Restoration at Wilkes Park

Hidden in the outskirts of East Portland, in a neighborhood almost nobody who doesn't live there knows about, there is a small treasure. Located on a small overgrown plot of land about the size of two city parcels, a creek emerges from an underground culvert and flows freely through a charming wood for about 200 feet before diving back underground, beneath a block of modern tract houses, to eventually outlet as a tributary to the Columbia Slough. This is Wilkes Creek.

Wilkes Creek emerging from its culvert

Several months ago I helped with planting native plants upstream at the Wilkes Creek headwaters on the site of an old farm that had once been in the distant countryside, but has gradually been engulfed by the growing city. The farm has recently been acquired by the City of Portland Parks Department, and the human-facilitated conversion from fields to wildnerness area is underway. The water emerges from springs on the former farmland, and the newborn creek flows behind a quiet subdivision and into its culvert, where it runs beneath Wilkes City Park before emerging into the north end of the newly-minted Wilkes Creek Natural Area, the little wooded plot I worked at on Saturday.

I arrived ten minutes late due to mistakenly driving first to the wrong end of the park (oops!) but I was quickly filled in and set to work watering plantings. There was a truck with a tank, but since the pump wouldn't work we got the water flowing using gravity to siphon it to the plants. Each plant needed a full minute of watering, so I found myself in a zen state of observing my surroundings. This is my kind of volunteer work!

The water truck

Other workers busied themselves with cleaning up garbage (and boy howdy, there was plenty of it!) and hauling mulch for the new seedlings, and after chatting a bit with the organizer I lost myself in the interior of the little woods. There was a large red elderberry, and nearby were delicate blue eggshells from a nearby robin's nest.

Red elderberry

A snowberry seedling in its mulch cradle

I took a lot of pictures. Blogger kind of organizes photos however it wants, so please forgive the seemingly random layout! I finished the day up by mulching a lot of baby shrubs and trees, and managed to work up a sweat. I am completely envious of the residents of the neighborhood around Wilkes Creek for the beautiful little jewel they have running through their midst, and I wish I had one in my neighborhood too, but all the creeks near the city's center have been sent to languish underground, sadly.

Robin's egg shells

The view from on top of the culvert

A colony of aphids, thriving on goldenrod

A young Cascara

Red-flowering currant

Looking through the culvert... can you see
the rectangle of green light at the other end? 

Looking downstream from the culvert

The interior of the lot, with a silver birch

The Vanport Flood Tour

About a month ago, I mentioned the Vanport Flood. For those who aren't in the know, Vanport was at one time the second largest city in Oregon and, with 40,000 residents at its peak, the largest housing development in the US, built by Henry Kaiser to house shipbuilders and their families during World War II. Estimates hold that over 100,000 people lived in Vanport between construction in 1942 and its final days, but on May 30th, 1948, after weeks of high water, the levee was breached at 4:17 in the afternoon, and Vanport flooded. 

Official records state that only 15 lives were lost, but some oldtimers report pulling many more bodies than that out of the water. It stands to be said that the City of Portland has been known to rewrite its own history from time to time, particularly when it comes to Vanport, so while I certainly can't say the official death toll has been fudged, it seems like a matter for research an enterprising history student might consider undertaking - I'm a biologist, not an historian, so I won't delve too deeply into the historical stuff, but if you want more information about Vanport, check out The Oregon History Project, History Link's essay on the flood, Columbia River Images' page on Vanport, this excellent article by the Portland Tribune, and not least, the history pages at Portland State University, which was born from the integrated Vanport Extension Center.

Rose gall

For the last ten years, the Columbia Slough Watershed Council has been offering a flood anniversary tour of the area that had been Vanport, and this year I joined about 40 other people for a four-stop jaunt around the West end to hear Susan Barthel, a local Columbia Slough expert, along with survivors of the flood, tell its story. We gathered at the Delta Park/Vanport light rail station, which is located near the east end of where West Vanport had been.

