Calling All Vet Techs

It was around 5 am, and I heard a lot of vague scuffling of cats out in the living room, which sounded atypical, but not quite dramatic enough to pull me entirely out of a deep sleep.  At some point, the sounds seem to have shifted to my bedroom and was coupled with the telltale squeaks of a rodent.  I sat up in the dark and grabbed my phone for a flashlight.   Two archenemies, Nutmeg and NASA were at either end of my violin case at the foot of my bed, softly growling and fishing around with front paws.  Clearly there was something back there and I had to do something about it.  First I managed to evict the two cats and close the door...  I realized I had to use the bathroom, and afterward, I managed to ooze past the eager cats with my phone light and back into the bedroom.   

I wasn't quite sure what to do, but I started by pulling the violin case out from the bed and gingerly rustling around with the edge of the blankets.  And the little critter started running up under the covers onto the foot of the bed... where both my little girls were sleeping.   I quickly blocked its further progress by pushing my phone edgewise down into the mattress in front of it, and thankfully the poor little thing just froze to the spot.  I knew I needed help, and as I was rooted in place, Anne was my best bet as she was about two feet away from me.   She sleeps quite soundly once she goes down, and she was not particularly particularly interested in my attempts to rouse her.

Suddenly I remembered the sufficiently impersonal phrase which often helps her jump into character and bypass her demand avoidance when it comes to animal-related things (a great passion of hers): "Calling all vet techs..."  She sprung out of slumber, ready for action.  In low tones, so as not to wake Laurel, I explained the situation and asked her to put a firm hand on the phone/rodent barrier while I went to the kitchen for a new pair of garden gloves I'd seen there the previous evening after Jared had been out to the hardware store.   Snuck past the cats again, twice, and handed the gloves to Anne, who eagerly installed them on her hands.  (This is not her first rodent rodeo - she has had practice saving moles and juvenile rats from NASA in the back yard on several occasions.)  

I completely encircled the sniveling lump in the bed clothes with my hands, and Anne fished around underneath with the gloves 'til she brought out a young grey rat.  She exclaimed over and over how cute he was, and we worked our way past the cats to the back door.  Anne went out into the night without a second thought and delivered the little bugger to our southern neighbor's yard, which was its likely origin.  "That one's going to grow up to be feisty!" she remarked.  "He bit the end of my glove."

Victory in place, we had celebratory drinks of water and contemplated how a rat might have made it into our house so heavily patrolled by cats.  The hypothesis was that it must have gotten under the house and come up through one of the vents of our defunct furnace, whose covers are ill-fitting and refuse to stay in place.  I adjusted the vent cover in my bedroom which was sporting sufficient room for rodent entry, but I think I had my answer when I went to adjust the kitchen vent cover and pin it down with a chair.  The cats followed me and sniffed at the vent with great anticipation...

So we will have to do something about that.  I really don't think we have a colony under the house as NASA regularly prowls around down there; so does his archnemesis in the great outdoors - Grey Kitty.  I think we just had a neighbor rat teen who was too curious for his own good and who had the best possible outcome given the cat trap he wandered into...  

Anne, thankfully, went right back to sleep,  and Laurel never stirred.

Another World is Possible

I am not sure how it all started.  The beginnings of my recent adventure stretch back to my own beginnings in a way.  More recently (a year or two ago) our family went to visit the Duwamish Long House maybe 10 miles to the north and west of our house and took a tour of the nearby archeological site there dating back a thousand or more years.  Along with our tour guide, we waved to the tribal chief as she pulled out of the lot in her car to go home.  Afterwards, or before, (I can't remember) I found a book in the county library system, partly in Lushootseed (the local language) and partly in English, sharing recollections of a few elderly Duwamish people; it was written many decades ago.

More recently still, I found a book at the Renton Highlands branch called Renton: Where the Water Took Wing.  I opened it and read part of the first chapter while I was waiting for the kids to finish on the library computers and discovered that only four miles distant there had been excavated an archeological site: a village dating to the 4th century CE!!!!!!!  The place was referred to Tualdad Altu, and there was a specific published report about the excavations there in 1980, shortly after the property, a golf course and country club since 1894, was bought by developers with plans to build an industrial complex.  I walked right back over to the card catalogue (computerized, these days, of course) and discovered said report was in the system in book form.  I felt like a secret agent requesting this neglected document from Central Storage.  It came in a week or two later.

I read about the beauty of what we now call Renton: the riparian forest and the rivers filled with migrating fish and waterfowl, the rich wetlands along the lake and the abundance of life everywhere one turned, the nearby teeming tide flats, the many winter villages of families - tied together by marriage and trade and specialized skills, and the summers spent camping and foraging. I am left in tears at the memory of what I can never have seen and the affront on nature in the glories of industry and the pollution which is the new normal.

