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.