Greetings all. Several people suggested that they would prefer the podcast and newsletter packaged in one email, so here it is. Again, any thoughts on this experiment with podcasts would be great.
As occurs in many cities, ghosts thread the landscape of Seattle, quietly passing by us everyday. Endless and ceaseless in their travels, despite some of our efforts to thwart their movement, they occur in every neighborhood. None of them call attention to themselves, though they occasionally burst out and wreak havoc, but all make an impression as they cut through the city’s hills and ravines and by our houses, schools, and businesses. How many of them exist? We have no idea though I know of at least 49 that have been named, some by early residents, most by settlers, and others by more recent arrivals.
These ancient ghosts, all of which owe their origin to the last Ice Age, are the uncountable creeks and streams that course(d) across Seattle. Known as ghost or lost or phantom rivers, they have been culverted, covered, buried, troughed, and hidden by decades of development. (Given their size, Seattle’s ghost rivers merit more the moniker of ghost creeks.) Although we may overlook these ghost creeks, many still retain some semblance of their corporeal existence and can reappear unexpectedly, such as during big rainstorms, when water collects and flows in the channels carved by the ancestral creeks.
Seattle is actually fortunate in how many of these ghost creeks still have sections where the water flows on the surface and provides enticing hints of how ubiquitous flowing water was in Seattle’s past. For the most part, however, even these visible traces of water receive scant attention and, I would guess, few visitors. Seattle’s ghost creeks are as much a result of how we interact with and perceive nature as any physical thing we did to them.
For instance, compare these two maps of Seattle. The left-hand side is the Google map, one that I would guess is becoming the most familiar to residents. I count four, maybe five streams on it. Pick any quadrant on the right-hand map and you will see at least four streams, and this map does not tell the full story, as not all of the streams are shown. (This map is mostly based on information from the Government Land Office’s cadastral surveys, which gridded the country into Township and Range and were completed in order to make the land available for individual ownership. In addition to the maps, the surveys contained detailed notes about topography, fauna, soils, and waterways but not all creeks made it onto the maps because they weren’t directly on the survey route.)
Few creeks better exemplify their ghostly nature than Thornton, which has the largest watershed (7,402 acres or 14% of the city) of any Seattle creek. In a 1998 poll conducted for Seattle Public Utilities, half of the 75,000 inhabitants who live within Thornton’s watershed couldn’t name the creek or its numerous tributaries when asked to identify a creek near their home. The most likely reason: a modern terrain of impervious surfaces—such as roads and parking lots—envelops over 50 percent of the watershed, giving Thornton its invisible, ghostly status. A similar cover of concrete applies to Seattle’s other creeks, and I suspect the percentage of people unaware of how close they are to ghosts would be significantly higher across the city. (Many Seattleites also tend to overlook our one actual river, the Duwamish River, or what author BJ Cummings called The River that Made Seattle, in her splendid book. Seattle used to have another river, the Black, which connected Lake Washington with the Duwamish, but the Black became a ghost in 1916 with the construction of the Ship Canal and Locks; only the merest remnant remains.)
By failing to recognize the existence of our ghost creeks, we miss so much. They have a rich variety of plants, some limited to streams. They are home to salmon and other fish, amphibians, numerous birds, and many mammals, particularly beavers. Creeks provide excellent travel corridors for animals such as coyotes, raccoons, and river otters, as well as good play areas for children (though the creeks are contaminated in places and the water may not be totally healthy). And, I know of at least one glacial erratic and several exposures of glacial sediments in Thornton Creek! Unfortunately, creeks also suffer when we neglect them. Fecal material from our pets, toxic-laced runoff from our roads and homes, and indiscriminate dumping of our garbage, each harms sensitive riparian communities.
Our inattention to our ghost creeks is ironic. In this city famed for its precipitation, we are overlooking a significant visible manifestation of our rain. One reason may be that our better-known water features, Lake Washington and Puget Sound, take all of the attention away from the creeks. These two big bodies of water have long played critical roles in the story of Seattle, and they deserve our concern, care, and protection, but so do our creeks. They are the arteries feeding into the lungs of Seattle’s urban aquisystem, and like human arteries, they need to be treated well. I can think of few better ways to do that than visiting them and learning their secrets.
If you want to get a sense for what has changed, take a walk in Discovery (particularly on the trail up from North Beach), Lakeridge or Schmitz parks and see how much water flows in the many seeps and rivulets that grace these areas. Now, walk out of the parks and it’s as if you had entered a different country, a country that has tried to erase nature and replace it with the human infrastructure of roads, sidewalks, parking lots, and buildings. It’s a startling change but I wouldn’t assume that people have triumphed; nature has a resilience and persistence that keeps these creeks alive. Like any good ghost, they will rise again.
This newsletter was inspired by a wonderful book I recently read: Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky. Spanning centuries and connected by a single drop of water, it’s a love letter to rivers, says the author, particularly to the Thames and Tigris, where the action centers. Shafak raises complex questions about history, museums, religion, and rivers as she weaves the lives of three people: a young girl on the Tigris (2014), a hydrologist who lives on the Thames (2018) and studies ghost rivers, and a young man who grows up in poverty on the Thames (1840s) and becomes a renowned researcher who translates the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a tour de force, hard to put down, thought provoking, and evocative and, I would also say, a love letter to the power of place in our lives.
Thanks to Jennifer Ott, Patrick Trotter, and Jason King for answering my questions about ghost creeks. If you are interested, Jason has a splendid Substack newsletter, Hidden Hydrology, that takes deep and thoughtful dives into this subject.
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