TURNING HOMEWARD: Restoring Hope and Nature in the Urban Wild

By ADRIENNE ROSS SCANLAN

Grief-stricken after her father's death, Adrienne Ross Scanlan journeys west to seek a new life in a new place. Arriving in Seattle without a job and knowing no one, she encounters the iconic Pacific Northwest salmon in an unlikely place—a Puget Sound suburban creek—and discovers home by helping restore the nature that lives alongside us.

Part memoir, part science-based nature writing, Turning Homeward takes us into the messiness and satisfaction of hands-on restoration, whether it's the citizen science of monitoring coho salmon die-offs in a Seattle creek or relocating a bumblebee hive. Along the way, Scanlan explores the real-world paradoxes of repairing home, such as when one nonnative transplant (Scanlan) yanks out another (Himalayan blackberry) to create habitat for native plants, or the opposing needs of homeless people versus birds, who both seek refuge in a beloved city park.

What Scanlan learns about nature's resilience and the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (repair of the world) sustains her when her beloved daughter is born premature.

In lyrical writing that engages but never preaches, Turning Homeward's heartfelt union of science and spirit shows that restoring the nature close to our lives also restores our courage, joy, and hope for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988215912

Book preview

Praise for Turning Homeward

In this beautiful book, Adrienne Ross Scanlan seamlessly interweaves themes of life, place, science, and spirit. Feeling uprooted after moving to the west, she discovers the surest path to home: participation in the natural world. Bees, wrens, herons, turtles, and salmon become her guides. The stories she shares will inspire all readers to look more deeply at the wild in our midst, and in so doing, feel more connected to the places we live. But Scanlan doesn’t simply rest in the peace of nature. This book gently invites us all to delight in the natural world, yes, but also to participate fully in its repair and its wholeness.

— Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Author of Crow Planet and The Urban Bestiary

"In her delightful and thought-provoking narrative, Adrienne Ross Scanlan takes readers into small nooks of the natural world where she explores the big and often-neglected questions of what it means to call a place home. Turning Homeward will inspire newcomers and long-time residents anywhere to follow Scanlan’s example as she surveys, rescues, tosses, uproots, worries, digs, and restores her way into her community."

— Maria Mudd Ruth

Author of Rare Bird

"Turning Homeward is a work of thoughtful atonement. Scanlan writes honestly and tenderly about what has not worked in mending her life, and the lives of salmon and urban streams, as well as what has. And out of despair at the havoc we have wreaked on this earth and each other, a quiet sense of hope grows in her words, the kind of active expectation of the results of conscious work that can in fact, lead to mending the wounds of the world and we humans."

— Susan J. Tweit

(originally posted at Story Circle Book Reviews)

Thoughtful, complicated … this book exudes humility and hope.

— Barbara McMichael

Kitsap Sun

Adrienne Ross Scanlan writes beautifully about salmon restoration and citizen science, as well as about how ‘to stay alert for beauty in overlooked places.’ Bittersweet and yet inspiring, her book asks the important questions: How can we share our home with wildlife and wild places in an increasingly urbanized metropolis?

— Barbara Sjoholm

Author of The Palace of the Snow Queen

"Adrienne Ross Scanlan’s Turning Homeward: Restoring Hope and Nature in the Urban Wild endeavors to find a difficult balance between cities and wilderness."

— Tobias Carroll

InsideHook

Even in its most basic form, life wants to see and to be seen. Scanlan is the very best kind of witness.

— Paul Constant

The Seattle Review of Books

"[Scanlan] argues that joy can be found through careful living and actions that are potentially positive, even in the face of increasingly negative challenges. In highlighting the possibility of hope, Scanlan appeals to basic human desires in order to shift those desires to encompass more, to find a way of navigating the world instead of the way … This is a book-length recommendation to pay attention in order to make the best choices as humans with human concerns, living in a rapidly changing world that consists of more than us."

— Heather Hamilton

Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group

"Scanlan is guided by her study and practice of tikkun olam—Hebrew, ‘repair of the world’ for social justice—and her grounding in the Jewish calendar year of celebration and remembrance … she offers this teaching as one way, a kind of signpost, but encourages us to find our own traditions, our own texts and stories, new or ancient, that might serve as a foundation for our life choices. Just so long as we do something to love our world, to turn our sense of belonging into the energy and wisdom needed to care for it and help it survive. As we do the work of repair, the world opens us to its wonders and truths."

