In the Swirling Waters of Burley Lagoon
Part Two: High Tide
Like Part One: Low Tide, this exploration came out in newspaper form in autumn. 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.
Along a stretch of distant shoreline, terns are hunting. Sunstruck, they gleam brilliant white above a verge of saltmarsh and forest that is shadowed by roaming autumn clouds. Flapping hard, shaking off water as they gain altitude, the terns do not wait for their flight to steady before they fold and knife into the lagoon again. There must be fish everywhere.
My kayak drifts that way. I gaze over the side, hoping for a glimpse of a fish, and am instead riveted by the scummy planktonic bubbles that drift along with me. They are on a slightly different trajectory, my kayak’s center of mass being lower in the water. Below them, also moving at yet another angle, and faster, are the dull flashes of shells and rocks on the lagoon bottom that I struggled to walk just last month, at low tide.
It is trippy, the layers of motion that are superimposed.
In Burley Lagoon you can cover a lot of ground by timing the tides. On an incoming tide, like this one, saltwater pours through the narrow channel under the Purdy Bridge and complexly unbraids to fill the lagoon’s two-mile length and 410 acres. For a moment, all the complicated forces at work on Burley Lagoon—shellfish industry, development, fish passage projects, local environmental campaigns, fecal coliform, even a former Superfund site—pale in comparison to the swirl of the water itself.
When I arrive at the distant shoreline, the terns are gone. Tiny forage fish explode from the water like the splashes from thrown gravel. They are too small to leave ripples. A kingfisher plunge dives at a wild 45-degree angle. Just overhead an osprey floats on outstretched wings. It scans the water and does not dive. For a while we share the afternoon.
In this northwestern corner of Burley Lagoon, mud banks topped with thick grass and reeds and wild roses are scalloped with hidden coves. Occasionally a dragonfly makes a darting mission over the water, looking me straight in the eye as it comes, before it veers off to catch unseen prey. A band of sandpipers appears among reeds, silent as stones. Something startles them and they’re off. In a tight flock they careen across the wide expanse of the lagoon. Afternoon shades into evening.
Not far from here is the former Strandley-Manning Superfund site, where a shoreside business recycled electrical transformers. Part of the operation involved a 9,000-gallon railroad tank car. Transformer oil contaminated with PCBs was stored in it until it could be sold to other recyclers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shut down the business in 1984 after finding PCBs in the soil. There was a clear danger that PCBs and dioxin were leaching into the lagoon.
Seven public utilities, including Tacoma and Seattle, had used the business. They formed a voluntary cleanup group. By 2001, after a series of soil-removal projects and sediment tests onsite and in the lagoon, the site was declared clean.
Locals question the rigor of the sediment testing.
If all sources of contamination were so clearly traceable to an origin, Burley Lagoon wouldn’t be the swirl it is.
In the 1970s, high levels of fecal coliform were found in oyster-growing areas of the lagoon. Pierce and Kitsap Counties led an effort to find and fix failing septic systems at homes around the lagoon and the creeks that feed it. Many of the homes were summer cabins and may never have had a proper septic system. Fecal coliform levels have fluctuated since then, occasionally spiking. In 1999, the Washington Department of Health downgraded the lagoon’s shellfish growing areas after it found elevated fecal coliform levels. In 2018, large parts of the lagoon were downgraded again.
By then, Taylor Shellfish Farms had arrived and intensified the lagoon’s aquaculture, which sharpened the spotlight on the lagoon’s water quality.
A watershed protection district led by the state and the counties attempts to address the problem, which is really a number of problems including failing septic systems and poor management of pets and livestock, as well as general ongoing development. Look at Purdy Creek, the lagoon’s second-largest watershed. Within 500 feet of the creek mouth, a gas station is built atop the creek bed. Everything spilled at the pumps is carried by storm drains into the creek.
Though most of the lagoon’s surroundings are rural and residential, and a strong push by the watershed protection district has replaced many failing septic systems, and for now fecal coliform levels seem to be improving, the steady creep of development means that pollution is a moving target.
I cannot find a better illustration of that than the mussels planted in the lagoon by Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. They are part of a statewide effort to track toxins in the marine environment. Mussels filter a lot of water when they feed. They also lack a liver and accumulate toxins. WDFW tests the mussels for PCBs, PBDEs, organochlorine pesticides, PAHs, heavy metals, and the tire dust chemical that kills coho salmon, and are considering tests for estrogenic compounds, pharmaceutical compounds, perfluorinated compounds, and alkylphenols. We live in a wild west of chemicals of our own making.
One of the perks of the spotlight of attention on Burley Lagoon’s water and sediment has been the research it has prompted on the lagoon’s physical dynamics.