I determined I would find the Tualdad Altu site, now covered over by a giant corporate park.  I breathlessly compared maps and descriptions in the book with Google maps, both in topographical mode and in satellite mode, and Tuesday of Spring Break I went crashing off through the mixed winter precipitation to find the place....  If any other locals want to view what I am pretty sure was the site excavated, you will want to pull into the lot of DH Pace Washington, supplier of garage doors, on SW 7th Street near the intersection with Thomas Avenue, park in back (ignoring the strange looks of employees parking company work vans,) and walk up the abandoned train tracks toward the fork in the line.  If you stop there and look back into the infestation of Himalayan blackberry vines and trash near the No Dumping sign, I think that's it.  Shouldn't there at least be an historical marker for one of the oldest villages discovered in the state????

Tualdad Altu, used for several decades in the 4th century was on the broad flood plain of the Black River in an area which, only a few thousand years before had been near a fjord, filled in by a giant eruption of Tahoma (the volcano renamed Mt. Rainier by the whites.)  The people living at Tualdad Altu could be identified today with the Duwamish. (By the way, despite treaties with the government and visits to Washington, D.C. for decades, the Duwamish are still not federally recognized.) Prior to the incursion of the white people, it is believed that the local folks identified with the waterway by which they lived, easily marrying into other waterways and creating vast networks of family and commerce across region and "tribe." It was apparently understood that the Duwamish, the Black, and the Cedar Rivers were all one large stream with a short diversion into Lake Washington, a waterway known as the Duw.

There are still some brackish waters in parts of the old Black River channel, housed in a Renton City Park called Black River Riperian Wetland and Forest.  I wanted to see this on my field trip, but I did not get as far as I hoped due to lack of parking, online reviews of security concerns, and the eractic behavior of an individual in the only tiny parking lot I could find.  I ended up parking in a semi-private lot in Tukwila with access to a hike and bike trail system where I could walk up the Duwamish and along the last bit of the Black, as far as the pump station, a giant facility which keeps all these heavily managed waterways from flooding.  I would like to venture further past the plumbers union and the sewage plant and the concrete recycler and the kidney dialysis center into the remains of this once-paradise, but I will want to take another adult or a medium-to-large dog with me.

After a lot of politicking and efforts by white immigrants to make a haven for heavy industry, canals were dug between Lake Washington and other lakes in the north of Seattle, suddenly shifting the lake's natural drainage to the ocean from the Duw to this newly manufactured waterway in 1916.  I remember reading the elderly Duwamish man's recollection of standing by the Black River, his family's home for untold generations, with his canoe, watching the water recede and trickle to a stop, while the white people showing up with gunnysacks, gleeful collecting the suffocating fish. The Cedar River was diverted into the lake from its natural outlet into the Black River, but somehow the salmon still find their way up each autumn. 

I usually feel unimpressed by graffiti, but this message scrawled on a bridge over the Black River drainage just downstream of the 1970 pump station spoke to me:

Origins

Lately Laurel has been curious about where she came from.  Lazarus has mostly not cared, but when Anne was Laurel's age, she had already pored over books of medical drawings and had a pretty clear understanding of pregnancy. 

So recently, Laurel told me a rather involved story about how she used to live with her Aunt and Uncle, but decided she really wanted to live with Mommy and Daddy, so Aunt and Uncle drove her to us and dropped her off.  Then she asked how she decided live with us, and seemed sort of non-plussed when I reported we had made that decision for her.  By way of explanation I told her again the story of the night she was born. 

I also recounted to her how when Lazarus was two or three I asked him if he remembered the time before we had Laurel, (which he confirmed); I asked him if he remembered where Laurel came from, and he answered that we had ordered her from a "mazagine." He and I crack up over the "mazagine" ordering process from time to time, and I think Laurel sort of believed the scenario...

Yesterday I showed her some books we had floating around about pregnancy, and she was a little confused as to why the adults had windows on their bodies, so that everyone could view the babies. Hopefully, my explanation related to cartooning was adequate.   She pointedly asked if she had grown inside me, and if Lazarus had grown inside me, and if Anne had grown inside me.  I have told her all that before, but the cartoons might have been the evidence she needed to finally believe such an outlandish story.  

This morning at breakfast, she asked to confirm that babies grow inside moms and dads, and I clarified that it would typically be moms, as the body part which makes the safe house for the baby is usually found there.  Told her again that although babies do grow inside a mom, they may live with someone else after they are born.  I think she is feeling some clarity now... ?

Or maybe that was the origin of her story that she got tired of the other relatives when she was a baby and asked for a ride to our place.   It's confusing sometimes being the youngest.