaches abounded with fine clams . . . gulls, shags and other oceanic birds. . . . Accordingly we were visited from one of the islands by a small party of natives . . . with little pieces of porpoise and seal flesh in their hands which they offered in the most open and friendly manner. And though these presents were not accepted, their generosity and good intentions were rewarded by some little presents." - Archibald Menzies, botanist with the Vancouver expedition, 1792

    After a long day crossing the strait, we slip through Cattle Pass on the slack tide and tuck around the lower end of the island into Griffin Bay, where our course is tracked by the sad, black, liquid eyes of some 40 harbor seals hauled out on the rocky outcrop. We drop anchor a few hundred feet offshore from a serene wildlife refuge and watch the hook descend into the bay. Here plankton blooms are sparse and the water clearer, reminding us that the islands are less of Puget Sound than they are of the North Pacific Ocean.
    Immediately we are surrounded by perhaps a dozen of those mottled-gray streamlined heads, circling us like earless Labrador retrievers. We are not threatened, just watched with considerable skepticism.
   During his six weeks in Puget Sound in 1792, George Vancouver carefully recorded his observations of land and sea, weather and wildlife. And he did not record seeing seals. Even Archibald Menzies, a naturalist whose journal focuses on wildlife, mentions seals only twice. Approached by natives offering "pieces of porpoise or seal flesh," the sailors shuddered and politely declined. Maybe seals were too humanlike or simply too bloody cute; whatever the reason, there would be no seal meat in the English diet.
   Our visitors remind us of sailing into Discovery Bay two weeks ago and discovering an ecological whodunit: What has become of a once-prolific run of herring? None of the usual suspects appears guilty. Fishermen have not fished those herring for years. Habitat and water quality appear healthy. And most of their natural predators, including salmon, are declining as well, except for one predator: harbor seals. So suspicion naturally falls on the closest predators, the seals at neighboring Protection Island.
    The Pacific harbor seal is a major player in coastal ecosystems from Baja California to the Gulf of Alaska. Pups are born in the summer and weaned in about four weeks. From then on, they're on their own, growing eventually to about 150 pounds, consuming about 10 percent of their body weight a day - up to 15 pounds of fish. Females may live 30 years, males up to 20.
   If Puget Sound is in crisis, somebody forgot to tell the seals, who appear to be thriving. In 1978 wildlife authorities estimated there were 10,000 seals in Washington waters. By 1994 the population was at 35,000 and growing 7 percent a year, which means there are about 40,000 today. Of these, more than half are in Puget Sound, where there are more than 200 known "haulouts," the rocks or beaches frequented by seals.
    Sea lions, their close cousins who breed in California and winter here, also are increasing; in-season, the population has grown from 100 to 1,000 in 20 years. During our voyage, we have seen no sea lions; they're summering down south. But seals appear everywhere: massed on the beach at Gertrude Island in the south Sound, their weight sinking a pier on Hood Canal, patrolling the shores of Bainbridge Island, Vashon Island and Commencement Bay, or lounging in the afternoon sun at their federal refuge just outside Discovery Bay.
   There's the first clue. Two thousand to 3,000 seals now live around Discovery Bay, says Steve Jeffries, a state wildlife official. It's precisely where schools of herring gather early in the year to spawn in Discovery Bay. I scribble the arithmetic. Starting with the mid-estimate of 2,500 seals, I multiply by 10 pounds of fish per day, multiply again by 360 days . . . and gulp. That's 9 million pounds of fish a year, all in one small area. Coastwide, from Puget Sound to California, federal biologists estimate that harbor seals consume 70,174 tons of fish a year, about half of that in Washington.
    "They're upper-level predators and highly opportunistic," says Jeffries. And nobody preys on seals. The region's orca whales eat primarily salmon and herring, not seals. For at least a century, the only predator was us. Fishermen viewed seals as competitors for salmon and other fish, and shot them. It was not only legal but encouraged by wildlife authorities. That all changed with the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which prohibited any shooting or culling of seal, sea lions and their relatives.
    Since then, populations have mushroomed, and tempers have flared. Witness the Ballard Locks, where sea lions have feasted on endangered salmon and steelhead while fishermen watch and seethe. Now, with more salmon headed for the endangered-species list, fishermen ask: Why spend millions of dollars restoring salmon runs that will be simply be gobbled up by seals?
   One answer might be this: Seals and fish have co-existed for eons, so let nature take its course. But if seals were thriving 200 years ago, why didn't Vancouver and Menzies report their presence? Because they probably were not thriving, Jeffries says. Indians hunted them, as evidenced by the natives' sales pitch to Vancouver's crew.

