Bridge Of Bureaucratic Sighs -- Family Slowly Mounting The Hurdles Of Building A Span

TREASURE ISLAND, Kitsap County - Curtis and Lettie Ciszek have fished in Alaska, sailed the South Pacific, dodged a hurricane off South America and while at sea given birth to a child. All that was simple, they say, just man and woman against nature.

Then the couple decided to build a 4-foot-wide, 393-foot-long wooden drawbridge to this tiny island. Now you're talking true adventure: man and woman against government.

To span a slippery mudflat between Bainbridge Island and their 1.6 acres, the couple had to navigate past the Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, the state Departments of Ecology and Fisheries, the state Shorelines Management Board and the Kitsap County Board of Commissioners. Demonstrating the kind of skill and perseverance that took them around the world, the couple now has every permit but one. They need Coast Guard approval. Construction is expected to begin Jan. 20.

Expecting an uphill battle, the couple spent two years and $5,000 trying to design a bridge that would gain public and political approval. In addition to hiring an architect and lawyer, they built a scale model of the bridge and commissioned an artist to do an oil painting to show that the bridge would look beautiful. They sat down with the county's planners to negotiate the design. For the county's public hearing, the Ciszeks staged a presentation by no fewer than 15 witnesses who took turns praising the project.

``It's been a David and Goliath story,'' says Ciszek. ``We felt there wasn't much of a chance of approval unless the Kitsap County commissioners gave their approval.''

Ciszek believes Treasure Island is the only privately owned island within direct commuting distance of Seattle.

Only one person, a longtime Bainbridge resident, has publicly opposed the project, which is costing the Ciszeks about $30,000.

But because the structure would cross a strip of water navigable at high tide, they needed almost as many permits and informal agency approvals as are needed to build dams on the Columbia River. The project triggered public hearings, public-comment periods, waiting periods, public notices to hundreds of agencies and individuals, biological assessments, water-quality certification, categorical exclusion from the National Environmental Policy Act, a finding that the project is consistent with the federal Coastal Zone Management Act, intense coverage by the Bainbridge Review and an incredible amount of paperwork.

All this, says Lettie Ciszek, 34, because she's tired of walking in hip waders through two feet of shoe-eating muck while carrying three children and groceries. Since she's spent several occasions face-down in that mud and since she's days from having a fourth child, a sturdy walkway seemed an even better idea now.

As for Curtis Ciszek, 35, he's had less trouble, because he commutes daily to his job as a ship broker in Ballard by taking a speedboat from a dock on the east side of the island. The trip takes 12 minutes, less time than it would take to drive to Winslow to catch a state ferry.

The family lives in a 500-square-foot log cabin, built in the 1920s by immigrant Swedish craftsmen. A massive quarry-rock fireplace dominates the tiny structure built with peeled island trees and filled with handmade furniture. Gaps in the log walls are crammed with oakum, some of which is stolen each spring by nesting birds. To say it's quiet, protected and cozy is not to describe all the island's pleasures. There is no crime. There is no noise from neighbors, except for the burble of clams squirting skyward at low tide.

The Ciszeks are the third owners of the island, originally called Dead Man's Island because it served as burial ground for workers from the Port Madison lumber mill, which closed in 1892. The remains were later relocated.

The first island resident was Luke S. May, a famed Seattle criminologist who sold the island in 1939 to Russell Gibson - who, with his wife, lived full time there from 1950 to 1975, according to a 1983 account in the Bainbridge Review. The Cizeks bought the island in 1988 from Ann Wilson, a relative of Gibson's.

Life here is secluded but not primitive. The cabin has electricity, a stove, washer and dryer, and some recent conveniences: computer, portable telephone and microwave. A second log cabin serves as guest house and office.

To own an island is the fulfillment of a dream Curtis Ciszek had while growing up on Bainbridge. But then, Ciszek's entire life has been remarkable since he dropped out of Lakeside School in 1972.

