History

John McReavy was a minister’s son. He arrived in the Hood Canal logging district in 1861, promising to pay fellow Mainer and Puget Mill owner Cyrus Walker $7,000 for a bankrupt logging camp near the Union River. By 1870, he controlled much of the southern part of the canal’s logging. That same year, he married Fannie Gove, daughter of a Steilacoom tugboat captain, and they had two sons, Ed and Herb, and a daughter, Helen, who wrote How When and Where On Hood Canal (1960). McReavy was a red-bearded Irishman and a lifetime Mason. He served in the territorial legislature from 1869 to 1889 and signed the document declaring statehood for Washington. His legislative agenda included education and woman suffrage.

According to his son, Herb, McReavy knew six presidents by first name. Perhaps an early logging accident which broke his arm proved to be some guidance. His arm didn’t healed correctly, and he never regained full use of his injured limb. His move to a camp cook didn’t seem to satisfy destiny’s call. Old-timers reported that “John got more flour in his whiskers than in the bread.”

John McReavy (1840-1918)

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John McReavy was amongst the first wave of those arriving for the timber. The watersheds of the Olympic Mountains were bustling. Upwards of 50 camps dotted Hood Canal’s shores. Logs waited between pilings for the tugs that would pull them to be milled. Mills also came and went, according to the scruples and management abilities of their owners.

The Washington Mill Company was one of the earliest, logging around the Duckabush River. The mill was made up mostly of loggers that drifted down from Port Gamble, near where Hood Canal opens into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Andrew Pope and William Talbot had arrived there from San Francisco in 1851 setting up to mill for the booming California goldfields. McReavy, like many others, sold much of his timber to Pope and Talbot and their Puget Mill Company soon evolved into the largest mill company the world had ever known.

The Webb Logging Company also worked the Duckabush drainage and Waketickeh Creek, a creek with a bottom full of boulders and no gravel suitable for spawning. Twana Elder Henry Allen referred to the creek as “no salmon run up.” According to Twana legend, Dukwibal, the Transformer, slipped on the boulders when crossing and cursed the stream.

In 1900, lumbermen Sol Simpson and Alfred Anderson sited the state’s second largest logging company and a town at a former Native American potlatch ground. The town of Potlatch housed the Potlatch Commercial and Terminal Company, later to be renamed the Phoenix Logging Company. In 40 years, 1.5 billion board feet were cut, almost 40 million annually. One contract supplied lumber for building the Panama Canal. The Canal Logging Company, associated with the Phoenix Logging Company in Potlatch, logged the Jorstad Creek drainage.

Simpson and Anderson would go on to expand their holdings, surviving beyond the boom era, aided by an historic agreement with the US Forest Service. In 1947, the Sustained-Yield Unit Act assured the Simpson Logging Company that it would be able, in partnership with the Forest Service, to have access to enough timber to log, then let logged areas recover and mature, in order to continue operations without any production gap. The goal of this private/federal relationship was to make the local communities built on this forest work sustainable. It had been common practice for companies to let cut-over forest lands revert to the counties for taxes and move on.

Simpson Logging Company continues to operate, and its holdings extend well beyond the scope of Hood Canal, throughout Mason County and Washington State, into Oregon and California, though the family has divided the original business, shifting much of the focus to resource management. The Green Diamond Resource Company is still located in nearby Shelton, site of Simpson’s longest running and most substantial milling operations.

One other company continues from late in that era. In 1922, H.M. Robbins started the Hama Hama Logging Company. With a crew of 300, between 1923-1933, the company produced 50 million board feet a year from the area of the Hama Hama watershed. H.M. Robbins’ grandson, David Robbins, and family still manage the company, which is also known now for its shellfish enterprise, Hama Hama Seafood Company, as it has diversified to balance resource use. In 2008, the Hama Hama Tree Farm was awarded Washington State Tree Farmer of the year, recognizing exceptional stewardship of private forest land.

The Apokak, owned by Abner Sund, son of John Sund, tugged log booms for the Phoenix Logging Company.

