The Kah Tai Valley, between the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Port Townsend Bay, once consisted of open prairies and estuaries. Development quickly transformed this landscape; however, due to benign neglect of a small area within Port Townsend Golf Course, a colorful relic of the last ice age still remains.
From the words of a native son of Port Townsend pioneers, James McCurdy, the valley once was a botanical delight: “Myriads of wild flowers transformed the valley floor into a many-hued carpet.”
— Washington Native Plant Society
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On a shortcut across the Port Townsend Golf Course, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a remarkable patch of wild flowers. They included some of the same diminutive species I had seen growing in the alpine meadows of the Olympic Mountains. I had seen none of these wildflowers anywhere else in town and wondered how they happened to be so abundant in this one place.
It felt like a secret garden that had fallen into neglect and ruin. The person who had once tended to the wildflowers was no longer with us. I took one last look, said my thanks and continued on my merry way.
Two weeks later I met Gerry Bergstrom, a local native plant enthusiast and member of the Washington Native Plant Society (WNPS). I asked Gerry about the wildflowers at the Golf Course. She had never seen them. Once she had, Gerry was equally curious about how they got there.
She contacted Nelsa Buckingham, one of the founding members of WNPS, who confirmed our suspicion that these were no ordinary wildflowers. They were a remnant of the northwest prairies that once dominated the regional landscape during the interglacial Ice Ages’ warm spells back when the mastodons and giant ground sloths roamed the prairies, and the skies were cloudy all day.
When the intermittent outbreaks of global warming became sufficient, shrubs and trees would start to squeeze out the prairies. The wildflowers and their grassy companions would hightail it back up to the mountains above the treeline.
With all their moving around, the northwest prairies adapted to a wide variety of conditions, but they never figured how to out-compete the trees and shrubs except in places that were especially rocky, wet or dry. When the Ice Ages ended, the northwest prairies were saved from extinction by the early northwesterners who kept the trees and shrubs at bay by their persistent burning of the grasslands.
These early North American pyromaniacs preferred the prairies over the magnificent old growth forest that swallowed up most of the land. In the grasslands a person could stretch out in the sun in the open park-like place. The grasslands provided better browse for game. They were where the locals grew their camas lilies, the staple vegetable crop of the region and the second most important trade item in the Northwest after smoked salmon. The bulbs were slow-baked in pits for a day and half until golden brown, then pounded into cakes.
From start to finish there was an art to making camas sweet cakes. A fire was started in the pit. At just the right time the fire was damped down with wet leaves and the bulbs were layered on top. Sometimes, herbs like lomatium root were added to the mix. The bulbs were covered with more wet leaves and wood. The pit was sealed with a layer of soil. The fire had to be carefully tended to damp out smoke spouts lest the bulbs become scorched. Other seasonings could be mixed in during the pounding of the cakes.
Our prairie remnant at Kah Tai Prairie Preserve is on a hilltop, not the best place to grow your favorite food crop. The lushest bulbs grew in rich, moist soils of the valley bottoms. Like everyone else the S’Klallam grew their staple crop in the wetland floodplain prairies. These wetland prairies were the first places settled by the agriculturalists who immigrated from Europe and Asia. They drained and filled the wet spots and soon erased all traces of the wetland prairie gardens. Tacoma, Seattle and Olympia were among the important sites of camas cultivation.
One Hundred Years of Neglect
Thanks to the efforts of our local chapter of the Native Plant Society, the prairie remnant at the golf course looks much better than it did when I first stumbled upon it. Back then, there was a ditch ripped through the middle of it; wild roses and the non-native grasses were crowding their way in. The wildflower patch appeared unkempt, unloved and run down. It’s not surprising that Nelsa Buckingham decided that the prairie remnant survived the management of the golf course by pure happenstance and benign neglect.
When the Kah Tai Prairie Preserve was inaugurated, it touched off a small brush fire war in the environmental battles of the time. Some of the older golfers claimed that it was Mark and Ann Welch’s grandfather George who planted the wildflowers at the golf course.
In the 1920’s there were no paved roads into the Olympic Mountains, and only the more adventurous souls made it into the remote areas of the future park. Among these adventurous souls were George and Lillian Welch.
Local environmentalists claimed that George and his buddies were the ones who brought the goats into what would later become the Olympic National Park. Try this for yourself sometime — bring up the folks who put the goats in the park with your environmentalist friends and wait for the spit to hit the fan.
We had better stuff to fight about back then, so the controversy was quickly forgotten with the opening of Prairie Preserve.