That year, Ciszek and several teen-age friends from Bainbridge climbed onto a 42-foot sailing fish boat, cruised out of Puget Sound, turned south and kept going, the start of a trip almost four years long. To hear Ciszek tell stories of his South Pacific island adventures is to hear a tale told by Robert Louis Stevenson as rewritten by Hunter S. Thompson.

``We were all on heavy medication,'' he says, laughing. ``It was Fear and Loathing in the South Pacific. I'll wait till my mom dies before writing that one.''

During the trip, one friend jumped ship in Samoa and stowed away on a freighter headed for Fiji, another married a Tahitian princess, and a third, deaf since birth, read lips at night by flashlight. More than once, someone hooked on to a big fish, expecting to haul in the intended main course, only to be dragged overboard.

During a week in middle of the Pacific with no winds, the crew got drunk and jumped into the water. While swimming around, someone turned and noticed that a breeze had sprung up and the ship was moving away. The crew barely caught the boat, Ciszek says.

Back home, Ciszek fished regularly fished in Alaska, using the same boat. In 1980, he hired Lettie as ship's cook. Two years later, they took their first-born, then 4 months old, and started on a trip around the world. Their second child was born while their ship was anchored in the Netherlands Antilles in the West Indies.

During the four-year voyage, their ship took the worst the ocean could offer. During one hurricane off South America, they sailed around the edge of the storm and spent one wild night, sails down, as the ship pitched in heavy seas. They woke up that morning to find the cabin and deck filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of exotic birds. As their eyes took in the bizarre sight, the birds began tipping over, dead. The Ciszeks later realized the birds had been blown hundreds of miles from land and were dying from exhaustion.

In 1986 the couple returned home and settled in a house in Kingston, which they remodeled and sold. They bought Treasure Island for $250,000, a price that included two lots on Bainbridge where the Ciszeks park their car. The island had been on the market for years. No one wanted it, says Ciszek, because no one wanted to trudge through mud. Since then, real-estate agents have said the island could be sold for $1 million. No doubt a bridge boosts the value of the island, although selling their treasure is the last thing the couple would do. They plan to double the size of the house to make room for the children.

``Curt wants to stay forever,'' says Lettie Ciszek.

Kitsap County in 1973 gave approval for a car bridge to be built to the island, but none was built and the permit lapsed. When the island's owners sought renewal of the permit in 1983, they were denied. Ciszek proposed a narrow footbridge with a drawspan in the middle to make way for any vessel seeking to cross the waterway.

The Kitsap County Board of Commissioners last October gave Ciszek permission to build the bridge, pending state and federal permits. Although Renee Beam, the county's shorelines administrator, urged rejection, the commissioners approved the project with the condition that the drawbridge retract into the structure rather than stand upright. The distance between the high-water mark and the bridge was increased from 4 to 8 feet so no shadow would harm plant life. (At mean high tide, the greatest depth in the channel is 6 1/2 feet. Ciszek has promised to leave the span open except when he is crossing the bridge.)

Beam says she recommended rejection because several neighbors privately expressed concern about viewing an aluminum drawspan sticking 38 feet in the air; hence the decision for a retractable drawspan. There was also concern that a historic spot on Bainbridge would be signficantly altered by having a bridge.

Gail Smith, the one resident who opposed the bridge, says commissioners were wrong to allow a private structure to restrict a channel designated in the 1930s as a public waterway.

Smith, 74, first visited the island 65 years ago. His parents and others regarded the island as a great place to picnic. ``It's a special place for people who grew up on the island,'' he says.

Commissioner Win Granlund, a Bainbridge resident for 30 years, supports Ciszek. He says concerns about the waterway are overstated. At low tide, ``it's just a trickle of water. As a boater, it's not what I consider a passageway.''

The Coast Guard has determined that the bridge will not affect wetlands, harm any wildlife refuges or harm any endangered species. Nonetheless, because the waterway is considered navigable, the feds are involved. ``In the scale of what we do, this is a minor thing,'' says John Mikesell, chief of the bridge section for the 13th Coast Guard District.

Minor to the Coast Guard, but a kind of paradise to Curtis Ciszek.

``Going there is like going back in time,'' he says. ``It's like a fairy land. It's just an island lost in time.''