Wing Luke Museum: A Guided Tour of an Immigrant Hotel
Wing Luke was a pioneering Chinese American lawyer, civil rights advocate, and the first Asian American elected to public office in Washington State. When he died in a small aircraft accident in 1965, the community formed the Wing Luke Museum in his honor. It celebrates Asian-American history and culture, and owns a hotel it purchased to display the lives of early immigrants.
The Yick Fung Corporation was formed by a group of Chinese immigrants because they were legally forbidden from owning property in Washington. This store served as a supplier to restaurants throughout Washington.
South Weller Street led directly to the tidal flats where the church steeple stands today. As part of a downtown reshaping, several hills were flattened and the soil used to fill in the nearshore area.
In addition to supplying regional restaurants, you could buy a third-class ticket to Hong Kong (or maybe Shanghai) for $1500 in today’s money. The store remained open until 2008.
To circumvent some of the financial restrictions, the Chinese immigrants formed associations of people from the same villages back in China. This is the meeting room of one such group. They assisted newcomers and planned civic activities. It was kind of like the YMCA.
This is the game room, where people played mahjong and other games.
The hotel contained about 180 apartments, but some of them had up to three rooms. This was the home of a family with eight children. The hotel remained a center of immigrants until it was closed in 1974 because of updated fire codes (after the deaths of twenty or so inhabitants in about 1972). The Wing Luke Museum purchased it and is renovating it as part of the display.
Every room was required to have a door and window. Most of the rooms were small. That is the light shaft out the window; it didn’t lead anywhere and only extended to the second floor, just for light and air.
Living out of your suitcase?
Here’s the light shaft. During reconstruction the building was modified and reinforced.
The museum also had exhibits displaying artwork and pictorial histories of many Asian immigrants, including Hawaiians. Overall, it was very interesting and worth the price of admission. I think it was $22 for a senior like me.
Fort Steilacoom Park and Lake Waughop
After spending the last five days walking around the back yard, digging the rain garden, I drove my FJ40 to Lakewood to take a look at Fort Steilacoom Park.
This play area was the only fort I saw.
But there were several old barns in various levels of disrepair. Apparently, Fort Steilacoom was the first U.S. military post in Washington, built in 1849 during the dispute with Britain over sovereignty. These barns are remnants of agriculture and the Western State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. The hospital superintendent from 1880 to 1897 was Dr. John Waughop, who turned the site into a botanical garden for non-native plants as part of his rehabilitation program.
The Coast Redwood isn’t native to the Tacoma area, along with many other ornamental species planted by John Waughop.
Lake Waughop was named after the hospital’s most popular superintendent. It is a kettle lake, created from the melting of a huge block of ice after the last ice age while sediment collected around it.
This invasive species is common to Washington. It is bull thistle (Cirsium vulgare). I also saw several thriving thickets of Himalayan Blackberry along the trail. These plants were not part of John Waughop’s ornamental plant garden.
Another ecosystem within the park is the oak savannah. It is the remnant of a native woodland that has been altered for thousands of years by the indigenous people of the PNW. The trees are Garry oak (Quercus garryana), the only native oak species in Washington. This area would have become a conifer forest if not for controlled burning by the local people.
After a three-mile circumnavigation of Fort Steilacoom Park, I finally made it back to my vehicle; unfortunately, there wouldn’t be AC for the ride home on this warm afternoon.
Ready to Plant
I amended the soil with 15 cubic feet (~1/2 cubic yard) of Tacgro compost at about 1:1. That’s the darker soil in the bottom of the pond. The original mulch was spread out 4-6 inches deep, sufficient to cover the grass and weeds; it’s ready for planting.
That’s not my department, unless a hole has to be dug in the stony, original soil.
The total time for this project was about 20 hours. The only cost was 14 bags of compost, less than $100.
Sisyphus and the Stone
I finished the surface today, and dug down about 10 inches to mix in compost for the central planting area. Along the way I encountered this boulder, which weighed a couple hundred pounds. I was able to roll it up the slope, but now what do I do with it? I’ll be using a compost created from yard waste collected by the city of Tacoma to amend the silty soil. The hole ended up deeper than I like, so I’ll need a lot more than four bags…
These are all the stones I could easily remove from the soil I removed and that to be amended by compost. Hauling them in a steel bucket may seem inefficient (it is), but carrying fifty pounds at a time is a lot easier than rolling the wagon up the hill, which is about six-feet higher than the job site. I estimate that I lost 10-15% of the soil volume, which will be replaced by compost.