Mosaic map of Vanport

The first thing I noticed was completely unrelated to Vanport history; these rose bushes seem to be infected with some kind of gall-forming parasite that causes them to grow these beautiful, if bizarre, tumors. I've never seen anything like them before and had no idea what they were, but a quick search after I got home revealed that they're caused by a tiny wasp. Gross, and yet charming at the same time.

Railing made from bronzed items recovered from flood debris

The tour began, and we trekked up to the top of the light rail platform to look at some of the commemorative art; a mosaic map of Vanport City, a railing made of bronzed items recovered from the flood debris, and three large metal plates commemorating the high water marks in the days leading up to the flood.

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We moved from the light rail station to the next stop on the tour, Portland International Raceway. PIR sits smack on the area of the floodplain that was once West Vanport, covered with apartment buildings, and we learned that not only are there still old foundations to be found on the raceway grounds, but that they still find flood debris from time to time.

The crowd gathered on the top of the Slough levee (the former floodplains are now completely encircled with levees, protecting them from flooding both by the Columbia River and by the Columbia Slough... I'll come back to that) to hear more about events the day of the flood, and also to hear stories of childhood in Vanport.

The Columbia Slough

One gentleman, Frank, was utterly captivating as he reminisced about swimming in the slough, days spent waging war with the kids across the channel, and even about fishing with the charnel from the slaughterhouses as blood and offal was dumped directly into the water, rendering the slough thick, red, and fouled. He made us laugh when he told us about kids swimming among the turds in the slough, because of course back then the city was still flushing its sewage directly into the waterway. "We just pushed 'em aside," he said with a wry chuckle, "it didn't bother us none." (I'd like everyone who yearns for "a simpler time" to dwell on that image for a few minutes).

One question that came up several times was "Why did it flood?" People wanted to know what caused the flood, and whether it would happen again. It was certainly not the Columbia River's first flood, nor was it its last, and it will flood again... of that we can be certain. Like most things in Nature, the causes of the flooding in this area are manyfold and complex, but contributors include the convergence of several cyclical occurrences. One was an especially heavy snowpack in mountains that contribute to both the Columbia and Willamette rivers, which converge at the West end of the Slough. Another was an unusually warm Spring, not terribly unlike the one we are enjoying right now, melting that large snowpack at a rapid rate. Yet another contributor were heavy seasonal rains. We may have any of these events in any given Spring, but when they all come together, the result is high water like we saw in 1896, 1948, and 1996. We will certainly see high water like this again.

Vanport informational kiosk at Force Lake

But will it flood? That's certainly the relevant question, and whether the industry and housing in the old floodplain stays intact depends entirely on whether the levees are high enough, and hold. We, as humans, tend to think of our constructions and our designs to hold back the forces of Nature as being strong and durable, but the disasters that we have seen in just the last couple of decades, including the flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of the tsunami in Japan, illustrate very well how transient human engineering is in the face of the imperturbable, vast weight of natural forces. This planet is our home, but it's a home that really doesn't care one way or another about wiping us out if we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or happen to be working at odds with its geological processes. I'm kind of hoping that, assuming we survive another few millennia, we eventually get to a point where instead of trying to control nature, we try to figure out how we can best fit into it.

The third stop on our tour was Force Lake, the site my first post on this blog was written about. It was nice to see, a month later, the young trees I'd helped plant and the native plants we had cleared space for thriving. Of course, many of the invasive species are also thriving, and they will continue to thrive; there's no unringing the bell. The tour guide talked a little more about the breach in the levee, and the group was off to see the railway embankment that sprung the initial, unstoppable leak. The levees are much better now, of course, higher and stronger. The City of Portland is, as many cities which have developed on floodplains, seeking FEMA certification. There is an air of certainty that the mistakes of the past will stay in the past, never to be repeated.

