Backwater World -- The Columbia River's Puget Island Is A Odd Mosaic Of Descendants And Dropouts, Dairies, Dream Homes And Endangered Deer

PUGET ISLAND LIES LOW, flat and green in the lolling Columbia River like a lily pad on a frog pond. It is so level and the navigation channel is so close that cargo ships seem to skate on pastures. It sits so deep in the water table that none of the folks who settled it, diked it, farmed it, the past 115 years have been buried there.

When Scandinavian fishermen moved in during the 1880s, it was a 7-mile-long, 3-mile-wide silt spit choked with trees and brush and swamped each spring by the wild river. Shacks went up on the shore and along Welcome Slough, which curled into the island and provided the only clear path through the thickets and mud.

Pastures, dairies and peppermint fields replaced forests after 27 miles of dikes were erected as World War I ended. By 1939, a half-mile bridge tethered the island to Cathlamet and tiny Wahkiakum County in Southwest Washington. The hardy community of Puget Island was known as "Little Norway."

Today, looping two-lane roads sit atop dikes, pass emerald fields and hug sloughs. You'll still find folks named Ostervold, Svensen, Nielson and clans so thick they make up their own unofficial neighborhoods, Blixville and Vikville.

People shoot basketballs into hoops that line and face the road. Eddie the dog naps on the centerline in front of Fred Aegerter's dairy. Fred Stanley and his dogs take up both lanes while herding sheep into a pasture. The Columbian white-tailed deer is on the endangered list but about 200 creep around the island.

Halfway between Kelso and the ocean and shaped vaguely like a leaf, Puget Island seems to float while the world charges past in a speedboat. In reality, its evolution has been as relentless and sure as the passing river.

Salmon fishing is basically a memory on the lower Columbia. Only three dairies remain amid the pastures that used to hold 25. The 82-year-old Grange Hall is closed and for sale because there aren't enough farmers to keep it going. The only real crop is cottonwoods, cloned trees raised in tidy rows on seven-year rotations and earmarked for the pulp-and-paper mill across the river in Wuana, Ore., where it becomes magazine paper.

Expensive homes crowd onto river banks where urban dropouts and retirees like to live. There is now more assessed value on the thin ring of land outside the dikes than on the 4,000 acres protected inside.

The Scandinavian stronghold has been diluted along with the industries that once united the community. What's left is a mosaic: of barns and dream homes; old-timers and commuters; browsing deer and pier pilings poking up like skeleton bones from the ubiquitous water.

ELROY SVENSEN kept an eye on the comings and goings in Welcome Slough as he told tales - with determined chronological detail - of hard times, teenage mischief and calamities.

He was born and raised on the island, worked in the mill across the river in Oregon and spent parts of four decades fishing. He claimed to have saved five lives out on the water while using up four of his own. As a kid, he said, he once clung to the neck of a white-tailed deer and rode it as if it were a mule, a 70-year-old memory that sent him giggling.

Floods have marked time on the island since the big one in 1894 that washed chicken and livestock out into the river and almost stopped settlement before it began. Svensen, barrel-chested and snow-haired, remembers each one since 1916, when he was born.

The most chaotic was a flash flood that moved in fast and dark at 1:30 one morning in 1965. A chunk of a cliff, 800 feet by 1,500 feet, broke from a hillside on the Oregon side and thundered into the river, pushing a 65-foot wave into the island. Homes, trees and power lines were sent sprawling into pastures. One man died. Svensen helped carry a woman whose house was destroyed to the safety of mid-island.

The river froze in January of 1930, before the bridge went in, isolating islanders for more than a week. A 9-year-old girl became ill, but it was five days before a pilot from Portland named Tex Rankin was able land his biplane, carrying a doctor and rigged with skis for landing gear, on an iced pasture. Rankin returned at times to airdrop newspapers and chewing tobacco.

"I remember him saying, `I gotta keep those Norwegians in snuff,' " Svensen said, chuckling.

On the opposite side of the slough and up West Sunny Sands Road, Marvel Blix stood in a cavernous boatshop next to his house. It was filled with slabs of Alaska cedar and English walnut, cans of putty, kerosene and epoxy, planer knives and chipping hammers.

He built wooden vessels for decades in Blix Boatworks, but with no market left, the place is an oversized tool shed now. At 84 and slowed by arthritis, he uses the shop to carve 7-inch replicas of the boats he once built.

Blix's father, Sigurd, was a boat-building legend on the lower Columbia after emigrating from Norway. Sigurd was a craftsman who took and gave only Sundays off. Marvel passed along the trade to his three sons, building each a boat after he learned to swim. They all live within a mile of him and his wife, Evelyn, but he no longer knows everyone on the island, which, he said, makes him feel like he doesn't know anyone.

A mile upriver on Sunny Sands, a retired Auburn businessman named Dean Wesner burned wood that had piled in front of his house next to the ferry dock. He and his wife are part of a wave of retirees who have moved to the island in the past decade. While Blix wonders who everyone is, Wesner is amazed at the instant intimacy.

