White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  Straightening: The Duwamish Waterway was once a meandering river that rose to flood at high water and tides. Merchants’ trips down the river’s eight miles took a week, and the winter and spring flooding changed the navigational route. In Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, Coll Thrush writes that Reginald H. Thomson, Seattle’s city engineer from 1892 to 1911, “called the Duwamish’s [River’s] natural curves ‘ugly’ and ‘unsightly,’ preferring a channelized and useful river to one that was messy and unpredictable.” In 1913, Washington State began removing twenty million cubic yards of mud and sand to shorten and straighten the river for large oceangoing ships. The flooding ceased; the shores that had once held Duwamish villages were readied for industry. The riverbeds were full of misplaced earth. The new people called this land reclaimed.

  Dredging: Settlers wanted to link the lakes and the sound. In 1854, at a Fourth of July celebration, Judge Thomas Mercer (one of Seattle’s earliest settlers) suggested a canal be cut to make that water chain. The lakes had names, but he labeled them with his own.

  In the 1860s, a white man tried to dig a channel between the lakes, but he was just a man with a pick, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow, and he failed.

  In 1886, a little channel was pushed from Lake Washington and Lake Union, just enough of a waterway for the passage of logs.

  In 1910 or 1911—my sources vary—the War Department and the city approved canal plans.

  From 1911 to 1916, dredging happened.

  In 1916, the canal was finished, the locks opened.

  In June 1917, the first vehicle crossed the Fremont Bridge; on the Fourth of July, a ship canal dedication celebration was held, but by then, the water level of Lake Washington had already dropped, the Black River had dried up, and the world had been upended.

  Assembling the above history felt like pulling out bones through pores. I spent most of the first month of my residency taking notes from books I hauled to the tower. In planning to write the history of myself in a place, I had tasked myself with too much. The past had its own ecology of interdependent memories and facts. I didn’t know what I’d find as I searched, much less what I’d write. My contract required me to interface with the media and the public, but I was given time to settle in first. I was nervous to let them in. I thought I might never be ready to explain.

  Once I began regularly walking the length of Lake Union from my apartment to the bridge to avoid traffic, I encountered a sidewalk sign below the southeast tower that summarized what I’d been piecing together and let me link it to my bridge:

  Before straightened into a channel, this site served as a seasonal home to the Duwamish people, who fished and hunted here on marshy banks and were supplanted by settlement. In photographs, as the Lake Washington Ship Canal was being built (ca. 1911), the site is revealed as a mud flat, houses and shacks on its banks, weirs controlling the flow of water, and the neighborhoods on either side straggling up the banks and hills. Snapshots of the opening of the canal, on the 4th of July, 1917, show a more orderly landscape with crowds filling the streets and canal banks. This is still a place of nature and people, commerce and leisure, a crossroads of water and steel.

  Still, I was glad to have done my own work to understand the narrative of place and people regularly flattened into land acknowledgments that opened Seattle rallies and lectures, often prefacing Native erasure with We want to begin by acknowledging that we are on Duwamish land. The US government fails to recognize the Duwamish as a sovereign nation, making the tribe ineligible for the fishing rights they had secured in signing the Treaty of Point Elliott. In 2001, the federal government granted recognition, but within days, following a turnover in the US presidency, the decision was reversed.

  The Duwamish Tribe is made up of groups that, before settler arrival, were distinct: the Inside People, Saltwater People, River People, and Lake People. The portage stretch between lakes was a meeting place for the Lake People. The Zakuse and Cheshiahud families lived on the Portage Bay (part of Lake Union) shores. The development of the Montlake Cut, the canal portion between Lake Washington and Lake Union, displaced the Lake People living there, sending them north (although they continued to visit their important places).

