On Returning Home
by land or by sea
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I drove to my hometown of Kirkland to spend the weekend at the Woodmark Hotel where my family celebrated my sister’s birthday. She turned 60 years old.
In my mind she is still seventeen and I am twelve. She is rosy-cheeked, with straight, long hair, wearing wide-legged jeans and white sneakers. She might be baking cookies or a tuna casserole; she might be practicing her flute or playing the piano in our living room. She might be in the basement, listening to a Stevie Wonder or Elton John record.
Whatever her occupation of the moment, she will be annoyed by me and looking after me all at the same time. Being the younger sister, I will want to be involved in whatever it is that she is doing. And when I can’t be with her, I’ll be touching each one of her delicate possessions carefully placed on her dresser—the one located all the way over on her side of the bedroom. This will infuriate her.
Our relationship has evolved since then. So has Kirkland. Modest homes with large yards have been replaced with boxy multi-million dollar affairs spaced mere feet apart. Free-range mixes and mutts are now outnumbered by tethered & fancy-collared, doodle-infused breeds.
Returning home floods the mind and unsettles the gut. Confronting what has changed and what has stayed the same is always a shock. This is true about cities and towns, the people who have left and arrived there, and most especially our own selves.
I woke up at the hotel on Friday morning, drank four single shot Americanos (the barista misunderstood the order), and took The Hound for a walk. We traveled the route I had jogged as a teenager, though in the opposite direction: from the hotel to my childhood home and back. Reverse migration, of a sort.
Noting what had changed and what had (remarkably) not changed along the half-mile walk to the old house reminded me of the recent news regarding salmon and orcas in the wilds of Cascadia.
This summer, the last of four dams built on the Klamath River was removed, after a decades long battle by tribal communities and environmental groups. The hydroelectric dams, built between 1912 and 1962 had devastating consequences for the Chinook salmon which suffered disease and an alarming decline in population.
By early October, the Chinook have returned to the river in larger numbers than predicted. They have been seen spawning in creeks located upstream from the dams—places the salmon have not been able to get to for over 100 years. By the end of October the temperature of the river measured 14 degrees F cooler than in any October during the last nine years.
In a separate, surprise return, members of the Southern resident orca L-pod were seen in November swimming in Penn Cove for the first time since 1971. One of the whales spotted there is referred to as Ocean Sun. She is estimated to be over 90 years old and is believed to have been present in the cove on August 8, 1970 when Tokitae (Lolita) the orca calf was taken from her pod and sold to the Miami Seaquarium where she performed for spectators for the next 53 years. No one knows why Ocean Sun and members of her the pod returned to Penn Cove in over 50 years, or whether they’ll ever return again.
In the early 70’s the property surrounding the Woodmark Hotel was the home to a defunct shipyard, where the only notable boat was a decommissioned ferry. As a child I would look at the mysterious marina with its rotting ghostly ship parked there as we drove by on our way to JC Penny. I wanted to get onto that boat, see what was inside, but it caught on fire before I was able to. Shortly after the fire, the property was transformed into the practice and training facility for the The Seattle Seahawks. When the Seahawks 10 year lease ended, the work began to transform the site into a business and retail park with a luxury, waterfront hotel.
It was during the construction of Carillon Point and the Woodmark Hotel that I found myself there on a snowy Christmas night. I was seventeen then and full of that robust type of melancholy that only teenagers are capable of experiencing. This particular Christmas, my parents were in the throes of a meaty and loud argument. Our terrier-mutt of a dog, Sebastian couldn’t stand the noise, so he went to his usual hiding place, down to the bathroom in the basement.
I found him there, picked him up and walked out of the house. We walked down the boulevard, not having any destination in mind. We walked until we came to the entrance of the new business park development. There was not much of a fence there, so we walked in, and on toward the edge of the lake.
We stood there, Sebastian and I, under the falling snow, and looked out over the dark lake, across the shore to the houses, all lit up for Christmas and Hanukkah. I picked him up again, wrapped my mittens around his paws, and melted the snowballs that had formed between his paw pads.
We stood there, looking out over the lake quite a long time. Long enough to feel the cold migrate to my insides. Long enough to wonder if someone might be worried about me. Long enough to eventually let the night’s silence slowly wrap itself around me. Long enough to begin to understand that whatever it was, it wouldn’t last forever—not the yearning of my young self, not my loneliness; not the pain of my parent’s failing marriage; not their deep disappointment in what the other could never save them from; not the lake or the land, and most certainly, not me. The me of that night would not last; and the me of the future wouldn’t last either. For the first time in a long time, I did not feel hopeless.
Returning 37 years later, and standing again where now the bells of Carillon Point stand, I thought of Sebastian. I thought of my younger self, and how I could never have imagined where I would travel to, who I would meet, marry, love; what I would learn, what would inspire me, disappoint me; what would utterly break my heart. I could never have imagined in what ways and for what reasons I would return to this same place I had first so strongly felt the resilience of the world.
We may never know how the Chinook salmon knew where the good spots in the Klamath river are, or what the L-pod was looking for when they swam back into Penn Cove for the first time in 50 years. We may need to admit that the great majority of our life is not meant to be understood.
The great mystery is alive, and it is smiling at us.
Thank you for reading.
{|AC
I loved all of that! You’re such a special writer! 💚
Outstanding. Thanks for sharing.