Excavation Update
Five hours of digging finished the major excavation–six inches of soil removed, cleaned, and spread around the site. I’ll remove another 6-8 inches along the center next and knock the sides down to a 30 degree slope. I had to transport most of the pebbles and cobbles up the hill, but some of it filled the inflow sluice (to the right in the image).
I found this soil tamper in the shed, left by the last owner. It does a great job compacting the relocated soil and isn’t too much work to use. And it’s a lot more efficient than walking around in circles to use my body weight.
Excavation Begins
I worked four hours today and made a lot of progress. This photo makes it clear how shallow the rain garden pond is going to be; the areas that have been excavated to 6-8 inches aren’t going to be any deeper. There will be a deeper (18 inches before backfilling with compost-amended soil) thalweg along the center of the pond, and I’ll cut a slope of about 30 degrees from the edge to the center line. The piece of siding is covering the infiltration hole–a sure ankle breaker for someone like me stumbling around with shovel-fulls of soil. Better safe than sorry.
I definitely have more pebbles/boulders than I need. I’m dumping the excess in a quiet corner of the yard. I’ll figure out what to do with it later. I’ve been using this area to dump soil removed to plant a few shrubs and small trees, so the new material fits right in.
This is my version of being a sculptor, but I work with earth rather than clay.
Site Preparation
I think the job can be completed without removing any material from the site, which is now completely exposed. Excavation is hard work, but transporting soil any distance is exhausting. Now that the mulch has been relocated to the perimeter of the site, excavation can begin. The soil is sand/silt with minor clay, and a significant amount of rock in the form of pebbles and cobbles.
I am removing most of the rock fragments by raking the excavated soil with a garden rake (back and forth until it is clean enough), then collecting the unwanted material.
Plastic buckets don’t hold up well transporting rock, so I’m using a steel bucket. The pile of rock is from the perimeter ditch only; there is going to be a lot more. It is going to be used to armor the inflow, which will be where the bucket is; the rest will either be transported to a location for long-term storage, or used as mulch around the perimeter–depending on how much there is.
In a perfect world I would use a wheelbarrow to move material around, but we inherited a good dumping wagon from the previous owners, which is too bulky to use on this small site. The amount of material to be transported is relatively small, however, so a bucket works well.
I’m not on the clock, so time isn’t an issue. Nevertheless, the work goes faster than you might think. I completed the work shown here, since my last post, in less than three hours. I’m 69 and not a weight lifter, although I do exercise regularly.
Review of “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything” by Ervin Laszlo
I’m not sure how to review this book. I bought it used because I’m interested in physics and the apparent deadlock it has reached; everyone admits that the Standard Model of Physics, as well as the Standard Cosmological Model, are facing challenges from a scarcity and plethora of new observations, respectively. The pioneers of modern physics acknowledged that they weren’t looking deep enough. We have developed a very solid model of physics, but it is based on high-energy, collisional experiments; it is very accurate in predicting the behavior of subatomic particles. Every physicists knows that particles do not exist, but are only the result of interacting quantum fields.
Cosmologists, astronomers, and astrophysicists are facing a crisis because of the incredible power of modern instruments like the JWST. Nothing adds up the way it should. We either can’t look deep enough (particle physics) or we’ve looked too deep (astrophysics). It is a conundrum. There is mounting evidence, collected by reputable physicists and other scientists, that we are missing something.
Ervin Laszlo died in June of this year, after a long career as a philosopher with a metaphysical interest. That would explain why this book reads like a wish list rather than a proposed research program. His lack of a formal scientific education could explain why this book sounds like nonsense at first glance. However, if taken with a grain of salt, it is an excellent generalization of the characteristics of a theory of everything. What it lacks is a systematic, skeptical presentation of the data; he seems to accept a large amount of paranormal data at face value.
