To keep the fresh, stiff coir in place, we staked it with metal landscape staples and lengths cut from nearby Pacific and Scouler’s willows. Willow stakes sprout if conditions are right and would eventually produce thickets that help shade the creek. An arch of leaves and branches is good: it keeps the water cool, shields little salmon from kingfishers and herons, and drops organic material that supplies nutrients. We were also hoping that the willows would provide enough food to attract beavers.
When we had a stretch of creek bed prepared like this, Bob would come rumbling back in the Hitachi and use the excavator’s bucket like a salt shaker, sprinkling gravel to a depth of 3 to 4 inches all over the channel. Female salmon use their tails to dig nests—called redds—in gravel beds. When a female releases eggs into the hollow she’s excavated, the attending male releases sperm. Timing is everything; fertilization occurs as the eggs settle into the nest.
The females choose nesting sites where the gravel is small enough to move with a thrashing tail but large enough to cover the eggs efficiently, and where the water is moving fast enough to keep the developing embryos well oxygenated but not fast enough to carry the eggs downstream before they settle into the nest, or threaten to scour the redd after the eggs are covered with gravel. It’s not surprising that the females are good at what they do; they’ve been at it for a while. The first salmon appear in the fossil record about 20 million years ago.
We field hands kicked and shoveled the gravel to cover the bottom of the new meanders, gave the coir a few tugs to make sure it was held tightly, double-checked to make sure all the bare dirt had a layer of seed and hay, and moved on. The restored stream channel was ready for water.
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After a week of work, it was time to divert the creek from the ditch and let it start winding its way through the new meanders. The remodeled streambed was finished and connected to the downstream end of the ditch, and now the task was to block the ditch at the upstream end so the water would divert and run into its new channel.
To do this, we stacked a pile of sandbags next to the upstream point where the ditch and the freshly dug watercourse met. Then three of us filed into the ditch and stood shoulder to shoulder, facing upstream. Working quickly, we laid black plastic sheeting in the stream. As the water began to pool against the sheet, another group bucket-brigaded sandbags to Peter Bahls, who threw them down in a line to hold the plastic flush across the bottom of the ditch. We tugged at the top of the plastic sheet, struggling to hold it fast against the pressure of the damming water. The rest of the crew hustled bag after bag down, building a wall that gradually began taking some of the pressure off the black plastic and us.
As the sandbag dike got taller, the water rose behind it until it reached the level of the new channel. That was the tipping point. First one tiny rivulet, then another poked out into the meander and soaked into the gravel. Others followed, eventually converging into a single column that began snaking its way out of the ditch and into the restored channel, wetting more and more gravel and coir. Susan and her sister took pictures, as if at a christening.
As we finished the sandbag wall, the water level rose until a steady stream was flowing through the virgin bed. Two of the cousins ran alongside the water, whooping and laughing and shouting words of encouragement. It was like watching an innocent man walk out of prison, exonerated, after thirty-five years. You follow him, trying to imagine what this freedom must feel like, and cheer him on.
In the meantime, Bob’s excavator was throwing dirt into the ditch behind the temporary sandbag-and-plastic dam, the bucket wheeling back and forth frenetically. When Bob finally had a chest-high wall built behind us, the three of us released our grip on the black plastic sheet. We crawled up and out of the ditch massaging our whitened knuckles, trying to work the cramps out of our hands.
Bob kept filling the ditch behind the sandbag dam. When it was solid enough to stop the flow on its own, we took the sandbags back out, one by one, and retrieved the plastic sheet. Just downstream of where Bob was working, the ditch was beginning to dry up. The creek had a new home.
A cluster of us set to walking up and down the ditch, finding freshwater mussels that were stranded in the drying muck. When we spotted one, we dug it out with our fingers and put it in a bucket with water. Freshwater mussels burrow like saltwater clams. They probe the substrate with a muscular foot and pull themselves down, until a crease at the other end of the shell is just at the surface of the stream bottom. That crease opens into a siphon; thousands of cilia on their gills, deep inside the shell, beat in unison to create a current that flows through the siphon’s intake tube, over the gills, and out the siphon’s exit tube. The gill filaments, layered in overlapping plates, trap bacteria and other microscopic food particles as the current passes through, while oxygen diffuses from the stream water into the bloodlike hemolymph. So we looked for the little black mouths filtering water as we walked up and down the ditch, and found individuals ranging from a half dollar to a pocket knife in length. When a bucket was full, we transplanted the mussels to the new channel—laying them on the gravel so they could dig their way in.
Although North America has the highest diversity of freshwater mussels of any region in the world, mussels do not do well in polluted water or silted-in streambeds. The Nature Conservancy estimates that 70 percent of native mussel species are extinct or endangered in the United States. If a creek has strong populations of freshwater mussels, it means that the water quality is good. We started to keep track of the mussels we found to transfer but gave up when we tallied more than a thousand in a 50-yard stretch of drying ditch. They were too abundant to count. If mussels are as reliable an indicator as they are purported to be, water quality in Tarboo Creek is exceptional.