A beautiful shrub I don't recognize, also at Force Lake

 

 

Rain Gardens

Human beings appear to be relatively unique, as members of the animal kingdom go, because we learn from experience as a species, mostly by screwing things up and then having to figure out where we went wrong, and how to fix it. The more of us there are, and the more technology we acquire, the more massively we are able to screw things up. Lots of animals learn from experience individually, and can even pass their knowledge on to other individuals, but human beings store and codify the results of our mistakes, and communicate them to other human communities across the globe. We call this process "science".

All that runoff has to go somewhere...

One of the ways that we have relatively recently screwed up is something most city-dwellers take for granted; impermeable surfaces, like roofs and roads and sidewalks. We've paved our habitat, which is really convenient when you want to push a shopping cart from a store to your car, but creates a big problem when it comes to dealing with water falling out of the sky. Until recently, our way of managing this has been primarily to just capture this water in roof or road gutters and direct it quietly underground to the sewer system, which is the point in this process where my interest was piqued. The gutters are falling off my house so it's, y'know, immediately and possibly urgently relevant.

Right down into the ground!

As part of their Slough 101 series, the Columbia Slough Watershed Council offers a Rain Gardens 101 class. I knew little about rain gardens other than that they were a way of dealing with roof runoff, which lately has taken to seeping into my basement.

The class was offered at Whitaker Ponds Nature Park on NE 42nd, a lovely little bit of restored wetlands that itself has a history rich in human errors; nestled away in an industrial area, with a Boeing silo looming nearby, it seems like an unlikely place to find a nature park.

That white smudge on the horizon is a massive Boeing Quonset hut.

In fact, the ponds and surrounding area had been used as a dumping ground for many years, and restoration required the removal of a prodigious volume of garbage from the site, including appliances and empty barrels of unknown provenance.

You would never know by looking at it now; it's a green haven for frogs, fish, ducks, rabbits, and countless other creatures.

Heron just, like, chillin'.

The Columbia Slough Watershed Council headquarters are housed here, in a small house; a good place for housing headquarters. This is where I learned more about stormwater runoff and the mistakes we've made in handling it than I ever thought I'd know, and, more importantly, what we're trying to do to fix our mistakes now.
The class started with a brief overview of the problems we've generated for ourselves by capping off most of our habitat with impermeable surfaces. The main issue is, the soil we're covering up and the plants that would have grown there would normally act like a giant water filter, cleaning the rain as it soaks into the ground. Some of the water would then percolate down to the water table, and perhaps into wells dug by humans, clean and fresh and good for drinking. Most of it would be absorbed by plants and evapotranspired back into the atmosphere, eventually to make more rain. Very little of it would become runoff.

Command Central for the Columbia Slough Watershed Council.

The problem with runoff is not just that we are interrupting the water cycle and depleting our drinking water resources. It's also that runoff carries with it all the nasty stuff it picks up from roofs and roads, like lead, petrochemicals, and other pollutants, into the rivers and eventually the ocean. And that's not all; our runoff screws the guy downstream, and  there's always someone downstream. It erodes streambanks, destroys fish habitats, contributes to sinkholes and landslides, and causes flooding, among other problems. It overburdens sewer systems and causes waste overflows into waterways. It costs money as well as habitat.

The rain garden at the CSWC headquarters. 

By the 1970s, the earliest I was conscious of environmental issues, we had figured out that this runoff issue was a problem that needed to be addressed somehow. Urbanization - the flow of the human population from rural areas into cities - was accelerating, and the global population had reached an alarming four billion people. In Portland, combined sewage overflows, in which the volume of runoff when it rained overburdened the sewer system, causing untreated sewage to purge unfettered into the Willamette River (and giving new meaning to "the smell of rain") were typical. Believe it or not, this was an improvement; Portland didn't vote to approve a sewage treatment facility until 1938. Until the plant opened in 1952, raw sewage was simply piped directly into the Willamette River and Columbia Slough.

Downspout, disconnected.