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McReavy had platted Union, then called Union City, in 1889, eight miles west of his Union River Railroad. And from the hillside in Union, from the McReavy House built that following year, he could survey his developing “Venice of the Pacific”—after all, the budding metropolis was on a canal. The Masonic lodge, the Occidental Hotel, the Congregational church, the sawmill—he’d built or bought them all. His general merchandise store sold every provision a Hood Canal logger could possibly require. Chewing and smoking tobacco brands were well advertised: Star, Copenhagen, Spear Head, and Velvet, as well as Owl cigars. The post office was located in the store as well. McReavy sold the Union Pacific and the Port Townsend and Southern railroads property for their switching grounds. Their convergence would make this place accessible by wagon, boat and rail. However, the 1893 depression ended McReavy’s ambitions. Railroads failed to come. McReavy’s Union City was left bankrupt.

McReavy’s dream of the ‘Venice of the Pacific’ dissolved, but soon a second generation of dreamers arrived. In 1906, Frank Pixley brought Gold Rush money from San Francisco. Fresh from the San Francisco quake, Pixley purchased much of McReavy’s bankrupt Union City plat and more, to Alderbrook, and from Dewatto to Tahuya. Pixley envisioned a community like San Francisco built on wealth and art. In 1916, Pixley returned to the area with his wife and two children. His ship was packed with a stash of art and cultural tools, including a piano, a printing press, books and musical instruments. Pixley named his new empire “Yacht Haven.”

Frank Pixley

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To locals, Pixley’s landing may have seemed more like an alien spaceship from mother ship San Francisco. His colony would be of High Art, Wealthy Patrons and Proper Society, free from the strictures of the “small town” mentalities like Religion and Morality and Law. And Frank Pixley had lived in High Society. His uncle, F. Morrison Pixley, was a founder of San Francisco, a politician and a newspaper owner. Frank Pixley had met the authors, politicians and businessmen who visited Uncle Pixley’s estate at Cow Hollow.

But people of culture already resided in the Canal area. Ed Dalby had grown up in Union City, listened to the Indian stories, and from his father learned to love boats. In 1910 the University of Washington graduate guided Edward Curtis as he photographed the vanishing of the Indian tribes. Later Ed joined The Seattle Post-Intelligencer as “Captain Barnacle,” marine editor, at a time when the mosquito fleet plied Puget Sound waters as a highway.

Dalby married Ethyl Morgan, a sensitive, artistic woman who dabbled in painting, poetry and music. He and Ethyl belonged to an arts group in the newly cultured city of Seattle, and she invited her friends to their Canal home. In 1922, Ed built a waterwheel power plant so Ethyl could have electricity. Unfortunately, the power was direct current, so all the lights were on, or all the lights were off. However, Ed always took any opportunity to shine the P-I promotional light on the arts colony.

Ethyl Dalby with son, Fritz Dalby

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The artist community progressed slowly until 1922, when the Navy Yard Highway wriggled down the shore. Though still a dirt road, it finally connected Union City to the rest of Puget Sound and all those potential tourists.

Orre Nobles was Pixley’s first convert of High Culture. Orre convinced his family to buy next to Yacht Haven and construct Olympus Manor, a 16-room lodge with two kitchens. With his talent for design and his eye for art, Orre created a unique cultural outpost which eventually had ties across the world, wherever Orre traveled.

Orre first saw the Canal as a 17-year-old, booking passage on the sternwheeler S.S. Chippewa from Tacoma with 675 other sightseers, surprising the “villagers,” as Orre called them. After graduating that year from Bellingham Normal, he returned to teach in the one-room school at Tahuya from 1914 to 1917.

Each weekend, Orre would row across the Canal to Yacht Haven to hold Saturday-morning “famous talks” with “Pix,” who filled the young dreamer’s head with stories of Europe, California and the Orient. Intoxicated by visions and imaginative fragrances, Orre became a vagabond.

In 1915 he visited the San Francisco World’s Fair, a year later Hawaii, enjoying a shipboard romance with a ship’s steward. In 1918-1919 he traveled by merchant marine to the Orient, South America and Australia. Later he regaled listeners with being “aboard a small freighter to China … with the cargo … filled with dynamite.”

In 1921-1922 Orre studied in New York at the Pratt Institute. He indulged his passion for theater and the opera, enjoying the gay and sophisticated New York nightlife. But he missed the Canal and the Thoreau in him. After teaching a year at the University of Washington in 1924 he began 28 years of teaching at Ballard High School.

He also continued work at Olympus Manor. In 1924 he built the Music Room from salvaged stained-glass windows, doors and beams and installed a pipe organ he rescued from a church in Seattle. He decorated with rugs from China, and he mounted a photograph of Pixley near the organ. He held dramatic concerts, attracting musicians and scholars as well as lovers of art and music.

