WORK BY JANA DEAN

Sound Wisdom: Stories of Place

Introduction

The savoir kind of knowledge comes through concise, applied study. For example, we may count the salmon returning each year to a watershed. Once we count the fish we know that yes, this certain number came back this year. From that information we can predict the number who will return next year and the next and the next. Often we believe we hold the key to a challenge when we have this kind of knowing. But when we know their number, do we really know Salmon? Such knowledge, while important, paints only part of the picture. What of the subtle changes that occur over the course of years, even decades?

To really know the fish of a place entails the insight expressed in the wordconnaître. To truly know the salmon of a stream requires familiarity acquired slowly and grounded in experience. Salmon impress our senses: the pulse of the water as they make their way through the shallows; the ripple on the surface as they swim along saltwater shoreline; the smell of rotting fish every November. Such experience touches the heart and helps build the bridge to wisdom. Wisdom provides a solid foundation for effective action.

Harold Wright, who has dedicated himself to restoring a salmon run in his own backyard, related to me the challenge he faced in obtaining eggs for his little five-gallon bucket hatchery. Coho salmon had long since ceased to run in any number in Woodard Creek. A biologist had told him that the stream lacked the habitat to support a run of coho. Now that didn't match up with Harold's memory of his own childhood of gaffing fish. Harold told me of his encounter with the biologist, "I just had to argue with him. I just had to convince him. I've lived on this creek all my life, and I pretty much know what it is. There is plenty of food, plenty of gravel. The only problem with this creek is too much fishing on the outside." Harold's role as long-term witness for the salmon run of Woodard Creek provided the key that opened the door for the restoration of the fish. He went home with the eggs and set up his incubation system. Thanks to Harold's determination, coho once again swim up Hendersen Inlet to spawn in Woodard Creek.

The perceptivity Harold Wright has applied in his dedication to Woodard Creek takes time and patience. Such insight comes through a lifetime of staying put and observing changes that span decades. Fortunately, however, the present does not limit our access to human experience. Indeed, memory and language can expand the experience of a single human being far beyond one lifetime through the vehicle of a story. A walk along the shoreline of sixty years ago lives on in the story told last fall.

Thanks to the memory of another person, I can describe to you the row of float houses that once lined the east side of Budd Inlet. I can describe to you the little man who shuffled bent-backed across the dirt track that was East Bay Drive to fill his bucket every morning from the springs that now underlie condominiums. These images, painted for me in full through the words of Mary Anne Bigelow now bring my gaze daily to the little stream that still winds its way down the hillside before slipping under the pavement at the intersection of Quince and Bigelow Streets. Just as Harold Wright's Insistence convinced the biologist to spare some eggs for the little hatchery, Mrs. Bigelow's memory give me access to some of the time-held wisdom of the place.

As I began work on Sound Wisdom, I saw four paths to stories that would express the wisdom of my home place: the history recorded in books; the history recorded in memory and conveyed through conversation; the memory held by the landscape itself; and folktales molded by centuries of human interaction with the landscape and its inhabitants. Little did I know how much my own experience, both before and during the project, would shape the stories I heard and told.

At the outset, the pattern of my own life near Puget Sound had crossed paths with dozens of other lives. It was at those crossroads that I began.

While telling stories as part of an educational program of the Washington State Department of Ecology, I met Sara Rivers. Sara had done a project in which she had developed a series of sense of place stories for the Puget Sound basin as a whole. Over a series of telephone conversations, her work became clearer to me. She provided not a map, but a sense that yes! stories did exist in a place - that a place spoke through the stories of its people, and through the patterns of its landscape. I thought: "Why not unearth the stories of a more tightly defined region? Why not unearth the stories right in my South Sound neighborhood?"

And so I began searching, following, as Sara is fond of saying, "the end of my nose." Encouraged by Sam Schrager at The Evergreen State College I began with oral histories. I sought out Indian people, oldtimers, advocates for beautiful places, fishermen, biologists. Initially, I had come to Sam with a set of assumptions and a predetermined framework for the kind of stories I sought; I was stuck in a mind set that sought information as opposed to experience. Sam stressed again and again not to assign context and meaning until I had listened.

At times, the part of me that wanted instant meaning couldn't see the point of all this listening, to all this borrowing of memory. So often, we speak of going and talking to someone to find out about a topic. Every day language blankets the act of listening by expressing it as its opposite: talking. In reality, to learn from another, we must stop talking and listen. The practical lesson only came to me as I actively engaged in the act of listening. In order to listen, I left as many of my values and assumptions behind as I could before interviewing people.

Through this not so easy dance of self, memory and others, themes began to emerge. It turned out that those themes which most directly intersected with my own experience were the easiest for me to understand. And as I got further along in the research, the research itself became my experience. More and more readily, I was able to see how different aspects of stories supported one another and fit together.

At the same time, the memories that people shared with me awakened my own awareness and ability to perceive the landscape for myself. I found that if I could imagine what once had been, I could more easily and accurately interpret the present. The landscape itself holds a memory. A cedar tree stands holding the sky of today and the sky of a hundred years ago. The roots of the tree may wrap a now phantom nurse log, like the great arching cedar that spans the trail at McLane Creek in the Delphi Valley. The journey of a salmon speaks for the ocean wave. The hills and valleys of South Sound speak for the glaciers that carved them. I myself went to Cedar, to Salmon and to the gulch near my house and listened to them, thereby augmenting the shared memories of others by creating memories for myself.

Much to my astonishment, recollections from other places I have lived also came to play a part in my understanding the stories of this place. At one point, a theme that had emerged was the log dump at Woodard Bay on Hendersen Inlet. Fascination led me to the Washington State Library to look at books about logging. Sandwiched in the middle of a volume about the Northwest's timber I found a short article on the flumes that carried logs out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains into the town of Madera, where I was born. With that article, I remembered seeing those long unused aerial watercourses when travelling to a family cabin at a place called Fish Camp which had once been a lumber camp. I began to see the connection between my own family history and that of Woodard Bay. Both my grandmother and grandfather worked in the lumber camps prior to the Depression and had later built the cabin because they loved the woods and the hills so much. I came to understand how my own life was part of the story; hence, in two of the stories that follow you will find reference to Idaho, where I lived my teen years, and in one story you will meet magpie, a bird character common not to Puget Sound, but to the desert.

I describe the birth of each of the four stories in short passages that precede the tales. In those passages, you can trace my footsteps through living rooms, offices, libraries and my own memory. You will join me on my journey in search of the knowledge expressed in the French as connaître: a search for a sense of place informed by the heart.

Produced by: Thad Curtz
E-mail:curtzt@elwha.evergreen.edu
Last modified: 03/30/1999