The promise of “Safe Return” meets a future shaped by human damage.
Ed.: The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of Salish Current.
Bellingham’s Zuanich Point Park is a pleasant place. People walk their dogs on the paved, even trails, and kids zip by on scooters. There’s often a breeze, so people come to the park to fly kites, sometimes large, impressive, multi-colored kites that weave and swoop.
You’ll also find a statue of fisherman holding a coil of rope at the park. Titled “Safe Return,” the statue is meant to commemorate the fishermen who have lost their lives over the decades. Below the statue, you’ll see metal plaques showing scenes from nautical life, and, on the granite pedestal, names of lost fishermen, organized by year.
This is not great art, but it is serious, well-intended and appropriate for a park that is part of Squalicum Marina, which houses over 1,000 boats. These range from small pleasure craft to charter boats, as well as commercial fishing boats that face the very risks of wave and weather that have been killing fishermen for decades — centuries, even, considering Indigenous fishermen who predate modern commercial vessels.
For me, “Safe Return” is usually just a marker on my walks. It might be translated as “Oh, I’m at the guy with the rope. I’ll be back to my car in about 20 minutes.” The other day, though, I stopped and really looked at the statue. I read the signs on it, and that got me thinking about other signs I’ve seen recently.
For example, Little Squalicum Park is not far from Zuanich Point Park — just over a mile. There’s a sign at the park warning people about the dangerously high levels of microorganisms in the water. Here’s the beach at the edge of the dog park — but you really shouldn’t let your dog swim.
I live in the Geneva area of Bellingham, about a mile and a half beyond the entrance to Whatcom Falls Park. Lakeway is the main road heading out toward Sudden Valley or in toward downtown, and there are a few core cross streets. One of them is Woburn Street, which becomes Yew south of Lakeway and Hannegan north of Sunset. In December, large stretches of this road, which I take daily, were closed. Heavy rains opened a sinkhole, and if you went as far north as Hannegan, the edges of the road looked like they’d been snacked on. In other words, parts of my town were closed or gone.
It wasn’t the only area that got hit. A couple months ago, Interstate-5 North was shut down for a few miles, because heavy rains had caused rockslides. The signs were clearly marked, and the Department of Transportation repair crews worked hard and steadily to open the freeway again.
I could go on — floods washed some houses farther out in the county completely off their foundations, for example — but I’ll pause with this list for now and bring our journey back to “Safe Return.”
The fishermen who went to sea took tremendous risks, and the monument records the names of those we know lost their lives while fishing. However, these new signs mark a different kind of threat, a threat that is trickier and more pervasive. Roads collapsing from below (Woburn), freeways being blocked by rockslides (I-5) and beaches that shouldn’t be used due to contamination (Little Squalicum) are all examples of human civilization being out of synch with the natural world. More specifically, they are examples of human civilization damaging and distorting that world.
The climate is changing, and it is changing because of human action. One of those changes is heavier rains, rains that ate one road from below and covered another with rocks the size of school buses. Another change is increases in both algae blooms and more bacteria in the water. A third change is that warmer oceans are driving fish to become smaller and fewer in number and variety. A fourth is that sea levels are rising, globally and here in Washington.
We have changed the world, and are changing the world, and we have not yet changed in a way that fundamentally acknowledges those facts. Instead, we plunge on, like those dogs chasing tennis balls into tainted waters, and act as if the world is not changing in deadly ways around us.
Our practices were developed for the world we knew, and that world is fading and changing. There will come a time when no new names are added to “Safe Return,” not because we’ve become so good at fishing that we can harvest the seas without loss. There will be no new names added because the fish are gone, the waves cover Zuanich Point Park and the roads we took to get there have crumbled away. There will be no “Safe Return,” and no safe return.
Unless.
—By Greg Beatty
Greg Beatty lives in Bellingham. He writes everything from jokes about cows to essays on cooking disasters and has more dog friends than human friends. He blogs about picture books at It’s a Picture Book World.