   "To the natives, seals were food!" Jeffries says. "They may also have been competition. I suspect the Muckleshoots or Nisquallys would not have tolerated seals swimming up into their salmon streams, taking fish along the way. They would have been easy to kill."

   If so, the seal population may have been controlled, which would explain the sparse reports from Vancouver. Absent human predators, there may be more seals in Washington waters today than in many hundreds of years.
   "They have increased because we protect them," Jeffries says. "If this goes on, we could be headed for a crash, and if everything crashes I don't know how we'll restore the system."
   Any mere mention of the alternative - killing the critters - appears to be strictly taboo. State officials shudder at the thought.
   So much for the prosecution. Here's the case for the defense: Yes, seals will eat salmon and herring. But, as Jeffries points out, seals will eat just about anything that swims. Dozens of isolated seal studies, usually of scat, show widely varying diets. For example, a 1994 study at Gertrude Island, one of the largest seal haulouts in Puget Sound, showed traces of salmon and herring but much larger amounts of whiting, perch, flatfish and squid. Similar results have emerged from studies in Hood Canal, Everett and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
   In one study, state officials reasoned that most Puget Sound salmon come from hatcheries, which tag their fish with tiny wire tags that can be detected with a handheld device. When officials sampled seal scat at Gertrude Island, they found little evidence of salmon tags. And a herring run at the south end of Vashon Island actually is increasing, despite its proximity to hundreds of seals.
   The case against harbor seals is mostly circumstantial, says Joe Scordino, a federal biologist. Seals appear to prefer whatever is easiest to catch. And that usually means something slower than salmon or herring. "The predator-prey relationship is never as simple as you'd like it to be," Scordino says. "We get little pieces of evidence here and there, but you're still in the gray zone."
Meanwhile, a study last year by the National Marine Fisheries Service cautioned that culling seal herds could lead to unintended consequences. For example, seals also prey on cod, whiting and other fish that eat herring and juvenile salmon. That study concluded that growing seal and sea-lion populations brought "new problems and conflicts," but could not establish how they are affecting the ecosystem.
    So the jury is out. Scientists say they need more research to understand how seals and fish are linked. And even if scientists could find seals guilty, one wonders if 4 million Puget Sound residents could stomach the idea of shooting a creature so high on the cuteness scale.
   Here in Griffin Bay, we are a jury of just two. And after a long evening of deliberation, we are hopelessly deadlocked.

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"Mr. Broughton informed me that the part of the coast he had been directed to explore consisted of an archipelago of islands lying before an extensive arm of the sea stretching in a variety of branches." - Capt. George Vancouver, 1792