  The lakes, rivers, streams, and overland portages formed a system unifying the people living in longhouses on or near their shores with access to food, routes, woods, and tucked-away places for the keeping of treasured, ceremonial, or spiritually dangerous objects. Along the broken water string that would become the ship canal, there were two major villages: Tucked Away Inside, near Puget Sound at Salmon Bay, had two large longhouses and a potlatch house; Little Canoe Channel, just north of Portage Bay, had at least five longhouses. More villages were in the river valley the ship canal changed. Today, the Duwamish Longhouse stands at a major village site along the Seattle Fault.10

  The Black River drying up was not an unintended side effect of the creation of the Lake Washington Ship Canal; river elimination was part of the design. Seattle’s hills, tides, trees, mudflats, and floods had to be dealt with for land to become property. Boundaries were set between water and land because impermanence and change made for poor real estate. Nature wasn’t good enough for settlers; it demanded transformation. Erastus Brainerd, employed by the chamber of commerce to lead a promotional campaign for the city, said the canal would “carry out nature’s outline but uncompleted purpose.”

  In 1906, rivers and creeks flooded, destroying towns, farms, and bridges. Hiram M. Chittenden, Seattle district engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers and namesake of the locks later installed, called for “discipline” for the rivers. The Duwamish was straightened. The White River was diverted. The canal was dredged. Lake Washington’s waters poured into the sound. The Black River disappeared. Land emerged where there had been water, and in the eyes of the settlers, it looked real.

  But Duwamish villages lined the Black River. A long-haired man-shaped monster, skaitaw, once lived in a deep river hole. A person could draw power and wealth from skaitaw. I don’t know what happened to the being. I imagine a dry hole filled with the memory of a monster, a cold spot of warped energy, the residue of power sucked from the world.

  In my favorite old Cowlitz story, a girl devours everyone who loves her before turning into a shark. I’ve tried to tell it but only ever recall that she kills her husband’s women, she kills his children, she eats her baby, she kills her husband. She goes to the ocean and there she becomes a shark, a dangerous being.

  Our old stories are about things like excrement, dreams, and learning to copulate, because they’re meant to teach us how to live. I asked my tribe’s spiritual leader about what I was supposed to take away from the shark girl story; he said I needed to do my own work to figure out the lesson. I think the story could explain the whole universe at the bottom of my throat.

  The day before I began office hours, Carl left for a few weeks on tour in the Midwest. I dropped him at the airport with two guitars and a suitcase containing a small bag of protective stones I’d given him. Alone in my perch over the water, I wondered what he was doing and how he was feeling while I read books and drank sparkling water. I texted him photos and said, I wish you were here.

  A woman-shaped neon sign filled the window facing the Fremont neighborhood. Visible from the street below the tower, her long waves of yellow neon hair hung below the frame. This public art piece, Rodman Miller’s Rapunzel, was installed in 1995. While I sat at my desk in the tower, the flat line-drawn figure looked in at me looking out at the world. Her neon-yellow hair hung in wavy lines on the tower’s exterior, obscured from my view. I felt her watching.

  Wikipedia says a tower isn’t meant to be lived in: much taller than they are wide, they exist to be seen (a clock tower) or to see from (a watchtower). There are niche towers for functions like measuring atmospheric conditions or supporting bridges, but Wikipedia says skyscrapers, being habitable, are not towers. How can this be possible? What about SimTower, the PC game in which I sp
ent much of my adolescence building hundred-story skyscrapers? What about the Columbia Tower, where I briefly worked for Amazon, judging a novel contest while looking out over the bay and the city buildup? I will concede that the ClockTower, my first Seattle apartment complex, is not a tower, but only because it’s much wider than it is tall. Whatever. The important thing I learned from Wikipedia is that the primary purpose of a tower is not, as I would’ve guessed, to be so high up that nobody can reach you. It’s to see them coming before they do.

  Most of my attempts at research into dangerous beings in the lake led me to the sea monster seen in Lake Washington in the 1970s and ’80s. Some thought it was a shark. In 1987, when it turned up dead, it showed itself to be an eleven-foot white sturgeon, vaguely sharklike in shape. Born around the turn of the century, the fish got into the lake by an unknown route: maybe through the ship canal after the opening of the locks or via the Black River before it dried up. Sturgeon may have been released into the lake after being kept in a small pool on the University of Washington campus for the 1909 world’s fair. A few others have been found alive and dead in the lake and canal in recent years.

