Cusp
Spring is here. It arrived last weekend, four days ahead of schedule, with temperatures in the sixties and sunny skies heralded in the forecast for an entire week of build up. The first such weekend each year has been unofficially earmarked as opening weekend at a five acre property in our custody on the west shore of Lake Cushman.
In preparation to go we dusted off the “to the lake” protocol: check the Facebook page for road and river status; prepare food and pack the cooler; double check the contents of the camp kitchen kit; pack for access—chainsaws, a peavey; pack for work—tools, Carharts, leather gloves; pack for play—a small pack, a water bottle, a towel; pack for rest—a hammock, a book, a yoga mat, wool blankets.
Nestled between the wilds of the Olympic National Park to the northwest and the Mount Skokomish Wilderness to the north, Puget Sound adjacent Hoodsport and Highway 101 to the east, the Skokomish Reservation to the southeast, and vast state-managed timberlands to the south and west, Lake Cushman glints in the convergence of the wild and “man-altered” landscape.
It is itself such a convergence. Lake Cushman is a hybridized hydrological feature—a natural lake that formed when the steeply cascading North Fork of the Skokomish River flowing east out of the Olympic Mountains hit their flatter, wider foothills and then was impounded—that is dammed—in 1925. The result was a reservoir eight times larger than the original lake.
The epitome of the wild-urban interface, the margins of Lake Cushman include clearcuts and designated wilderness area; the north end of the lake is crowned by snow-capped mountains and a national park, the south end plugged by a pair of dams; where we are perched above the lake the broad trunks of old growth fir, hemlock, and cedar teem with the invasive ivy planted by our predecessors.
We come here to bask in this wildish edgestate for as much of each year as we can.
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There exists a discrete threshold between winter and spring, and it was there running like a ribbon through our two days at the lake. I could have traced its line with chalk on the gravel road—spring in the sun, winter in the shadow.
I could have named the moments we crossed it—winter from dusk to dawn, spring again the moment the sun crested the ridgeline across the lake, flooding the fir, cedar, and hemlock grove of our steeply sloped parcel with streamers of light. It caught the fingers of smoke curling from the green wood smoldering on our fire in angular shafts, a world-class light show for an audience of two.
Alex uncovered a rough-skinned newt, still winter dozing contentedly under a cedar shingle. Her movements were slow, dazed. But suddenly the thin line between winter and spring was at her feet and he watched as she took her first sleepy steps into wakefulness for the year.
As we worked through the weekend—Alex shoring up the viable but tired cedar dock, me continuing the slow and perennial work of pulling invasive ivy and tending our brush fire—I thought about the seasonal transition we were undertaking. How difficult it is to make plans this time of year, or dress, or anticipate and prepare for the fluctuations. But we do it. We’ve figured out how to live well within wide bands of possibility.
It occurred to me the adaptability required to undergo a seasonal shift is not unlike the quality of resilience with which I want to fortify my sense of place attachment, to this place in particular. This is a new relationship for me, and relatively informed—by an understanding of place attachment, by an experience of place loss, by general knowledge of this peninsula ecosystem and an interest in how it’s changing. Lake Cushman teaches a certain quality of flexible attachment. I’m learning a lot.
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We never really know when we’ll be able to go into the lake for the first time—deep snow leaves the gravel forest service roads accessing our spot impassable for much of the winter; then in the spring the undammed South Fork of the Skokomish River, along which our access road runs, floods, again leaving the road impassable for an indefinite amount of time.
Once we’re granted access we never really know what we are going to find. We cross our fingers that our biggest fir and hemlock have survived the winter storms; we cross our fingers that our biggest alder snags haven’t. The uncertainty is the only given.
We’ve come to include this lakeside perch in our expanded concept of home. We’ve come to love it, and to love sharing it with those eager to access the same sense of awe it brings us. We intend to know it, and care for it, and champion it to its healthiest expression.