Anyone who has had experience with the various wildflower mixtures and herbal lawn recipes will realize how far fetched is the idea that George Welch or anyone else could have created a native prairie from scratch by bringing wildflowers down from the mountains.
On the other hand, I was skeptical that the prairie remnant could have survived for nearly a hundred years of neglect. Without burning, intense grazing or regular mowing it takes about twenty to thirty years for grasslands in the Kah Tai Valley to be replaced by wild roses, snowberries, oceanspray and oregon grape.
The golf course faced even greater challenges than the S’Klallam people in maintaining the prairie remnant. The plants that came over with the European settlers and the Asian sojourners tend to outcompete the Northwest native prairie plants. As the prairie remnant got smaller and more isolated it became more susceptible to competition from the non-native grasses and weeds, especially around the edges.
According to one Oregon State University Extension Service lawn and turf specialist, no matter what seed you plant, what kind of turf you roll out, no matter how well you take care of your lawn… in seven years it will revert to the same pasture and vacant lot grasses threatening to invade the prairie remnant at the golf course.
It would have taken some seriously potent benign neglect for the prairie remnant at the golf course to have survived for all that time.
Mr. Whiskers and the Golden Paintbrush
There was one plant growing in the prairie remnant that seemed a possible candidate to have made that trip down from the Olympics in George Welch’s rucksack. Geum triflorum or Old Man’s Whiskers is supposedly rare in lowland prairies. It behaved differently from its neighbors in the Prairie Preserve. While most of the other plants were dispersed throughout the prairie site, Mr. Whiskers was growing in clumps in a few places and appeared to propagate mostly vegetatively rather than by seed. If George helped put the goats in the Olympic Mountains, it didn’t seem so far fetched that he might have planted a few of his mountain favorites in the prairie remnant at the golf course.
Messing with mother nature is a very human trait. When the Makah tribe discovered the South American potato, they planted it in their prairies. The result of the tribe’s years of potato cultivation is the Ozette potato, an heirloom variety that is still grown in the Pacific Northwest.
Likewise in 2004 the Native Plant Society planted the seeds of the Golden Paintbrush, a rare and endangered species, in the Prairie Preserve.
Meanwhile: What about the Goats?
The internet is riddled with stories of the goats ravaging the Olympic alpine meadows and dramatic videos of helicopters airlifting them out of the park.
But it doesn’t have much about how they got there in the first place, other than an obscure 2009 interview in the Peninsula Daily News with Mary Ann DeLong and Ann Welch, “both fourth-generation descendants of pioneer Olympic Peninsula families”:
“My granddad [Jack Pike] was the Clallam County game warden who supervised the release of mountain goats in the Olympics in 1925,” DeLong said. [Ann Welch’s great-uncle Van Welch] “was game warden in 1929 when the second group of goats was released.” …
Ann’s grandfather, George Welch, was also present at one of the goat releases…
Both women said that while their ancestors often are blamed for introducing the goats into the Olympics, they were only carrying out instructions — others, including the Clallam County Game Commission and the U.S. Forest Service, made the decision to import them from the Canadian Selkirks and Alaska, they said.
“It was a time before they understood the devastation that a non-native species could cause,” Ann Welch said. “They thought the goats would look cool.”
Jack Pike, pictured in the photograph as a dark-haired man with a black mustache, was an avid hunter and fisherman who campaigned against the damming of the Elwha River because it would ruin the fish runs, DeLong said.
Her grandfather was also known as the game warden with a heart, she said, because he would look the other way if he came across a deer taken illegally by a man who had a family to feed.
George Welch’s early photographs of the mountains were one of the ways proponents of an Olympic National Park brought the Olympics to the attention of the average person.
The goats were another effort to draw attention. Not only would they “look cool,” they would attract the interest of hunters. In fact it was the Great White Hunter, Teddy “Bull Moose” Roosevelt who established our first national parks.
In 1937 Teddy visited the Olympic Mountains, and in 1938 Franklin Roosevelt established the Olympic National Park. Hopefully Teddy snagged an Olympic mountain goat along with a rack of Olympic bull elk antlers for his collection.
When the Olympic National Park was established, hunting was outlawed. Without predators to keep the population in check, the goats went on to become a real problem in the park.
Besides chewing the alpine meadows and rockeries down to the nubbins, they treated hikers like walking salt shakers and sometimes became aggressive in their pursuit of a scarce resource. In any case the experiment failed and the goats are now in the final phases of culling and relocation.
It seems a harsh judgment when two generations later, granddaughters feel they must apologize for an experiment done by forebears with good intentions and the understanding of the time.
