From the Archives • December 1998

Ecola Ilahee

Douglas Deur

Winter again. I hunker back down into the damp season. Short gray days give way to long black nights while south winds rattle, unrelenting, at the door. (Here at the door: water will find its way through every unsealed seam, every last caulk-less crevice.) Wild surf yanks up kelp, the snaking Nereocystis, bullwhip with bulbous tip, and hurls it high on the beach amidst clots of yellow-white foam. Overhead, east-facing seagulls zip northward in an involuntary, tumbling migration. AND THERE IS THE RAIN. Pounding, drizzling, or intermittent. Showering, driving, pouring. Drenching. Stinging the face as it is blown hard and horizontal. (After a few generations on this wet west coast, locals have generated many words for the rain. Good, functional terms, metaphorical and meteorological, categorizing the force and frequency of each rain, the size, velocity, and variability of each drop. Like Eskimo words for snow. It's "hammering." It's "spitting." It's "misting." Best put on a proper coat.)

And by all means, wear some waterproof shoes. Mother wasn't kidding. A remarkably big chunk of this town sits on soggy spruce bogs, seasonal wetlands that have been filled and drained to make way for roads, shops, and shingled, faux-rustic micro-mansions. Not only do we live in a very wet land - we also live in wetlands. This time of year the water table pokes up above the surface to remind us. Puddles and impromptu creeks; backyards ponded up so deep you could stock them with largemouth bass. The tourists can fish there for a fee until things dry out. Sometime next June, maybe.

In their natural condition, though, wetlands are something to behold. Each wetland is a little different from the next, but they all share some distinctive characteristics. It should come as no surprise that they are, by most technical definitions, wet; they are covered with surface water for several days or weeks, cumulatively, out of the year. Plants are different there - long periods of inundation would kill most terrestrial plants, but wetland plants are specially adapted, each species capable of being submerged for days, weeks, even months. Soils, too, are perpetually soggy; while ordinary forests soils are deep and rusty orange, wetland soils are often "anaerobic" with so little oxygen that organic debris rots very slowly, clays accumulate, and soil colors turn gray or black. (Perhaps this sounds familiar?)

Some of the most impressive wetlands in our region are found at the mouths of rivers and streams. Here, the daily rising and falling of the tides creates a unique assortment of wetland communities, well suited to the daily movements of tidal waters. Down by the mouth, where salt water mixes with fresh, there are green and grassy tidal flats, "salt marshes," lining the shoreline. Upstream, incoming tides back-up downstream flow, twice daily, creating one of those textbook Oddities of Nature: the freshwater tidal wetland. In all of these tidal wetlands we find a complex circuitry of meandering channels, a tangle of still waters tucked between rushing streams and churning sea.

These Northwestern coastal marshes are among the most productive lands on the face of the Earth, lush green intertidal meadows, producing more organic carbon per year, per square foot, than do our forests, farms, or fields. And at the root of this pronounced productivity we find vast piles of rotting gunk. Yes indeed: organic debris is key, carried there by water, tumbling down streams, or churned up and tossed there by ocean waves. Leaves, seaweed, dead organisms of all descriptions, algae - diverse and decomposing things are carried to the slow, calm waters at the river's mouth. There, stalled in backwater stillness, this stuff accumulates into rotting masses, termed "detritus" by in-the-know enthusiasts of rotting debris. Roughly a quarter of the organic material that enters the slow tidal backwaters is carried to the high tide mark in the form of detritus, producing long winding lines of high-tide junk. There, consumed by an assortment of "decomposers" - bacteria, insects, a host of wiggling invertebrate critters - this material serves as the foundation of a mighty food chain, feeding fish and birds, indirectly feeding those creatures by whom birds and fish are eaten. No doubt about it, salt marshes are essential to the salmon. Here, at the fringes of the salt marsh, salmon feed on the super-abundant populations of decomposers as they migrate, gathering in the slow-moving and diluted salty water, adjusting to the changing salinity, fattening themselves for the ocean or river journey ahead.

