LandNotes

Photo: Tore Ofteness

I love this story on Crosscut.com, a web news source covering the Pacific Northwest.  The writer, Bob Simmons, seems to have  internalized a crucial lessons in shaping narrative nonfiction: if a source tells you about a near-death experience, put it at the front of the piece.

Barbara Snow was alone in her home by the lake on that January morning. She awoke at 5 o’clock to a terrifying scraping and hammering at the sides of her house. She opened the door to her carport to see what was going on. Tons of muddy, ice-cold water rushed into the house. In moments the water was chest high and she was struggling in the darkness to get out.

“I thought I was dying,” Snow recalled last month. “I started to feel warm and at peace with everything. I began to see happy scenes from when I was a little girl.

“I thought to myself, I’ve always been late for everything, am I going to be on time for my death? For some reason this struck me as very funny, and I came to my senses.”

The year was 1983, and Snow was almost swept away after “bad logging on private and state-owned land, poorly built logging roads and a record rainstorm” on mountainous land sent ”80 acres of mud, logs and timber slash” into Whatcom Lake near Bellingham, Washington.

The havoc energized the community to protect Lake Whatcom and the surrounding hillsides. The citizen-based groups Conservation Northwest and Whatcom Land Trust organized public pressure to have the land set aside in a timber and wildlife preserve.

Twenty-six years after the Smith Creek disaster, it’s happening. Under a land transfer agreement between [Whatcom County] and the state Department of Natural Resources, the land becomes what may be the state’s largest county park: 8,400 acres of timbered hills, within easy bicycle distance of Bellingham.

There is a  lot of great detail in the piece about the land’s history and the current deal that could make it a park.  Of course, voices are raised in opposition: we can’t afford to maintain a park, we should still be able to log the land. But Simmons gives the last word to Whatcom County Administrator Dewey Desler, who takes the long view and argues for the project. 

Great stuff, and I won’t spoil the writer’s fine ending by quoting it here.

Read the story at Crosscut.com