is the thing you supposedly do at iconic and touristy Pike Place market in Seattle.
Always a go-to for foodies, this year it also drew tree people attending the Partners in Community Forestry/Society of Municipal Arborists conference, one of the main annual gatherings for the industry. I wandered down to the market while waiting for events to get underway and found a lot that got my juices flowing. First the coolest non-fish eatery downtown, Biscuit Bitch.
Take out a sausage-egg biscuit to a picnic table overlooking Puget Sound and you will have many darling starling friends.
The weather is perfect.
Who said it rains in Seattle? Not on my parade it doesn’t. Everything is fresh, fresh, fresh.
I want to cook!
There are indeed people throwing salmon around, though luckily not in my direction.
Salmon everywhere here.
Of historical interest here, the original Starbucks with an eternally long line. It all started here, for better or for worse. A logo to become better known than Coca Cola.
Eat enough at Pike Place and you will begin to resemble one of the bronze beasts stationed around the market.
I’m pretty sure that these macarons are the best in the world.
Wild strawberry and passion fruit, thank you much.
Somebody’s got my number. I was born in ’57.
Tree people share a language, concerns, enthusiasm. Of course I like hearing about making vacant lots into permanent urban forests in Syracuse, as described by the city’s brainy forester. Especially important in low-canopy, low-equity neighborhoods. Pretty cool to hear about the Urban Food Forest Project, also in Syracuse, which features persimmon, paw paw, ramps, hickory and currants.
In the typical airless hotel conference room we hear about wonderful green vistas in Washington, DC: adding tree boxes to the rights of way, where you will also find a road diet, in other words shrinking the dimensions of a street and adding medians to make them safer and increase canopy cover. Canopy, canopy, canopy! Other terminology that would be arcane elsewhere is instantly understood here: ground-based Lidar, green infrastructure, utility conflicts, community engagement, eco-ambassadors, bump-outs. Climate-ready tree-planting palettes. Did I hear that right? Most important, in terms of a takeaway, questions about the pipeline, in other words the future generation of urban forestry. The time for trees is now. Rock star urban forester Beattra Wilson, a big shot at the U.S. Forest Service, exhorted her audience to continue with successess in diversification to better reflect the population. Advocacy is for everyone.
But I keep coming back to salmon. Not the hokey salmon toss in the market. Something tree conferences do well is take participants on tours of the area that highlight shared interests. So we set out by bus to check out bioswales altering the topography of a street in the suburbs, which was cool. Beautiful Pacific Sunset maples, a cultivar first developed in the early ‘90s.
Even cooler was Part 2 of the tour, a stop at a waterfront park, where a city naturalist explained the steps being taken to restore the local salmon population.
Micronutrients that are usually found deep in the ocean have been discovered at the tops of the trees here, a result of the salmon entering the rivers after their years in the Pacific. We’re all connected. We observed chum salmon making their way up a shallow steam to spawn, hauling themselves, thrashing, really almost crawling.
Dozens of them, something I’ve never seen before aside from in nature flicks. Their efforts so moving. As a colleague said, watching their massive struggle, I can’t help but think about my own life. The naturalist showed us one old grandaddy after his struggle was over.
“We need the tonic of wildness,” said Thoreau. “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
As much as we try to deal with tree issues, as professionals and as a society, that mystery is paramount. Watch the spawning salmon and you will know it.
Jean Zimmerman 