I would caution anyone who reads this to be more skeptical than the author. Scientific inquiry requires an open mind, a trait more common to philosophers than physicists–probably because philosophers don’t have to work so hard to comprehend what has already been learned. Progress is slow most of the time, but this book and the concepts it presents is a step in the right direction.
I recommend it as a primer on what may come in the future, but don’t expect Laszlo’s New Physics to become real anytime soon.
Breaking Ground on the Rain Garden and Pond
This is going to be a long-term project, but that doesn’t mean I can wait for someone else to do the work. Actually, I enjoy working with soil and rocks, maybe because I’m a geologist. After 20 years living along the Gulf Coast, where rain falls by the bucketful, and the land is often flat and impermeable (when it isn’t waterlogged), I’m familiar with drainage projects like this. I prefer surface drainage over buried pipes because they are easy to monitor and keep clear of debris.
This schematic drawing of a rain garden pond summarizes our plan pretty well. The pond isn’t intended to have standing water, so it isn’t lined; instead the bottom is typically filled with a mixture of sand (easy for us) and compost or some equivalent material. We already have a lot of mulch for covering the area.
The hole is going to be about 18 inches deep in the center, and filled with a mixture of the removed soil and compost/mulch. I don’t need to increase infiltration or water retention; the soil contains a lot of silt and thus holds moisture surprisingly well, while being well drained. Inflow will be through a sluice cut into the soil from the deck (the shovel location) to the edge of the pond. I plan to use the stones collected from the soil to armor the inflow; from the looks of the refuse so far, I should have plenty.
Other than dealing with all the rocks I’m finding in the soil, it isn’t too difficult to remove.
The outline has been set with a couple of hours work, but now the hard work begins. I am going to remove the inner soil to match the perimeter depth, then cut a smaller area down six inches deeper. This process will be repeated until I reach the design depth. The refuse is being used to fill the 4-inch area where the mulch was removed; it will also be used to build a low berm.
The next few months are going to be slow going, but I’ll keep you posted.
Geologic Survey of Eastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Figure 1. View looking west along the coast from Beacon Hill, in Victoria. The cliffs on Vancouver Island are similar in height to those across Juan de Fuca Strait, in Washington. However, the bluffs are composed of glacial deposits further south in Seattle, rather than bedrock. The large tidal range (7-10 feet) exposes rocky platforms at low tide. I’ll examine several of these features in this post.
Introduction
Figure 2. We drove to Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula and took a ferry to Victoria. We also drove about 70 miles west to Port Renfrew. The inset geologic map reveals a maze of faults and rock types. The rocks around Victoria comprise the Westcoast Crystalline Complex, which includes granitic and metamorphic rocks dated between 540 and 143 Ma (colored green). The purple area indicates a suite of granitic intrusions from the Jurassic period (200-160 Ma). The numbers indicate locations discussed below: (1) Beacon Hill; (2) Mount Douglas; and (3) Port Renfrew.
Beacon Hill
Figure 3. This exposure of the Westcoast Crystalline Complex at Beacon Hill Park doesn’t tell us much. These rocks are weathered and stained, making identification difficult without breaking off a fresh piece. We don’t do that here at Rocks and (no) Roads. Nevertheless, I am relatively confident that they are not sedimentary rocks.
Figure 4. This photo uses a magnification of 10x, and the field of view is less than an inch. Individual crystals of feldspar can be seen throughout the image, recognizable by flat surfaces that form irregular boxes. These light-colored feldspars are indicative of continental intrusive rocks like you would find in a subduction tectonic environment. The gray blobs are quartz. Based on this brief examination, I think these are granodiorite, an intrusive rock rather than metamorphic.
Mount Douglas
Figure 5. The view, looking south from the top of Mount Douglas (see Fig. 2 for location), reveals Mount Olympus (snow-covered peaks in the distance); and intrusive rocks with the characteristic salt-and-pepper color of granodiorite. This exposure also contains a set of joints (large X pattern enhanced by weathering) that would have appeared as the rock rose through the crust as overlying rocks were eroded. Victoria is visible in the distance.
Figure 6. This image shows veins of quartz or feldspar (white material) that would have filled cracks and voids after the main magma had solidified (tens of miles deep), but residual liquids were still present.
