Dungeness River

The Dungeness River is more than a landmark near Sequim: its water, fish, and timbered banks shape the practical circumstances and remembered scenes of Joe Rantz’s life. It supplies power and food around the unfinished family farm, draws Joe into risky salmon fishing, and provides the setting for both his education in woodcraft and his courtship with Joyce Simdars. Across these episodes, the river is at once a resource, a force that demands skill, and a place where relationships take form.

Setting and Water

The river belongs to the landscape around Sequim, a town set on prairie between the Olympic Mountains and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. On the stump farm outside town, Harry Rantz and Joe diverted water from an irrigation canal flowing out of the Dungeness River. The diversion was illegal, but it enabled Harry to establish a water-powered sawmill and helped make the partially cleared property workable. They used the mill to produce rough-cut lumber for the two-story farmhouse, whose construction remained unfinished even after the family moved in.

The water system extended from work into domestic life. Harry connected a flywheel and generator to the waterwheel and ran electrical wire into the house, hanging bulbs from the rafters. When the ditch’s water supply waxed and waned, the lights flickered and varied in brightness. The river’s water thus brought power to the house, but not a dependable supply: the household’s improvised electricity registered the changing flow that fed it.

Water also transformed the ground behind the house. In spring, the flow over the wheel excavated a pool almost ten feet deep and twenty-five feet long. Salmon, steelhead, and trout from the Dungeness made their way up the irrigation ditch into the pond. Joe could catch fish there with a net fixed to a long pole and take one for dinner. The river’s connection to the farm therefore ran through a chain of altered channels: water diverted for machinery also created a pool stocked by fish moving upstream.

Food, Risk, and River Work

The river offered Joe a different kind of opportunity during the financial hardship that followed the 1929 crash. Berries and watercress were not enough, and singing for coins on a Sequim street brought little income. Joe and his friend Harry Secor knew of a deep, green pool where large chinook salmon waited to spawn. Joe found a gaff hook in the barn and secretly carried it with him. On a misty Saturday morning, the two friends evaded a game warden who patrolled the river during spawning season. They fashioned a gaffing pole from an alder and used thrown rocks and a stick to drive fish from the pool toward Joe, who was waiting in the shallows. He caught a salmon and pulled it onto the gravel bank.

That method ended after the game warden approached Joe from behind and knocked him unconscious. Joe came to in time to see Harry Secor pursuing the warden with the gaffing pole. The pair expected the warden to return with help, and they never snagged another salmon. The episode makes the river’s abundance inseparable from the rules and hazards governing access to it: the fish could provide food, but taking them this way brought the boys into direct conflict with the person charged with enforcing those rules.

The river also furnished the route and material for Joe’s seasonal work. In the summer of 1934, while trying to earn enough to continue at school, he cut hay, dug ditches, dynamited stumps, and laid asphalt, but much of his labor was in the woods with Charlie McDonald. When Charlie needed a new farmhouse roof, he took Joe upriver in a buckboard to look for cedar. The upper reaches held the remains of old-growth trees, including giant cedar stumps left after loggers had taken the straight, useful middle sections and discarded other portions. The river landscape was consequently both a source of timber and a record of earlier logging: the surviving wood required careful judgment before it could be put to use.

Learning to Read the Landscape

Charlie taught Joe to assess fallen logs rather than dismiss them. Using a peavey, he rolled the wood; with the flat of a splitting maul, he tested for a clear ringing tone. He felt for hidden knots and irregularities and studied the growth rings at the cut ends to judge the grain. When they found a suitable log, they used a crosscut saw to cut it into twenty-four-inch sections and carried the bolts back to the buckboard.

The instruction continued from selecting wood to splitting it. Charlie showed Joe how to divide a log into quarters with a maul and iron wedges, then how to use a froe and wooden mallet to cleave roofing shakes across the grain. The work depended on attending to shape, texture, color, and the response of the fibers as they separated. Joe was drawn to the possibility that careful observation could reveal value in wood others had left behind. In this episode, the river corridor is not merely scenery around his labor; it is a working environment that offers materials and teaches a way of seeing them.

Affection and Memory

A meadow among cottonwoods on the river’s south bank becomes the setting for a quiet change in Joe and Joyce Simdars’s relationship. She regularly left the school bus near the river and searched the woods for him. One day in late April, Joe led her to the meadow and looked through the grass for a four-leaf clover, which he often gave her as a token of affection. He found one and presented it to her. The gesture joins the river’s open landscape to a recurring practice between them: a small, observed detail becomes a way of expressing care.

The Dungeness River gathers these strands of Joe’s life without becoming a single, fixed symbol. Its diverted water supports a household, its fish offer both nourishment and trouble, its wooded reaches become a workplace and a classroom, and its bank holds a remembered moment between two young people. The river’s significance lies in those material and personal uses, each dependent on attention to what the place can provide and what it demands in return.