Lillian and George’s Wildflower Garden
Ann says that the family believes that it was her grandmother Lillian who took care of the wildflowers at the golf course. In the seventies when Ann worked there, they still burned the prairie remnant every year, just like their S’Klallam predecessors.
It’s time to set aside the foolish notion of benign neglect, an idea that reflects an environmental ethos that nature is better off left to itself, free from human intervention. Our Northwest prairies represent an ecosystem that depends on the human touch for their continued existence.
We should honor Lillian and George Welch for their efforts in preserving the prairie remnant at the Port Townsend Golf Course.
“There are two ways of being happy:
We may either diminish our wants or augment our means — either will do — the result is the same; and it is for each man to decide for himself, and do that which happens to be the easiest.
If you are idle or sick or poor, however hard it may be to diminish your wants, it will be harder to augment your means.
If you are active and prosperous or young and in good health, it may be easier for you to augment your means than to diminish your wants.
But if you are wise, you will do both at the same time, young or old, rich or poor, sick or well; and if you are very wise you will do both in such a way as to augment the general happiness of society.”
— Benjamin Franklin
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Once Port Townsend was a City of Dreams, a place of great opportunity for resourceful and creative young folks with big dreams and lean wallets. Right next to the nicest house in town you might find a ramshackle tract house with an unmowed lawn and a junker car rusting in the blackberries. There were plenty of empty rooms, sheds, garages, and places to park a trailer or pitch a tent. There wasn’t a lot of cash circulating around town, so the owners of these nooks and crannies welcomed a little help with the rent, some fixing up, or maybe just the opportunity to have someone around to talk to.
Of course most of these low budget, do-it-yourself housing solutions did not meet all of the requirements of the Uniform Building Code, Health Department Standards or Fish and Wildlife Guidelines. Survival in these situations depended on the goodwill of neighbors and the willingness of local officials to sometimes look the other way.
These low-rent situations were a godsend to folks in need, whether temporary or terminal, and a refuge for artists, musicians, New Age visitors from the beyond, tree planters, driveway auto mechanics, writers, do-gooders, jugglers, back-to-the-land, off-the-grid, hippy libertarians, zen monks, single mothers, organic gardeners and many others with aspirations too numerous to list who chose to diminish their wants in order to live out their dreams.
In Ben Franklin’s America, the pursuit of happiness replaces property as a foundational value. The wealth of the nation is measured by the happiness of the people rather than by land values and the accumulation of possessions.
Hard Times Kept PT Real
One of the best economic indicators of the times was the Food Co-op. Even in the early eighties on a typical weekday the Co-op might only net sixty-five dollars in sales. On the weekends receipts were usually over one hundred dollars. All of the labor was done by volunteers so that the prices could be kept low. Lots of folks depended on the low prices, especially single moms who could get the Co-op worker’s discount by babysitting for another mother while she worked at the store.
The food selection was pretty basic, lots of bulk foods and so not much produce. The organic growers were still sussing things out, so some of the produce in the coolers was wilted and disfigured. Co-op shoppers who didn’t know better often assumed that was how organic produce was supposed to be. There were times when the store would be out of basics like milk or bread, but there was always rice and beans and folks made do.
The winter’s winds and rains kept Port Townsend real. Most of the Victorian houses were in various states of disrepair, hard to heat and rented by the room. In winter the kitchens were curtained off with blankets and the housemates gathered around the wood stoves until it was time to trip upstairs to cold rooms to sleep in long johns under piles of blankets. The sheds and garages could be damp places in which to camp on wet winter nights.
After a day’s work it could feel too much effort to start a fire and better to go visiting instead, especially around dinner time. When the arctic winds whipped through the Port tossing boats every which way, a boat jockey might head to the Town Tavern and nurse a cheap beer or two into the wee hours of the night.
The Boomers Come to Town
America lacks generational continuity — our young people tend to graduate and get out of dodge as quickly as possible. In the seventies and early eighties, swarms of young people wandered up and down the West Coast looking for a place to land. Port Townsend had all of the essential amenities: lots of young folks, a sufficient number of tolerant townspeople, cheap food at the local co-op, cheap places to sleep and sometimes someone warm to share the night with.
It was an easy place to visit, but a hard place to stay. The regional economy was hard hit by the decline in jobs as the logging and fishing industries slowly went bust.In the dark of winter when the tourist dollars quit rolling around town there was never quite enough money to keep everyone working. Folks made do, worked for less than prevailing wages, rented out rooms at less than market value, helped each other out when they could.
