Memories and points of interest: reflections on the water

We were guests this week on a tour by boat of the shores of Lake Washington, Union Bay, Portage Bay, and Lake Union, bodies of water that describe a path from our neighborhood toward Salmon Bay, Shilshole Bay, Puget Sound, and the world beyond.

Our journey began in Moss Bay on Lake Washington and meandered south through the gawker’s paradise of Yarrow Bay, Cozy Cove, Fairweather Bay, and Maydenbauer Bay, places where the homes include float plane moorage with ocean‐going yachts tied up alongside, helicopter landing pads, and, in one case, palm trees in the garden.

At the entrance to Yarrow Bay, shipyards were created in 1900 that grew to a workforce of between 6,000 and 9,000 during World War Two as vessels for the United States Navy were built and repaired there. The shipyard, where in 1935 the ferry Kalakala was built, was redeveloped in the 1990s into a marina and business park, where we had dined out the previous evening and which we admired once again as we passed. At the exit from Yarrow Bay on Yarrow Point sat what is potentially the most expensive residence in Washington, a 2016 Tom Kundig‐designed home that looks across the bay to the site of the former shipyard and is presently listed for sale for $79,000,000. Inside the home, a cat was sitting on a window sill watching us as we floated past.

At the turn at Hunts Point, we passed the current state record‐holder for a residential real estate transaction, set in April when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sold the house for $63 million. Rounding Evergreen Point at the exit from Fairweather Bay, we found ourselves in the shadow of the Governor Albert D. Rosellini Bridge, at 7,710 feet the longest floating bridge in the world. We paused in admiration beneath its eastern approach span upon spying its maintenance building there in the shadows, which was introduced to the landscape during the overhaul in the 2010s of the highway corridor that crosses the lake and which we agreed must be a great space into which to settle each day for work, if for no other reason than that the view and the location are deluxe. Just to the south of the bridge in Medina is the home of Microsoft co‐founder Bill Gates, a 66,000‐square‐foot erection in the Pacific Lodge style, which sits surrounded by trees on the shore of the lake. Gardeners were fussing with the lawn, but no other soul was to be seen.

A series of canals and locks, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and opened in 1916, created the first navigable passage for deep‐draft commercial vessels, barges, and recreational boaters between Lake Washington and Puget Sound. The simplified access to the fresh water of the lake that had been the purpose of building the 8.6‐mile‐long Ship Canal soon convinced the American Pacific Whaling Company to move its headquarters to Bellevue, where it would tie up its fleet of whaling ships in Maydenbauer Bay after each hunting season from 1919 to 1942, as the fresh water of the lake was less punishing to the hulls of the vessels than salt water and would kill barnacles that had attached themselves while at sea. Today, Whaler’s Cove within the bay is among the few apparent reminders of the role the community once played in the whaling industry. We used the bay as the cul‐de‐sac for our sightseeing drive along the east shore of the lake and decided it was time for lunch.

We crossed the lake into Union Bay, from 1926 until 1966 home to the Ravenna Dump, the largest garbage dump in the city of Seattle, then and now with Alaska Airlines Field at Husky Stadium at the University of Washington campus looming at its southern shore. My aunt and uncle lived in the Ravenna neighborhood when I was a boy, and I can remember when visiting their home the seagulls making an endless procession overhead to scavenge at the dump at the bottom of the hill. From Union Bay we motored through the Montlake Cut, where I imagined us in a repechage, having lost to the boys in the boat and enjoying a race in their wake beneath the Carl Gould‐designed Collegiate Gothic‐style towers of the Montlake Bridge. Portage Bay at the exit from Montlake is where one first encounters a collection of the famous houseboats of Seattle, and that neighborhood was filled with people watering flowers in their pots, readying kayaks, eating al fresco, and looking contented in the sun.