And we are learning to hold it all very lightly.
Each year, new logging scars appear on the land, both enroute to the lake and visible from its shores. Last spring when we arrived, we discovered that about a third of the hillside facing our dock from across the lake had been logged, just at the edge of the wilderness.
The cedars that were replanted on the tail of a harvest probably 25 years ago are dying in the sunny margins our access road. The Douglas fir replanted at the same time seem robust, but University of Washington Climate Impacts Group research indicates that they too will disappear from much of their territory in Washington, including in the south Puget Sound and southern Olympics—where Lake Cushman is. It also notes the arrival of fire on the Olympic Peninsula as never before—this place will be as much as 1000% more vulnerable to wildfire in the arriving drier, hotter climate regime.
We are witnessing a shift in forest composition each time we drive to the lake and survey what the timber companies are replanting in the wake of their harvesting. No longer the species I’ve always associated with our region—western red cedar, western hemlock, Douglas fir—they’re planting species of pine I don’t recognize, and a different variety of fir I have yet to learn, no doubt better suited to long periods of drought, more fire resistant.
This winter, our bank lost a large clump of alder, old by the species standard—maybe they sprouted ninety-nine years ago when this bank was newly a bank, no longer just a continuation of the woods that climbed from the undammed river’s edge below. Our artificial littoral zone—too steep to be stabilized by living plant life—is slowly eroding. Someday our dock will slough off the side of the hill and into the lake.
Change is happening here, visibly and rapidly. Each permutation feels like an invitation to recommit to this place as it iterates. So far those changes have been notable, but undisruptive. We’re practicing resilience. With each season we hope to foster an attachment that serves us when the changes are someday more drastic, one that reminds us to reorient to a best possible scenario again and again, and work like hell to bring it about, holding its possibility—but lightly.
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In three years we’ve kept at the work of peeling back the layers of garbage, shoddy craftsmanship, and invasive plants left behind in this place; taking down alder snags, thinning big leaf maple, and clearing the understory of its fuel load; scraping puce paint off the dock, resetting proud nails, and digging rusted rebar and the twists of chain link fencing out of the lakebed.
As we work, a singular essence of place is shining through, a signature wild infusion. We’ve spent days swimming with newts, boating into layer upon layer of beckoning blue mountains, hiking from trailheads at the lake’s edge, and bobbing around in our PFDs twenty yards off the dock where we can see the regal form of Mt. Rose rising up from the water with Mt Ellinor hovering behind. We’re gobsmacked by it. Despite its logging scars and the chortle of outboard motors, being at the lake feeds our hunger to taste our own wildness.
Our bank and the hundreds of years old trees stabilizing it might all let go and fall into the lake next winter. The forested edges of Lake Cushman may very well burn one day. There is no illusion of constancy here—Cushman promises nothing.
In an effort to restore the salmon fishery, the Skokomish Tribe may one day call for the removal of the dams, leaving our five acres perched on a hillside, 100 steep feet from a raging river’s edge. “[Chinook salmon] Population recovery will require both the restoration of normative watershed functions and characteristics, and the recovery of Chinook life history patterns adapted to them,” reads the 2010 “Recovery Plan for Skokomish River Chinook Salmon,” co-authored by the Skokomish Tribe and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. I want to prepare myself to celebrate the loss of my lakeside perch in service of the vitality of this place I love.
As I face the possibilities, I want to attach myself to this ecosystem in such a way that my actions in this place support its wellness as an extension of my own. I want to hew to a commitment to accept and adapt to every change. I don’t want my attachment to stand at odds with what is, or with what is best for this land; I want to learn from the evolutions of the land what it means to live in the paradox of radical acceptance of impermanence and deeply attached love.
Alex and I jumped in the lake on Sunday before we left. It felt like it had just melted that morning, but the sun was warm enough to counter the water’s effects. The impermanence is the preciousness, we know. We sprawled across the dock, relishing the seasons’ edge.