04/10/2007: "Remarks to the Marine Stewardship Area Workshop"

(The following is a copy of the “Host Remarks” given by Karen Vedder at the first Marine Stewardship Area Workshop held April 7, 2007, on San Juan Island -Editor)

By Karen Vedder

Think of your first memories of these islands.

Is there anyone here whose memory is not laced with the wonder you felt at the incomparable beauty of this place? Yet each of our memories is unique. The moment in time when your memory was created is unique. It forms a baseline, in ways seen and unseen, for your vision of the place.

This baseline is different for each person living and dead who has every walked these shorelines or paddled these waters. The differences may be quit small and imperceptible or large and noticeable. My friend, Kit Rawson, tells me that the small or large differences between these moments in time reflect what is called a shifting baseline.

This shifts, of course, go back to the beginning of time. Every creature in these waters evolved from something else. I would like to go back to when the first Europeans came to these waters. They encountered a culture full of art, song and legends that incorporated the world that the Native Americans lived in and with. These explorers encountered a world whose baseline may have changed very little for thousands of years.

This is the world encountered by the European explorers who first sailed these waters. They recorded what they found in their ships’ logs.

In his journal on May 2, 1792, as he left New Dungeness, this is what George Vancouver wrote when encountering these islands:

“The delightful serenity of the weather greatly aided the beautiful scenery that was now presented; the surface of the sea was perfectly smooth, and the country before us exhibited every thing that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view. As we had no reason to imagine that this country had ever been indebted for any of its decorations to the hand of man, I could not possibly believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture”.

In the same time period early explorers such as George Steller, and Captain Cook encountered large numbers of sea otters. The Native Americans believed the otters spread joy where ever they went. The explorers described the otters like this:

“The male caresses the female by stroking her, using the fore feet as hands. . . .[They play with their young ones, throwing them and catching them again with joy.]

[The baby otters couldn’t swim for several months.] The mother must have some curious method of carrying them out to sea and returning them to their hiding places on shore, or in the cavities of rocks that project into the sea; indeed they are known to sleep with their young on their breast and to swim with them on their back; [They swim] with wonderful swiftness and the gloss of their hair surpasses the blackest velvet.”

One hundred years later, in 1872, Peter Lawson settled on San Juan Island, and rowed to Victoria to pick up Fanny Deardon from a ship of brides that had arrived from Manchester, England. Their granddaughter, Etta Egland was born in l896. This is how she remembers her childhood:

“Living on San Juan Island was an adventure. Any time you went anywhere in a boat, you went by tides. We lived by the tides. Winifred and I knew the tides. We knew when the tide was going out and when it was coming in.

Winifred and I used to row out to the fish trap at Mitchell Bay where our cousins and uncles worked. We used to walk the planks from piling to piling and we could identify the types of fish coming into the trap on the tide.

My father often went fishing. He’d take a rowboat and go out in the fall of the year, catch silvers and salt them for winter. In the early spring he’d have the spring salmon. And then the sockeyes and the humpbacks and the coho. Humpback bellies were the best salted fish there was.”

In 1920 June and Farrar Burns, homesteaded Sentinnel Island just south of Spieden. June writes:

“It was fun digging clams on a low winter tide by the full mon. Once we went with all the Chevaliers over to the clam beach on Johns Island and dug three or four gunnysackfuls in an hour. We gathered gallons more than we ever used - there were so many of them, who could have helped it? “

In 1946, June and Farrar spent 100 days sailing and rowing through the islands and June published their adventures in the Bellingham Herald. One day during that blissful summer, she writes:

“Dudley Pratt and Janna came over to ask everybody on McConnell and Coon Islands to Reef for a steamed clam supper that night.

They had 963 tiny clams of the right size for steaming but there were 29 people to eat them. Figure it out. But there was spaghetti to fill you up if the clams and the wonderful nectar didn’t.”

In September, 1974, I came to San Juan Island. I remember the blue skies of Cattle Point, sitting on the cliffs and looking out to Haro Strait. The water was filled with purseiners casting their nets and bringing them in. At dusk, the guard changed, the purseiners came to shore and the gillnetters headed out for the night. Off the shore of Shaw you would see the reef netters with their tall towers looking for salmon. Between the boats dove the common murre, marbled murrelets, pigeon guillemots, white-winged scoters, surf scoters and rhinoceros auklets. And on the rocky shoreline were Harlequins and Oyster catchers. This is my baseline for San Juan Island.

What are your first memories?

Has your baseline shifted since then? Do you remember welcoming the Orca back in the spring before they were endangered? Do you remember Westcott Bay when it was filled with eelgrass? Do you remember when August and September meant barbeques with whole salmon caught yourself or given to you by friends?

No one in this room will ever share the joy the otter brought to the Native Americans or even be able to imagine digging a gunnysackful of clams in an hour. There are people in this room who, even now, have memories that are no longer part of this place.

Today is our collective shared baseline.

We are here to learn from each other, to gather ideas from each and every person here. What strategies can be effective? What are you willing to do? What are your communities willing to do?

We all have an opportunity today to roll up our sleeves and deepen our understanding of our marine surroundings at the same time as we exchange ideas and discuss what methods should be embraced and what steps should be taken by ourselves and our communities to protect the waters and marine creatures of the San Juans