Shall we begin with lahars and moraines, gentle words from Java and France that move the tongue and the lips softly as if savoring an unfamiliar delicacy? The words sound like items from the menu of a fusion chef ten thousand years in the future in a waterfront restaurant four hundred feet above a sunless sea and beach presently invisible under half a mile of solid ice; water immobile, a solid surface trod by the footsteps of heavy beasts and the quick new creatures stalking them, one ponderous, the other pondering. Ice is their common road, snowdrifts snaking across it, a landscape taking form thousands of feet below.

No, let’s skip all that. The Earth before such climate change is too alien. The Evergreen State without a tree. Pleistocene megafauna that would thrill any Victorian zookeeper, most very red in tooth and claw. Red on a landscape of grays. Flood waters too Biblical for any scientist to believe. A saber-toothed tiger under the north flight-line of SeaTac. A mastodon tusk left in a hill being removed to make way for obsolete horses. The Stilly pouring over the ridge behind Pilchuck. Ice still thick where the BMWs and Teslas will eventually thrive on their asphalt tundra. Then, abandoned ice blocks settling into the moraines and muck as they melt; one to become an Olmstead park, ringed by a civilized promenade, and its eastern neighbor to become a cranberry bog and then a shopping mall, express lanes between them. We can imagine the ice Earth, but only like Chesley Bonestell imagining the methane glaciers of Pluto or Titan.

So, although ice is water and water will connect the future Seattle, it seems best to skip past 4000 years of fast-rising sea levels and 6000 years of seas rising at today’s glacial pace and see the Salish sea before Peter Puget was a twinkle in his grandmother’s eye. Water streams off the mountains pushed up into the atmospheric river by tectonic forces. It engraves V-notches in the smooth floors of the old glacial valleys, fills the old fjords with sediment and freshens the salt chuck with its torrents from rain and melting ice. Glacial water, traveling its mysterious underground channel like the waters of Xanadu, springs up improbably to fill hilltop kettlehole lakes. Whales, the people say, follow a sunless underground sea from those shadowy lakes to the rarely-pacific Pacific, where a thunderbird may snatch one to fed its chicks secreted high in the mountains of the ancient gods. The trees are enormous, the underbrush dense. Dead trees fall, piling one up on another, each log growing a linear forest of its own, a possible path through the tangle, as far above the ground as the roof of a house. Green land without timber is a swamp. Water-paths wind, sometimes salt, sometimes fresh, between the places where human people can live.

When the tide is out, the table is set, surrounded, like the old settler, by acres of clams. Butter clams are scattered on the cobble beaches, horse clams squirt you as you walk over them, geoducks expose their necks only at a minus tide, on the sandy beaches where boys dig fast and deep to get one out before the tide comes in. That water always comes in, a little higher each year, as it has since the ice started melting long ago. When it goes out, gulls and eagles cruise over the beach, looking for anything that has washed up. When the water comes in, a heron stalks carefully through the shallow water, embodying Morris Graves’ yogic bird. Water flows out of the seaside bluffs, especially in the winter, greasing the gray clay from the bottom of long-lost lifeless lakes until, almost every year, some portion of a hill slides onto the beach, adding its agates and tree trunks to the shore and reminding us that the ice only recently left and the land is still adjusting. When Earth becomes real estate, this propensity for sliding will become expensive.

To travel through the forest is foolish. Nobody does it for very far. Water is the way. In the lowland, people travel in boats carved from a single log, some carrying one person, some carrying thirty. Children are dropped into the salt chuck at a young age; they must learn to swim before their canoe is capsized by a sudden squall in open water. The big cedars are felled patiently, near tide-water, with fire and stone axes. Andreas Stihl has not started devising a faster way to make trees into logs yet. In the foothills, where one must go to collect huckleberries, bear grass, and mountain-goat wool, braided meltwater streams leave wide gravel bars, easy going in late summer. Water connects Seattle.

By and by, some people land on the point in a different kind of boat, driven by the wind like a sea bird. The bird’s wings need tall spars to hold those wings, and the ancient forest provides them. They go into the business of making spars for ships, transporting them by water down the coast. They move across they bay to build a port city near a better harbor. The site of their future city is surrounded, interspersed by water, but not always in the places wanted. Since heavy things must move by water, one generation tries to dig a canal from lake to bay but the job is too much for them. Another generation starts in another place and succeeds. Rivers are moved and re-shaped for convenience. Lakes are raised and lowered, meandering channels are straightened. Clean water is brought down from the mountains in a pipe. Industry builds along the water ways, connecting to the Orient, to the south-lands, and north to Alaska. Lumber floats out and a ton of gold floats in. An airplane company starts as a boat yard, and for the early planes, water is their airport. Water connects Seattle, to the world.

With water comes the need to be out of the water. Wharves must be built, rails and trestles extended, waterways bridged. Timber provides the ties, the trestles, and often the fuel to push the rails deeper into the forest, to cut more trees, to build the mills to turn even more timber into timbers. Wooden ships still carry lumber to distant ports, but increasingly rails carry it east, where the forests of the Great Lakes region have not yet recovered from fire and logging. Some of the timber stayed in Seattle, bridging and gradually covering the tidal marshes with platforms on pilings that were in turn replaced with all manner of solid materials, burying the clams and eelgrass beds and relegating spawning herring to more distant estuaries. Gulls and eagles find human detritus on the land and the shore. They are not picky eaters. The great blue heron yogi finds a quieter place to contemplate absorbing the great rainbow trout yogi. Few people were eating a lot of herring roe and eulachon oil at that point anyway. A rail yard and warehouses are what’s wanted. Timber connects Seattle.