  The sturgeon’s direct ancestors, predating dinosaurs, evolved during the early Triassic period; not long before, a mysterious calamity—maybe asteroid collision, carbon dioxide ocean poisoning, or volcanic eruptions—had caused the “Great Dying,” a mass extinction that wiped out nearly all animal life on earth. The sturgeon is still the long-bodied bottom-feeder it always was, similar enough to its ancestors that it’s often called a living fossil, but while those ancient fish were bony, the skeleton of a sturgeon is now almost all cartilage, much like a shark’s. In the Columbia River, they grow to twenty feet long and can live for a century. In an old photo that has been on the wall in my parents’ hallway for as long as I can remember, my great-grandfather Morris carries a sturgeon, nearly as long as he is tall, slung over his back by rope.

  Though they’re bottom-feeders, they occasionally leap into the air, nose to the sky, body spinning. Their reasons for doing this are unknown, but the percussive pounding of the fall against the water’s surface can reach the tactile sense organs of sturgeon deep below. The jumping may be a kind of talking, messages sent down where there is no light.

  My second week, I saw my first superyacht, the two-hundred-foot Lady Lola. While the big boat passed under my bridge, I learned from Google about its remote-control curtains, Technogym exercise equipment, two Jet Skis, six sets of dive gear, heated pool with waterfall, eighteen-hole golf course with floating buoys that allow passengers to use the sea as though it’s the green, outdoor theater, and helipad space. The closed-off upper deck has an office, hot tub, salon, and sheltered terrace. A summer charter went for $430,000 a week. The boat was for sale for $49.9 million.

  I had no way of understanding such a boat. My dad’s seemed huge when he was shoving it into the water from the lakeshore, but it was just a fishing boat propelled by an electric motor smaller than a toaster oven. I drove the boat down the Delaware River once, when I was about ten. I’d crossed that river countless times on our trips to Pennsylvania to visit my grandparents or the big mall. The water drew the line between home and that country of steel and coal. To be in the line was to be in no-place, to wedge my body into a divide.

  My mom grew up near the banks of the Columbia, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest. Its drainage basin encompasses most of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, as well as portions of several other states and part of British Columbia. At its mouth is a little point of land called Cape Disappointment: a British fur trader went looking for a massive river he’d heard about, but he found only what he thought was a bay, so he decided the river wasn’t real.

  For thousands of years, this river was a community core, transportation link, food source, and world center. The river didn’t divide; it unified disparate villages. Over the last century, settlers have dammed it to curb flooding, ease passage, make land, and generate a staggering amount of power for the region.

  From land or water, a river is slightly visible, mostly obscured. A canal wants to be a river. It wants to carry what a river carries, but without flair: tidy banks, no tricky bends. A river doesn’t want to be a canal, but now that the settlers are here, a river doesn’t have a choice.

  My elementary school class took an educational boat ride down the Morris Canal, constructed in the 1820s and ’30s to bring Pennsylvania anthracite from the Delaware River through North Jersey and to New York City. People had cut down the trees and needed something else to burn. The canal starts in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where I went to Catholic grade school; goes through Hackettstown, where I attended high school; continues through Sussex County, where, at the restored canal town of Waterloo Village, I went to poetry festivals as a teenager; and passes through four counties before ending in Jersey City, where my parents would take Nate and me to the science museum. From the museum’s cafeteria, I took photos of the tiny-but-not-so-distant-now New York City skyline.

  In 1924, after oil became favored over anthracite, the canal was abandoned. Only remnants remain. To a child who knew only rivers, the canal pieces looked like the real thing, a waterway with only a middle and no ends.

  The Bridge of the Gods spans the Columbia River in my ancestral territory. It was built in 1926 at the site of a massive landslide that blocked the river about nine hundred years ago. The river broke through, creating the Cascades of the Columbia, river rapids that were an important fishing place long before they were a treacherous spot for settlers on the Oregon Trail. At the end of the nineteenth century, for easier passage, the US Army Corps of Engineers cut a canal and installed locks.