Orre Nobles, Olympus Manor Study

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It seems as if Orre attempted to construct what he saw as an artist: Light was multicolored, conversation was poetry, sound was music eternal. In the waters in front of the Chinese-themed architectures of Olympus Manor, Orre built a torii gate, an ancient symbol of friendship in the Orient, to welcome guests to his Canal kingdom, like emissaries arriving from foreign lands.

For the next decade, Nobles toured China, becoming an explorer as well as a bridge for Oriental art. In 1927, he accompanied Josef Washington Hall, a fellow UW teacher who, known as Upton Close, became a commentator and political author of the Orient, much as Lowell Thomas did in the Mideast. Orre illustrated Close’s Eminent Asians . In 1930, while on sabbatical in China, Orre designed Art Deco rugs for the Fette Rug Company to export to the New York market. In 1935-1937 Orre guided Orre’s Oriental Odysseys to China.

Orre liked to be known as a “friend of the famous,” and he knew national media personalities in entertainment and sports. One such friend was Don Blanding, the popular poet whose book, Vagabond’s House , about the romantic South Seas, sold 150,000 copies in 48 printings and was said to have popularized travel to Hawaii. Blanding’s poem “To Orre” was displayed above the Manor’s guest book.

A more unlikely friendship was with heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. Orre was Tunney’s housemate at his 1928 Camp Spectator training camp in New York. After Tunney would train all day, sparring with boxing foes and with sports writers, Orre would row Tunney across the lake to their cabin where Orre would read Thoreau, calming him in preparation for the next day’s training.

Orre also knew the Northwest art scene, including Richard Fuller, founder of the Seattle Art Museum, which focused on promoting Asian and Northwest art, and “Gang of Twelve” artists Morris Graves and Mark Tobey, who incorporated Asian influences in their art.

Graves often visited his brother who lived in Union and is remembered first as a genius, then an eccentric, then an addict. His early period broke open new imaginative spaces, using birds as subjects for vast emotional landscapes. San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, central to the Beat Generation, the important literary and cultural movement in the 50’s often identified by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, pays homage to Graves in his collection, A Coney Island of the Mind :

—-The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves

——–is not the same wild west

—————————————the white man found

It is a land that Buddha came upon

———————————–from a different direction

—It is a wild white nest

———————–in the true mad north

————————————————-of introspection

——-where ‘falcons of the inner eye’

——————————————–dive and die

————–glimpsing in their dying fall

———————————–all life’s memory

——————————————–of existence

———-and with grave chalk wing

———————————–draw upon the leaded sky

—-a thousand threaded images

—————————————of flight…

The Beat generation was characterized by restlessness and experimentation, individuals who bristled against the expectations of the traditional intellectual climate, identifying with the motion of America more than with its institutions. Interest in the Pacific Rim cultures, the philosophies of Buddhism in the Far East in particular and with the cosmologies and traditions of Native American cultures in the West, influenced much of the character of this group. The coastal route between San Francisco and Seattle became a popular stretch. And for a few of this era’s contemporaries, Union was the far outpost, a trek to the Olympic Peninsula, its mountains and Hood Canal.

Mark Tobey was drawn to the area by the Dalby family who appreciated the community of artists gathered here. Tobey briefly lived in Union in the early 1950’s. He had traveled much of the world because of his art, becoming in 1961 the first American artist to exhibit at the Louvre’s Pavillon de Marsan in Paris. A friend of Tobey’s introduced Jackson Pollock to Tobey’s work in 1944 and Pollock practiced with the paintings he viewed at Tobey’s shows in New York, reproducing them in huge sizes, pouring instead of brushing paint onto the canvases. Pollock was fascinated by the way Tobey filled space without representing a particularly identified subject, by lines influenced by Eastern calligraphic techniques. Pollock was so impressed he wrote in a letter that Tobey was an exception to the rule that New York was “the only real place in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru.”

With Graves and others, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest school and, like many of its members, was self-taught. Graves and Tobey visited the Union art colony and knew not only Orre, but woodblock artist Waldo Chase as well.

Grandson to Mother Ryther and her landmark Seattle orphanage, Waldo wanted to live in the woods and not be tied to a job. He and his brother, Corwin, learned the ancient Japanese art of making prints from wood block designs and moved to Pixley’s beach at Yacht Haven. For three years they lived in separate teepees, selling many of their prints to Alderbrook guests. Many that knew him talk about how Waldo was “like a magnet,” drawing artists to him and nourishing the artistic spirit in those who gathered around him. He was a woodblock print maker as well as social critic and philosopher. He was spiritual as a tree, just as skinny and just as tall.

