Êsâoêfe- a
A certain small but vocal number o f my readeis have been
lobbying for a piece on rais Against my belter judgment and
notions o f decorum, I'll scratch off a few anecdotes and true
life experiences, some "Rat Tales from Cannon Beach," if
you will.
Amongst tlie general population, few creatures conjure the
revulsion and disgust, the mythic and macabre loathing,
generated by Rattus rattus, Rattus norvegicus and their
whiskery, beady kin. Mumau’s German vampire film
"Nosferatu" links the appearance o f plague rats with the
vampire phenomenon in Europe, "Ratsy Rizzo" of
"Midnight Cowboy," sinister animated charcters in Walt
Disney's movies, and Conan Doyle's "the Giant Rat of
Sumatra," all play on a deep. Jungian archetypal squirm
regarding rats that lurks in our collective psyches. The
narrator in Gunter Grass's The Rat is. indeed, a rat. He
catalogs the long history o f rat peisecution. Trapped, shot,
poisoned, maligned in every conceivable manner, the rat
considers his species’ circumstance to be analagous to that o f
the Jews. Something etched and embedded in our being
winces and shiveis at ratness^Here, then, are a few tales
from The Edge designed to promulgate that special rat
queasiness and disgust we seem to crave and celebrate in
movies, literature, and song.
My career in the trades lias provided ample exposure to
rats and rat ordure. Rip a ceiling down from some aged
beach house and you'll confront a cascade o f dessicated rat
cack. We've coined the term "ratsulation" for the blend of
house insulation and rat guano that plummets into your lace
when a ceiling is removed. Inevitable tangles with rats, rat
spoor, mumnufied rat carcasses, and rat feces are the
common lot o f remodel carpenters. When we encountered
the rat beasties face to face, we always called in their
nemesis, "Doc Killzum,” rat exterminator extraordinaire.
Doc Killzum laid down lus true word on rats one allemoon
over the tailgate of a pick-up truck
"See them rat bodies in the back o f my truck. That small
feller there is a common house rat. No sweat there. That big
boy there with the hairy taiL That's your wood rat. You
folks got them, you got a problem, sure as death They'll
chew the wood right up in your house and haul off things "
The Doc, a puffy, stocky little man with a whiskered muzzle
that quivered, looked to me like he identified with his quarry,
maybe even knew them too well, if you catch my drift.
"I'll lay some bait out. They know me around here. Don’t
worry. They worft trouble you no more."
He scuttled around the job site for an hour or so and, sure
enough, those rats vanished. His very presence cowed those
rodents. I suspect he exuded some odor, some rat juju mojo
that ran ice water through their veins and quailed their furtive
hearts.
Oh, yes, I know your rat stories all right. This one’s true,
and I yard it out around beach fires once in awhile on a
summer evening when a good dose o f unseemliness catches
my fancy. My friends, the Beers’, rented a small house south
o f to wjt for several years. In the kitchen, a low ceiling
housed a veritable New York City of rats. They danced the
schottische up there day and night, cavorted in a shameless
bacchanal, chirped and sang in reckless abandon One day a
young woman dropped by for coffee. She noticed a wet spot
on the ceiling.
"Laurie,” she said to the lady of tlie house, rubbing the
wet spot above lier with a finger and licking the moistness
with her tongue, "you’ve got oil leaking from your ceiling!"
"No," Laurie said quickly. "Rats!"
Brother Tim and I remodeled a home near Silver Point
some time ago for a close friend who cultivated songbirds.
Her house was immaculate and shipshape. Her largess
toward the bird population included placement o f 50 pounds
o f birdseed in feeders each week for feathered visitors.
When we sawed into the walls surrounding her bath tub, she
went into the screaming dithers. Hundreds o f pounds of
birdseed poured from the wall cavities, cached away by
house rats. I believe she cancelled her membership to the
Audubon Society the next day.
One o f my close acquaintances, Ab Childress, has always
displayed a certain puckish mischievousness. For years he's
kept a mumnufied cat in a shoe box for those special
occasions when ickyness is a high lark. Ab specialized in
foundations under old houses. Twenty years ago, he
scrabbled around under a house in Cannon Beach's exclusive
neighborhood, digging out a foundation at a remodel project
for us.
"Boys," lie told us one morning at coffee, "there’s been an
artist at work up there on the side o f that house yorfve been
building You’d better take a look.”
When we arrived for work that m orning we were
confronted with a disturbing collage that quite unhinged the
gentry living in that neighborhood. Ab had located a
veritable ossuary o f rat and cat creatures under the house
foundation, D-Conned into eternity. He had affixed the dead
to the wall o f tlie building in a life-like posture, mummified
cats chasing a fleeing gang o f mummified rats. We've had no
more work in that neighborhood.
I sometimes wonder why rats have historically been given
such bad press. They're good parents and resourceful. They
occupy tlie same houses and spaces we do. Maybe they just
remind us o f ourselves.