     George Vancouver never ventured into these islands. Instead he dispatched the ship Chatham and its crew, commanded by William Broughton, who spent a week exploring and charting the twisting channels, tidal currents and jagged shorelines. No record of Broughton's foray survives, but his verbal report convinced Vancouver that these intricate waters were too risky for His Majesty's ships, and that future explorations would be pursued in small boats. This despite the risk that "such a service in open boats would necessarily be extremely laborious and expose those so employed to numberless dangers and unpleasant situations."
    Among those dangers would be hidden rocks, sea monsters and people peddling timeshare condominiums. So forewarned, we sail the sloop Velella into the heart of the islands, around Shaw Island and into Wasp Channel, where a gentle breeze nudges us between Shaw and Orcas islands.
    A mile west of the Orcas ferry landing we drift past tiny Bell Island, seemingly uninhabited but posted with signs - two hands cradling a spiny, speckled rockfish and labeled: "No Take." Bell Island and seven similar, small niches of island shoreline are the last refuge for copper rockfish and other bottom fish whose rapidly diminishing numbers have alarmed biologists.
   In a region enamored of slick, silvery salmon, bottom fish get precious little respect. Biologists have identified more than 80 species, including halibut, skates, ratfish, cod, pollock, several species of sole, and an array of homely, spine-covered creatures generically known as rockfish.
    Hunkered down on the sea floor, rockfish do their best to blend in, rarely if ever visiting the surface. Divers can swim within a foot or two, but rockfish tend to stay put, stone-still, camouflaged with mottled colors and webbed spines, their oversized eyes declaring: "Don't mind me. Just another wad of seaweed and rock. So just move on and find yourself a silver salmon."
   Rockfish have dignity. Left alone, copper rockfish may patrol the same watery neighborhood for 60 years, and some species may live up to a century. Cod and pollock are known to migrate substantial distances, but rockfish are homebodies, inhabiting the same rocky habitat for a lifetime.
   In Puget Sound, bottomfish are the territory of Wayne Palsson and Robert Pakunski, odd men out in a state fisheries department obsessed with salmon. These unsightly creatures never have been thoroughly understood, Palsson says. State research dollars go mostly to salmon programs, federal dollars to the big-money fisheries in Alaska and the Bering Sea. Now all those years of neglect appear to be catching up with us.
    We chatted at the stern of the small, fiberglass boat in which they have spent two weeks working side-by-side with Canadian biologists, conducting bottom fish surveys in the boundary waters. To do this, they had to invent their own tools. Bottom fish, it seems, present a scientific challenge: The fish are way down there, and the researchers are not.

     "We used to scuba dive, but you can only do two dives per day," Pakunski explains. "That would take a lifetime."

   So the biologists fabricated a frame of iron rebar, attached an underwater video camera on a motorized swivel, hooked it to a remote control, and lowered the contraption to the sea bottom. It looked like something from a Star Wars junkyard, but it worked. In the past few years, they have lowered their gadget more than 2,000 times into the nooks and crannies of Puget Sound, the straits and the islands.

    Each "drop" lasts six minutes, during which the camera makes a full revolution, recording on videotape any life within a radius of four meters. More recently, they have added a device that projects laser beams, providing an accurate measure of the size of the subject creature. The researchers note the numbers, species and size of fish on the tape, then extrapolate that data, coming up with what they believe to be reliable estimates of who lives where at the bottom.
    The results are discouraging. Rockfish appear to be in steep decline, they say - both in numbers and size. "There are too many areas of ideal habitat where nobody's home," says Pakunski. "It's depressing."