One of his earliest pupils was Ed Aardal. Aardal’s parents, Sivard and Marth, came over from Norway to the Hama Hama area but were flooded out. They bought land from the Skokomish Indians and moved onto the reservation, raising Ed and his six siblings there. Waldo taught Ed at Mohrweis, the first school in the Skokomish Valley, and encouraged Ed to pursue his abilities as an artist, exhibiting with him locally.

From the Hood Canal Courier 9/9/1932:

“More each year it becomes apparent that Hood Canal is becoming a center for talented artists, writers, musicians and general literary students. The art exhibit furnished by Waldo Chase and Edwin Aardal, both local artists, for the Jubilee, was acclaimed by critics to have been inspiring, elevating and educational.

Mr. Chase, retiring by nature, yet sensitive to the aesthetic impulses so needful in the finished artist, kept endless lines of inquisitive onlookers interested with his clear explanations of the ancient Chinese method of wood block printing he uses in the production of his masterful works. After having lived the greater part of the past twenty years in the outdoors of the Olympics in an Indian tepee of his own design, he is able to bring to the drawing room colorful productions of nature’s gorgeous views.

Mr. Aardal, whose principal pieces are black and white pen drawings, is recognized as having made some very thoughtful pictures and distinctly natural portraits, some of which have been published. A fishing scene of his, as well as some other outstanding studies, created considerable mirth at the exhibit.”

Waldo also suggested that Ed drive down to Burbank to interview with Walt Disney. In 1935, Ed traveled with his brother, Sigard, down to California and interviewed with Walt Disney. Disney asked him to draw some sketches, then hired him. Sigard returned home, but Ed became integral to some of Disney’s most landmark creations—Fantasia, Snow White, Bambi and many others. His wife recalled a day when Walt put his arm around Ed’s shoulder and told him, “Ed, you’re my best animator.” He spent 25 years with Disney then joined Hannah Barbera for another twenty-five, animating the Flintstones and the Jetsons.

Ed had met his wife, Joanna, shortly before his trip down to Burbank. He danced with both her and her sister at the Blue Ox, a roadhouse that kept things lively up the Canal. Ed and Joanna married in 1936 and they returned frequently over the years to visit her family in Matlock, at the southeastern foothills of the Olympics. Ed would continue to Union for visits with Waldo, for chats in his cabin that would let the posturing and pace of Hollywood evaporate, dry up like the needles overhead, brown from the summer heat and dropping from the pines into the duff or onto Waldo’s cabin’s shake roof.

Federal Agents Preparing to Raid the Blue Ox by Ed Aardal

During Prohibition, Dick Shively, an ex- Seattle cop and bootlegger, entertained revelers at the Blue Ox. Government agents regularly visited the roadhouse as well, but apparently few violations were discovered.

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Waldo’s goal seemed to have been to help everyone be their best. He inspired genuineness. When Ned Bishop, of the Grays Harbor Bishop family, died, the Bishop trust donated $750,000 to Waldo’s grandmother’s orphanage in Seattle. Waldo would never take money. Though, in fact, he did institute the Hood Canal Dollar, a barter system adopted during the Depression years. Since Union City was so isolated, little money circulated in the community. Waldo printed these “dollars” and when Guy Garfield, cousin, of President Garfield and owner of Twana Mercantile, accepted them, they came into some local circulation.

By the 1930’s, “the girls,” Clara Eastwood and Miss Eloise Flagg, owned Alderbrook. The resort prospered as the Navy Yard Highway brought more tourists. As one of the promoted attractions, which included the usual boating and horseback riding, guests could visit the “Artist at the Waterwheel,” as the legend on Waldo’s business card says.

Customers visited Waldo’s studio to purchase prints. Waldo tired easily of chatting, so when their purchases seemed complete, Waldo would, at times, drizzle kerosene on the fire; it would flare up, and the shoppers would quickly leave.

Waldo Chase in front of the Torii Gate

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Whereas Waldo believed conversation frivolous, trifling and wasteful, The Duchess made it into an art form. Kristen Hauser, nicknamed “The Duchess” by Orre, was like Orre, also Danish. She had graduated from the Danish National School of Industrial Arts, divorced a Nebraska taxidermist, moved to Seattle and run a boarding house for Cornish School students. For several years she lived in China, where she would hostess Orre’s Oriental Odyssey tours.

