A Watershed Is An Argument
A watershed is not a thing. This is the first surprise of working in one for any length of time. It looks like a thing on a map — a neat grey line around a clutch of tributaries, the drainage basin rendered as silhouette, the way a country is rendered as silhouette. On the wall of my office at the university I keep the USGS hydrologic unit map of the lower Snoqualmie basin, and the Stillwater sub-basin is inked in on it by a student several years ago as a gift, a clean grey outline you could cut with scissors. But a watershed is not the outline. A watershed is an argument among everyone who drinks from it, drains into it, lives on its banks, fishes it, permits it, sues over it, is buried above it, or has an ancestral claim to it older than any permit. The outline is only where the argument happens.
The Stillwater rises on the western flank of the Cascades, in country that was logged hard in the first half of the twentieth century and has been logged more gently and more argumentatively since. Its upper forks run off timberland owned by two private companies and the state. There are no towns up there, only the quiet of second-growth Douglas-fir and alder regrowth over the old skid roads, and the kind of dirt roads that require a forest permit and a sense of humour to drive. Those headwaters belong, for all practical purposes, to the foresters and the elk.
The middle river runs