Go, have a look in-between rain storms, where the detrital crud clings to the uniquely adapted marsh plants - the fleshy succulent stems of Salicornia and Seaside Plantain, the purple daisy-like Aster flower and the yellow disk of "Brass Buttons," the Saltweed with leaves glistening with extruded salts, the sharp grass blades and dangling spikelets of Slough and Lyngbei's Sedge. Though Northwest marshes have taken much abuse in recent years, there are still some fine coastal marshes to be seen.

The native peoples of this coast knew that these marshes were important places. On the shores of the lower Columbia, where silts and detritus amass, freshwater intertidal marshes foster the growth of wapato, Sagittaria latifolia, with leaves of arrowhead shape, small white flowers, and tuberous roots. These roots, edible and tasty, were of tremendous importance to the Chinookan peoples who lived along this River. Villages were intentionally located near wapato patches and the harvest of wapato was a major social event. On the ocean coast, rapidly-growing patches of such plants as the slough (or "basket") sedge, Carex obnupta were harvested for basket weaving materials.

But among all of the practices that made use of the tidal marsh's awesome productivity, none was as sophisticated as the cultivation of two marsh plants - the Pacific silverweed (Potentilla anserina ssp. Pacifica - a plant with buttercup flower and symmetrically placed rose-like leaves) and the springbank clover (Trifolium wormskjioldii - a small clover with purple flowers and long oval leaves). These two plants grow naturally in the narrow band where detritus gathers deep, ground-zero in terms of marsh productivity. And both have edible roots, which don't taste half bad if you know the right recipes or the right times to harvest. Over the years, the peoples of the Northwest coast, particularly in British Columbia, learned to enhance the productivity of these edible plants. They would weed out competing plants, and pile up detritus on their root grounds. In some cases they would even transplant rootlets and build "raised beds", rock or log structures that expanded plots of these plants into the muddy or rocky tidal flats below. There are still a handful of Native people alive today who can recall, vaguely, when entire tidal flats were being managed in this way. And while such intensive gardening may not have been widespread on the northern Oregon coast, it is still quite clear that these hyper-productive plants were of much value to local tribes. They were the "yetska" roots, so prominent in Tillamook tales. And they were prominent in the placenames - the Tillamook name for Cannon Beach refers to the tide flats around the mouth of Ecola Creek. The term was Neshyetskawin, "place with lots of Potentilla," a good place to venture into the wetlands, gather roots, and eat.

Since the arrival of our own peoples on this coast, edible marsh roots have gone out of style. Not recognizing the potential and productivity of the natural marsh, settlers were eager to dike, fill, and drain wetlands. The vast majority of Oregon's ancestral salt marshes are now buried below cow pastures, parking lots, and buildings. (Downtown Cannon Beach, like many of our coastal towns, is built atop fill, dumped there to carve construction sites out of the tidal marsh.) The salt marshes that exist today, only 11 square miles of them in the State, are largely new wetlands, built up atop silts deposited on old mudflats in the last hundred years, silts swept off of ragged logged hillslopes and deposited in tidal backwaters downstream. Dig down below these marshes and you are likely to find - not the archaeological traces of ancient root grounds - but turn-of-the-century clam flats, covered in wood chips, milled lumber, and remnant fragments of rusty old bolts.

Old marshes can return, though, like a phoenix from the swamp. Here and there, throughout the Northwest, people are beginning to experiment, removing dikes and fill, allowing the tides to reclaim the lowlands. And, here and there, it appears, detritus accumulates once again - the native plants, the native animals gradually return. These dynamic wet lands have the potential to heal. Which is fortunate. For generations, we have underestimated their ecological importance, misunderstood their vital role as habitat, viewed them more as a damp nuisance than as valuable resources unto themselves. Maybe, just maybe, by their very resilience, these environments will give us a second chance.

A good, basic plant identification guide to the Northwest's wetland plants is Fred Weinmann et al., 1984, Wetland Plants of the Pacific Northwest, Seattle: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I have several things in-press on the Native American management of wetlands - two of these will appear in P. Hirt and D. Goble (eds.) Northwest Lands and Peoples: An Environmental History Anthology, and D. Deur and N.J. Turner (eds.) Keeping it Living: Traditional Plant Cultivation and Management on the Northwest Coast, both to be published, barring disasters, by the University of Washington Press. The South Slough National Estuarine Reserve, in Charleston Oregon, is actively researching the effects of salt marsh restoration efforts on the Oregon coast.

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