The sixties didn’t arrive in most of America until the seventies. Along with the peace, love and rock and roll came the drugs, sex and rock and roll. As long as the young folks kept things on the down low, the town’s live and let live attitude prevailed. If things got “too messy”, “too loud” or there were “too many comings and goings at all hours”, the police would get a call and come restore the peace — usually without hauling anyone off to jail.
Dens of Iniquity and Community
Danny Yesberger’s place is probably the most famous of the seventies’ party houses. Back in the day his house was considered out in the country even though it is off San Juan not far from the golf course. It was a funky, yet charming A-frame, with rustic outbuildings and a natural amphitheater out back where local musicians played.
Danny’s house was also one of the early group houses. He shared the rooms in his house and his outbuildings with other young folks, some of whom had nowhere else to go. One of the most beautiful sights in his neighborhood was when Danny’s horses would break loose from their pasture, and five or six of them would race down San Juan Avenue as if there was no tomorrow.
The Town Tavern was more than just the den of iniquity it was sometimes made out to be. A group of psychology students from Oregon State founded the Tavern as a place to experiment in communal living. Community members worked twenty hours a week tending the bar and serving food in the deli in exchange for beer and room and board.
It was a sometimes dysfunctional family with a commitment to serving the community at large. The Tavern’s deli served an Everything Sandwich and a bowl of soup that made a substantial meal at an affordable price. The Tavern Co-op members tended to their share of the town’s drunks and had a couch upstairs for people with nowhere left to go. They kept the big old stoves in the tavern and deli cranking hot. They kept the beer flowing and the good times rolling, especially when the region’s best bands came to town.
In hindsight, free beer and rock & roll were not the healthiest long-term lifestyle choice, so it is not surprising that the Town Tavern experiment eventually ended.
Local Low-Rent Entrepreneurs
At best, Port Townsend’s low-rent entrepreneurs operated in a quasi-legal gray zone. Their lives were cluttered with midnight water heater floods, backed-up sewer pipes, leaky roofs, late rent checks, truckloads of left-behinds to haul away, doors coming unhinged… as they struggled to maintain the balance between things falling apart and things getting fixed up. There was always a fine line between the benevolent low-rent entrepreneur and the slum lord. In a matter of months renting to the wrong person could quickly turn a tolerably nice rental situation into a slum.
Fred “The Head” Epstein became a master of the art of dumpster diving. He distributed his ill gotten hoard of past-the-pull-date foods to friends and neighbors. Anyone who has never peeked into a dumpster would be surprised and appalled at the treasure trove of goods consigned to the local landfill.
There’s a magic to diving beneath the floor sweepings and rotting lettuce down to where the good stuff lies. It’s not enough to lean into the dumpster to fish things out — true dumpster divers go all in. Fred would surface from the dumpster with the most wonderful assortment of food that was perfectly good once you wiped away the sour milk and floor sweepings.
His friends and neighbors might be gifted with two dented cans of tuna, a loaf of bread, six quarts of yogurt and twenty pounds of mint-flavored chocolate where someone got careless with the mint extract. Fred’s friends would eat the tuna and find five other yogurt-eating friends. The mint-flavored chocolate would pass from house to house until it ended up in a two-gallon bucket on the other side of town where it sat for five years.
Fred’s dumpster diving career was cut short when the Port Townsend Safeway decided to protect Fred from himself by asserting its right to throw away perfectly good food. The mint-flavored chocolate finally went to the chickens who turned up their beaks at it.
Besides being a predecessor to the local Food Bank, Fred went on to become a Port Commissioner and one of the innovators in the low rent, do-it-yourself housing solutions. His two-story houseboat was one of the area’s most famous land yachts. He openly bragged about how he got around the building codes by planting his house on top of an old boat hull. It’s no wonder he got caught dumpster diving — Fred had his own ideas about how things should be and never hesitated to tell anyone what he thought.
Jan Anderson was a little man with a big heart. With his little trailer he moved big boats and put them in places where no one else could go. Whenever he got stuck in an impossible situation he would unhitch his trailer, go home, have a drink of wine and think his way through the next move. As for insurance, he would tell you, “The day I drop a boat that’s the last day I work. That’s your insurance.” He was the boat mover that working people could afford. Without Jan many boats would never have made into the water or to their final resting place.
Jan was also the founder of the Funky Boatyard. He rented property from the Port and sublet it to small businesses which otherwise would not have had access to space at the Port. He also had property with affordable rentals. In his later years he had the misfortune to attract meth addicts to his property. These were good people until they became afflicted with meth. Their souls turned black and they were no longer safe to have around. As the drugs have become more toxic, the risks of sharing your good fortune with others have become greater.