   Predation is the problem, they say, and the evidence points to people. With salmon runs in decline, sports fishermen have turned increasingly to bottomfish, figuring a spiny rockfish is better than going home empty-handed. That pressure is beginning to depress stocks of fish, the biologists conclude after studying video of areas where fishing is allowed and "no-fishing" areas such as Bell Island.
    The best example is the underwater park in Edmonds, north of Seattle. The park is frequented by scuba divers and is within a stone's throw of downtown Edmonds and its busy ferry dock. Yet there are twice as many lingcod and 10 times more copper rockfish than at at similar sites up and down the shoreline. The Edmonds fish also are larger and older. Why? Because there is no fishing allowed, Palsson says.
   Research at Bell Island and other no-take areas points to the same conclusion. Where there is no fishing, there are more and larger fish. "Fishermen ask why we're taking it out on them," Palsson says. "And it's true there are lots of stresses on those fish - seals, sea lions, shoreline development, changing beach patterns. . . . But fishing is one stress we have some control over."
   In Washington, the mere mention of "no-fishing" can get a state biologist into hot water. Scientists are supposed to be politically objective, interested only in scientific facts, not public policy.
   "But our jobs are changing," Palsson says, "from fishery biologists to conservation biologists. It's a subtle and important change from the old days, when we heard the governor telling us: We want to be the sports-fishing capital of the world."
   Instead, Palsson and Pakunski advocate designation of more, and perhaps larger marine reserves, where fishing is either prohibited or strongly discouraged. It will take years, but rockfish should begin to recover. "San Juan County voluntarily designated eight bottom-fish recovery areas, and we already can see the difference," Palsson says. "But that's still less than 1 percent of the critical habitat in the Puget Sound area."
   In the San Juans, no-fishing areas have become a cause celebre. And there is no more enthusiastic supporter than Dennis Willows, longtime director of the University of Washington marine laboratories at Friday Harbor. "I'm not particularly green, and I'm not a fisherman," Willows says. "But the scientific data is so obvious, it's stunning."
   He pulls a tattered file and exhibits a set of graphs, not from Palsson and company, but fishing statistics provided by the state. The graphs show plunging catch rates for rockfish and several other species. Puget Sound and the San Juans are ecosystems that demand systemwide responses, he says. The systems are remarkably resilient, able to withstand overfishing and other environmental abuse - "until some unknown threshold is reached."
   "It may still look fine, but in the background there is water quality insult, reproduction insult, . . . and I worry that we are getting dangerously close to that threshold."
   Selected fishing closures eventually will provide scientists with critical data, a broader extension of what Palsson has collected with his odd home videos. This, says Willows, is not environmental advocacy; it is a logical extension of good science.
   In 1792, Capt. Vancouver and company repeatedly set their nets in Puget Sound - usually with little or no success. They must have wondered where the fish had gone. And so it goes for 200 years. The fish don't change, but the fishermen get smarter, better-equipped with electronic fish-finders, high-test lines, trolling motors. These days, one can actually buy an off-the-shelf underwater video camera that sounds more sophisticated than the one invented by Pallson and Pakunski.
   You look at this stuff, and you wonder how any fish are left out there. But there are. Those grainy home videos are evidence that rockfish, while scarce, are also survivors. There are plenty of rocky shoals and kelp forests ready to be repopulated with some homely bottomfish.
   All they ask is an even break.

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"Accompanied by Mr. Broughton and some of the officers, I went on shore about one o'clock, pursuing the usual formalities which are generally observed on such occasions, and under the discharge of a royal salute from the vessels, took possession accordingly of the coast." - George Vancouver, June 4, 1792.

