Issue 30: Fall into Winter

Salish Sea ABCs

Gosh. What a year. Now that’s an understatement.

I’ve been reluctant to post because of all of the craziness in the world. The deaths, violence, transitions. Culminating into a general doom. I find myself in this time, not just reflecting but spiraling around in sad episodes: what does this work even mean, especially during the state of the nation and the continued attacks on marginalized people?

Sometimes I feel that I need to stick my hands into dirt and scream. Scream for those who don’t have the opportunity and scream for those who can’t anymore. I know that this quasi-ceremonial action will only uncompress my heart temporarily. A short gasp of breath until we are compacted back in our daily lives.

A year ago, I wrote this piece about the death of salmon. A non-fiction + futurism story about what people will do when salmon become extinct. I wrote it because despite the melancholic emotions about the land in my pieces they almost always have a cheerfully charged volta. Ex. Yeah it’s messed up but it’s all going to be okay. So, I challenged myself to stay in the anger and loss. Spoiler alert, the salmon do not come back. The piece starts off as a childhood memory at Pike Place. There was nothing else that made me more mad and seething than seeing salmon thrown like footballs between two fish mongers. I internalized it as a deliberate gimmick that plays on innocent tourists. It seems like something that literally could be on TV. It became so recognizable that it has cemented itself as a place memory for most. You can’t think about Pike Place without the salmon, the bronze pig, and the gum wall. It’s that act of throwing limp salmon around, that’s what I was taught never to do. If you taunt the salmon, the animals, and others they will stop coming back. They won’t return because they feel disrespected. Why would they allow us to harvest them if we can’t return a relationship based on compassion and consideration?

It has made me think about we’ve lost reverence for our responsibilities. It’s always someone else’s problem, story, and deal. And it’s heartbreaking to know that when we’ve lost them, their stories multiply. When they are gone that’s when people realize that their stories matter. That’s when people would have wished they had listened more, engaged more, cared more, read more, and written more.

I decided to write about things I am really passionate about. I was inspired by an abecedarian I heard a couple of weeks ago. I thought that it would be cool to do one as a response to the Salish Sea. I listed all the letters of the alphabet and jotted down the first thing that came to mind.

A is for alevin. The first stage of a salmon’s life. They rock their miniscule heads and squeeze out of their egg sack. They have dark eyes and their long transparent body cling an orange buoy: lifeline. The parents, long dead, provided them with the necessary nutrients to begin to understand their new world. Slowly absorbing the yolk attached to their bodies. Once it’s depleted the alevin become fry.

B is for bear. If approached by a bear, shout “HEY BEAR!” If you feel that yelling is too aggressive, attach a bear bell to your backpack. But never a speaker. Don’t be that guy. Bears can eat those people.

C is for camas. The sweet potato of the Pacific Northwest. Salish people used to cultivate the plant by the thousands. A façade of lakes, their violet flowers would wet the prairies. Today, we see camas begin to be repopulated in the city, along street curb to large swaths in the San Juans. I remember talking to my mom about Seattle’s efforts to bring back camas. She said she used to plant them in our front yard. No one talked about camas back then.

D is for Daly’s Drive In. A lowkey burger shack on Eastlake Avenue. Halibut burgers and blackberry milkshakes. An intense combination. I feel like I’m still chewing on blackberry seeds. Inside Daly’s you could eat in a sunroom overlooking Lake Union and up to the hills of Queen Anne. The room felt like a boat galley whose owner said, “It’s okay you can leave your shoes on.” I miss Daly’s. Why is it that yellow is the color of nostalgia?

E is for Elwha Dam. The 100-year-old victory for the river and its people. A tool of settler colonialism to control the water and change the ecosystem. The Elwha Dam fell in 2012 and the Glines Canyon in 2014. I watch timelapses of the destruction on YouTube. I see the excavator floating on a barge, zigzagging across the river channel, eating the dam like a popsicle as it descends downwards like an elevator. Now, I share timelapses of the rematriation of the land – returning to mother- as the Elwha River finds the path of least resistance. The river retakes roads. It’s the river’s time now.

F is for Fall. I’ve tried searching for the same autumn mornings that Seattle has. No luck so far. So, I write to remember. I used to hate fall. It meant summer was over. Green to brown; early to late. Father’s health failed us in the fall. All too drastic of a change. Then I left and the feeling of Seattle’s fall has clouded me. Cool bright mornings, enough to see the moist air raise from the concrete. Fog some mornings but not most. Tea in high school and coffee in college. Heavier clothes and melancholic music. Fall is something everyone has to wear in Seattle.

G is for Glacier. The Vashon Glaciation period -19,000 years Before Present- crossed the border of Canada and the United States. It turned the region into a sandbox. Depressing the land and creating valleys between the Cascades and Olympics. The top of the Puget Lobe stood 3000 feet over Seattle. Some crevasses on Rainier are 100 feet deep. 10 stories high. Remnants of the Vashon Glaciation. The absolute power of frozen water. If God is real, God is a glacier.

