In the Swirling Waters of Burley Lagoon
Part One: Low Tide
Ready to dive into Burley Lagoon? This exploration came out in newspaper form in September. I waited to publish it here (as an extended cut) until the latest round had been decided in the long struggle between Taylor Shellfish Farms and local residents over a proposed 25-acre geoduck farm. On December 2 the Pierce County Hearing Examiner gave the geoduck operation its official blessing.
Burley Lagoon's brackish water swirls around my calves. Mist hangs in the air. The low roar of the Purdy Bridge is a constant; otherwise it is a soft soundscape, a barely heard rustle of millions of creatures sucking and spitting planktonic water. I am alone. Gulls make occasional comments. So do trucks working at a few of the homes that ring the lagoon.
You have to be cool with muck to reach the middle of Burley Lagoon at low tide. I’ve made it to a tidal stream on the lagoon’s exposed belly, and I am able to rest because here the mud is a little less intent on swallowing me whole.
A fish darts past and shelters under sea lettuce. I wait it out. It reveals itself to be a black-eyed goby, mottled like a snake. Nearby is a bed of Olympia oysters, our only native oyster. The silt-browned and blunted shells of the Olys belie both their incomparable taste and their rarity since our bays were raked clean of them one hundred years ago. They are a little deeper in the lagoon than the dominant cultivated Pacific oyster.
Soon incoming saltwater begins to slacken the stream. An event that a Burley local has described to me as “the march of the crabs” is on. Those who live here seem to mark time by the comings and goings of different animals, particularly birds: there is a changing of the guard, I am told, when the herons that prowl the mud flats give way to gulls and terns that hunt the rising tide. Then come kingfishers. Then eagles and ospreys.
The crabs are Oregon shore crabs, and they dance in hundreds past my feet like commuters. These small multicolored crabs are good osmoregulators, meaning their bodies are adept at maintaining the right internal balance of fluids and salts. A good skill to have in a place where salt and fresh water are constantly ebbing and flowing.
I am appreciating the swirling nature of Burley Lagoon. A sharp community magnifying glass has been trained on this ecosystem since Taylor Shellfish Farms announced its intention to convert 25.5 acres of its 175-acre clam and oyster operation here to intensively grow geoducks.
My goal in tromping around is not to render judgment on the situation. Taylor claims the impact on the lagoon’s ecology will be minimal, a claim with which the county’s environmental impact statement (EIS) largely agrees, while a coalition of residents argues that geoduck farming will compound the aquacultural harm to a lagoon already missing much of its wildlife. You should read the EIS and public comment arguments and decide for yourself.
The situation is layered with ongoing water quality issues, which I will touch on in Part Two.
Me, I’m just here to see the lagoon firsthand. Not a soul shares it with me as I begin with laborious sucking steps to seek higher ground. Alone, yet I have this sensation that from the homes on shore, folks could be watching my every move.
The swath of Pacific oysters is impressive, a near monoculture. Rugged old oysters are the substrate for a coating of uncountable thousands of young oysters. Taylor outplants them with powerful water hoses.
Shells on shells on shells—one of the reasons Olympia oysters have struggled to reestablish is that in order for their free-swimming larvae to land and begin to grow, they ideally need a thriving bed of Olympia oysters to land on. It’s like Gary Snyder pointing out that you can’t fashion an axe handle without an axe.
The productivity of the lagoon is stunning. Looking more closely, I find perfect mudholes: in each is the glistening bulb of a contracted anemone. They too are perched on oyster shells hidden below the mud. I laugh. In sneaking biodiversity into the shellfish crop, they are living the old Wobbly slogan, “Building the new world in the shell of the old.”
Taylor has been working here since 2012. Shellfish farmers have been here nearly a century. Thick shell middens on the Burley shoreline attest to the fact that people have been feasting here for thousands of years.
There is a folk tale about how Beaver and Otter battled over the lagoon. Beaver wanted the Purdy Spit to run from shore to shore to block out the saltwater. Otter wanted a channel and tides and fish. Apparently Otter won.
Or at least is winning at the moment. Scientists with the United States Geological Survey have recently uncovered a set of clues related to a dramatic earthquake a thousand years ago. The fault stretches from Tacoma to Belfair, cutting right across the tops of the Gig Harbor and Key Peninsulas. Salt marsh sediments in Burley Lagoon and Lynch Cove to the west are perched above the highest tides, where they could not have formed. South of the fault zone, in Wollochet Bay, fir stumps are rooted in the intertidal zone, where they could never grow. Sediments in Burley Lagoon also show distinctive liquefaction features, evidence of strong ground shaking.
The earthquake pushed everything north of the Purdy Spit up to six feet higher than everything to the south.