    On the last day of our voyage, I launch my kayak from the stern of the Velella, anchored in tranquil Strawberry Bay, where Vancouver anchored in 1792. The kayak carves a liquid V on a mirrorlike surface as I paddle out to Strawberry Island, a forested gem about 200 yards long at the focal point of the bay.
   Here seagulls perch on the tidal rocks, each with its beak tucked neatly into one wing. Pigeon guillemots - sleek, black seabirds with remarkable red feet - inhabit the granite cliffs. A lone fisherman in his small aluminum boat drifts just off the kelp, his fish line glinting in the morning sun as he leans back with a cup of coffee and grins at me as if to say, "It doesn't get any better than this."
   I beach my boat and climb to the top of the island, stopping to admire the wind-weathered madronas and Douglas firs, some of which appear old enough to have been admired by Vancouver. The view from the top encompasses 100 square miles of inland waters and 50 miles of coastline. The sole signs of humanity are the Anacortes ferry steaming across the southern horizon and my fisherman friend working the kelp. This does not look like a sick ecosystem. It looks like Paradise.
   Yet, paradoxically, scientists seem to agree that, for all their splendors, these waters are troubled. Most of Puget Sound's fish populations - salmon, herring, rockfish - are in serious decline. Federal endangered-species listings are imminent, with as-yet-unknown impacts on people's lives. To scientists, natural beauty and ecological trouble are not contradictions. Puget Sound, like all oceans, mirrors daylight while shrouding the biological complexity beneath the surface.
   Over the past three weeks, we have sailed more than 400 miles of this inland sea, retracing the 1792 route of George Vancouver from Discovery Bay to the South Sound, from Bainbridge to Strawberry Bay. Our days turned on tide and wind as we relearned how to live with, not resist, the rhythmic ebb and flow of nature. We dreaded our return to the city.
    From an aesthetic standpoint, at least, we came home encouraged. We saw virtually no litter, not a single plastic six-pack yoke or hamburger wrapper, and none of those surface "rainbows" that indicate oil on the water. Even in notorious corners such as Elliott Bay and Eagle Harbor, the sound looks remarkably clean. Everywhere we sailed, we encountered bald eagles, great blue herons and harbor seals.
    While prices for waterfront property inflate, much of the shoreline resembles what Vancouver described two centuries ago. There are miles of seemingly pristine shore in areas such as the western bluffs of Whidbey Island and the eastern shore of Hood Canal. State officials consider two-thirds of Puget Sound's shoreline to still be "natural."
    Admitted, these observations are not scientific and we are not scientists. I am a journalist; my old friend and skipper Keith Benson is a historian of science. In lieu of scientific expertise, we brought to this voyage our keen, personal interest in preserving this inland sea. Along the way, we conferred with biologists and oceanographers, fishermen and environmentalists. We glimpsed the endangered Redfish Lake sockeye at the Manchester labs near Port Orchard and sampled oysters plucked straight from the waters of Burley Lagoon in the South Sound.
   Here is the essence of what we learned: Puget Sound is far more complex than we give it credit for. It is both an ecosystem and a web of ecosystems that invite oversimplification and defy understanding. For all its ecological woes, Puget Sound also shows many signs of health. State officials, who test these waters on a regular schedule, report that water quality is generally improved. Horribly polluted sediments in Elliott Bay and Commencement Bay have been cleaned up or capped. Sewage treatment has been upgraded, and outfalls have been moved so discharges are more effectively diluted.
   Less obvious are the neighborhood responses. In Port Townsend, eighth-graders collect data from monitoring stations on the bay. In Seattle and other urban ports, scores of volunteers with the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance track down polluters, then work with them to find nonpolluting alternatives. In the San Juans, citizens have created mini-reserves for depleted rockfish.
   Although most fin fish have declined, shellfish show steady improvement. Commercial and recreational oyster beds that had been closed for years have been reopened, and oyster growers had their best year since 1984. Mussels, which naturally accumulate pollutants, now accumulate far fewer of them. Last spring, hundreds of people turned out on Hood Canal to harvest healthy populations of shrimp and crab.
   Some fin fish - halibut, for example - show improvement. And although herring runs are generally down, they're on the upswing in certain spots such as Vashon Island's Quartermaster Harbor.
Scientists are much better at identifying these trends than they are at explaining them. There is reason to believe rockfish have been overharvested, but herring have not been heavily fished for several years. Biologists disagree on whether salmon have been overfished, but both sides seem to agree that the biggest problems are environmental - not in Puget Sound, but in the rivers and the ocean.
The ocean is the wild card. There is growing evidence of what scientists call a "Pacific decadal oscillation," meaning long-term temperature cycles in the North Pacific that appear to have favored fish in Alaskan waters at the expense of Washington's for the past 20 years. But researchers can't say if or when that oscillation will swing back in favor of Puget Sound.
   All this uncertainty breeds two schools of thought. One says: Err on the side of caution. Crack down on all forms of pollution - industrial outfalls, undertreated sewage, overloaded septic tanks and oily bilges. Prohibit or curtail construction along the shoreline. Ban fishing. Spare no expense, because we cannot afford to lose Puget Sound.
   The other says: Be sensible. Our biggest problems can be traced to ocean temperatures beyond our control. Meanwhile, Puget Sound is far healthier and more resilient than we think. It has survived more than a century of human development and, if we proceed with common sense, it will survive for centuries to come.
    There is ample science to support either point of view. Most scientists do their best to stay out of the fray.

