Elwha Love: Behind the Scenes

of a River and Dancers and Gatherings—Plus a GIVEAWAY!

Friend,

On the ferry’s car deck, rust framed my view of Washington’s retreating Olympic Peninsula, the week’s book events and reunions still fresh in my mind. Soon, I knew, those memories would join earlier recollections—and a collective history I don’t want to forget.

It’s history that’s personal to me. I came of age on the peninsula, where my family gathered watercress from Indian Creek and swam in nearby Lake Sutherland. Where I roamed the Elwha Valley with my grandparents Sydney and Imogene Tozier.

Back then, my delight in those wanderings eclipsed the river’s larger story. Like most kids I knew, I paid little attention to the controversy over the river’s dams, declining fish runs, or the travails, long patience, and courage of the Lower Elwha Tribe.

But later, when I learned more, I realized that the river’s story mirrored human ones. Stories of the captivity and re-wilding of hearts.

Including my own. But that’s a tale for another day.

In the afterword of What the River Keeps, I wrote about the river’s capture—and healing. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1887, my poetry-loving great-great grandfather Charles Amzon Wood pulled shallow midwestern roots, transported his wife and children to the Olympic Peninsula, and re-planted them in the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony, a “utopian” settlement crouched on Ennis Creek at the edge of the frontier town of Port Angeles. His and Emily’s children—including my great-grandmother Mary Emma—spent their childhoods a mere shout from potlatches at the Klallam’s Ennis village.

From land near that creek’s mouth, my forebears looked through new, cedar-framed windows toward Port Angeles harbor and another Klallam village—Tse-whit-zen—at the base of Ediz Hook, the alluvial spit guarding the harbor. Mary Emma and her siblings played on the shoreline where Klallams beached canoes, camped, and smoked salmon over driftwood fires.

Even so, the broader coexistence of cultures was an uneasy one. Intense pressure from the USA’s expansion had already forced S’Klallam Tribes to sign the 1855 Treaty of Point-No-Point, which ceded historic tribal lands to the U.S. government. Ensuing years had seen tribal villages around nearby Port Townsend destroyed, driving the S’Klallams who lived there to new locations. A number of them joined the Lower Elwha Klallams at their ancestral home seven miles west of Port Angeles.

Consolidated into fewer, larger settlements, tribal members strove for normalcy, pursuing traditional occupations guaranteed them when they relinquished their lands. They’d been promised the right to harvest fish and shellfish where they had always found them, as well as the freedom to hunt and gather on lands that remained unclaimed and open. . . . Though encroachments on their treaty rights persisted, it appeared likely that, despite the newcomers, as long as nothing harmed the cornerstone of their survival, the Klallams would preserve their autonomy and culture.

That cornerstone? The Elwha River’s salmon.

Enter Thomas Aldwell, who had been secretly buying Elwha bottomlands for years. In 1910—the year my beloved Mary Emma gave birth to my grandfather—Aldwell tapped backing from Chicago investors, logged a reservoir site, and began construction of the Elwha Dam only five miles from the river’s mouth.

When the government failed to stop construction, the treaty’s pledge to protect the salmon on which the Tribe depended flew out the proverbial window. Built without fish ladders, the dam blocked all salmonid spawning upstream of the Elwha’s hundred-foot barrier.

Outside of the Tribe, however, few paid any mind to the dam’s ecological consequences. The hydroelectric benefits to the Olympic Peninsula were simply too profound to allow fish—or The People who needed them—a voice. After all, upon its completion in 1913, the Elwha Dam carried the primitive peninsula into modernity and launched an unparalleled lumber industry. Prosperity arrived for most who had toeholds in that commercial growth, and Lakes Aldwell and (once the Glines Dam was finished) Mills became hubs of wilderness recreation.

The Klallams, however, saw none of those benefits. Instead, they watched sacred sites drown in the reservoirs and saw life as the Tribe had known it die—as surely as did the fish below the Elwha dam. Denied passage upstream to lay their eggs, salmon slammed the concrete barricade, circled at its base, and crowded limited spawning beds in the lower reach. Since most didn’t spawn at all, seven runs of Elwha salmonids, historically ranging from a combined 400,000 to a million per year, began a precipitous decline.

. . . Meanwhile, members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe were banished from ancestral fishing campsites outside of the Elwha Valley as if they were squatters. Natives collided with homesteaders in traditional hunting grounds. Industrial builders buried Tse-whit-zen and other villages under tons of fill and replaced them with pulp and paper mills powered by the Elwha River’s generators.

Though crushed, the Klallams persevered. Rightfully called The Strong People, they pursued their treaty rights for decades, finally presenting the beleaguered fishery to 1991-92’s 102^nd Congress. Their breakthrough arrived with the passage of H.R. 4844—The Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act. The Elwha’s renewal was at hand.

Or so the Tribe thought. It would be another twenty years before the dams began to fall.

***

I talked about all that at recent gatherings celebrating this new book of mine: What the River Keeps—the story of reclusive biologist Hildy Nybo, who returns to her childhood home on the Elwha River, where she untangles her mysterious past during the dams’ demolition.

Here’s a pic from the event at Port Angeles Field Hall with childhood friends Gail Ralston (MC, at left) and Christine Lavik (interviewer, right). Reuniting with them and others was THE BEST. Years apart seemed like a day.

***

I pondered more old stories over dinner with the Tidermans at Gail’s place, where, ironically, we ate from Thomas Aldwell’s personal set of Wedgwood china. Gail found the dishes at an estate sale.

***

Bill Tiderman (center), whose family ran the historic Elwha Resort (where I settled my character Hildy) taught his wife Mimi (left) to fly fish on the river.

Bill also helped his dad build the resort’s square dance hall, which appears in some of the book’s pivotal scenes. He surprised us with early pics of the caller, dancers at the hall, and the campground just outside its doors.

Though I wrote more moustachioed men than you see here, Bill reassured me that both hall and dancers in the novel rang true.

Whew.

***

The next day, Gail and I hiked to the Elwha’s nearshore, where perspectives still collide.

But where healing is bigger than history or politics.

(In the bottom-right photo above, note how the nearshore has expanded from freed-up sediment—more than 70 acres worth since the dams came down.)

For the above shot, I aimed my lens toward Freshwater Bay, west of the river.

And here, toward the Elwha’s beautiful outflow . . .

into the Strait of Juan de Fuca . . .

and the regenerating beach and tidelands.

Never thought I’d cry with happiness over woody debris and silt deposits.

But I did.

***

Later, I walked a section of the Olympic Discovery Trail to a sign Gordon Taylor of the Peninsula Trails Coalition recently crafted and installed on that trail below my grandparents’—and my—former home, where my passion for nature awakened.

Gramps spent years securing sections of the abandoned railroad right-of-way to help complete the 130+ mile trail, which crosses the Elwha farther west.

I cried here, too.

***

I don’t have photos of the Sequim event yet, but at the Lynden Library a week prior, folks braved heat in the 90’s and NW Washington Fair traffic to ask wonderful questions, to hear best-selling author Susan Meissner and me chat, and to CELEBRATE the novel’s launch with treats and book giveaways!

Two of my grands drew winners. 🧡

***

📙📙📙 Would YOU like to win a copy of What the River Keeps? Subscribers can enter by replying with RIVER in the subject line no later than October 3.

The winner can choose either a paperback or audiobook—beautifully read by Earphones Award-winning narrator Caroline Hewitt.

Meanwhile, practice those fish puns, will ya? Salmon like you oughta know a few.

Love,

Cheryl