Bird on a Wire
There was no one quite like Niels Holm. He managed his brother’s property, which included the Ace of Cups, the old Food Co-op and Puffin Shoe Repair. Along with Aldrich’s and the library, these businesses formed the heart of the Uptown District. In the pre-internet days a lot of business and socialization took place in these establishments or out on the street where folks loitered drinking coffee.
Niels’ Zendo House was probably the most famous and sometimes infamous of the group households. In the front of the house was an austere meditation room with an adjoining tea room. The walls were lined with straw mat-covered benches with a narrow aisle in between. The meditators sat on extra-firm zafu pillows. With Niels, meditation was a serious business — not some groovy, lackadaisical, New Age experience. He had genuine Buddhist credentials. He was a personal assistant to Suzuki Roshi at Green Gulch Meditation Center.
When he was young, Niels traveled across India in a loin cloth with a begging bowl. He had a fabulous time. Everywhere he went people wanted to take him home and feed him. They had never seen a white sadhu before.
The hardest part of his trip was that he got fat from all the food. “When I got the other side of India I went to the port to ship out. The guys on the ship didn’t know what to think when they saw some long haired guy in a loin cloth come walking up the plank.”
Niels felt that houses built to code lacked character. He used to say to anyone who would listen, “I can’t build that way. Those houses are all the same, they have no soul. You know soul like the black musicians say, when someone has put everything they have into a song.”
He had a pet crow named Woody. Niels would get into his truck and drive the three blocks from his house to Lawrence Street, where he would wait on the street for Woody to “appear out of nowhere” and land on his shoulder. He loved to impress the innocent bystanders loitering on the street.
Woody’s devotion to Niels became a problem when the jealous crow started attacking Niels’ wife every time she tried to get close him. One day Woody would no longer put up with Niels’ attention to his wife and flew away.
Now and then, even years later, Niels would see a crow up in a tree or on a telephone wire and wonder if it was Woody.
Today’s Stories Are Not Yet Told
It is fine to reminisce about the times when Port Townsend was a place of greater opportunity, but what about now?
Housing costs have soared out of reach, rentals are nearly nonexistent, the sheds have been converted to bed and breakfasts, more requirements have been added to the building codes and city ordinances, and we seem to be plagued with a rash of emergency pandemic restrictions that never quite go away. Has happiness become as hard to catch and hold as the crow up in the tree?
It may seem that way because of the quasi-legal nature of do-it-yourself affordable housing. No one who cares will talk about it lest their friends or neighbors lose their right to a place to live.
Someday, the people who are out there catching happiness for themselves will tell their stories about today.
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“The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness.
You have to catch it for yourself. ”
— Benjamin Franklin
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Top Photos:
Niels Holm in foreground at left works on one of his unconventional and soulful creations.
At right is the finished structure.
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The grasslands provided better browse for game. They were where the locals grew their camas lilies, the staple vegetable crop of the region and the second most important trade item in the Northwest after smoked salmon. The bulbs were slow-baked in pits for a day and half until golden brown, then pounded into cakes.
In the 1920’s there were no paved roads into the Olympic Mountains, and only the more adventurous souls made it into the remote areas of the future park. Among these adventurous souls were George and Lillian Welch.
It behaved differently from its neighbors in the Prairie Preserve. While most of the other plants were dispersed throughout the prairie site, Mr. Whiskers was growing in clumps in a few places and appeared to propagate mostly vegetatively rather than by seed. If George helped put the goats in the Olympic Mountains, it didn’t seem so far fetched that he might have planted a few of his mountain favorites in the prairie remnant at the golf course.
Likewise in 2004 the Native Plant Society planted the seeds of the Golden Paintbrush, a rare and endangered species, in the Prairie Preserve.
These low-rent situations were a godsend to folks in need, whether temporary or terminal, and a refuge for artists, musicians, New Age visitors from the beyond, tree planters, driveway auto mechanics, writers, do-gooders, jugglers, back-to-the-land, off-the-grid, hippy libertarians, zen monks, single mothers, organic gardeners and many others with aspirations too numerous to list who chose to diminish their wants in order to live out their dreams.
Community members worked twenty hours a week tending the bar and serving food in the deli in exchange for beer and room and board.
Niels felt that houses built to code lacked character. He used to say to anyone who would listen, “I can’t build that way. Those houses are all the same, they have no soul. You know soul like the black musicians say, when someone has put everything they have into a song.”