Katie Gale: A Coast Salish Woman's Life on Oyster Bay

14. Relationships

126 14 Relationships February 2, 2011, Oyster Bay. The sun rose behind Mt. Rainier this morning. It was one of those stunning dawns when the eastern sky glows pink and red through wispy clouds and Rainier is a dark silhouette. The outdoor temperature is twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit. It’s a killing frost. My chard and collards will survive. If I stand up at my desk I can see the bay and watch the water rise and fall throughout the day. The tide is still in as I look now. It was high, sixteen feet, at close to 6:30 a.m., just an hour or so before the sun came up. If I were to put on some warm clothing, walk down the steps to the beach, and pluck my kayak out of its storage sling, I could be on the eastern shore in five minutes. I could be at the head of Oyster Bay in fifteen minutes or down bay to the site of New Kamilche and the mouth of Little Skookum within half an hour. I’m not particularly fast or athletic. It is a small bay and all of these points are easily reached by boat. The shore at low tide is also walkable. There are obstacles, sometimes, where trees have fallen from the banks. Sometimes it is necessary to skittle over a wet trunk or pick one’s way over twisted, slimy roots of cedar or madrona. It can be done. At night, after dark, I can see the lights from my neighbor’s house, the old Brenner Oyster Company plant, below me or the flicker of lamps on the tide flats in the night when someone is working on the oyster beds. Relationships 127 I live in a house built in the 1950s for Brenner employees. However, I bought my place from Nat Waldrip, a descendant of one of the early oyster growers. The first inhabitants of this little abode, people who migrated to Washington from Oklahoma, have stopped by a few times to visit the old place and talk about the trails they followed between this place and other houses on the bay. Joe Abo has similar stories about his 1950s boyhood, when most of the workers hereabouts were Japanese and Japanese Americans. Those trails were probably used when Katie Gale lived here, if not before. My son and his friends followed them as recently as the 1980s. When I first moved to Oyster Bay, my next-door neighbor lived in another Brenner house. His name was Shorty and he had a dog named Bandit. Shorty swore that a cougar roamed our woods. I was careful at night when I went out to feed my dog or lock up the chickens or bring in firewood, but I never saw one. It was raccoons that gave me trouble. And Bandit himself, with his prowling and thieving habits. My old apple trees, probably planted by homesteader M. C. Simmons, still bore fruit then but I harvested none, even after I posted my own dog under the branches of the biggest one to fend off the night raiders. Sometimes I could see as many as five pair of eyes shining down on me when I went out to check on the barking and growling of the dog below. Down bay I can see other simple structures like mine on the hill above the Olympia Oyster Company plant. That was all Gale property in the late 1800s. Farther on, if I paddle all the way to Little Skookum, I’ll be followed by seals and pass mussel floats and the Kamilche Sea Farms. As I move silently along the water, I can stop and say hello or holler out to people I know along the way. Maybe I’ll see Sally Kaufman or Charlie Stephens. Susan Christian may be out on the deck of her oyster plant home. Late nineteenth-century Indians and European Americans must have seen and talked with each other every day just the way we do now. They were on the water and tide flats most of the time, except for those Relationships 128 who were farmers. They would have hollered out as they passed each other in canoes or skiffs. They would have walked down the beach and scrambled up rough paths to the houses built above the high-tide line to visit or to borrow some sugar or buy...