Such clues are hard to find. Glaciers left a jumbled mess of clay and rock to serve as our topography. As I reach the upper cobble beach, where I can walk like a human again, I think of how even these upper beaches change with the seasons, their slope getting steeper in winter, the rocks pushed by waves into windrows.
Still alone, I hike past a driftwood-filled pocket marsh where crossbills are picking at something in the algae. Beyond is a depression in the upper beach. I’ve been told a homeowner scooped it out with a backhoe decades ago, apparently in an effort to trap salmon. Now it is a gravelly tide pool.
Taylor Shellfish leases its tidelands here from a family that has been here many years, raising clams and oysters. Locals say that while the crop has not changed, Taylor brought an intensification to the process—bigger tools, more manpower, the control of species considered pests—that has resulted in an observable loss of other kinds of life.
“The biodiversity is not what it could be,” said shoreline resident Bruce Morse.
At the heart of the public comment and EIS process is a lack of reconciliation between technical studies that measured the lagoon’s phytoplankton, oxygen levels, sensitivity to eutrophication, fish populations, etc. and the memories and questions of those who have lived here for decades. One indicates no harm from geoduck operations. The other sees harm accumulating all over the place. What is striking is the absence of any older studies that might provide a baseline.
Today I finally get an inkling that defining a baseline here would be like attempting to define a baseline for an ancient agricultural village, or for the South Puget Sound prairies where camas and oaks grow because of glacial outwash soils and traditional fire management. The lagoon is in constant flux. The sculpting forces range from human to tectonic.
The challenge, when thinking about aquaculture, is to trace lines of cause and effect through such unstable terrain as memory and commercial opportunity, especially when the ecosystem itself is complex and malleable enough to resist simplifications of the story. Burley Lagoon provokes those who spend time here to recognize that nature has the power to sustain a landscape of abundant life, even if that abundance is now suppressed.
Wintering ducks are in decline across much of Puget Sound. To untangle aquaculture’s impact on them from a host of impacts related to the region’s booming population and global climate change would be difficult even with the best data.
My own instinct, as a person with farming in my blood, and having seen the way geoducks are planted and harvested by liquifying sediment to the point that a man can stand waist-deep in it, is to wonder about the impact of such churning of sediment. Like the tilling of soil. What does it do to the structure of the lagoon? No studies have been done of life under the sand here. Yet as any local who harvests the occasional geoduck by shovel and sweat can tell you, there awaits as you dig a strange community of ghost shrimp and thin-shelled clams and blood-red polychaete worms.
A single island sits in the center of the lagoon. As I cautiously approach it I find it impossible not to envision the past. The heart of the island is a ring of tall shrubs around a bare spot that feels like a shared campsite, complete with bits of charcoal, matted plants, and gunnysack and cardboard and driftwood arranged into a sort of cave or altar.
The shrubs burned a few years ago thanks to a careless squatter. They are resprouting. Crabapple and serviceberry, I notice. Around the flanks are roses with big hips and yarrow and pickleweed. Food everywhere, I realize. Pairings for your shellfish harvest? Could it once have been cultivated? It now has the haunted feel of a back corner of a city park.
Going beyond the campsite grove, among the pickleweed, tiny yellow blooms of jaumea have summoned dozens of honeybees, bumblebees, and hoverflies from land. The terrain is tundra-like, with pothole pools and exposed stones among the succulent-leaved salt marsh plants. In one of the pools I find a round off-white object half-buried. A moon snail shell? I poke it. No. It is a goose’s lost egg.
The lagoon’s main channel bends around this far side of the island, creating a sweeping point of land that submerges at the highest tides. At the point, I find a chair-sized rock covered in orange lichen and white stains. Below, in the channel, are clam beds. Again I am envisioning the past. The rock commands a view of the entire lagoon. It is not hard to imagine the low-tide soundscape alive with the shouts of mucky clam-diggers.
In fact, there are similar rocks at various tidal elevations around the island, one for every situation of tide and season. Placed here? As I pass them one by one on my return journey I try several on for size and know I’m not the first to sit on them. Not by a long shot. Which is why, considering all the ink spilled and science done and arguments made lately about Burley Lagoon, the weirdness of today’s solitude is heightened.
It is a well-traveled place now silent. Radiating from this little island are staked-down skirts of predator-exclusion netting meant to protect the shellfish harvest. From the homes on shore, eyes are watching.
In a week I’ll return for high tide.
End Notes
Here is the final environmental impact statement (EIS).
Here is Friends of Burley Lagoon.
Here is Taylor Shellfish Farms.
Now that the county hearing examiner has released its decision to approve shoreline development permits for the geoduck project, the next step is review by Washington Department of Ecology, followed by a likely appeal by environmental groups.
Part Two of this exploration will be released in about a week. High time for high tide!
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Lovely to read this, thank you!
Thank you for writing this wonderful article about the estuary we live on. ❤️