   I think back to a conversation two weeks ago on the Seattle waterfront with biologists from the Muckleshoot Indian tribe, who face a dilemma of science and politics. After years of unrelenting pollution, Elliott Bay and the Duwamish River are being cleaned up, they said. As part of that effort, the Muckleshoots closed their own salmon fishery for four years to help rebuild depleted Duwamish runs. This summer, those closures are expected to pay off with the return of up to 100,000 salmon above the level needed for sustainable spawning. This may include several thousand surplus chinook - the same species deemed endangered. Tribal fishermen want to net those fish in Elliott Bay, but county officials fear that an Indian fishery would lead to conflicts with non-Indians who can't fish.

   Science says: Go fishing. Politics says: Stay on the beach.
   Similar debates have occurred over the need for costly sewage-treatment plants or the fish-gobbling sea lions at the Ballard Locks. Science gives us information on which to base decisions, but it does not make those decisions.
   In Strawberry Bay I climb back into my kayak and paddle around tiny Strawberry Island. An incoming tide is now streaming past, and I paddle onto a bed of kelp to hold my position while I jot some thoughts. Back aboard the Velella are two cardboard boxes of interview notes, books and charts I have accumulated - a makeshift log of my voyage, literal and intellectual, through Puget Sound. There is much to see and learn and think about.
    I watch six of those sleek guillemots work the tide. Starting at the southern end, they ride the current, dipping their heads into the water and occasionally diving for prey. At the north end, they take to the air and race back to repeat the process, wing tips leaving a trail of tiny splashes on the surface.
    Now I watch the happy fisherman work the opposite side of the channel, drifting with the tide at the foot of a granite cliff, revving his outboard to run back against the current, then repeating his course. His strategy mimics the guillemots, though not as effectively.
   Back on the Velella, Benson returns from his own foray to Cypress Island and displays a delicate pink blossom - "Hooker's onion," he says. Archibald Menzies, the botanist aboard Vancouver's ship, identified the same plant here in 1792.
   Twenty years ago, Cypress Island came very close to being bulldozed. It was privately owned and slated for massive clear-cutting, 1,000 homes and condominiums, a 100-slip marina and 18-hole golf course - all approved by the state. It was rescued by a few far-sighted citizens, by the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, and finally purchased by the state. Today the island is preserved in its natural state, a permanent memorial to the power of citizen action.
   Given declining fish runs, this is no time for complacency, but neither is it a time for despair. We have done well over the past 15 years - cleaning up sewage and toxic sediments, preserving wildlife habitat, instilling an environmental ethic. Polls show a broad public consensus that favors doing the right thing for Puget Sound.
    But what might that be? People crave direct causes and effects, heroes and villains. Some would close down fishing altogether. Others demand tougher laws against pollution. Others want more public ownership of critical wildlife habitat. Science provides no road map. On the contrary, with each new breakthrough, the oceans become more complex and the solutions less obvious. 

     Our best bet is a deeper and broader understanding of a marine web composed not just of leaping salmon and noble orcas but of microscopic diatoms, prosaic herring and homely rockfish.
   This is the lesson learned by those eighth-graders in Port Townsend, or the rockfish defenders in the San Juans. For all those costly sewage plants, individual action still matters. A better understanding of this intricate inland sea should lead to wiser decisions and enrich future voyages of discovery.



Puget Sound: A changing profile
-- Area: 2,000 square miles.
-- Shoreline: 2,300 miles.
-- Mean depth: 600 feet.
-- Volume: About 1 trillion cubic meters.
-- Temperature range: 45 to 60 degrees F.
-- Adjacent human population: 3.8 million .
-- Government jurisdictions: 8 counties, 5 major cities.
-- Recreational vessels: 16,000 power boats, 21,500 sailboats, 43,500 canoes and kayaks.
-- Ship traffic: 3,000 cargo and passenger ships per year; 560 tankers, 4,000 oil and chemical barges.
   Shoreline: Of Puget Sound's 2,300 miles of shoreline, about one-third has been modified by development ranging from timber bulkheads to world-class seaports. Two-thirds, or 1,541 miles, remain essentially natural.
   Water quality: Generally improved from a decade ago, probably because of better sewage treatment and enforcement of pollution laws.
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