"My wife and I came here to retire and wound up with a 90-year-old house to remodel," he said. "I went to the bank in Cathlamet and got credit in about 10 minutes. I went to the building department and got a permit in 10 minutes. I went to the hardware store and said I needed to open an account. The guy just kept saying OK.

"I said, `Don't you want to know who I am or where I live?' He said, `I know who you are. You bought that old place by the ferry dock.' "

Not far from the Wesners live Bill Coons and Lynne Hacklin-Coons, who scored in high-tech in California and now raise alpacas. They bought a stately farmhouse with the idea of opening a bed-and-breakfast, but soon decided llama-like animals with fleece as buttery as cashmere would be easier than tourists.

They are upscale by island standards with a big house, expensive furniture, a sailing boat. They've got two camels for no apparent reason, a sport-utility vehicle complete with vanity license plate, and host a yoga class in a remodeled room above one of the barns.

Yet, they seem to fit in, even helping organize a tour of the island farms to get kids interested in the agricultural life.

"People here were friendly from the start," Hacklin-Coons said, "but once we got animals they were friendlier."

PERHAPS 800 PEOPLE - many of them part-timers - live on the island, which makes it urban by Wahkiakum County standards. The county, tucked away in Washington's extreme southwest corner, has fewer people (3,900) than all but one of the state's 39 counties and less land than all but two.

There are no traffic jams in Wahkiakum County; it does not even have a stoplight.

It also has virtually no industry or real prospects. It ranks at or near the bottom in most commerce categories and leans heavily on its state-managed timber. It is lush, with trees and water everywhere, but other than having a small paddle and canoe center in Skamokawa, the county seems to exist in a tourist limbo between Interstate 5 and the beach in Pacific County to the west.

Wahkiakum and Puget Island have become bedroom communities for Longview and Vancouver and have attracted many urban retirees drawn by cheap property and relaxed lifestyle. There is nothing much for young adults. Consequently, the median age of the county residents is among the oldest in the state.

Wahkiakum's lone incorporated city, Cathlamet (pop. 550), is perched on the hillside between Highway 4 and the Columbia River. At the eastern edge of its three-block downtown lies the start of 4-mile-long Highway 409, which is also the foot of the bridge to Puget Island.

Follow 409, and you'll travel the island's mid-section, past a small market, which provides the only public bathroom in the form of a parking lot Port-A-Potty. The road ends at a dock on the southern shore where the last ferry on the lower Columbia motors to Oregon and back once an hour.

Ferries used to work both sides of the island. Today, the 75-foot Wahkiakum is all that's left. It is a low-slung, open barge painted white and baby blue and is big enough for 12 cars or pickups at a time. Compared to the bloated ferries that ply Puget Sound, the Wahkiakum is a rickshaw.

Vehicles line up in three short rows. On one side of them sit two close-quarters bathrooms and sitting rooms, big enough for perhaps 12 people. On the other side, perched about 10 feet above the deck is the pilothouse, about the size of a minivan.

The ferry, which has been puttering back and forth at 10 knots since 1962, has been known to retreat to pick up a regular who arrived minutes late for a sailing. In fog and storms passengers turn on headlights to illuminate the course ahead.

It sails from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., taking 15 minutes to get across one way. From Puget Island, it heads slightly downstream to avoid sand bars, passes Coffee Pot Island, no more than a long, thin spit.

At the Oregon side, it curls back upstream into a half-mile-long channel lined by trees before docking at a remote landing at the edge of Westport.

The first mate, the captain's only help on the boat or at either dock, loads and unloads the vehicles and collects the $3 fares. Even with the low overhead, the ferry costs about $250,000 more to operate a year than it makes. The state and county make up the shortfall.

About 80 residents commute daily to the mills on the Oregon side. It is also a faster way to get to the big stores in Astoria and serves as an escape valve when Highway 4 washes out.

Capt. Danny Eaton, who has taken his shifts piloting the ferry the past 17 years, stood in the pilothouse and pointed to a house not far from the Puget Island dock. That, he said, was where his family used to operate a dairy, raise livestock, grow cucumbers.

"I'm like these deer," he said. "I've moved about a mile and a half my whole life."

Eaton is a businessman when he's not steering past sand bars. He and his wife, Terrie, run a small fitness club attached to their house. Dressed in sweats and headband, she managed the club one afternoon while baking bread, washing clothes and cleaning house, the island version of multi-tasking.

THE DECLINE OF FISHING and farming and high-paying mill jobs has led many residents to explore moonlighting and cottage industry, but on West Sunny Sands Road the Aegerter brothers stubbornly run one of the island's last dairies.

At 4:30 each morning, Fred and John steer 1,800-pound Brown Swiss and Holsteins in and out of milking-parlor stalls. The cows know the drill, burying their heads in food troughs while suction draws their milk. When the milk stops flowing so does breakfast. With cleanup time, the morning and afternoon milkings take about five hours a day. Then there are the other chores.

The Aegerters moved to the farm 40 years ago from Switzerland via Quebec.

Fred, 53, has a ruddy complexion, a bushy mustache, alert eyes and one of those faces that naturally shapes into a smile. John, 60, is friendly, too, but quieter. The brothers became full-time partners when their father died in 1975.

