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Authors: Thomas Hopp
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headed north.
We passed the Duwamish Tribal Office on our left, an old gray house beside a construction site with a sign that read, Future Site of the Duwamish Longhouse, prompting the hyper-observant McKean to murmur absentmindedly, “Muckleshoot Casino cash finally having an impact on the local tribespeople.”
“And grant money from the Gates and Allen foundations,” I added.
McKean nodded as if he’d already known that fact as well. He said nothing more as I drove along West Marginal Way headed for the downtown waterfront and the lab building where I’d picked him up earlier, until he suddenly cried, “Turn right! Right here!”
I pulled the wheel hard and we skidded onto a wet driveway and bounded across some railroad tracks and onto a muddy gravel lane that took us to another riverside parking lot, this one with a sign reading, Terminal 105 Salmon Habitat Restoration Site and Public Access Park.
“What’s here?” I asked, pulling up at a dismal postage stamp park of recently-planted greenery wedged between a scrap yard downriver and a defunct container terminal pier upriver. As was often true, I was a bit irked at how easily McKean had yanked my chain.
“It’s not what’s here,” he said, opening his door with that cerebral glow in his eyes, “but who’s here.”
We followed a short graveled path to a recently constructed concrete observation platform overlooking the Duwamish River. McKean leaned his lanky frame on a rail and pointed a thin finger out across the expanse of muddy water to where several strings of DayGlo red plastic gillnet floats drifted on a slow upstream tide, overshadowed in the distance by the container cranes and skyscrapers of Seattle. A fisherman in a small dinghy was at the nets, pulling a big sockeye salmon into his boat. He quickly disengaged the netting from its gills and returned the net to the water. A fine drizzle dappled the brown river and lent a sheen to the fisherman’s red life vest and dark green raincoat and hood. It put a damp chill on the back of my neck.
“Unless I miss my guess,” McKean mused, “that’s my old high school chum, Frank Squalco.”
“How can you be sure that’s him?”
“I recall Franky Squalco from art class at West Seattle High School,” McKean replied. “Based on that fisherman’s humble stature and his rather square form, I guessed it might be Frank when I saw him as you drove. Furthermore, as you see, he’s gillnetting salmon, and only those few Duwamish tribesmen who live in Seattle can use gillnets here, so the odds improve. I’d like to get his take on this shellfish poisoning business.”
“Why would he know anything about it?”
“Because Erik Torvald was a geoduck fisherman and Natives hold half the rights to geoduck licenses in this state, by law.”
As the fisherman drew in another salmon our view of him was cut off when an outbound tug came down the shipping channel pulling an immense black barge piled with rusty cargo containers. The barge was so stupendously huge and near that it seemed for a dizzy moment that our viewing platform was moving past its black metallic hulk, rather than the other way around. When the barge passed downriver under the gray concrete rainbow of the West Seattle Freeway Bridge, the fisherman was already steering his dinghy toward our shore. McKean waited, unaffected by the clammy air or the cold droplets that beaded his canvas field coat and were getting down the neck of my jogging shell. I knit my arms around myself and wondered why I never dressed warmly enough for the weather I inevitably encountered when tagging along on these adventures.
The fisherman throttled the boat down and glided into a small inlet on our right. He helloed up at us absentmindedly and then paused to take a long second look as his dinghy bumped the beach. “Peyton McKean!” A grin of recognition spread across his broad, brown, forty-ish Northwest Native American face. “I haven’t seen you in a while.
We passed the Duwamish Tribal Office on our left, an old gray house beside a construction site with a sign that read, Future Site of the Duwamish Longhouse, prompting the hyper-observant McKean to murmur absentmindedly, “Muckleshoot Casino cash finally having an impact on the local tribespeople.”
“And grant money from the Gates and Allen foundations,” I added.
McKean nodded as if he’d already known that fact as well. He said nothing more as I drove along West Marginal Way headed for the downtown waterfront and the lab building where I’d picked him up earlier, until he suddenly cried, “Turn right! Right here!”
I pulled the wheel hard and we skidded onto a wet driveway and bounded across some railroad tracks and onto a muddy gravel lane that took us to another riverside parking lot, this one with a sign reading, Terminal 105 Salmon Habitat Restoration Site and Public Access Park.
“What’s here?” I asked, pulling up at a dismal postage stamp park of recently-planted greenery wedged between a scrap yard downriver and a defunct container terminal pier upriver. As was often true, I was a bit irked at how easily McKean had yanked my chain.
“It’s not what’s here,” he said, opening his door with that cerebral glow in his eyes, “but who’s here.”
We followed a short graveled path to a recently constructed concrete observation platform overlooking the Duwamish River. McKean leaned his lanky frame on a rail and pointed a thin finger out across the expanse of muddy water to where several strings of DayGlo red plastic gillnet floats drifted on a slow upstream tide, overshadowed in the distance by the container cranes and skyscrapers of Seattle. A fisherman in a small dinghy was at the nets, pulling a big sockeye salmon into his boat. He quickly disengaged the netting from its gills and returned the net to the water. A fine drizzle dappled the brown river and lent a sheen to the fisherman’s red life vest and dark green raincoat and hood. It put a damp chill on the back of my neck.
“Unless I miss my guess,” McKean mused, “that’s my old high school chum, Frank Squalco.”
“How can you be sure that’s him?”
“I recall Franky Squalco from art class at West Seattle High School,” McKean replied. “Based on that fisherman’s humble stature and his rather square form, I guessed it might be Frank when I saw him as you drove. Furthermore, as you see, he’s gillnetting salmon, and only those few Duwamish tribesmen who live in Seattle can use gillnets here, so the odds improve. I’d like to get his take on this shellfish poisoning business.”
“Why would he know anything about it?”
“Because Erik Torvald was a geoduck fisherman and Natives hold half the rights to geoduck licenses in this state, by law.”
As the fisherman drew in another salmon our view of him was cut off when an outbound tug came down the shipping channel pulling an immense black barge piled with rusty cargo containers. The barge was so stupendously huge and near that it seemed for a dizzy moment that our viewing platform was moving past its black metallic hulk, rather than the other way around. When the barge passed downriver under the gray concrete rainbow of the West Seattle Freeway Bridge, the fisherman was already steering his dinghy toward our shore. McKean waited, unaffected by the clammy air or the cold droplets that beaded his canvas field coat and were getting down the neck of my jogging shell. I knit my arms around myself and wondered why I never dressed warmly enough for the weather I inevitably encountered when tagging along on these adventures.
The fisherman throttled the boat down and glided into a small inlet on our right. He helloed up at us absentmindedly and then paused to take a long second look as his dinghy bumped the beach. “Peyton McKean!” A grin of recognition spread across his broad, brown, forty-ish Northwest Native American face. “I haven’t seen you in a while.
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