As the mussel rescue continued, Peter Bahls and Susan waded up and down the old ditch in hip boots, netting salmon fry that were stranded so we could ferry them over to the new channel, along with the mussels. Sean and various friends and relations collected equipment.
Estella Leopold had returned to work several days before, but Susan’s father, Carl, was there to the end, helping us transplant mussels and salmon fry. He was eighty-five years old at the time.
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In 1935, when Carl was fifteen, about our younger son’s age, his father bought 80 acres of abandoned farmland in central Wisconsin for back taxes—about $8 an acre. The family spent the next twelve years of weekends and vacations there; Carl was present for seven until the war broke out. They remodeled an abandoned chicken coop into a kitchen and bunkhouse they called the Shack, planted tens of thousands of pine trees, and restored native prairie vegetation. The work the family did on that farm was the first attempt that had ever been made at ecological restoration.
Carl’s father, Aldo Leopold, wrote A Sand County Almanac in an attempt to explain why the family spent all of their weekends and vacation time doing stoop labor together. Originally he’d talked about buying the farm as a place to hunt grouse and ducks. But that wasn’t really what he had in mind. Working on the Shack was his attempt to put the land ethic into action.
The land ethic is an extension of a moral guideline that is the cornerstone of virtually every enduring ethical and religious system. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is the sum of the law and the prophets, encapsulated in a core declaration from the Sermon on the Mount: always treat others as you would like them to treat you. A Sand County Almanac simply asked people to extend this ethical behavior to the organisms that share the planet with us. It’s an idea that people from North America’s First Nations have had for a long time.
It is essential to realize, though, that both ethical commitment and religious faith grow through practice. They have to be realized somehow. Ethical behavior can be lived through caring for the sick and needy; religious understanding can grow through prayer or meditation or communion. One way for a land ethic to grow is through restoration. Working at the Shack was the Leopold family’s way of treating the land we l
ive on with the same respect we show to other people.
Carl’s sister Nina recalls that when her dad first told the family about the land purchase, she had visions of a place in the country with geraniums and a white picket fence. But the farm Aldo bought had been badly abused. The original vegetation had been stripped and the soils bled dry by fifty years of poor farming practices. The previous owner had burned the house down and simply walked away. The only structure left was that drafty chicken coop, half filled with frozen manure.
We find it repugnant when people exploit or abuse others for personal gain—we call them cheats, tyrants, scoundrels, or villains; we describe them as despicable, evil, vile, wicked, or manipulative. Leopold said we should feel the same way about people who exploit or abuse land. If someone we meet is broken or damaged, we reach out to help them. If land is broken or damaged, we reach out to help it—by planting trees and native wildflowers.
For years after its publication in 1949, Leopold’s little volume of essays had a tiny following. But today more than 2 million copies have been sold, and its ideas and ideals are considered a foundation of the conservation movement. At Tarboo Creek, Carl was watching his grandchildren carry on work his family had started seventy years before.
By the time the mussels and salmon fry were settled in and the cleanup accomplished, it was late afternoon. We gathered around Carl and watched the water flow by in the new channel, gently working its way toward the Pacific.
Trees
Among gardeners in Wisconsin and Minnesota, late January is famous for the arrival of the seed catalogs. The holidays are over; the temperature is below zero and dropping, and there is nowhere left to pile the snow that’s still falling. Something like spring seems impossible. And then, precisely then, the seed catalogs arrive.
I feel the same way about placing our tree order each fall. Something as impossible as a forest seems just a hope away.
Our place along Tarboo Creek is shaped like a triangle, bordered by a one-lane road that runs southwest to northeast and a two-lane blacktopped road on the east. Biologically, the parcel has three distinct zones: a derelict pasture of about 6 acres that makes up the triangle’s point, a 3-acre strip of floodplain on either side of the creek, and 8 to 9 acres of cutover, third-growth woodland on the bluff above the stream.
In 2004 the pasture was treeless. The floodplain had a single row of alder stems on either side of the ditch, along with a tangle of willow and alder in the remnants of the old creek channel. The uplands had been stripped of trees that were larger than a hand span across. We needed to reforest the old pasture and the floodplain, and underplant in the cutover uplands. As I write, we are twelve years and more than ten thousand trees and shrubs into the process.
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Our tree-planting season can start in November—sometimes even October. Like the arrival of the salmon, the onset of planting season depends on the rains. If the winter storms are early and heavy and the soils re-wet sufficiently after the Pacific Northwest’s late-summer drought, you can start putting trees into the ground before leaf drop is over. But if the rains are late and light, you would dull your shovel trying to dig at the bone-dry ground, then worry about the saplings’ roots drying to death before they have a chance to acclimate and grow.
But whether you start early or late, the first thing to do is decide which trees and shrubs you’re going to plant. This is actually harder than it sounds.
Traditionally, the goal of ecological restoration has been to replicate the conditions that existed when Native Americans were managing North America, before the arrival of Europeans. To do this, you go back to the original land survey records, when the government divided the country into a grid of 640-acre sections, and look at the notes the surveyors made about the vegetation on your site. In our case, Peter Bahls found references to “spruce bottom”—wet forests dominated by Sitka spruce.