H is for Harry and the Henderson’s. The best sasquatch movie ever made. Starring John Lithgow. It won an Academy Award for Best Makeup in 1987. The innocent cockeyed grin of Harry will forever be seared into my mind. I’ve heard so many sasquatch stories growing up but never one in the city. Harry and the Henderson’s house was filmed five blocks away from mine.

I is for Inner Space. The place where I learned to skateboard when I was eight. In a basement of an industrial building between Wallingford and Fremont. My dad enrolled me in a winter camp to get me out of the house. I was hooked. It was a sanctuary for a developing kid. Skating new lines, learning ollies, and becoming confident in committing rather than doing it half assed and ending up on your ass. Wearing Zoo York and listening to East Coast Hip-Hop. Eating so many Hot Pockets. That’s what skaters do. Inner Space is now All Together Skatepark.

J is for J-Pod. Fifty-six southern resident killer whales, living and deceased, apart of the pod. Across three generations. There is a matriarch, Granny, who’s descendants are Sissy, Canuck, Samish, Capricorn, Riptide, Suttles, Bellatrix, Se-Yi’-Chn, Hy’Shqa, Tilem I’nges and Sxwyeqóh. There is a matriarch, Mama, who’s descendants are Blossom, Sheekah, Blackberry, Tsuchi, Tofino, Mako, J15, Shachi, Rigel, Eclipse, Nova, Crescent, and E.T. There is a matriarch, Sucia, who’s descendants are Merlin, Slick, Mike, Keet, Alki, Sonic, Echo, Saiph, and Scarlet. There is a matriarch, Neah, who’s descendants are Saratoga, J13, Princess Angeline, Polaris, Star, J60, Dipper, Notch, Phoenix, Moby, Kiki, Tahoma, Everett, Ewok, Rhapsody, Oreo, Doublestuf, Cookie, and Tahlequah. You may have heard of Tahlequah, the mother who mourns her dead calf, carrying the calf for two weeks back in 2018. And now, she’s had to do the same. Another calf born in December 2024 died on January 1^st. Another mourning period shy of two weeks. Another mourning ceremony for her pod. Another reminder that our time is coming.

k is for kanim. Canoe in Chinuk Wawa. Our vessels, our lifeblood, our kin. Do I need to say more?

L is for Licton Springs. Whose red ochre has been spilling from the North Seattle neighborhood since time immemorial. Duwamish people used to frequent the site for spiritual ascendance and therapeutic relaxation. Settlers turned the site into thermal baths. Today, Licton Springs only has one uncapped spring. It’s name is an anglicization of liq̓təd or leEK-tud, the word for red paint in Southern Lushootseed. In 2019 the site gained Landmark Status after grassroots push. The first of its kind. Almost 500 landmarks before a Salish place was honored. Last year, I visited Licton Springs. I dipped my fingers into the spring and they stayed orange for three days. I was content not to wash that hand.

M is for Mima Mounds. Have you ever been to Mima Mounds? A large grassland, west of I-5 between Olympia and Grand Mound. Acres of large dirt uplifts like thousands of sleeping turtles. Their grassy shells foster kinnikinnick in the winter and chocolate lilies in the summer. Winds pick up the seeds and disperse them across the mounds. People have been trying to figure out the origins of Mima Mounds: giant gophers, glacier deposits, flooding, or aliens. Who knows? I like that they’re a mystery. Keep Mima Mounds Mysterious. #KMMM

N is for Nevermind. Nirvana’s 1991 sophomore album. Kurt, Dave, and Krist, exploded Seattle’s grunge into the mainstream. Raw yet polished. Authentic and dark. Twisted but loose. Dark, brooding, and anti-establishment like the pre-Amazon SLU days of Seattle. I found Nevermind in middle school. The cusp before phones didn’t engross us. I went to the library and checked out all the albums and rip them onto my iPod. Even the live recordings. I fell in love with Nirvana. Saturating myself with grunge and alternative metal. While writing this, I discovered a 1991 interview about Nevermind.

It features a reporter from the TV broadcast channel MusiquePlus. His back is facing the camera. He has a thick French-Canadian accent. He is wearing a leather jacket with lots of straps. Kurt is wearing a black top hunched over a cigarette. He is between Dave and Krist. Krist is standing, his hands in his long leather coat, beneath is a gray sweatshirt with white flowers. Krist is seen occasionally swigging from a label-less beer bottle. The cameraman is above them, filming downward, at times you can see patches of thin hair on the crowns of the bandmembers. When the interviewer asks a question, the camera is completely zoomed out, when a member of Nirvana answers, the camera pans and submerges the member’s face in the frame. Throughout the whole interview the camera is tilted. Uniquely 90s. Minutes in, the reporter asks how Nevermind is a change from the band’s first album.