W IIA T IS IN A NAM E? More to the point, what
is up with this column’s name: "Ecola llahee?”
Let me explain. I took this column name with
just a little reluctance - it is a term out o f a language
which is, for all practical purposes, dead Words
out o f dead languages, like Latin or Ancient Greek,
hang in suspended animation outside o f everyday
discourse This suspension can be useful, allowing
linguistic precision for example, we might hope
that, i f a surgeon must repair nerves at the base o f
our skull where the spinal chord enters, she might
ask her assistant to make an incision leading to the
"foramen magnum,"and wouldn’ t casually slip into
the here-and-now ambiguities o f English, asking
instead for an incision leading to our "big hole.”
However, words from dead languages also
serve as the everyday instruments o f pompous
pedants and showy charlatans, precision tools for
intimidating the uninitiated And this, even the hint
oflhis, seemed just a bit out o f line with the egalit
arian ideals and progressive predisposition o f the
Upper Left Edge As longtime readers w ill attest,
we are not in the befuddlement or bedazzlement
business
So prepare to be initiated. Ecola llahee: when,
in January o f 1806, W illiam Clark (o f Lewis &
Clark fame) ventured into the vicinity o f Cannon
Beach, he sought to obtain blubber stripped from a
whale beached a short distance south o f the mouth
o f what we today call "Ecola Creek.” While Clark
and his crew were here, local villages buzzed with
talk o f the beached whale, and Clark heard
incessant references to "ecola” the term for "whale”
in Chinook Jargon (the inter-tribal trade language o f
the north coast, which as I have said, is essentially
dead, despite some limited use in remote coastlines
o f B C. and Alaska).
Clark, not fam iliar with indigenous names for
the creek, recorded its name as “ Ecola,” a term
which was quickly for gotten for this Creek,
traditionally named for elk and edible shoreline
plants. But the name “ Ecola” took on a life o f its
own. Elk Creek was renamed “ Ecola Creek” in
commemoration o f C lark’s visit with the locals, and
Ecola State Hark was a commemorative name, too
More recently, local business, organizations, and
even people have been named Ecola, invoking
both whales and the places named after them.
Ecola llahee, then, translates literally as "place o f
whales” in Chinook Jargon but, as a matter o f
convention, refers to this particular portion o f the
northern Oregon coast in which we dwell The
name is a direct inheritance from distant limes
It invokes tins column’s concern with north coast
flora, fauna, landforms, environmental issues, and
the people who lived in this place for thousands o f
years before being annihilated to make the land
safe for espresso bars and tee-shirt shops. People
liked the column label, among them our own
Reverend Editor, and it stuck.
But what about whales? There are many whales
still swimming beyond the surf. Grays and hump
backs and blues On rare occasion, there are fin,
beaked, sperm, sei, or minke whales, too. Now
and then, i f you watch close, you might also see
porpoises, dolphins, or orcas. It is hard to find
someone who is not, on some level, tickled by the
presence o f nearby whales. They are huge,
mysterious, and yet we view them with an empathy
reserved for fellow mammals. Warm-blooded
creatures that at some fxnnl returned to the sea:
social and communicative, big-brained and
intelligent.
T he Pacific coast o f North America is one o f
the few places in the world where one might see
large numbers o f whales from land Most o f these
are gray whales, passing in the course o f annual,
6000-mile migrations In the winter, grays breed
and give birth in the warm Mexican waters o f Baja,
while feeding in Alaska’s Bering Sea during
the summer, rooting about in seatloor sediments
and filtering out small crustaceans in their baleen
Grays seldom stray into deep waters - migration
routes bring whales close to shore, particularly as
they round the headlands And March is one o f the
best months to see gray whales rounding headlands
as they trek northward. (A smaller number o f
whales, mostly new calves and their inolhers, w ill
pass through in May.)
Otien, on clear days, you can sec misty spouts
o f water as grays rise to exhale, and to inhale once
again in preparation for the next dive. Occasionally,
you can see a lluke rise above the water's surface
or see a gray whale breach, from the c liffs o f
Neakahnie Mountain and Ecola State Park, you can
look down on their barnacled forms (their skins
crawling with crab-like "whale lice") and see their
crisp outlines from head Io tail (The Oregon coast,
o f course, does have one captive whale which can
be viewed regardless o f season or w'eather. This
celebrated orca-in-a-box needs no additional pub
licity and we won t give it any here It is telling and
potentially demoralizing to realize that we live in a
part o f the world where the most celebrated
individual is a cetacean - indeed, a cetacean with
flaccid fins and a deep fear o f minnows Amidst
much wailing and tooth-gnashing by central coast
Chambers o f Commerce, this particular whale soon
may be set adrill to lend for him self on the high
seas.)
T he California grays were hunted to precariously
low levels during a b rie f and intense period o f
industrial whaling in the Iate-I9th century. East
coast money turned perfectly good whales into oils
and cosmetics for east coast markets. By the 1880s,
only 2000 grays remained. Their populations now
rebound, aided by moratoria on North American
whaling established in the early 1970s.
