Schoolhouse Creek
and of Newts and Coho

by Bill McMillan

It was 1957 or 1958 when I first experienced the Washougal River tributary/wetland complex where land acquisition for the Schoolhouse Creek Restoration Project has recently been made. I was a boy of 12 or 13 at the time. I was small for my age and tripped along behind a father who mystifyingly caught steelhead that never seemed to find my own offerings. But the river had more to offer than large fish to a boy who never seemed quite destined to catch one at the time.

A wetland is just a politically correct name for a place that boys of 12 or 13 call a swamp. Boys like swamps. Tom Sawyer's and Huck Finn's Mississippi had plenty of them. One of the places that my father fished on the Washougal required a quarter mile hike through a dense willow thicket of interconnected mud bottomed "wetlands" and beaver dams that those of us that still have a boy inside of us gleefully recognize as swamps.

And it must have been a steelhead fisherman with the remaining boy inside of him who long, long ago named it The Swamp Drift because of the hike it entailed to get there on the deceptive trail he made through the swamp maize to reach his fishing spot. Fishermen in the Camas-Washougal community had been calling it The Swamp Drift for at least 20-30 years prior to 1957, and in this day and age, the 1920s or 1930s qualifies as "a long, long time ago."

But my boyhood love for The Swamp Drift was not for its fishing. As I said, I was not destined to catch steelhead at the time. I loved it for its swamps. As my father hurried to the river, I lingered in the mud and ooze, playing with the slow, docile brown newts with bright orange bellies that inhabited the area in prolific colonies. Sometimes I never did reach the river, and my father would return with a great silvery fish dangling at his side, and smile at me and shake his head: "Son, it's one of the best runs on the river. You can't catch a steelhead without your line in the water." Nevertheless, he would often sit down with me for a few moments and enjoy the slow, liquid movements of the newts with the wide little smile on their faces and somehow inviting gaze of their tiny black eyes. They are among those few wild things that seem almost to enjoy being held ... a mere deception really, due to their slowness.

But in remembering those swamps, there was something missing even then: coho salmon. We fished the swamp drift from late fall through the winter and into late spring. We should have seen coho. The swamps, while already altered by the construction of the Washougal River Road many years before, remained relatively intact and provided ideal coho habitat. There was a reason for the lack of any numbers of coho. The Washougal River Salmon Hatchery was being constructed further upstream. Few if any coho ever returned to the Washougal River that far upstream due to a waterfall that was also being modified in 1957 for salmon passage to the hatchery. The first returns of coho to it would commence in 1959 and 1960. But where did they get their eggs to begin?

The lower Washougal River was racked by the then Washington Department of Fisheries each fall through the early 1960s for coho brood stock to supply eggs for the hatchery. Reports from the early 1950s indicate the Washougal had native returns of 2,000-3,000 coho prior to that time. Some of those undoubtedly spawned in the creeks running through the Swamp Drift swamps. But by the time I was trekking through those swamps from 1957 and into the early 1960s, coho escapement to natural spawning destinations on the Washougal River was undoubtedly impacted by the coho collections occurring at the rack on the lower river. The result: excellent coho habitat gone vacant.

By 1963 and 1964 I had become an experienced steelhead fisherman. Perseverance rather than skill prevailed. The Swamp Drift remained a favored destination, but it was about this time the large tract of land containing the lower swamps between the river road and the river were purchased and platted into lots. That development plan required two things: routing the several creeks into more direct river entries, therefore denying water to the past swamps, and constructing fill for an access road to the lots between the river road and the river in almost the exact line of the past swamps. I was no longer a boy and hadn't played with the newts for several years. Maybe I didn't even miss them at the time. And I didn't know what their passage included -- a future for coho salmon on the Washougal River.

Then one November day in 1965, I followed the newly cut channel of one of the creeks in its straight line route to the river. The creek bottom was bare dirt hollowed out to the exact shape and breadth of the backhoe bucket that created it. The creek then tumbled over a short, steep slope of large exposed boulders to the river. 75 feet upstream of the river the creek exited a shiny, new silver culvert where I had parked the car on the new subdivision access road. From the culvert the water fell three feet onto freshly excavated bare rock. As I walked the creek channel to the river, there, fully exposed over the naked dirt, were two coho trying to spawn. The bottom was littered with hundreds of pink eggs the female had expended on top of the hardpan she could not excavate with her tail.