After the 1937 Japanese invasion, she returned to Hood Canal, a home to expatriates. Although she lived wherever rent was cheapest or free, she always had something to serve, be it cookies or tea, though she got upset when she discovered her liquor bottle unaccountably empty, and she always served it on a silver tea set. She also served conversation, witty, sparkling and engaging, with the afternoon tea. She acted like a duchess, and everyone who visited her wanted to be part of her play.

This play was an artifice created by Orre, of his magical kingdom of the Canal. He ruled, of course, as “King of the Canal.” The Olympus Manor was, of course, the manor house. Royalty included the “rowdy” Duchess. The young women of the court were addressed as “lady,” and children of the realm called “prince.” There was only royalty and the court at Olympus Manor, the magic of another world of art and music, where, miles away from the depressed cities, the artistic and the wealthy met.

Pix played the renegade jester. He walked the Navy Yard Highway, dressed in two body-type bathing suits to cover the holes, carrying a golf iron and wearing a pistol around his neck, he said, “to protect the Bill of Rights.”

The old man with the long gray beard and the cranky eccentricities became part of the scenery of the artist colony. However, he also owned the water company and the telephone company and was the justice of the peace, a school board member and the founder of the publicly owned PUD 1.

1935 was the high point of the artist community. Orre again entertained the the Tacoma Drama League society ladies at Olympus Manor. In the evening, he hosted a beach bonfire for his guests. The season’s highlight was when the musicians paddled the Indian canoe, draped with cedar, into the cove to serenade the ladies, the night and all the stars.

Up the little cove, Don Beckman, a Hollywood publicist, dialog writer, set designer and producer, had built a chalet-style Robin Hood Inn and Nottingham Village like a movie set. While Beckman was vacationing with the Robin Hood movie producer, the two passed the picturesque creek setting. The producer exclaimed, “It’s Sherwood Forest!”

In 1935 Waldo married Helen Chard Engells, a “raw-foods enthusiast.” They would live in Waldo’s tepee on Pixley’s beach. Each guest was to “bring a carrot… two miles westward over a woodland trail.” Those who reached the reception site at Pixley’s Sunset Ridge stood around a bonfire and, in a pagan ceremony, tossed in a piece of wood to symbolize the burning of false actions and inhibitions caused by society. The couple ate offerings of raw food, and a Seattle P-I photographer captured the couple on film talking Hindu ideals and eating raw carrots. Within a year, they were divorced, perhaps the publicized zaniness too much, or perhaps the tepee too small. “She always had ‘hell’ in her name,” he is recalled noting later.

Waldo’s art was now maturing. Whereas Orre traveled the world for inspiration, Waldo traveled the Olympics with pack animals. No longer were simple designs of snow and mountain scenes blocked with color. Now multi-colored prints of mountain cabins, Indian maidens in dog-headed canoes and ships backlit by moonlight offered a wider emotional range. He also worked to bring attention to some of the traditions embedded in the land.

The March 6, 1942 edition of the Shelton-Mason County Journal discusses a demonstration at the Shelton library in which “he and Henry Allan, patriarch of the Skokomish Tribe , collaborated in fashioning the “Oleman” house model.”

“The Oleman” house is called man’s first habitation on Puget Sound, housing up to 200 Indian families inside its 50×200 foot dimensions. A small cedar model of an Indian hand loom is another part of the display. An explanatory note written by Chase said:

“‘Our local Indians were outstanding for their woodworking ability, so much so that various experts from the country were taken to California by the Spanish Padres to teach the southern Indians the construction of the windows, doors, and roof beams of the first missions built in 1700 to 1800 through California… the loom, the canoes, and the winter house were the three outstanding creations of our local Indians.”

Louisa Pulsifer, born in 1882 in the last cedar longhouse on Hood Canal, is credited with saving the Twana language and preserving tribal customs and basketry skills.

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Because of the scenery, and some say because of the wild blackberries, several Grays Harbor lumbermen, the “Sawdust Aristocracy,” built summer homes nearby, including the Schafers, the Hobis, the Middletone brothers, the Callisons and Ned and Lillian Bishop. On the other side of the cover, near Alderbrook, those in the “Swedish Colony” built their summer homes. These included Seattle shoe business partners John Nordstrom and Carl Wallin, as well as Kitty Nordstrom’s father, Dr. Nils Johanson, founder of Swedish Hospital. The Sundstrom daughter married Burgess Meredith. Each summer the families vacationed on Hood Canal.