Kris: “so now we even have Nevermind behind us and we’re blazing new exciting frontiers”

Interviewer: “does it change…”

Kurt: “Sacagawea”

Interviewer: “How do you say that?”

Kurt: “Sacagawea”

Kris: “She was um Lewis and Clark’s guide when they… you know..they were explorers”

Dave: “She was a trailblazer”

Kris “They trailblazed all the way and discovered the west and opened up the west. Sacagawea was their Indian Guide”

Interviewer: “Okay”

Kris: “Yeah Sacagawea”

Interviewer: “So what about him”

Dave and Kurt: “It was a her”

Kris: “Well we were blazing new frontiers and they were blazing new frontiers”

Interviewer: “I get it”

Kris: “We’re the Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea of modern day rock and roll”

Dave: “We were going to name the album Sacagawea but do we know how to spell it?”

Kurt: “But our distribution company wouldn’t go for it”

Interviewer: “Why did you entitle the album Nevermind?”

Kurt: “I. Don’t. Know”

I am glad that Nevermind isn’t called Sacagawea. Can we stop naming things after Native people?

O is for Oyster. Don’t eat oysters in the months without R’s my mother always told me. It took me years beyond my childhood to stop counting on my fingers and realize that it just means don’t eat oysters in the summer. I was always afraid of paralytic shellfish poisoning. For an essay in my MFA program, I wrote about my family’s connection to Oysterville, Washington. It’s a small town on the Long Beach peninsula. Traditional Chinook territory. And of course, famed for the production of Washington oysters. I found out that my grandfather had pushed to erect a plaque in Oysterville that recognized his grandparents. A little white sign nailed on a fence outside a house.

1870-1896

HOMESITE

-----OF------

Capt. James R. &

Jane Haquet Johnson

Whose Ancestors included

Chief of the Chinook & Quinault Tribes.

Their Ninth Child,

Myrtle Johnson Woodcock

was the last Indian Princess

Born in Oysterville.

P is for Pink Floyd. When I entered middle school, my parent’s cared less about what I wore for student picture day. Usually, it was a whole affair of dressing up, combing hair, and practicing a smile. The grandparents needed a good picture. Well in sixth grade, I don’t know what happened. I guess they let me dress myself. So, I did what any sixth grader would do and wore a Pink Floyd shirt. You may already have a mental image in your head. Probably a black shirt with the prism of Dark Side of the Moon or a white shirt filled with The Wall? No. I wore a camo green shirt that had a singular salmon on it. The salmon was bright neon pink and in-fact an anatomically correct Pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) you know the one that swells a hump when they spawn. Next to the salmon was a small text that said “Floyd”. Needless to say, when the photos arrived in the mail there was a bit of confusion.

Q is for Quileute. The traditional and current stewards of Forks and La Push, Washington. A town which became incredibly popular due to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. She found Forks by googling something like “What is the rainiest place in America?” Thus, reigniting the insane feud between vampires and werewolves. Meyers appropriated the Quileute people’s stories, making all the werewolves in Twilight from the Quileute Tribe. On her blog, where she has answered some Frequently Asked Questions, Meyer’s writes “ I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to the Quileute Tribe. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story.” The italics my is real. I could go on and on about how fucked up The Twilight Saga has been for the Western gaze onto Native people. I won’t. But what I will say is, it’s estimated that The Twilight Saga grossed over $3.3 billion dollars from five movies alone. The book’s sold over 160 million copies. Millions of unknown dollars from merchandise. The Quileute Tribe though, received zero compensation or further acknowledgement from Meyer’s and Summit Entertainment. And still people make a pilgrimage to Forks and La Push to see if Quileute people are real and if they truly can turn into werewolves.

R is for rabbits. North Seattle people, does anyone remember all the rabbits on the west side of Green Lake? Along the hill adjacent to Aurora but south of Beth’s Cafe. As a kid, I remember a scene of hundreds of rabbits along that hill. Like something out of Watership Down. Some people agree and others don’t. Weird.

S is for spindle whorl. A traditional item integral to wool weavings done by Coast Salish women. The spindle whorl is a disc like a CD, which supports the base of the wool which is wrapped around a shaft. Spindle whorls hold immense spiritual power. They are often carved symmetrically to depict guardian spirits like thunderbird. Salish people believed that there was a type of relationship that goes into the wool. So, the weaver needs to be able to provide positive intentions. Most of the spindle whorls were stolen by museums. Slowly, they are coming back in contemporary art.