Their dairy has lasted while most haven't because they've kept it compact and efficient. With about 85 cows, it is a small operation. They handle 95 percent of the labor and keep the dairy clean and tended.

"People say you can't eat pride, but it means a lot up here," Fred said, tapping his left temple. "This is like Switzerland."

Still, they have 30-year-old milking equipment. They have waste-treatment tanks and good marks from health inspectors, but environmental regulations that have helped kill many dairies have them worried. John plans to retire. Before Fred buries more money into the operation, he wants to see if any of his three children, in their 20s and making their own careers, are interested.

A few miles to the north on West Bernie Slough Road, Chuck Emerick's dairy has found a new life. Long the biggest, most advanced dairy on the island, the milking parlor, stables and waste tanks are dormant and rusted and surrounded by more than 300 acres of young hybrid cottonwoods.

The two-year-old trees look like wispy pale bushes, but they grow about 10 feet taller and an inch thicker each year. After seven years, they will be harvested by machine, chipped in the field and taken to the mill across the river.

The Fort James Lower Columbia River Fiber Co. has pushed the so-called fiber farms, leasing land at $75 an acre and paying production costs and applicable property taxes. Some property owners, like Emerick, grow and sell their own trees.

Cottonwoods now take up 1,200 acres, almost a third of the arable land. They not only give farmers a return; they change the landscape as they cycle from wide-open fields to thick tree stands to open fields again.

THE TREES ALSO GIVE food and shelter to the Columbian white-tailed deer that lived in great numbers in the lower Columbia before people moved in.

One Saturday morning on Gordan Oman's property, which sits along Cross Dike Road between the Aegerters' dairy and Emerick's tree farm, a helicopter flew at 25 feet, chasing six deer toward a trap.

With the chopper grinding and spraying dust behind them, the deer bounded into a natural funnel, with Oman's barn hemming them in on their right and a slough on their left. They were so panicked they didn't see the sprawling 12-foot-high net propped and stretched in front of them.

Two deer managed to escape through the slough, but four got tangled when the net collapsed atop them. As the deer thrashed, volunteers and wildlife workers, hiding behind wood piles and farm equipment, moved in.

The routine was the same for each deer. One or more volunteers pinned it down while another slipped a hood over its head to calm it. Someone pulled its legs free from the net and strapped them together, front left to back left, front right to back right, with a belt-like sash. A veterinarian took blood samples and gave shots. A wildlife agent snapped a radio collar around its neck.

Each deer was placed into a canvas pouch that was then hooked by cable to a hovering helicopter. When all the deer were attached, the helicopter flew off, carrying all of them like a cluster of grapes on a vine to Crims Island, about 10 miles upriver.

The idea is to disperse the population to protect it from events like the 1996 flood that killed 150 deer inside and near Julia Butler Hansen National Wildlife Refuge, near Cathlamet. Al Clark, a federal biologist who has long monitored the deer, acknowledges that transplanting is playing God, but says it is necessary to stabilize the species, on the endangered list since 1968.

The deer were here first and plentiful enough to impress Lewis and Clark, but have been unable to expand their range. Today, about 200 of the estimated 750 deer in the lower Columbia are on Puget Island.

In all, 18 deer were moved from Puget Island and 12 from Westport during the capture. Of those 30, at least five died: three immediately from the stress of the move; one drowned trying to swim back; one swam back east of Cathlamet only to get hit by a car. Eight showed up back on the Oregon side. The whereabouts of four are unknown.

There are nine females and four males being tracked by radio transmitter on uninhabited Crims Island and more may be moved to it next year. Twelve years ago, deer were transplanted into an existing herd on nearby Tenasillahe Island and the population there now approaches 200, Clark said.

THE GOVERNMENT HELPED shape the island by building the bridge and the dikes, but locals love to ridicule it. They get upset about the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers manages the river channel and the way the salmon runs were mismanaged. Deer captures strike them as funny because they have watched the deer swim right back.

Oman, who videotaped the capture, was just happy to be rid of some of the deer that have been nibbling his cottonwoods. Many islanders see the lanky and likable Oman as their unofficial mayor even if he won't admit to it. He heads the diking district commission, personally tending to two of the six pump stations that regulate island water levels. He is former fire chief and was a volunteer firefighter for more than 30 years.

He has built 100 bridges of various lengths, installed septic tanks and towed various things - including small helicopters that have crashed. He runs a contracting business known as Oman Dozing and Digging that works around the county. Yet, like many on the island, he gives the impression he's just floating along.

"These days," he said, puffing a cigar, "I do more dozing than digging."

He's a practical man, mindful that the new residents, lost industry and changing lifestyle are part of a cycle, like his field where frightened deer were chased down and bagged. His father used a bulldozer to turn natural stands of trees into pastures. Now, the cows are gone and sprouting 12-inch cloned saplings are growing in their place.

The river that once defined Puget Island by requiring a certain mettle, has changed, too. The dams, dikes, the bridge and ferry, and fishing's decline have sapped its daily influence. Yet, to old-timers and newcomers alike, the swaddling Columbia still makes this an island.

Richard Seven is a staff writer and Harley Soltes is a staff photographer for Pacific Northwest magazine.