Paddling Into the Past

An eagle floated above a cliff as I paddled against difficult currents in northern Washington’s San Juan Islands. Swooping down over my heavily loaded sea kayak and dragging its talons like grappling hooks in the water, the eagle snagged a small fish and shot off clutching its wriggling prey. Minutes later I heard the sound of a diesel engine. I stopped and waited. Suddenly a salmon fishing boat burst into view, passing 30 yards off my bow. The boat was ablaze with Northwest Coast Native American designs, including a thunderbird, the supernatural creature that dove from mountains to snatch whales from the sea. The vessel’s Native American crew stared at me as they glided by.

My thoughts drifted back to the time when ancestors of this crew had come face to face with the region’s first white explorers. When the explorers arrived they found thousands of Native Americans living in wooden structures along the thickly forested, salmon-filled waterways of northwestern Washington. Indian nations were interconnected by a network of canoe routes that extended from Puget Sound north into Canada. Villagers paddled dugouts up and down the water trails to potlatches, weddings, summer camps and fishing grounds; to trade, to gather food and to visit other villages, using canoes in much the same way the Plains Indians used horses. Warriors raided in canoes. Hunters chased whales in huge dugouts festooned with thunderbird drawings.

On this trip, I was tracing their path.

It was spring in the San Juans, and I was kayaking south along the northernmost section of the Cascadia Marine Trail. I’d been eager for several years to paddle at least a portion of this network of waterways extending from the Canadian border to the southern tip of Puget Sound and to explore the rich history they intersect. I wanted to get a feel for the Native American world of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The paths I would follow were those used by the 13 Indian tribes that have inhabited the area for centuries. My plan was to paddle the northern part and finish among the islands and peninsulas of central Puget Sound at the boyhood home of Chief Seattle, the renowned Suquamish tribe leader for whom the city is named.

I would follow directions outlined in the “Guide to the Cascadia Marine Trail System,” a booklet published by the nonprofit Washington Water Trails Assn. (WWTA). The system, which opened in 1993, was designed by WWTA principally for use by kayaks, canoes and other small craft. It now has 37 campsites, spaced every five to eight miles, with more added each year. Many have fascinating histories.

For example, the Ft. Worden campsite, near Port Townsend, Wash., boasts bunkers built in 1904 to guard against any invasion of Puget Sound. And Ft. Ebey campsite on Whidbey Island was the site of a raid by canoe-loads of vengeful Tlingit warriors from Alaska in 1856.

Having launched my kayak at North Beach on Orcas Island, near Washington’s border with Canada, I was now 15 miles down the trail. The largest of the 172 San Juan Islands, Orcas is a 25-mile ferry ride from the mainland town of Anacortes, Wash. I’d spent my first night camping at Point Doughty on Orcas listening to seals splashing off nearby cliffs.

In my kayak, which needs only four inches of water to float, I could hear just about everything: the breathing of seals and porpoises, the sizzle of rain, the explosion of surf. And I could enter areas nearly impossible to reach by land.

Later, I pulled into the campsite at Stuart Island, next to a Northern California couple who were unloading a two-person kayak they had rented in Seattle.

As I set up my tent, I saw to the west that the sun was setting over snow-covered peaks on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. After dark, in water just 20 feet from my tent I could see small fish racing through the shallows, their phosphorescent trajectories creating eerie afterglows.

*

Next morning I crossed Spieden Channel to San Juan Island--the second largest of the islands--picking my way between small boats lined up in conga formation, heading out to sea. As I cruised past the shore, I watched as sea gulls pecked at shellfish between shore boulders.

On the west side of San Juan Island I passed English Camp, a remnant of the war that almost erupted between Britain and the United States over the drawing of the 49th parallel. Britain had claimed in 1846 that the parallel (which was also the dividing line between Canada and the United States) placed the San Juan Islands in Canadian (thus, British) territory. The United States disagreed. It took two decades--including a buildup of U.S. and British troops--until the issue was resolved in 1872.

Off Lime Kiln Point on San Juan Island’s west side I spotted whale-watching boats as they surrounded a pod of orcas whose silvery breath spouted into mid-air.