Just beyond the I–5 Ship Canal Bridge and into Lake Union, we tied up for lunch at Ivar’s Salmon House, where we joined the al fresco diners with a platter of fish and chips and a lively discussion of the events of the day. The lake has been the site of the Duck Dodge sailboat races since 1974, and I once joined a participating boat as crew by boarding from the Ivar’s dock, so had a reminiscence as we ate about dodging ducks while being driven before the wind charging over its waters. After lunch, we rounded its shores, first past M/V Skansonia, a beautifully restored, decommissioned wooden state ferry that is now a wedding and event venue, where we also stopped for a while to watch the operations at Seattle Boat Co. SkyLaunch Marina and develop envy of some of the gorgeous boats being lowered thereby into the water. Past the headquarters of Lake Union Hot Tub Boats, whose frolicking customers we cheered, and then beyond Gas Works Park to make the George Washington Memorial Bridge our turn‐left sign, we shortly afterward were saluting the floating home featured in the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle. We craned our necks to watch as a Kenmore Air de Havilland Otter buzzed its floating dock as it touched down on the water beyond the Museum of History and Industry, then, with a wave to the old Ford Assembly Plant and a nod to the old Lake Union Steam Plant, we hauled into view of The Paddle, a paddleboard rental company stationed on the shore across from our lunch spot that seemed to be doing a land office business, given the crowd of people in the water coming and going around their deck. Despite my lack of success at operating a paddleboard years ago in Puerto Rico, I continue to think it looks like a lot of fun, and half‐committed myself to sneaking back to The Paddle one day to try again as we threaded our way through the throng en route for home. The Space Needle presided grandly over it all.

By the late 1950s, the city of Seattle and other communities surrounding Lake Washington had been dumping raw sewage into the lake for decades, and it had become commonly known as Lake Stinko because that phosphorus‐rich effluent caused profuse growths of cyanobacteria (blue‐green algae), which gave off a corrupt odor as they died and then decomposed. In 1955, the Washington Pollution Control Commission issued a bulletin declaring the pollution in the lake a crisis;² by 1958, the lake had become so polluted that it was declared unsafe for swimming, and other recreational activities were nearly prohibited. As the pollution of the water grew worse, an eight‐inch Secchi disk that had been visible from its surface at a depth of 12 feet in 1950 could not be seen more than two feet below the surface by 1966. That disk made occasional appearances in conversations around the family dinner table when I was in grade school, as the lake was a prominent feature of the landscape seen from our living room windows and was to be visited but not entered because the disk told a pestiferous tale.

Lake Union fared no better. Industrial pollution, raw sewage, and untreated stormwater were poured into the lake, where today sediment chemistry analysis reveals contamination with several toxins, the most widespread of which are metals such as arsenic, mercury, and silver; tributyltin (a banned vessel‐bottom antifouling agent); polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (combustion byproducts); phthalates (plasticizers); and polychlorinated biphenyls (a banned carcinogenic organic compound described as a forever chemical).³

The average elevation above sea level of Lake Washington was reduced by nine feet as the Ship Canal was completed in 1916; as a consequence, the Black River, its natural outlet to Puget Sound, dried up. Lake Union had an estimated 900‐acre surface before the filling and bulwarking of its shoreline began in the nineteenth century; today, it has a 580‐acre surface. Our proximity to them makes the limnology of these abridged waterways a subject of interest in our household, particularly because, after 1851, when John Low and Lee Terry built their cabin at Alki on the shore of Elliott Bay, we nearly destroyed them and the creatures that depend upon them, and certainly because we and our metropolitan neighbors have spent the last 60 years working to amend how we live in these plundered habitats and rekindle the natural environment as we may, rejecting the anthropocentric fatuity of the creation mandate that calls for the earth to be subdued and ruled over.

This year so far, the average depth of visibility of a Secchi disk lowered beneath the surface of Lake Washington has been 14 feet. Individual readings have been as great as 25 feet in the past quarter century, and the lake water is generally assessed as being quite clean. Our time exploring it this week reminded us how precious it is and how entwined our lives have been with its welfare. It brought a welcome rejuvenation of the conviction that the depredations we have visited upon our home need not be accepted as irreversible or, worse, inevitable. We can do better.