In 1993, Portland launched its Downspout Disconnection program, offering free disconnection and incentives to city residents. The program was massively successful, but led to another problem; how are residents to deal with the stormwater puddling on their lawn, seeping into their basements, or, defeating the purpose entirely, running across the sidewalk and into the street drain? Here enters the rain garden.

A rain garden/bioswale in downtown
Portland, near PSU.

Also called a bioswale, rain gardens are, at their most basic, essentially just a hole in the ground that water can soak into. We see them most often, in Portland, in the form of curb improvements, as well as the reedgrass-planted depressions in between the paved areas in New Seasons' parking lots, but they are also starting to creep into yards and parking strips as homeowners become more aware of the benefits of using them to manage runoff. The city has also recently updated its building code to mandate onsite runoff management for new construction (I'm fuzzy on the details), so I expect we'll see many more rain gardens in our neighborhoods.

The interior of the rain garden at Whitaker Ponds.
Here thar be bunnies! Squee!

Of course, the garden part of rain garden implies that they are so much more than just a hole in the ground, and they are. A rain garden also consists of plants that are happy to be deluged with, and help soak up, lots of water at once, such as rushes and sedges (rushes are round, but sedges have edges) and they are carefully designed to direct runoff away from foundations as well as, importantly, to dry up within 48 hours so as not to become infested with pests that breed in stagnant water.

The promise of adventure ahead...

A well-designed rain garden is not only a pragmatic bit of drainage engineering, but also lovely to look at and a boon to small city wildlife like birds and beneficial insects. I won't go into the details of building and planting a rain garden here, because the East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District has put together a guide that is far more helpful than I ever could be. The Oregon Environmental Council has also put together a rain garden guide, and there's a helpful OregonLive article about them as well. So I will leave you to their more capable instruction, and add a couple of totally gratuitous shots of Whitaker Ponds Nature Park just because I love it so much.

The eco-roofed gazebo at Whitaker Ponds.

The Columbia Slough.

This rural home doesn't even have gutters... just long eaves that distribute runoff into thirsty plantings below.

My own putative rain garden.

Force Lake

I was born in the Columbia Slough Watershed, in a little 880-square-foot tract home my mom bought newly-built in 1969 for $28,000. The Slough was virtually in my backyard, if you included a few blocks of residential neighborhood, a few acres of empty fields, Columbia Boulevard, some train tracks,  a landfill that is not recorded in history and was most likely illegal, and the rendering plant as part of my mother's holdings. In my young mind, this was our empire.

It was the 1970's, so I and the other neighborhood kids were pretty much allowed to roam at will, as long as we were home in time to hear our mothers call us in for dinner. There were few rules governing us, so we spent our summers eating Chick-O-Stix and "fishing" with sticks, yarn, and safety pins off the blackberry-entangled banks of the slough, having been warned by our parents not to eat the berries or the fish, if we caught any, because the slough was contaminated. We didn't know with what, but I remember losing my desire to catch fish out of it one day, watching a large, ulcerated carp flopping in the shallows until it died, gasping, on the muddy bank.

The 70's wound to a close and the 80's overtook them. My mother decided to escape some legal difficulties by taking me and disappearing into the wilderness of Northern Washington State, I grew up and eventually returned to Portland, got busy getting married, raising kids, starting a business, and all that adult rot that people occupy their time with, and didn't think too hard about the Slough until buying a kayak a few years ago. All of a sudden, getting on the water was a thing, and I needed to find the nearest places to paddle. This led to an obsessive fascination with finding all of the green spots in Portland on Google Earth, and in turn to my discovery of Whitaker Ponds, home of the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, a group I had heard of but wasn't intimately familiar with.

Well, one thing led to another, and pretty soon it started to rain. Around this time I also decided to go back to school to pursue my long-held dream of a career in science, and eventually found myself with the option of volunteering with the Columbia Slough Watershed Council to fulfill a requirement for my Biology class. A Saturday morning planting native trees led to a Sunday afternoon at Slough 101, learning about the history and ecology of my watershed, and when it came time for a large volunteer project, I knew where I wanted to put my 20 hours.