I marveled that these coho had been able to enter the creek over the steep boulder entry to the river. My heart broke at the site of the exposed eggs and the culvert that denied access to the creek and swamp complex upstream . It was my first inkling of what loss of fish habitat really means. It was that moment of understanding from which a fish conservationist was born.

By 1968, I no longer had access to The Swamp Drift as one by one the lots sold. Today it is a long established community of tidy homes whose owners have no concept of the history of their land. And those who fish that section of river today can only access it by boat. Interestingly, it is still called The Swamp Drift by a generation of fishermen for whom the name must seem an utter mystery.

I came to move onto the Washougal River in 1970, reared a family there, tried desperately to alter its fishery and land use management, reconstructed two old cabins into livable homes as different stages of my adult life necessitated, and eventually heartbroken and weary of the land and fish history of the Washougal River moved away -- at first for a two-year retreat to a basalt canyon in eastern Oregon in 1994, and then permanently at the end of 1996.

But the 1990s were a decade of great change in thinking. Ironically, it was a bird that initiated fish management reform: the spotted owl. I was recruited to be a member on one of the Spotted Owl Advisory Boards for Northwest Region National Forests in 1989-90. I don't think any of us envisioned at the time the sweeping changes that would occur resulting from what was primarily a failure in the outcome of those Advisory Boards to come to any real consensus or conclusion beyond debating the effects of a mountainous stack of planned timber sales. I don't think any of us understood that we were initiating a complete restructuring of a huge and proud federal agency -- the USDA Forest Service. And even less did we understand that we were setting the stage for a rather remarkable shift in fish and wildlife priorities. That shift would be toward land acquisitions with a public ownership that would preserve and/or restore land for specific fish and wildlife reasons. And this was increasingly done, not for the spotted owl, but for varied species of endangered or threatened trout and salmon.

In 2000, planning was initiated to purchase a parcel of land on the Washougal River. The initial plan was created by one of a new generation of fish conservationists. Tony Meyer has lived all of his life in the Camas-Washougal community. Tony is younger and less beaten than I. He's a perpetual fount of ideas and optimism. Tony refound a complex of creeks and lost swamps that I had tried forever to forget, but psychologically could not. What had been my "Swamp Creek," running through the willow ponds and wetlands to The Swamp Drift as a boy, is now the successful Schoolhouse Creek Project initially envisioned by Tony.

The Schoolhouse Creek Project is a $450,000 restoration of the old woodland-wetlands upstream of the Washougal River Road that will reconnect the series of creeks that had been separated from the largest of those wetlands since the 1960s. Tony's vision has been fulfilled through land acquisition in a cooperative effort of the Lower Columbia Enhancement Group, the Camas-Washougal Wildlife League, the Clark-Skamania Flyfishers, and Washington Trout. The eventual funding of the project was also predicated on the enthusiasm expressed by local landowners and Cape Horn-Skye School.

Sadly, the swamps that I trekked across to The Swamp Drift are forever gone beneath houses and a road. An inspired corrective future can not always recreate the past. Thus prevention is always a more powerful tool than restoration.

But the degraded stream channel in the last few hundred feet of its confluence with the Washougal River has already been reconstructed thanks to a dedicated landowner who wanted the right thing done on his section of creek as well. This summer's work on his land included replacement of a culvert with a bridge; construction of a logjam along the edge of the Washougal where the creek joins to provide protective habitat for both adult and juvenile fish; creation of a series of step-pools to provide lower spawning and rearing habitat; and an off-channel pond with added wood for additional rearing.

Next will come the re-creation of stream channels and recharging the dewatered swamp-wetland upstream that can now occur thanks to the land acquisition needed for the Schoolhouse Creek Project. It will include replanting of appropriate native trees and wetland vegetation. Even as you read this, some of the creek channels will have been rerouted and culverts altered through the cooperation of Skamania County and local landowners. This will again provide coho, steelhead and sea-run cutthroat access to a still intact woodland-wetland complex further upstream and where the stream itself has long remained intact.

The Cape Horn-Skye School will be using the wetland/creek complex (much of it on its land) as a learning site for its elementary and middle school students. I would like to think that some of those students will learn to connect fish and land management as inseparable components, and that their lives will be guided by what they learn. And I would like to think that some of those students will find the slow, dull little newts with their "smiling" faces and black, accepting eyes as their means for loving swamps and the great web of life that swamps contain.