Burley Lagoon’s brackish water swirls around my calves. Mist hangs in the air. The low roar of the Purdy Bridge is constant; otherwise, it is a soft soundscape, a barely heard rustle of millions of creatures sucking and spitting planktonic water. I am alone. Gulls make occasional comments. So do trucks working at a few of the homes that ring the lagoon.
You have to be cool with muck to reach the middle of Burley Lagoon at low tide. I’ve made it to a tidal stream on the lagoon’s exposed belly, and I am able to rest because here the mud is a little less intent on swallowing me whole.
A fish darts past and shelters under sea lettuce. I wait it out. It reveals itself to be a black-eyed goby, mottled like a snake. Nearby is a bed of Olympia oysters. The silt-browned and blunted shells of our only native oyster belie both their incomparable taste and their rarity since our bays were literally raked clean of them 100 years ago. They are a little deeper in the lagoon than the dominant cultivated Pacific oyster. Soon incoming saltwater begins to slacken the stream. An event that a Burley local has described to me as “the march of the crabs” is on. Lagoon dwellers seem to mark time by the comings and goings of different animals, particularly birds: there is a changing of the guard, I am told, when the herons that prowl the mud flats give way to gulls and terns that hunt the rising tide. Then come kingfishers. Then eagles and ospreys.
The crabs are Oregon shore crabs, and they dance in hundreds past my feet like commuters. These small multicolored crabs are good osmoregulators, meaning their bodies are adept at maintaining the right internal balance of fluids and salts. A good skill to have in a place where salt and fresh water are constantly ebbing and flowing.
I am appreciating the swirling nature of Burley Lagoon. A sharp community magnifying glass has been trained on this ecosystem since Taylor Shellfish Farms announced its intention to convert 25.5 acres of its 175-acre clam and oyster operation here to intensively grow geoducks.
My goal in tromping around is not to render judgment on the situation. Taylor claims the impact on the lagoon’s ecology will be minimal, a claim with which the county’s environmental impact statement (EIS) largely agrees, while a coalition of residents argues that geoduck farming will compound the aquacultural harm to a lagoon already missing much of its wildlife. You should read the EIS and public comment arguments and decide for yourself.
The situation is layered with ongoing water quality issues, which I will touch on in Part 2.
Me, I’m just here to see the lagoon firsthand. Not a soul shares it with me as I begin with laborious sucking steps to seek higher ground. Alone, yet I have this sensation that from the homes on shore, folks could be watching my every move.
The swath of Pacific oysters is impressive, a near monoculture. Rugged old oysters are the substrate for a coating of uncountable thousands of young oysters. Taylor outplants them with powerful water hoses.
Shells on shells on shells — one of the reasons Olympia oysters have struggled to reestablish is that in order for their free-swimming larvae to land and begin to grow, they ideally need a bed of established Olympia oysters or shells to land on. It’s like Gary Snyder pointing out that you can’t fashion an axe handle without an axe.
The productivity of the lagoon is stunning. The glistening bulbs of contracted anemones await the tide, each in a perfect mudhole. They too are perched on oyster shells hidden below the mud. I laugh. In sneaking biodiversity into the shellfish crop, they are living the old Wobbly slogan, “Building the new world in the shell of the old.”
Taylor has been working here since 2012. Shellfish farmers have been here nearly a century. Thick shell middens on the Burley shoreline attest to the fact that people have been feasting here for thousands of years.
A single island sits in the center of the lagoon. As I cautiously approach it I find it impossible not to envision the past. The heart of the island is a ring of tall shrubs around a bare spot that feels like a shared campsite, complete with bits of charcoal, matted plants, and gunnysack and cardboard and driftwood arranged into a sort of cave or altar.
The shrubs burned a few years ago thanks to a careless squatter. They are resprouting. Crabapple and serviceberry, I notice. Around the flanks are roses with big hips and yarrow and pickleweed. Food everywhere, I realize. Could it once have been gardened? It now has the haunted feel of a back corner of a city park.
Going beyond the campsite grove, among the pickleweed, tiny yellow blooms of jaumea have summoned dozens of honeybees and bumblebees from land. The terrain is tundra-like, with pothole pools and exposed stones among the succulent-leaved salt marsh plants. Goose poop is everywhere.
The lagoon’s main channel bends around this far side of the island, creating a sweeping point of land that submerges at the highest tides. At the point, I find a chair-sized rock covered in orange lichen and white stains. Below, in the channel, are clam beds. Again I am envisioning the past. The rock commands a view of the entire lagoon. It is not hard to imagine the low-tide soundscape alive with the shouts of mucky clam-diggers.
In fact, there are similar rocks at various tidal elevations around the island, one for every situation of tide and season. Placed here? As I pass them one by one on my return journey I try several on for size and know I’m not the first to sit on them. Not by a long shot. Which is why, considering all the ink spilled and science done and arguments made lately about Burley Lagoon, the weirdness of today’s solitude is heightened.
It is a well-traveled place now silent. Radiating from this little island are staked-down skirts of predator-exclusion netting meant to protect the shellfish harvest. From the homes on shore, eyes are watching.
In a month I’ll return for high tide.
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