The legislature, appalled at brazen cutting of timber off the school sections, attempted to at least profit from it by imposing a small tax on the stolen timber. Loggers refused to pay it. Timber on the stump was presumed to be free. Homesteaders would give it away or burn it, so as to let enough light in for them to sow wheat in the ashes amongst the stumps. Logs were pushed as fast as possible through thousands of tiny mills, where dull saws threw crooked lumber into a commodity market that made nobody any money, stuffed belowdecks and above on coastal freighters, themselves made of the best timber extracted from the forest. More was loaded on wooden flat-cars headed for points east via tracks laid on timber sleepers, and often crossing those obstructive rivers on timber trestles.

Seattle was never a mill town, in the way Everett, Tacoma, Shelton, Port Angeles, Hoquiam, Raymond, and biggest of all, Longview, were. It was, however, a timber town. The logs and the smoke were elsewhere, but the money and the lumber flowed through Seattle. Loggers, fresh out of the woods with a year’s pay in their pockets came to Seattle to “blow her in” at the box houses down on the sag. John Considine found box-house fortune that lead to vaudeville and the foundation of the Eagles’ lodge, an auspicious bird for an industrializing city. Those with enough foresight to want to keep a bit of their money for later use entrusted it to Dexter Horton at his dry goods store, perhaps. The less-wise woke up, found themselves penniless, and headed back into the woods, trying to remember the good time they were pretty sure they’d had. Other bankers handled larger sums, for lumbermen and land developers, some of whom still signed their name with an X, needed either safekeeping of their fortunes or capital for expansion, as technology was requiring frequent upgrades to all the machinery necessary for the lumber business. Timber money connected Seattle to the national financial system, and brought machinery in from places like Chicago, Trenton, San Francisco, and Portland. The Pacific trade traveled by wooden ships, a great many of which were built in Seattle. Timber, and timber money, connects Seattle to the world.

Some timber left Seattle as eighteen by twenty four inch beams for warehouses and wharves, but some left in smaller, more valuable pieces. One visionary lumberman bought a small boat yard and converted it to build airplanes out of the prime Sitka spruce that was still plentiful. Before long, the company would switch to aluminum, produced by the greatest hydropower river anywhere. Airplanes, from water and from timber.

Gulls, no longer finding the beaches so bountiful, cruise the air each morning and evening between the Cathcart landfill and their nostalgic seaside homes atop an industrial jetty, keeping their traditions alive while embracing the new. Eagles (the raptors, not the lodge or the band), once again bountiful now that they are no longer being shot and poisoned, are happy to enjoy an occasional house cat along with their staple of dead fish. Civilization has its perks. The heron’s stinking fishy refuse may sully the valuable ground beneath one of the prime view snags they prefer to nest in, but they are elegant in an age that values elegance. And they chase the crows away. An obscure grayish owl, a bird hardly anyone had ever seen, put an end to the “get out the cut” era of old-growth logging. Loggers offered clear opinions regarding what environmentalists should do with those birds, but in the end, everyone knew the inexhaustible old growth was exhausted. Whether 1% was left or 5% was left, an argument that was mainly about how old a tree had to be to be “old”, in another decade it would all be gone either way at the rate modern mills were inhaling it, regardless of the birds, which were now plural thanks to the alliteratively marbled murrelet.

Crows, starlings, and pigeons, those most egalitarian and unwelcome urban birds, plop their droppings on Mercedes and Chevy alike. Medina or Mercer Island, Holly Park or Rat City, the birds ignore gate-keepers and gangsters equally. Songbirds sing in the Arboretum, but they sing just as heartily in the ivy-choked alder blackberry thickets along the railroad tracks and the latter day Hoovervilles beside the freeways. Even hens, exiled out of the city limits by postwar zoning imposed by people eager to forget the deprivation of the Depression years and the Big War, have been welcomed back both by home-office yuppies whose chicken coops are nicer than what some human people have for a home, and by new immigrants who find comfort in recreating a bit of what was familiar in the old country. Eggs are animal protein even a vegetarian can enjoy.

The FAA says the airspace above five hundred feet is free for anyone to use, no matter where the two-dimensional property lines are drawn. But the birds, who rarely read the NOTAMs, ignore even that. They strut around the pools and tennis courts of Eastside garden parties, and then on a whim join the boys kicking a soccer ball around a vacant Rainier Valley lot, or the backyard barbecue of a now-multifamily once-suburban 1970s tract house. The new aluminum thunderbirds are more plentiful than the old feathered ones, and they consume Jet-A rather than whales. In their variety, birds connect Seattle.

Birds connect rich neighborhoods to poor neighborhoods, old people to young people, and plutocrats to recent immigrants. Everyone, regardless of race, religion, or caste, is happy to see a bird, and often, to feed a bird. Sometimes birds are the only natural thing a prisoner or a patient can see through their permitted slit of daylight. We all like knowing that the eagles and herons have been saved. Even the ubiquitous urban birds roosting by the thousands in unnoticed places are, like the ubiquitous urban gray squirrels, at least fun to watch. We even have a museum now for those man-made birds of spruce and aluminum.

It’s a special day, here on the ground, when the sun is out and the mountain is out. The creatures of the air are held to no such limits. It seems they could fly to the sun, or at least to Ballard. They represent possibility in an age of limits. Birds connect Seattle, to the future.