The fog was swirling as I slipped past harbor seals lounging on barnacled rocks. I began to roller coaster in whitecaps that were heading up the Strait of Juan de Fuca from the ocean. Across the water were Discovery Bay and Port Townsend, backed by the imposing Olympic Mountains. George Vancouver--the British explorer who was the first white person to arrive at Puget Sound--had sailed up the strait directly across from me, in June 1792, aboard the ship Discovery.

Near what is now Port Townsend, Vancouver and members of his party saw something startling: “. . . a long pole and two others of smaller size . . . put upright in the ground each having a human skull on the top,” wrote Peter Puget, one of Vancouver’s lieutenants. The skulls were raiding trophies placed by local tribes along the canoe trail as a warning to outsiders.

Spray flew from jagged whitecaps as I turned into the protected waters of the middle San Juan Islands. Red-barked madronos guarded tranquil coves. I camped at the Blind Island marine campsite at Blind Cove on Shaw Island. Three other groups of kayakers were there.

I shared a camp-stove dinner of rice and chili beans with a couple from Portland. In their mid-40s with children in college, they were kayaking north the next day to connect with the new British Columbia Marine Trail through the Gulf Islands. They had come from Anacortes by ferry and talked of kayaking the entire Inside Passage to Alaska. A black oystercatcher shorebird with a long, red bill splashed below us in the shallows.

The 700-mile Inside Passage has a long history. Native people from what is now Alaska used it as the road into the lush south, where they stole food and sometimes took prisoners.

In 1857, 400 Tlingit warriors from the north, bent on revenge, knifed down the Passage in massive, high-pronged dugouts. The previous summer their chief and 27 warriors had been killed while raiding a Puget Sound village for food and prisoners. The Alaskan avengers found a white militia leader and territorial legislator named Isaac Ebey, chopped off his head and paddled home with it: a chief for a chief. Ebey’s Landing, where the decapitation took place, is near Port Townsend, where Vancouver first sighted skulls. This June it became a marine trail campsite.

*

The sun was rising through low clouds as I crossed turbulent Rosario Strait, heading east toward Anacortes. Ten-thousand-foot Mt. Baker floated like a snow cone on the horizon. A 40-foot fishing boat passed me, the words “Lummi Nation” written on its side. The Lummi reservation was a few miles ahead.

For centuries the Lummi lived in fishing villages scattered throughout the San Juan Islands, trapping salmon on island reefs with willow and nettle fiber reef nets. Using canoes, they stretched the nets across shallow water in the path of salmon that flooded in from the sea with the tide. After the tide came in, the nets billowed out with fish.

Enormous catches were made of salmon bound for huge interior rivers. A native chief presided to ensure that rituals were adhered to. Little was more important to the Northwest Coast Indians than salmon; their lives depended on them.

I paddled with the incoming tide into a trail campsite on Saddlebag Island, near the town of Anacortes. Rocky meadows opened out on both sides of the beach. An eagle spiraled above tiny Dot Island, a National Wildlife Refuge on the next island southeast. Exhausted after three long days of paddling, I fell asleep in my tent long before dark.

At dawn as I glided south onto Padilla Bay--one of a handful of national estuarine sanctuaries--I saw waterfowl everywhere; flocks of black brant fed on eel grass, great blue herons stalked fish through the shallows.

I entered Swinomish Channel at the south end of the bay where I spoke with a Japanese family gathering sea grass. I followed the narrow, six-mile channel directly south past the Swinomish reservation and the town of La Conner, out into Skagit Bay.

I was now in the northern reaches of Puget Sound. The Skagit River delta region, a birder’s paradise, opened up to the east. The delta is a maze of marshland channels, river shacks and World War II bunkers within the Skagit Wildlife Area, which is a nesting ground for raptors such as red-tailed hawks and bald eagles.

At twilight, I slid onto the gravelly beach of Camano Island State Park campsite. A teenager from the nearby Tulalip reservation helped me unload. He was circumnavigating the island in his canoe. The dozen or so surrounding tents glowed with the light of lanterns inside.

*

I continued south through Puget Sound for two more days until I reached Agate Pass and the village of Suquamish: home of the Suquamish tribe and burial place of its most famous ancestor, Chief Seattle.