Like the flow of sediment. The lagoon has three energy zones. Where I am now, it is Burley Creek’s energy that dominates. Tidal scouring is minimal. All the fine silt carried by the creek from its ten-square-mile watershed falls out here and makes the bottom mucky and inhospitable for most shellfish. In contrast, the outer third of the lagoon is dominated by tidal energy, which sweeps fine sediments away and leaves a perfect sandy or rocky bottom for growing clams and oysters and geoducks. In between is a mixed-energy zone where tides, creeks, and wind all play a role.
Walk the Purdy Spit or the shore of the lagoon in winter and you’ll see the wind’s influence here. Driftwood of every size and shape crowds the high tide line, along with more beach trash than you’ll see anywhere else on the Key Peninsula, all of it pushed northeast to this dead-end corner of Carr Inlet by the prevailing southwest winds.
Tweak any of the lagoon’s energy sources or sources of sediment, and you could have a radically different environment. An estimated 31% of feeder bluffs around the lagoon have been armored, cutting off their contributions to the lagoon’s sediment flow.
What about eutrophication, when an enclosed body of water is loaded with fertilizer runoff and blooms algae and then suffocates? Or what about the availability of phytoplankton, the main food source for all these shellfish? Is there enough to support everything farmed as well as wild?
These questions led to studies of how water moves through the lagoon. As you might guess, it’s complicated with varying tides and streamflow and wave energy. Researchers discovered a gyre that swirls outside the lagoon’s entrance.
Yet more than 50% of the lagoon’s water is exchanged within two days in the south end and four days in the north end. That is a lot of turnover, more than enough to prevent eutrophication and circulate a fresh supply of phytoplankton. According to estimates, farmed shellfish consume less than 17% of the available food.
The subtle conveyor belt of creek water helps a lot. Burley Creek is the largest watershed feeding the lagoon. It is a constant force. Old-time loggers knew it. In the northernmost reach of the lagoon, old pilings in various states of decay stretch into the slackening water. In the 1800s they held tracks and logs were rolled straight from train cars into the lagoon, where they were rafted and floated out on the current.
In the rainy season, when roofs and storm drains and pastures are washed clean of whatever has accumulated on them, small creeks spring to life. The time when the most toxins enter the lagoon is also the time when the most fresh rainwater flushes it clean.
It is common for locals to find plastic crates, PVC pipes, and oyster bags scattered around the lagoon’s margins, bits of the shellfish operation that have been pried free by the lagoon’s swirling forces. The proposed geoduck farm would plant individual plastic sleeves by the thousands around the young geoducks. Already plastic predator exclusion nets are staked across large swaths of the lagoon’s floor.
For local activists, these are symptoms of a shellfish-growing operation that has come to treat their lagoon like industrial farmland. The rapid loss of biodiversity, they say, has been striking. One of their ongoing fears is that Taylor Shellfish may apply to spray pesticides to control competing species, as shellfish growers have done in Gray’s Harbor and Willapa Bay to kill native burrowing shrimp, or herbicides to control eelgrass.
Beyond the old pilings, I look for Burley Creek. The water here is motionless and dark. The creek reveals itself as a subtle drift of floating willow leaves.
I enter, and the creek winds through banks of asters, fireweed, goldenrod, and Pacific crabapple trees. It is early fall. There are honeybees and hoverflies, rosehips and hummingbirds. The water is silent, not a ripple, until I round a horseshoe bend and spook a salmon. Its back and tail fin flash dark gray, almost green.
For a long time I float in this secret world, immersed in fruit and flowers, letting the current spin me slowly downstream, paddling back up again.
Dusk comes. A willow leaf is under me, floating at half the speed. Another layer of flow. I’m lost in thought when it’s my turn to be spooked. Two kingfishers, barreling around the creek corners, let out a drawn-out rattle of alarm when they see me. My paddle catches an edge and I almost join the salmon in the inky water.
After that it is a long paddle back across the lagoon’s expanse. Long white clouds like furrows are reflected around me.
The strangest thing happens. I approach a floating wrack line. Sea lettuce and maple leaves and eelgrass and bubbles—even the kidney-colored body of a dead shore crab—stretch in a narrow band across the width of the lagoon. The seaweed known as Turkish towel softly scrapes my kayak’s hull as I cross the line.
Several paddle strokes later I decide to pull out my journal and make note of this feature.
With my paddle at rest, the kayak mysteriously slides to a stop. It drifts backward. The lagoon, as if sweeping itself from both ends, carries me back to the collection of floating wrack and deposits me there silently, alongside everything else, another piece of seaweed collected by the daily crosscurrents.
Endnotes
Here is the final environmental impact statement (EIS) for the proposed and recently approved geoduck farm.
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.
If you missed Part One: Low Tide, it is here.
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