They were charmed by the summer of Orre, fashionable and witty, the life of the party. He lived life acting the part of an artist. An educator, he taught by example how to be America’s most cultured man in the 1930s: worldly, sophisticated, talented, artistic, a gay vagabond unfettered by mere social habits and mores. While his family denied his sexual orientation, he quoted P-I columnist Emmett Watson’s assessment of him as a “confirmed bachelor.” He had grown into everything Pixley could have hoped for.

In 1952 Orre retired from Ballard to spend more time at Olympus Manor. However, in July 1952, the drunken caretaker, an ex-Marine, tossed a smoldering cigarette into the woodbox, and the lodge, the Music Room and all the statues and rugs from China, the pipe organ and the paintings went up in smoke. The caretaker died in the fire.

So did Orre’s soul. “We will never rebuild,” Orre lamented, “Genius cannot repeat itself.” His treasures of a “life richly lived” were gone. All he had left were his memories and such Chinese epigrams as “When empires crumble to dust, Daffodils will bloom again,” because he carried fire insurance on only two carpets.

Orre Nobles at the Pipe Organ (with picture of Pixley) in the Music Room at Olympus Manor

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But he regained his good cheer. His steamer letters to his ship-cruising friends were as delightful as butterflies. Orre drew envelope designs charged with the robust senses of impending adventure, the joy in the palette: oranges, reds, greens and purples, as the ships traveled to China, Europe, and Japan. At his death, his much anticipated Christmas card reached some five hundred lucky recipients.

Orre died in 1967, a pioneer of a world traveler who helped introduce Oriental art to the West, an influential teacher of arts and crafts, a friend of the famous, a global garage-saler, a jewelry designer and artist as well as an art promoter and showman. In 1974, seven years after his death, the Frye Art Museum sponsored an art show of Orre’s and his students’ work.

Waldo lived until 1989, 93 years old. In his later years he became less an artist and more a social conscience. During the Second World War, too old to be drafted, Waldo’s pacifism led him to Waldport, Oregon, a camp for conscientious objectors where he taught printmaking. A generation later Chase attracted anti-war hippies and Vietnam veterans to his small, wood-heated cabin, where he taught an eastern philosophy of personal and emotional freedom. His anti-war philosophy, his love of the mountains, his disinterest in a job and his long hair all marked Waldo as our first hippie.

While Waldo burrowed into the local sacred, his community of peers was dispersed widely. He was tied to a network of ideas that traveled the coast, the country and further. And if Waldo was a deep thinker, a social conscience, an artist and a craftsman, Orre was fashionable, a gigolo of joy, a bird with many nests. He promoted art to enjoy life. If Orre was sunshine, Waldo was fog and rain.

What is left of Orre’s Olympus Manor is a stone-lined path and an Aztecan fountain. The buildings, art, paintings, statues, vases and furniture were destroyed by smoke, mildew or theft. The old Olympus Manor was redeveloped in 1974 as the Blue Heron Condominiums. Above the old Navy Yard Highway, the Aztecan bas-relief face no longer spouts water into a basin where goldfish used to swim.

These days, Robin Hood Pub & Restaurant patrons can once again view the mural of Hood Canal painted by Paul S. Jones , Pixley’s nephew. Alderbrook Inn is newer, larger and owned by Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes. Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ summer complex is next door. The Dalby Waterwheel has been moved for the tourists, and the wheel is turning. The epithet assigned to the stretch by Sunset Magazine in the 1980’s, “Millionaire’s Mile,” now feels diminutive, another detail of another story surveyed from memory’s far shore.

Yes, this is a bit of a lament for when summers were always perfect. High tide and the currents full of fish. At low tide, estuaries full of eelgrass and geoducks, Dungeness crabs and sand collars, starfish that dotted the beaches. Those days, it would seem, of boundless watershed resources.

But this is also a celebration, for the individuals in the community who know these generations of stories, and for the fact that we have McReavy’s house looking out over Hood Canal, at the Olympic Mountains, a place in which to gather and remember, to present and protect our stories and cultural heirlooms. This is a celebration of those stories, those heirlooms, from which we are able to draw inspiration and dream ourselves back into that mind that quiets and sees and flurries to create new stories, new works to share.