In late September and early October of 2004, I traveled to Washington state to visit my daughter Beth attending Whitman College in Walla Walla and my son Will attending the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Wishing to see the country and visit old friends along the way, I drove my car and brought my kayak. I followed I-80 from Iowa to Utah, stopping for a short outing on the Great Salt Lake, then continued to Washington on I-84. In Walla Walla, Beth suggested that I visit the Palouse River Canyon. When I reached Tacoma via I-84 and I-5 several days later, I spent a day kayaking on Puget Sound with John Fleckenstein, a friend and former coworker who had moved to Olympia, where he now works as a zoologist for the Washington Natural Heritage Program. This is my account of kayaking there....
Dense fog hides the opposite shore as we leave the harbor. The slow trumpeting of the foghorn at Boston Harbor recedes into moisture-muted distance as we paddle across Budd Inlet toward Hope Island. John knows where we are going and leads the way toward an invisible shore. Looking down next to my kayak, I see small white jellyfish pulsating like free-swimming hearts in the clear water. A seal surfaces nearby, only its brown head protruding above the glassy surface, but dives before I am within camera range. Reaching shallow water on the far shore and cruising over the cobble-covered bottom, we see hundreds of pink starfish scattered across the bed of the estuary, hunting mussels and oysters. John nods toward a black, grebe-like bird swimming on the surface. “Pigeon-winged Guillemot”, he says, providing me with a new addition for my life-list, a pelagic species of the Pacific Ocean.
Hope Island looms greenly in the lifting fog ahead of us. As a state park, its coastal rainforest is unbroken by the clearings, houses, roads, and powerlines that characterize the suburban mainland we have passed to arrive here. The tide is out, so the island is ringed with a wide band of coarse, cobbly gravel. Above the tideline, I recognize the frond-like foliage of white cedar and the tall, pointed crowns of Douglas-fir among the trees crowding the forest edge. We pull ashore to explore. Stepping out of his kayak onto the wet, rocky beach, John finds a Sunflower Starfish, nearly black in color, speckled with white dots, with fifteen short, stubby rays instead of the five, slender ones of the pink species. Green, spinach-like leaves of kelp lay flaccidly on the wet ground, awaiting the return of the tide to restore their upright, underwater posture. As we walk upslope, we find a narrow band of tawny saltgrass and maroon sea blite, salt-tolerant species also found on alkali flats of the Great Plains.
We hike into the interior of the island on a narrow trail through a lush understory of alder, holly, sword fern, and bracken fern under tall trees of Douglas-fir, western white cedar, and hemlock. Everywhere I look, tree branches are bearded with pale green strands of Witch's Hair, a pendant lichen resembling Spanish moss. Ferns and mosses thickly cover dead logs and leaning snags. The umbrella-like leaves of thousands of vanilla-plants form a low herbaceous canopy over the spongy forest floor. We find a patch of purple mushrooms. Banana slugs- large yellow, shell-less snails- creep across the wet ground. Our hike takes longer than expected, so we are relieved to see that the rising tide is still below our kayaks when we return to the beach.
The incoming tide has reversed the flow of water through the Sound, so we must now paddle against the current as we begin our return journey. Having previously paddled only on non-tidal waters, I am intrigued at the effects I now see. As we round the tip of a peninsula separating two bays, we encounter a narrow seam of roiled water between the two expanses of flat water. When we breach the eddyline, our bows are suddenly swept to the left as our sterns are carried to the right, spinning us counterclockwise. We recover easily, but I have never seen such a sharp boundary between currents- it is as if the tide in one bay is coming in while still going out in the other. At another point, we pass a small upland stream emptying into the bay; the incoming tidal water flows into its valley and quickens in velocity as it is constricted into the narrow channel, forming a rapids. Having traveled almost exclusively on inland rivers and lakes, I am accustomed to seeing water flow only outward from stream valleys into open bays, so it looks to me like the water here is flowing the “wrong way”- up the valley!
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| Shoshone National Forest, adjoining Yellowstone Park near Cody, Wyoming |