All of this backstory leads me to today's outing at a horribly polluted puddle of water out back of the Expo Center, adjacent to the golf range, called Force Lake. Once the most popular swimming hole in Vanport City, Force Lake is now a Superfund site and unsafe to swim in. I am going to need to do some additional digging to try to find out what, exactly, is wrong with it, but in general with most of the contaminated sites along the Slough the story goes like this:

Once, there was a business on or near that site, and that business either processed or manufactured something. Likely starting back before there was much by way of environmental protection laws, the business simply drained any unwanted byproducts of manufacture into the lake, and continued doing so even after the new laws prohibited it, because they always had. Everything died, hardly anybody cared, and eventually the business went under so there's no one to hold accountable for cleanup.

I have a feeling a more detailed and accurate rendition of the story can be found on the Friends of Force Lake website.

So that's where I went this morning, to do a little cleanup and try to help. At this point, the lake borders a golf course, so it is picturesque and devoid of most large, obvious trash, like empty refrigerators, junked cars, and barrels full of waste, and the focus is on removing invasive species and planting native species in the hope of restoring the ecosystem to something closer to its pre-European-settlement native state. More about that later.

Walking in, I spotted an impressive patch of mushrooms growing on some woodchip mulch near the road.

I arrived just in time to be treated to a little presentation on the history of Vanport City, which is far more colorful, controversial, and interesting than the whitewashed version usually told; the City of Portland had rigidly racist city policies and did not like being adjacent to the fully-integrated second-largest city in the State of Oregon. There's much more to that story, but that's for a different blog.

After some cursory trash pickup, I scoped out a site for removing invasive species.

You would think that after spending 4 hours removing my body weight (at least) in thistle, bindweed, and blackberries, it would look impressively cleared out, right?

                                  Nope.

That's OK. After we'd cleared about as much as we could clear in the time allotted before the City truck came and took all our bags of weeds away, it was time to start planting. I put four little trees in the ground while other volunteers busied themselves doing the same.







After planting, while wandering about I noticed that the beavers had been busy.

Yep. I don't want to run into any angry beavers in a dark alley late at night; they'll gnaw right through my legs. Those little trees are going to need tree cages if  they're going to stand a chance against these guys.





Earlier I mentioned that I'd come back to the invasive species, and our efforts to restore the wetlands to a native state.

I have been thinking about this for a while, about how we throw all this effort into trying to un-ring the bell, to remove the species Europeans brought with them and restore a natural balance that was upset over 200 years ago in this part of the world; to kill the invaders and replant the indigenous species. In doing so, we disturb the soil, destroy habitat,


and kill organisms that are surviving in balance with the introduced flora. If, with careful cultivation and weeding and ongoing maintenance, we can restore this wetland to a simulacrum of the ecological equilibrium it was in 250 years ago, it will still remain only a testament to our effort to exert control over nature; if we should suddenly disappear, all of our work would be erased in a few seasons. It is not truly restored to a state of wildness, but only to an illusion of wildness that sates our egoistic drive to feel as if we have done something, left our mark.

This is not to say that I think restoration work should be stopped, or that it is futile, or pointless. That lake was full of human detritus, couches and garbage and unwanted appliances. It is still full of human filth, and we owe it to ourselves as well as to the species we share our habitat with to clean that mess up, as best we can. But I wonder when we are going to learn the humility to release our insistent clutch on control, and allow true wildness to find its own equilibrium in our midst? We can't undo the past or unbring these introduced species, and it seems that if we could, in addition to knocking off shitting everything up, also understand and embrace our lack of control, we might finally be able to regain our own place in Nature; perhaps to a lesser degree at first, but hopefully to a greater one in time.

On that note, here's a fuzzy little bee.