“Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest. The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
--Alexander Pope
In the middle of August 2021, Nick joined me for a delightful day's paddle circumnavigating Hope Island, a gem of a state marine park not far from Deception Pass State Park. Like Deception Pass, this land, ceded to the US federal government under duress by the Swinomish Tribe in the Point Elliot Treaty of 1855, was withdrawn from entry by President Andrew Johnson on September 22, 1866 for a possible military installation. Due to the withdrawal (which was in effect until 1923, when the land was transferred to the State of Washington to be designated a State Park) there were no homestead or cash entry patents issued, and the island was left alone. Owing to this lucky circumstance, it is one of very few places in the lowlands of western Washington where old-growth forests and undisturbed grasslands flourish. In recognition of this value, it is designated as a Natural Area Preserve, the highest level of protection on state park lands, afforded to only four sites statewide.
We launched our kayaks from Snee-Oosh Beach on the Swinomish Reservation. The fun-to-say name translates from Lushootseed roughly to "beach facing west." We had checked the tidal currents in advance with the help of the Deep Zoom website with its real time data overlaid on nautical charts. As long as we kept to our timetable, we knew that the currents would provide an assist on our crossings and our counterclockwise tour around the island.
We paddled for about a half hour on choppy seas until we approached the rough shores of Hope Island and beached at a small pocket beach to bail out some of the accumulated sea water. The sharp cliffs above us afforded our first glimpse into another uniqueness of this island. The rock is serpentinite, a metamorphic rock with a fascinating provenance from tectonic plate boundaries. It is formed from rock of Earth's mantle, the 1,800 - mile - thick layer underneath our planet's crust. To form serpentinite, the rock called dunite, which is nearly pure mineral olivine with some pyroxene and chromite mixed in, is subjected to relatively low-temperature metamorphism while simultaneously absorbing large amounts of water. So much water that the volume of the rock increases 30-40% and produces heat that powers hydrothermal vents on the sea floor above it. In Hope Island's serpentinite, the olivine has largely been altered into a mesh of veinlets composed of the mineral antigorite enclosing relict cores of the original olivine. This serpentinite is part of a larger assemblage of rocks which outcrop on nearby islands and collectively make up an ophiolite sequence, a distinctive formation of sites where the sea floor has spread apart at a plate boundary, the crust was thinned and magma rose toward the surface.
There is some evidence that life on Earth might have started its advance at hydrothermal vents above forming serpentinites on the ocean floor. Specifically, the hot water expelled from the vents precipitates sulphides and calcium carbonate on contact with the iron and carbon dioxide in cold sea water and the micrometer-scale pore spaces in these precipitates are ideal niches for nascent life lacking cell membranes. Percolation of fluids through the honeycomb pore networks concentrates nucleotide molecules (the building blocks of RNA and DNA) and eventually nucleic acid chains, providing ideal conditions for life's origins.
Bailing finished, Nick and I paddled on around to the northern shores of the island and beached at the small campsite on a bench above Lang Bay. On dry land, we sought out a cross-island trail through the woods. Immediately, we found ourselves amongst towering Douglas fir and western redcedar trees of a size and maturity that are normally only found in the remotest wilderness areas of the high Cascades. The noise of powerboats on the surrounding waters faded away; the songs of birds in the canopy became dominant. But just as we were acclimatizing to the reverie of these ancient woods, the trail rounded a corner and opened onto a high grassy bluff, open save for a few madrone and juniper trees. Such a complete change of scene after only a few minutes of walking!
After a snack and a rest at the gorgeous viewpoint of islands and waterways, we returned to our kayaks and continued our circuit around the island with a few more visits to secluded beaches and a return paddle across the channel to Snee-Oosh.
I don't actually know the etymology of the island's name, but its salient features certainly inspire us toward hope. The iconic naturalist, Jane Goodall, posits that hope for all of humanity and the planet that sustains us is galvanized through storytelling.
"Hope is what enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen,
but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so." -Jane Goodall
In The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, she outlines a "cycle of hope," based on these features:
Goals: defining realistic achievements to pursue
Pathways: articulating the steps necessary to reach the goal
Confidence: belief that it is within one's ability to undertake the actions required
Support: help is available to overcome adversities that are encountered
Ms. Goodall's sense of hope for Earth and its inhabitants is bolstered by four reasons for hope:
1) The Amazing Human Intellect--people really do figure out powerful ways to make things better;
2) The Resilience of Nature--left alone or gently nurtured, nature often has an amazing capacity to restore itself;
3) The Power of Young People--every individual matters, has a role to play and makes an impact;
4) The Indomitable Human Spirit-- people deliberately tackle what seems impossible--"the difficult is hard; the impossible just a little harder."
In spite of the reactionary headwinds of this moment in history..... an unprecedented ecological emergency ["This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis" --Joe Biden] marked by obstruction to clear solutions and globe-spanning resurgences of nationalism, racism and outright military aggression.... there is a groundswell of confident humans striving toward the goal of reimagining and instituting a new, sustainable life pathway for humanity, supported by millions of engaged people.
The ultimate hope that I have, and that I hope is illuminated in my ruminations in this blog, is that the seeds of ethical relations between all of us and the world we inhabit will grow and flower, nurtured by every story told about each step toward that goal along a route discerned by the knowledge that together, we humans are endowed with the capability to see our way toward a future of dignity and respect where each person has the opportunity to flourish on a healthy planet.
And to that end, maybe we all need to take a day to paddle around Hope Island, then renew our contribution to the actions that will propel our eternal hopefulness.......
-- David