T is for Triton Head. A small peninsula on the Hood Canal where my grandparents built a home and spent their last decades together. A wood burnt plank read “Oliver’s Potlatch House”. The house was designed like a longhouse. High angled ceilings and exposed beams jetted out and pointing to the water. Large panoramic windows overlooking the Hood Canal. The home welcomed us for Christmas, Easter, and weekend get-aways. My earliest memories were at this house, laying my large head on a wool blanket and looking out into the pitch-black outside. Humming of love encapsulating me as family made food and laughed all night. Though the house is no longer is in the family, sometimes when I close my eyes at night, I wish I could wake up there. Back when everyone was together. And the only thing I had to worry about was school the next day.

U is for University Way. Otherwise known as the Ave. Unforgettable lyrics in The Ave by Blue Scholars, “Fuck class, get your education on the Ave”. I’ve had many firsts on the Ave. And we’ll leave it to that.

V is for Vulpes. The genus known as True Foxes. In our neck of the woods, we have red foxes. That’s Vulpes vulpes. The truest fox? I haven’t heard many stories of foxes in our Salish and Chinook knowledge systems. It mostly is Coyote who is our trickster. Maybe those fox stories didn’t survive. This is a question I would have loved to ask my dad. Back in 2010, he designed a red fox logo for the Washington Stealth. A professional lacrosse team that moved to Everett from Vancouver B.C. Over that year we went to many lacrosse games and I eventually took interest in the sport. It did help that lacrosse is a traditional North American Indigenous sport. It was # decolonize. I was hooked. Each time I laced up, I thought about that logo my dad made. I told some teammates about the logo, and they asked if it was my spirit animal. After that I stopped talking about the logo then later lost interest in playing.

W is for whulge. Whulge is the sound that the ocean makes as it crashes into itself and recedes back from the beach. x̌ʷəlč is the lushootseed word for saltwater. An onomatopoeia by design. whulge, whulge, whulge.

X is for X. Marks the spot where tribal leaders left their “X mark” on treaties. Two perpendicular lines. A mark of acknowledgement, a shared notion, a slight understanding. Signatures were reserved for the literate population. John Hancock -considered the most recognizable signatures in American History – takes up most real estate on Declaration of Independence. Indian treaties -the supreme law of the land as stated in Article VI of the Constitution- “x” will suffice. Indians hereby cede, relinquish, and convey to the United States all their right, title, and interest “x” will suffice. Broken translations “x” will suffice. The reversal? “X” will not suffice.

Y is for Yellow Cedar. Growing up, one of my favorite places to play was on this log outside of our house. It laid adjacent to my dad’s studio in the backyard. The back side was cut parallel to the ground and there was a two-foot indent that was hollowed out from bottom to top. The log had been prepared for something, but for what? . It had to be about 30 feet long, it was old and weathered, but it provided a place to channel the unknown as a kid. Every summer I would find myself trying to cut back the blackberries as they wrapped around the log. I followed the carpenter ants as they made tunnels and carried out little pieces of cedar dust. Sometimes I would crawl and follow the indentation, seeing the spiders, centipedes, and other little bugs. I found myself immersed in a little ecosystem that was thriving off of this cedar log. Moss was growing, even another tree was growing on top. As a naïve kid, I thought this was a totally normal thing to have in your backyard. I speculated to myself, maybe this tree needed to be cut down in order to put the studio in the backyard or maybe we are holding onto this tree for someone or why do you need a playground when you can run and jump along an old log. The log evidently was a part of a totem pole project in Jackson Hole, WY. In the Wildlife Museum, stands a 25-foot pole titled “Tetons” showcasing the Grand Teton mountains transitioning into Thunderbird, Thunderbird clutching a copper shield and frog ancestors on each side holding bundles of prairie sage and Coast Salish designs still anchoring the bottom of the pole to the earth which the tree came from.

Z is for Zoo Plankton. If you don’t believe in magic, then explain bioluminescence. Not the technical part, I don’t care about that. Explain to someone the reality of seeing the ocean light up blue on a summer night. Turn off the side of the brain that is hungry for an explanation and just witness. In this case, just listen. The first time I saw the waves change colors was in Quinault. It was the last days of the 2013 Canoe Journey. My family was camped on a beach that stretched for miles. After the sun went down and the campfire slowly died out, we called it a night. It was dark but the stars and moon seemed notably bright. Before I was able to sleep, my older brother woke us all up and rushed us all outside. I was scared that something horrible had happened but as my eyes adjusted to the faint horizon lit by moon, I saw the water illuminant neon blue. An incandescent blue so bright it was basically Gatorade. My brother and I decided to run out to meet the waves, he sprinted. I fell a bit behind, I could see his footsteps mark the sand like electrical currents that diffused an instantaneous blue-green pulse into the sand. We all huddled at the shoreline, watching the dull waves hit our feet then lighting up. I knew in that moment I would never forget this. Years later, I talked to my brother about this event. Of course he remembered. He told me the first time he saw the ocean light up, he was a kid and since then he never thought it was real because he kept searching and wishing it would happen again.