We got about a foot of snow in Seattle last weekend. It’s always dramatic and unusual when that happens, but it was here and gone, nothing like our last big storm in mid-February 2019. I remember that one well because I was trying to move that week, and because we had several waves of heavy snow, enough to bring down trees and close schools for days. Of course, with remote schooling in pandemic times there are few excuses for a snow day, and besides, this year’s snow all fell over the weekend, Monday was a holiday, and rains brought a big thaw by Tuesday. Kids, you were robbed.
Originally, I had planned to be in Tucson this week for a week of relative warmth and some high-desert hiking. But when COVID rates remained high in Arizona a few weeks ago, I canceled my plans and decided to do a short trip close to home. Plan B put me in a little Airbnb a mere stroll from Grayland Beach, a hard-packed expanse of sand that was close to deserted in the middle of this week in the middle of February.
I walked for miles on the beach, enjoyed a gorgeous sunset and some bald eagle sightings, and had the chance to meet my friends Cai and Marty for an impromptu outdoor lunch in a nearby town. When it’s warm enough to eat outside in winter (though we did each have many layers on), you know life is good. The quick trip was enough to start me dreaming of summer camping adventures, too. It won’t be long.
Although Seattle is on the salt water of Puget Sound, we are about 100 miles from the open ocean—and with heavy metropolitan traffic, it takes about two-and-a-half hours to get there. So I don’t go to the coast as often as I’d like, and every time I do, I swear I will do it more often. There’s nothing like it, and especially in a week where people in the heartland have had truly terrible weather, I need to remember how lucky I am to live where I do.
“Here in the corner attic of America, two hours’ drive from a rainforest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to,” Timothy Egan wrote in The Good Rain. He didn’t even mention the sea. It just is. How spoiled we are, we who dwell on the edge, we people of the best coast.
Grayland Beach, looking north and northeast, Feb. 16Shadow and sand dollar, Grayland BeachSunset on the best coast
Eight miles west of Highway 101, I had a decision to make: Continue straight to La Push on Washington 110 or turn right to Mora. I had a reservation at the Mora Campground near Rialto Beach, but check-in was many hours off, so I thought I’d spend the morning at Second Beach near La Push. As I neared the intersection, I saw the choice had been made for me: The temporary road sign flashed “QUILEUTE RESERVATION CLOSED.” Good for them, I thought.
Forest sprite, Hoh Rain Forest, Washington
As the pandemic took hold last spring, tribal governments up and down Washington’s coast closed their lands to visitors. When summer came and the spread of the virus slowed, many adjacent areas in Olympic National Park opened to stir-crazy Americans seeking outdoor relief from isolation. I saw license plates from all over at Rialto Beach and cars parked a half-mile down Mora Road. But just across the Quileute River, its eponymous tribal nation remained off-limits to outsiders, as did the Makah reservation at the northwestern tip of the contiguous United States and the Quinault Indian Nation in southwestern Washington.
I applaud tribal nations for doing whatever they can to keep the coronavirus at bay, especially given the long history of indigenous people dying from diseases brought by outsiders and the high COVID-19 toll some Indian nations are facing in 2020. The closures are a reminder that the 574 tribal nations in the United States are sovereign and have the right to self-determination as well as the right to receive benefits from the federal government.
At least most of them do. Here in Seattle, we live on the unceded land of the Duwamish people. Our city was named for Duwamish Chief Si’ahl, who famously said, “The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know: all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.”
The Duwamish are a federally recognized tribe under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, but they are not currently on the list of federally acknowledged tribes. According to the Duwamish website, in 1978, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs basically amended the treaty by adding seven new rules with which the Duwamish must comply to receive land, benefits, and services. The case has been under review by the Interior Department’s Board of Indian Appeals for more than five years.
Meanwhile, despite being in the heart of one of the wealthiest areas in the United States, many Duwamish people cannot access health services, nor can the tribe profit from tourism and gaming, as so many others do. (Seattle is surrounded by high-end resorts run by the Snoqualmie, Puyallup, Suquamish, and other neighboring tribes.) Even if the Duwamish prevail, I’m not sure how likely I’d be to hit a future casino. But along with more than 10,500 other people—half of whom have signed up in 2020—I’ve decided it’s time to pay a small, symbolic amount of rent to the Duwamish people in recognition of the centuries they’ve spent caring for the land where I live today.
In last Sunday’s online service, my minister Rev. Beth Chronister advocated for Real Rent Duwamish, and she also acknowledged that our physical building is on Duwamish land. I am part of a faith tradition that is grappling like never before with our nation’s history of settler colonialism and enslavement. But Rev. Beth cautioned us against absolving ourselves with what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” We can pay token rent and say a land acknowledgment and call it good, or we can go deeper, into real relationship and covenant with each other.
I can think of two ways beyond church that I will try to do this. Early in my freelance writing career, I authored two guidebooks that explored the Oregon Trail and the Lewis and Clark Trail. I know I tried my best—given my body of knowledge in the 1990s—to offer a nuanced view of how the United States expanded westward, yet I am sure I fell fall short. As I get future opportunities to write about history, I will do better.
Second, I recommit to living as lightly as I can. I retain a small footprint by American standards, dwelling in 400 square feet, yet like Henry David Thoreau, I need to leave my cabin now and then. I usually go on foot, but I have a car, and I occasionally use it to visit nature that’s not within walking distance. A paradox, I know. So when I go into the woods and walk beside the waters, I want to be as mindful as I can of what I find there. “We rarely care for that we cannot name,” says British writer Robert Macfarlane, who has worked with artist Jackie Morris and musicians to re-animate lost words from the natural world, just as many Americans seek to authentically connect with indigenous wisdom.
This is not wisdom from the past. Its practitioners are here now, seeking the right to harvest salmon and protect their water from oil spills. As best I can as a 21st century urban creature of comfort, I want to know plants by their names and birds by their songs. I want to invoke spirits and spells and “sing the things I see,” perhaps gaining a tiny fraction of the knowledge possessed by the people who have lived here for millennia and who still live here today. I honor their wisdom and would be grateful for a small measure of it, if I am worthy. Spirit of life, let me be worthy of these gifts, and let us share them widely.