— Anne Kilgannon

Black Hills Audubon Society’s Echo Newsletter

"Turning Homeward is one of the greatest books of place I’ve ever read and they easily account for 50 linear feet of books of library shelving. With uncommon spiritual depth and elegant prose, Adrienne teaches us how to see a place on its own terms. My home place is more a home, a richer home, a dearer home thanks to this tireless, gifted writer."

— Karla Linn Merrifield

Author of Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North

Joyfully welcome a new voice in a new generation of nature writers. Adrienne Ross Scanlan’s journey from New York City’s beaches to Seattle’s salmon streams, from winter to spring, from Yom Kippur to Purim, from searching to celebration, continually delights, surprises, and inspires.

— Kathleen Dean Moore

Author of Wild Comfort

TURNING

HOMEWARD

Title

© 2016, 2023 by Adrienne Ross Scanlan.

All rights reserved.

Published 2023.

First edition, hardcover, published 2016 by Mountaineers Books.

Second edition, paperback, published 2023 by ARS Books, Shoreline, Washington.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover and interior book design by Mi Ae Lipe (whatnowdesign.com).

Wave image by Hanna Udod (front cover) and salmon image by Ekaterina Lanbina

(front cover and frontispiece), both from iStock.com.

Trillium image by Sidelnikova Yana, Shutterstock.com.

Back cover photo by Jim Scanlan.

Many of the essays in this book originally appeared in different form, in the following publications: Tiny Lights, EarthLight, American Nature Writing 1997, American Nature Writing 2000, the Fourth River, Raven Chronicles, Many Mountains Moving, EarthSpeak Magazine, Sugar Mule’s special issue Women Writing Nature, An Orange County Almanac and Other Essays, City Creatures Blog, Platte Valley Review, and The Prentice Hall Reader, 11th edition.

To contact the author or order additional copies:

Email: [e-mail]

Website: adrienne-ross-scanlan.com

Print book ISBN: 979-8-9882159-0-5

Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9882159-1-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023907204

Printed on FSC- and SFI-certified paper.

Printed in the United States of America.

Hence, understanding is always best

and a prudent mind. Whoever remains

for long here in this earthly life

will enjoy and endure more than enough.

— Beowulf, as translated by Seamus Heaney

Contents

Author’s Note

Cottage Lake Creek

East King County

Ellsworth Creek

The Montlake House

Squire Creek

The Duwamish River

Longfellow Creek

Phinney Ridge

The Nisqually River

The Montlake Fill

Green Lake Park

Resources

Sources

Acknowledgments

Reading Group Guide

Author’s Note

One day, seven years after moving to Seattle, I looked up at the fiery-red leaves of a vine maple and knew that the changing leaves meant it was almost the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and that soon the salmon would return from the ocean to spawn and die in local creeks. I did not think of the brilliant fall colors of my old home in upstate New York. That was a place from my past. I knew where I was. Now Seattle was my home.

Or so I thought. I wish it were that simple: to know a place just by its species and seasons, and then be able to call it home.

I found home largely through discovering and helping to restore Pacific salmon, a group of creatures that journey from their place of birth, change and grow, and then return home, changed again. Turning Homeward offers a glimpse of the theory and practice behind stewardship and restoration, but it’s beyond my expertise to offer an analysis of whether decades of restoration can bring back salmon. Similarly, Jewish thought and tradition is far more complicated than what I present, especially surrounding the many interpretations of tikkun olam, repairing the world. To learn more about these topics, please go to the acknowledgments and the resources section at the end of the book.

But home, as I’ve come to learn and hopefully have shown on these pages, is never a simple, finished place. And salmon have their own perilous twists and turns in navigating an increasingly likely route to extinction. Sockeye salmon numbers along the Cedar River are so low they’re now being trucked to spawning grounds in hopes of ensuring the survival of adults returning to mate and lay their eggs. Their crash toward extinction is caused by the concurrent threats of climate change warming Lake Washington’s waters, invasive predators eating juvenile salmon, unwise reliance on a hatchery program that ran out of funds and sits idle, and the region’s increasing urbanization. According to the 2020 State of Salmon in Watersheds report, Puget Sound is home to fifty-nine populations of chinook salmon, steelhead, and bull trout, all listed under the Endangered Species Act, all struggling. Also struggling are the Southern Resident orcas that depend on salmon as a food source. From Covid to climate change, heat waves to wildfires, and domestic and international terrorism, we’ve had no shortage of reasons for grief, and little room for hope.

