The Dam That Came Down
The dam on Harris Creek was not large. I want to be honest about this from the start. It was a concrete weir perhaps three metres high and eleven metres wide, built in 1934 to impound a small pond for a mill that stopped running in 1952, and it had sat there for seventy-one years doing no useful human work and a great deal of quiet, cumulative ecological harm. Harris Creek is not the Stillwater. It is a neighbouring drainage, a tributary that enters the Snoqualmie about nine miles downstream of the Stillwater confluence, and I have no formal study on it. I went because a colleague invited me and because a small dam coming down on a salmon-bearing creek is, in this region, something a person in my profession makes time to see.
The removal was scheduled for a Tuesday in late October, after the main spawning window had passed on the Stillwater but before the weather closed in. The contractor was a firm I had seen at three or four other removal sites; they do competent work without theatre. There would be tribal biologists on site to monitor, a state biologist, and perhaps forty people who had earned the right to stand on the bank: the land trust staff who had spent six years negotiating the project, the descendants of the man who built the weir in 1934, two reporters, a photographer, and me.
I drove out with Len. This is the kind of thing he would not miss, though he does not