Ketchikan is... Where the Sea Returns to Land
It all started with the creek.
If you find yourself here on a very rainy day, you might notice the way the water forges myriad paths back toward the ocean. It tumbles down cliffs and sallies over mud, traverses forests and passes through basements, its fingers following gravity and pursuing its source. As this water follows the same path again and again it begins to carve out the rock, and it was such a trajectory - thousands of years ago - that established our creek.
Then salmon, for reasons still mysterious but undoubtedly extraordinary, chose this creek as the crux of their life cycle: here they would spawn, hatch, begin their journeys to the ocean, and complete the life cycle. Year in and out, they would fling themselves up against forceful, raging waterfalls with success rates as low as 10% in order to perpetuate their species. And as they did so, they began to provide nourishment for the people, the animals, and the forest. For the trees here, too, are fed by the salmon.
In pursuit of the salmon, then, came Native people, setting up fish camps near the mouth of the creek every summer, smoking and preserving the rich and oily meat to feed their villages through the winters. These people made boats of the wood that the sea had given them, and with these they returned to the water, often bringing fish back to land. In rhythms and cycles, just as the salmon went out to sea, the sea returned to fill the creek with each high tide.
This bastion of life didn't escape the notice of outside eyes; entrepreneurs and settlers, attracted and eager, began to arrive on the scene at the turn of the 20th century. The sea, the creek, the salmon, and their particular locus brought in merchants, builders, entertainers, ministers, and - above all - sea-going, fish-gathering people. The maritime world arrived by sea, used the forest to build houses, and used it to build boats that would take them back out to the ocean and the fjords. When they came back to land, it was with fish from the sea.
Just as it goes, the water returns.
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