Born in 1786, the son of a Suquamish canoe builder, he gained prowess as a young warrior who planned and led distant canoe raids, some even into Canada. Broad shouldered and taller than 6 feet in his moccasins, he was a giant among his shorter contemporaries. He gained the respect of many tribes, becoming a powerful leader even beyond his own Suquamish tribe. He often spoke from his dugout to tribes assembled on shore. A white settler wrote: “He could be heard a half mile away when he addressed his people, and he seemed to control them by his powerful intellect.”

The region’s first white settlers landed directly across the sound from Chief Seattle’s long house in 1851. He befriended them and helped them immensely in their early struggles to survive. The grateful settlers named their city after him.

I walked the shore where Chief Seattle’s cedar long house, called Old Man House, once stood, and I thought of the famous speech he gave during treaty negotiations with the U.S. government in 1854.

His words proved prophetic:

“It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.”

Chief Seattle died in 1866. His grave, half a mile up the hill from his long house, is marked by the upright beams of a long house with canoes on the crossbeams, in the style of a Suquamish burial place. The Seattle city skyline is almost visible across the sound. Two miles farther up Agate Pass is the Suquamish Tribal Museum with displays that highlight the tribe’s history from before the white man arrived. A slide show blends images of the past with elders’ voices.

*

On the sixth day I pushed off for Bainbridge State Park, a marine trail campsite three miles away. The next day I would paddle home to Seattle. A Native American boy ran down the beach toward me, pointing toward the bay. I looked and saw low clouds rolling in. Then a strange-looking boat raced out of the clouds. It was a huge dugout canoe, maybe 40 feet long, its bow covered with Northwest Coast Indian designs, and its 11 paddlers pulling hard. It flashed by close to the beach.

The boy was excited. He said his older brother was in that boat.

The Suquamish tribe had joined other coastal tribes in trying to revive the old ways of canoeing, the boy told me. His older brother and friends had carved the huge dugout from a cedar log and planned to travel ancestral canoe routes. They also were going north soon to challenge the Lummi Nation to a canoe race. They were practicing. Before the canoe disappeared, a paddler in the stern flashed us a smile.

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GUIDEBOOK

Washington Waterways

Getting there: United, Alaska and Delta fly nonstop from LAX to Seattle. Advance-purchase, round-trip fares start at $196.

Trail guide: “The Guide to the Cascadia Marine Trail System” is published by the Washington Water Trails Assn., telephone (206) 545-9161. This booklet includes descriptions of the 37 campsites with maps and trail guides. It comes with the price of membership: $25 for individuals, $35 for families.

Where to stay: I stayed at six of the campsites. Visitors can pay $7 per night to stay at each site, or they can purchase, as I did, a Cascadia Marine Trail permit for $20 that is good at any site during 1997. Permits can be obtained from the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission, tel. (360) 902-8500, from the Washington Water Trails Assn. and from most of the rental outfitters that follow.

Rental outfitters: Various Puget Sound companies rent boats and sell camping gear, including: Northwest Outdoor Center on Seattle’s Lake Union, tel. (206) 281-9694; Pacific Water Sports near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, tel. (800) 934-6216; Folding Kayak Adventures in Seattle, tel. (206) 522-8249; Eddyline in Anacortes, tel. (360) 299-2300.

Tours: Shearwater Sea Kayak Tours on Orcas Island, tel. (360) 376-4699, will help plan trips in the San Juan Islands. Make sure you get Puget Sound or San Juan Island current guides and tide tables and the proper charts to help ensure safety.

Reading: “Kayaking Puget Sound, The San Juans and Gulf Islands” by Randel Washburne (The Mountaineers, $12.95) is an excellent guide to 45 trips on the Northwest’s inland waters. It contains detailed descriptions of the waterways encompassed by the Cascadia Marine Trail. It tells how to get there, where to launch, gives trip duration and rating (protected, moderate and exposed waters) and lists necessary charts and current tables.

Ferries: Washington State Ferries has daily service to the San Juan Islands and other parts of the Cascadia Marine Trail System, tel. (206) 464-6400.

For more information: Washington State Tourism Division, P.O. Box 42500, Olympia, WA 98504-2500; tel. (800) 544-1800 or (360) 586-2088.