The straight-grained, knot-free wood of old-growth Sitka spruce resonates so well that it is the material of choice for piano soundboards and guitar tops. Sitkas also helped persuade Bill Boeing to set up his airplane company in Seattle. In 1916, Sitka spruce was the preferred material for fuselage and wing frames; it’s still the material of choice for building experimental aircraft. And it was abundant in the Pacific Northwest—especially in the cooler, wetter forests along the coast.
When the Salish people worked this land, before the arrival of whites, the spruce bottoms of Tarboo Creek and nearby Chimacum, Snow, and Salmon creeks were crisscrossed with beaver dams and spotted with ponds and marshes. They were wetland complexes—free-flowing streams that connected expanses of still waters ponded by beaver dams.
To supplement the information in the old land survey records, you can start walking. In our case, the destinations were stumps from old-growth trees that were felled in the 1860s and 1870s. When you find an intact stump, you’re often able to locate notches for the springboards—planks the loggers nailed into the wide butts of gigantic trees. The springboards furnished a platform to swing double-bitted axes and pull a two-man crosscut saw—a tool they called the misery whip—so the tree could be cut above the flaring base.
Walking our place, we found some scattered western redcedar stumps, still 5 feet across at the cut after 130 or more years of decay. All of them were charred from the slash fires that had burned through the Tarboo Valley, and the rest of western Washington, between the years when the old growth came down and about 1920. So we added western redcedar to the planting list.
Another key destination is pockets of undisturbed vegetation. Back in the Midwest, where both Susan and I grew up and went to school, we’d walk railroad tracks to find little strips of intact prairie plant life. The railroads sometimes ran ahead of the farmers, so in a few places the tracks were laid and rights-of-way fenced before the prairies were plowed under—leaving relicts we could use as a source of seeds and information about which plants grew at which sites. At Tarboo Creek, we walk the floodplain near the mouth of the stream, just north of its junction with the estuary and salt water. The tiny bit of old growth that remains there, near the tree we call the big Sitka, includes majestic, moss-covered bigleaf maples in the canopy, sprawling thickets of shrubby vine maples in the understory, and a forest floor covered with lush sprays of sword fern.
So in thinking about the future of our place, we could create a vision of the past from relicts and stumps. But by the time we were getting our restoration work under way, the science of climate change had become a sophisticated, maturing discipline. Research at the local and global level had made it clear that temperatures and precipitation patterns in western Washington were changing rapidly and would continue to change. The forests of 1820 would not thrive in the climate of 2120.
This makes things difficult. In some places on the Olympic Peninsula, western redcedars can live a thousand years. The big Sitka is at least five hundred years old, but it’s growing at what is now the southern edge of its species’ range. Do we plant trees for the past, or for the future?
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Knowing which trees to plant requires an understanding of the nature of climate change. For me, this was a four-step process.
First, I looked at data on rates of fossil fuel use over time. The graph begins to swing upward at the start of the Industrial Revolution, then spikes as the industrialized nations moved to a petroleum-based economy after the Second World War. I also found a data set on the British Petroleum company’s website documenting the average amount of oil used per person per year. The data were organized by country, so I made a map. It shows that northern countries tend to have high rates of fossil fuel use per person, with the United States having the highest of all.
Second, I found data on changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide, or co2, in Earth’s atmosphere over time. The graph mirrors the pattern of fossil fuel use—steep increases since the Industrial Revolution that show no sign of slowing. The correlation is logical, because there is a causative link: when we burn gasol
ine or coal or fuel oil, we release co2into the atmosphere.
Burning is what a chemist calls an oxidation reaction. In this case, the hydrocarbons and other organic compounds in fossil fuels react with oxygen and are transformed into carbon dioxide and water. The reaction releases the energy that keeps us warm in winter and powers our cars and trucks. A carefully controlled version of the same overall reaction is occurring in your body’s cells right now, except that in your case, the organic compounds that are burning are sugars—not hydrocarbons. The energy that’s released is used to power the chemical reactions keeping you alive, and the co2that’s released as a by-product returns to the atmosphere every time you exhale.
Trees and other organisms that perform photosynthesis oxidize organic compounds to stay alive just as we do, but they make them as well. They take in co2molecules—possibly from your breath—and use the energy in sunlight to transform them into sugars. When we burn fossil fuels, then, we are burning the bodies of photosynthesizers and the creatures that ate them—releasing energy from sunlight that hit Earth hundreds of millions of years ago.
Third, I looked at a graph of average global temperature over the same period of time. Along with fossil fuel use, it is increasing. This made sense, too: co2is particularly efficient at absorbing infrared radiation that’s reflected from Earth’s surface and is headed back into space. These infrared wavelengths are the same ones you’ve stood under if you have a heat lamp. When co2absorbs infrared, the molecule gains energy and moves faster in response—meaning that its temperature goes up. As it bumps into nearby nitrogen (N2), oxygen (O2), and water molecules in the air, some of the heat that the co2absorbed in the form of infrared radiation is transferred to the other molecules. As a result, all of the components that make up air begin moving faster and heating up the atmosphere.
Saving Tarboo Creek Page 3