And yet, hope remains, or at least hope remains stubborn, and for good reasons. Across the Puget Sound region and the Pacific Northwest, scientists, tribes, and local people are acquiring or restoring habitat; installing rain gardens to decrease stormwater impacts; removing antiquated dams, culverts, and other fish passage barriers that block access to habitat; and in many other ways refusing to give up. Far from being unique to the Pacific Northwest, a stubborn hope is present nationally and even internationally. Years ago, when I wrote the Green Lake Park chapter, I said that hope wasn’t a feeling but rather, the actions taken, no matter how slow, no matter how small and steady, are what lead to that better future. I knew more than I realized. When I look back at Turning Homeward from the chaos of the last several years, I realize the book follows what I would later learn is the psychological research showing the four components of hope: realistic goals, realistic pathways to achieve those goals, confidence that we can achieve those goals, and support as we face the obstacles that inevitably arise on the difficult road to success.

To that I can only add a fifth component, one not validated by research (as far as I know, at least) but certainly found in my experience: stories of risking fear and failure, stories of stewardship and commitment, stories of actions taken and impacts assessed, stories of setbacks and successes, stories of time and effort and love, stories of bringing the world home again despite so much that is still unknown. Turning Homeward was written to share my stories not because they are unique, but because so many people in so many ways have their own stories of repairing and restoring our world—stories that inspire, impart practical wisdom, and give much-needed comfort in dangerous times.

Since Turning Homeward ’s first publication, I’ve steered my writing to stories like these. I’ve been inspired by watching my lovely, spunky daughter grow toward adulthood. Another unexpected joy was becoming a freelance developmental editor and helping other writers tell their stories of community, place, and home.

This new edition has an updated Resources section that includes recent research on stormwater’s negative impact on salmon survival, as well as good news about rain gardens and other simple strategies for cleaning our waterways. Changes were made to some place names (Terminal 107 Park, aka T-107, is now the həʔapus Village Park and Shoreline Habitat), but references to the long-gone (and not missed) Alaskan Way Viaduct remain. Also updated was information on colony collapse disorder in bees, the status of salmon in some waterways, as well as a solution (more or less) to the mystery of how starlings came to North America. For the most part, though, Turning Homeward was written as an introduction to the often thorn-ridden and meandering paths on the way to place, its restoration, and home, not as a definitive account of all things that are salmon and natural history in the Pacific Northwest. Nor would perfection be possible since nature always evolves, knowledge always grows, and every answer opens the door to a new question.

My hope, instead, is that this updated Turning Homeward contributes to a growing literature of what the historian William Cronon calls caretaking tales—tales of love and respect, of belonging and responsibility, created when humans are knowledgeable about and committed to the places they care about, whether the faraway wilderness or the nearby neighborhood. Some of my tales are of success, others of failure; some are of lessons learned, others of questions that linger. I hope that each one is a cairn along the trail toward home.

1

Cottage Lake Creek

Sockeye. Chum. Coho. Chinook. Pink. Steelhead. When I moved to Seattle in the late 1980s, people talked of fish once seen in creeks that had long since been forced under strip malls and parking lots; they spoke of how many salmon they used to catch and how big those sockeye or Chinook were. The anadromous Pacific salmon and trout that had once dominated the rivers and streams of the Pacific Northwest—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Northern California, British Columbia, and reaching into Alaska—seemed to be everywhere yet nowhere, appearing and then disappearing like an old family ghost, spoken of often but usually in the past tense. Like ghosts fading from human memory, the salmon’s return to their ancestral home seemed to become more tenuous with each passing year.

I came to Seattle after having lived for three years in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, where a boulder-strewn creek flowed through my backyard and the Catskill Mountains were close by. For a time, my cottage there was a sanctuary from the stresses and strains of working in a domestic violence program, but it wasn’t enough to silence the call for a change echoing through my life. Nature was in abundance outside the small town of Woodstock—but missing were ballet and theater companies, swing dances, neighborhood Chinese restaurants, nearby university classes, Shakespeare in the Park, and many other joys of city life. Seattle had all that and more, yet as much as I enjoyed being back in a city, I found myself longing for nature. And the more I tried to find it in my new home, the more curious I became about salmon.

In 1991, Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads, a landmark research paper, identified 214 naturally spawning native salmon, steelhead, and sea-run cutthroat trout stocks that faced a high or moderate risk of extinction across California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Forty-one of the at-risk stocks were from Washington State, many from the Puget Sound region, where Seattle is located. Of the eighteen stocks the study cited as presumed extinct, most were also from my new state. In 1999, Puget Sound Chinook were listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), as were Hood Canal summer chum, Washington coastal and Lake Ozette sockeye, Lower Columbia River Chinook and chum, and Middle Columbia River steelhead.