  When I was a kid, my family would visit my grandparents and my mom’s siblings every other summer. Grandma Kate and Grandpa Bud lived in Dallesport, Washington, a dry place upriver from the Bridge of the Gods. As a teenager, I decided I wanted to walk to the river and cross over to Oregon. I think the distance to the river from the house was about half a mile, but the distance to the bridge was three miles, and I didn’t walk in the right direction anyway, instead going deeper into Washington, attempting to take photos of Mount Hood with my chunky new digital camera. I had only half accepted my mistake when I turned around and retraced my steps along the road splitting an expanse of scorched grasses. I didn’t know why I wanted to go to the river. I knew that Native men fished with dip nets from platforms, but I didn’t quite understand that the platform-construction techniques and fishing methods had been handed down from men who could have been my ancestors. I knew my mom had grown up in Dallesport and other towns along the river, but I didn’t truly understand what it meant that her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother had grown up along the river, too, and so had everyone else in my maternal line for ten thousand years, even after our community was broken by US government violence in the 1850s and most of the people were removed to reservations. My family hung on in their homeland at the edge of the new white people’s world.

  One day at the bridge, through my open window, I heard the Ride the Ducks tour guide say, “I want you to take out your phones. And I want you to go to Google Maps. And I want you to search for ‘Center of the Universe.’”

  I did this.

  “Center of the Universe Hypnotherapy,” 0.3 mi away, 3 reviews.

  “Fremont Center of the Universe Signpost,” Historical Landmark, No reviews.

  I wondered what it meant for Fremont to be the center of the universe. I saw this designation on street signs and sidewalk sandwich boards enticing potential renters to live in new apartments above the expensive grocer. According to the Fremont Chamber of Commerce’s website, this neighborhood was built upon a geographically special place with a gravitational pull that brings visitors back over and over again.

  The research question that brought me to the bridge was, What happened to a'yahos, the serpent spirit that lived in and above Lake Washington? I knew it had left. Did it go when the ship canal opened and the lake dropped
so many feet?

  I made a hole-ridden timeline of colonization and “progress” in Seattle, and upon rereading Thrush’s Native Seattle, I saw the problem with my hypothesis: a Duwamish elder told ethnographer John Peabody Harrington that by the 1910s, a'yahos was “gone, not there now.” The canal opened in 1916, leading to the water level drop I’d thought could be the reason a'yahos left. But a'yahos had vacated its home years before that.

  What drives a spirit away? Maybe it happened when the white people first arrived to claim their pieces of wilderness. Maybe it wasn’t driven away at all; maybe it just departed.

  Why did it leave? The question of my heart. Where did it go? The boundary line of my imagination.

  A month before getting the bridge keys, ending my year in the suburbs, I moved to Capitol Hill. The neighborhood had been the center of my social life since moving to Seattle nine years earlier: bars after class, karaoke after long days, readings any night of the week. After my first year in the city, I started an internship at Richard Hugo House, a literary nonprofit in a weathered Victorian on the Hill, and sometime after, I began dating Kevin, a writer who lived in the neighborhood. His apartment seemed as if it could be demolished any day, like so many of the other dusty homes that would turn to vacant lots, then frames, then gleaming structures. The leveling and rebuilding happened grotesquely fast, the little world of the Hill remade every time I returned. Kevin’s building still stands, with him still inside it. Hugo House has been torn down and rebuilt under a slick stack of apartments. I moved into a prewar brick building under no threat of demolition. The neighborhood paper reported two weeks after I moved in that when the big earthquake hits, these elegant old brick buildings are most likely to collapse.

  My research turned up no details about the place’s significance before colonization. “We were unable to identify any traditional cultural properties on the Capitol Hill uplands,” wrote Jay Miller and Astrida R. Blukis Onat in Winds, Waterways, and Weirs: Ethnographic Study of the Central Link Light Rail Corridor. Prepared for Sound Transit in 2004, this 262-page study brings together document review, elder testimony, and ethnographic research to present Native histories of traditional cultural properties near the proposed light-rail route, and to contextualize the project’s land use within histories of movement, destruction, and change through colonization.