Port Renfrew
Figure 7. The cliffs at Port Renfrew are lower than in Victoria (compare to Fig. 1). They also don’t appear to be the same intrusive rocks we saw at Beacon Hill Park or Mount Douglas. The beach is covered with boulders and dark, coarse sand that couldn’t have originated from the erosion of granitic rocks. Let’s take a closer look.
Figure 8. (A) This boulder includes a piece of the rock the magma was intruded into. The rounded edges suggest that the magma was still hot enough to partially melt the fragment; furthermore, the lack of a halo surrounding the inclusion implies that the melted material was incorporated into the magma by mixing. (B) This looks a lot like the granitic rocks in Fig. 5. (C) This boulder is fresh and individual minerals can be identified. Being wet enhances the contrast. The low quartz composition (I estimate it at ~20% from the gray blobs) suggests that this is either granodiorite or tonalite, depending on the amount of Ca-bearing feldspar. That requires either a chemical or mineralogical analysis. These boulders were transported along rivers from the center of the island, which is composed of granitic rocks (Fig. 2).
Figure 9. These ripples are almost a foot long, measured from crest to crest; and the troughs are filled with larger fragments of rock and shell. You don’t see these sedimentary structures preserved in the rock record very often, even if they do survive the vigorous tides on Vancouver Island.
Figure 10. Exposures like this make geology fun. The darker rocks are tilted about 30 degrees to the left, but there are two distinct rocks types here: the lighter colored rock to the left is the same sandstone that makes up the cliff (Fig. 7); and the darker rock is schist, highly altered mudstone. In other words, a mildly altered rock is in direct contact with a metamorphic rock.
I checked with RockD, which integrates a global geologic map with location, and discovered I was standing on the contact between Leech River Complex metamorphic rocks (200-66 Ma) and Carmanah Group unaltered sedimentary rocks (37-23 Ma). This is a textbook unconformity that represents at least 29 million years.
The younger rocks are nearly horizontal, so I think this is an angular unconformity. During the missing millions of years, the older sediments were buried and heated enough to create schist; then uplifted and exposed to the sea, whereupon the younger rocks were deposited on a beach not that different from what we see today.
Figure 11. The devil is in the details, as shown in these images. (A) The older rock was folded during burial and, when exposed to the waves, eroded along relict bedding surfaces. Coastal sediments were then deposited in nooks and crannies like we see today. (B) Those dark fragments that look like they’re lying on the beach are actually cemented in place; the background pebbles aren’t modern sand, but instead sand frozen in time at least 29 million years ago.
Amazing.
Summary
Sometimes you can tell a story about the rocks you find, and this is one of those times. And it’s a story that unfolds across the globe. However, this story can’t be easily told because it unfolds on a sphere–the Earth. I’ll do my best.
For hundreds of millions of years, way back in the Paleozoic era, what we now call North America was drifting eastward and the West Coast (e.g. the Pacific Northwest) was a passive margin, like the East Coast is today. Suddenly, geologically speaking, the supercontinent, Pangea, which had been created from all the continents, split apart. North America reversed direction and the passive margin became a collisional plate boundary.
Ocean crust, and any islands or microcontinents that were in the way, were swallowed by the mantle or crushed by North America, creating the igneous rocks we saw at Beacon Hill Park and Mount Douglas. Muddy ocean sediments were swallowed and transformed into the schist we found at Port Renfrew. Volcanoes erupted all along the West Coast.
Then the story gets complicated and controversial.
Because the earth is not flat, crustal plates don’t slide beneath one another like sheets of paper. They crumple at the edges, forming transform faults (e.g. San Andreas fault of California) along which tectonic plates (or pieces of them) can slide past each other horizontally. This probably occurred between 200 and 66 million-years ago; if so, the rocks of Vancouver Island were originally deposited/intruded in Eastern Washington before sliding hundreds of miles to the NW.
When the crumpled edges of the colliding plates had taken up the slack, subduction resumed to the SE and the Cascades Range of volcanoes was born. This process continues to this day.
That’s the best story I’ve heard so far.
Timothy R. Keen 
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