Today, there are roughly 22,000 grays swimming
laps along the Pacific coast - up to 5000 official
whale sightings have been recorded along the
Oregon coast in a single week. Two other
populations o f gray whales, the Atlantic and the
East Asian Pacific grays, were not so fortunate:
both now appear to be extinct. Closer to home,
some w hales o f our area - blues, fins, and hump
backs - are in very bad shape, decimated by North
American whaling during the tum-of-the-century
and continued industrial whaling by Japanese and
Russian ships into the late 20th.
When Clark stumbled onto the beach near
Chapman Point, whaling was a long-established
practice on this coast, but was carried out at such
low levels that it didn’ t make a dent in the overall
population o f whales: at this level, whaling was
"sustainable ” While the tribes o f the northern
Oregon coast reported hunting whales, their efforts
may have been restricted to injuring whales at sea
in places with predictable currents. These currents
carried injured whales ashore, where they were
butchered for meat and oil An intricate etiquette
surrounded the division o f a beached whale Every
beach had different rules - locals usually received
the choicest pieces, but nearby villages might hold
rights to a section, a tail or a certain flank. The
numerous people Clark encountered near Ecola
Creek may have included several visitors from
other villages, gathered to claim their appropriate
share o f the whale (and in turn, this division o f the
whale between several different peoples may
explain in part why Clark found so little whale meat
available for trade, despite the beached whale’s
great size).
The Makah o f the northwestern Olympic
Peninsula were more accomplished whalers,
pursuing whales with dugout canoes and wooden
harpoons with stone points Harpoon heads were
tied to lines o f floats made o f inverted, waterproof
sealskins - once harpooned, the string o f sealskin
floats would keep whales from submerging, so that
they could be dispatched and dragged to shore with
relative ease The most skilled Makah whalers were
tribal elites, and tools and ceremonial goods
associated with whaling have been found archae-
ologically, in the wealthiest Makah households
In the mid-19th century, U S negotiators signed
a treaty with the Makah, confirm ing their right to
hunt whales in their traditional waters for all time
The treaty, however, did not anticipate the near
extinction o f Pacific whales by the end o f that
century, and was challenged by later, international
treaties banning all Pacific coast whaling. The
Makah viewed the whaling ban (and the industrial
depletion o f whales which precipitated this ban) as
impositions from the white world, entirely out o f
their control and to their distinct disadvantage.
Now, more than other whaling tribes o f the
Northwest coast, the Makah view whaling as an
essential, symbolically-charged component o f their
struggles for cultural persistence Thunderbird, by
the legends o f the Makah (and most other coastal
peoples) was huge and powerful, an adept whaler
who devoured whales like a normal human would
eat salmon, today, the thunderbird takes on renewed
significance among the Makah, and their homes,
public buildings, and tnbal cemetery bristle with
small, totemic carvings o f thunderbirds. C iting
chronic economic and social troubles follow ing the
whaling ban, the Makah recently requested an
exemption from international whaling treaties so
that they might hunt whales once again.
(Immediately thereafter, while I was visiting the
Makah, tribal boats tangled a gray whale in their
nets. “ Accidentally” I was told with ambiguous
smiles The whale was hauled to an inaccessible
offshore islet and butchered - by the time
authorities arrived on the scene, the whale’ s meat
and blubber were jammed into freezers throughout
the Reservation.) The Makah have just secured this
exemption, and this spring w ill be the first season in
70 years that the Makah have [legally] hunted
whales, 'faking four whales a year, they w ill jo in a
small number o f other indigenous peoples o f the
northern seas who are allowed exemptions from
international treaties for subsistence whaling.
In the past, environmentalists, animal rights
activists and tribal rights activists have been allies,
sharing their concern with the objectification and
despoliation o f living things which is currently so
fashionable among the world’ s industrialized
peoples Now they butt heads over the issue o f
Makah whaling, and lawyers descend on the scene
like locusts.
In regional environmental issues, as in life
generally, there are no easy answers.
For more inform ation about local whales, visit
one o f the many Oregon State University sponsored
whale watching viewpoints. These viewpoints w ill
be marked with "Whale Walchm^ Spoken Here "
signs in late March, and w ill be staffed by trained
volunteers with free OSU publications on
Northwestern whales.
Websites for Whale Watchers:
“ Whale Watching Spoken Here”
5AUUy I- L/'CKAfF”
http://www.hmsc orst.edu/education/wlialewatch.shtml
Tmniiww. Gwrac D i m
AN1> IllUSTRMION
Whales on the Net
http://whales magna com au/WATCH/index.html
Whale Watching with Oregon Online Highways
http://www.ohwy com/or/w/whalewat.htm
Whale Museum, San Juan island
http://wwwwhale-museum org/links.html
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UPPER LEFT EDGE ZIARCH W 8
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Hours: I lam-6pm. Wed to Saturday
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