The next installment of my ongoing let's-go-look-at-public-art project takes us back to Portland's South Waterfront district again. It's not a part of town I tend to go and wander around in just for fun, so I'm not all that surprised that more art went in while I wasn't paying attention. Beyond that, I'm reasonbly sure I've walked along this stretch of the South Waterfront Greenway before without really noticing any of the new art a few times, because that wasn't what I was looking for at the time. So with that introduction out of the way, up first in this sorta-belated art tour is Cradle (2013) by Northwest artist Buster Simpson, located toward the current north end of the greenway at the foot of Curry Street. It's a sort of concrete frame holding some weathered logs and tree roots, like ones you'd see as driftwood on the beach, or as part of a slash pile after a clear cut, or as local construction debris after building another South Waterfront condo tower, or maybe it's a random dead tree or two that came floating down the Willamette from who-knows-where after a big storm. At first glance you might think it's not very nice to look at, which honestly was my first impression too. But I think I understand what's going on here well enough to try to explain it. Let's start with the Public Art Archive page for Cradle (linked up above), which offers this description:
“Cradle” is a sculptural gift to the Willamette River. Once a wild river with vast amounts of woody debris, the Willamette has been tamed and we have become its steward. Four anthropomorphic concrete anchors cradle three cedar root wads as if awaiting eventual deployment of their woody debris in support of habitat enhancement along the river’s edge. “Cradle” offers a dynamic encounter between the weight of the human-like anchors and the buoyancy of the tree biomass. The embrace relays an authenticity of relationship and interdependence, from the cradle on to future generations. Four words in Chinuk Wawa, provided by The Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, are inscribed on the concrete anchors and invite passersby to contemplate the site’s history and fathom our complex relationship with it as we look into the future.
If you aren't immersed in Pacific Northwest environmental policy stuff, you'll probably come away from that wondering why everyone is so worked up about woody debris. All of that talk is really about endangered salmon. The idea here is that, if left undisturbed, rivers and streams naturally tend to accumulate old fallen logs, dead tree stumps, etc. from the surrounding forest, and this debris serves as an essential safe space for baby salmon, providing shelter from hungry predators and summer heat. The wood is also supposed to slow down the water flowing around it, which should allow gravel to accumulate on the creekbed nearby instead of being washed further downstream, and these gravel beds are essential as the one and only place a returning salmon is interested in laying or fertilizing eggs. After which they can relax and chill and live happily ever after. (*checks notes*) Er, actually they drop dead almost immediately and decay on the spot with all the other salmon, and it smells terrible, but if you freeze and roll the credits just before that happens it's actually the same plot as every Hallmark holiday movie: Protagonist returns to the same wholesome hometown they once outgrew; relationship drama ensues; ends up spawning; abandons entire career and never goes back to the big city. Anyway, the point is that the wood promotes both ends of the whole circle of life, if that makes any sense. Furthermore, as the theory goes, we don't have to just sit around and wait for these conditions to occur naturally on their own; instead, we can create ideal salmon habitat wherever we want, by bringing in logs from somewhere else and anchoring them in place with weights and steel cables and whatnot so they don't just float away. Which is essentially what the art here is depicting, in stylized form.
So yeah, aesthetics aside it would be fantastic if we could point to Cradle as a monument to How We Fixed The Salmon Problem. Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. As an August 2022 article (summarizing a May 2022 study) explains, some habitat restoration methods clearly are beneficial, like removing barriers to migrating fish, everything from fixing culverts under streets to removing entire dams. (And check out this Oregon Fish & Wildlife map showing roughly how many unmitigated salmon barriers are still out there.) Letting beavers build dams (which creates wetlands) seems to help a lot too. And they identified some individual cases where adding woody debris seemed to have helped, but in many cases it had no effect on juvenile salmon numbers. The tone of the report suggests they aren't ready to give up on the idea just yet, as it sure seems like it ought to work. But there's clearly a missing puzzle piece around what gives a logjam the right salmon feng shui, and so far nobody knows what that puzzle piece is. And then there's a much larger problem: While improved habitat does seem to boost salmon numbers right up to the point where they depart and head out to sea, so far there hasn't been a corresponding bump in the numbers of adult fish returning to their point of origin. And again, nobody knows why. So that's a bit of a problem, and it's possible that making art to celebrate woody debris was a bit premature, in retrospect.
As a bit of historical context, there are plenty of swanky midcentury architectural fish ladders[1] out there too, dating back to the days when those were the thing that was going to fix the Salmon Problem.[2]. So at least this isn't a new trend, I guess. And I'm glad these examples exist, because if they didn't I was going to have to use an analogy with fancy porcelain phrenology heads instead, and phrenology heads are creepy.
So yeah, Cradle is maybe not a crowd pleaser in the looks department, and the whole concept behind it turns out to come with a big asterisk, and it can't even fall back on being a whimsical kinetic whatzit for kids and tourists like a lot of the art the city buys. But at least I can think of a few interesting comparisons we can do between it and other art around town, which means I get to link to a few old blog posts. This is something you're supposed to do if you're writing a Serious Article about capital-A Art, to illustrate some theory you have or just to demonstrate you've looked at other Art before and have had serious thoughts about it too. Though I've never figured out whether linking to your own old posts hurts or helps when Google decides how to rank this stuff.
First, if you want to celebrate something that actually helps salmon, there are at least two statues of beavers around town, probably more than that. One is up on NE Alberta St., and one further south on the Greenway Trail at the Heron Pointe condos. The latter has been there since the 1980s and seems to be a beloved part of the neighborhood as people are always giving it fresh flowers to hold, or making costumes for it. Cradle does not seem to have inspired the same level of devotion, or at least it hasn't yet. About which, it's an established scientific fact that human beings seem to be inherently biased in favor of "charismatic megafauna" versus, say, tree roots.
There actually is a way to make woody debris more charismatic, though, and I'm going to tell you how, though I can't promise this will be enough to save the baby salmon or the world in general. When I was a small child in the late 70s, my mom had this business idea that 1.) putting googly eyes on driftwood was a legitimate Pacific Northwest handicraft, and 2.) people will pay good money for driftwood critters with googly eyes. See, the art is in picking out the wood that has inherent potential, and then putting the googly eyes right where they have to be. Stop there and change nothing else, and viewers' brains will do the rest of the work and turn that into a cute face. (Compare the story about the pope asking Michelangelo how he created his David statue. Michelangelo replied that it was simple: You just take your chisel and chip away everything that isn't David.) After a couple of family trips to the beach, a few things became clear. First, it turns out most driftwood has little or no inherent potential for cuteness, and kids are no help at all in picking out the few choice bits of wood that do. So that part is a lot time consuming than you might think. Second, you would have to find and sell a great deal of googly-eyed driftwood critters just to break even on trips to the coast, given the high gas prices and low mileage of the late 70s. And third, taking driftwood from the beach for commercial purposes was and is a bit of a legal grey area at best. So that's why mom's business idea didn't pencil out back then, and all of this is a very roundabout way of saying the Cradle tree roots would almost certainly benefit from having googly eyes. But please note that it's only Art if an actual artist with an MFA comes by and adds them. If anyone else does it's just vandalism and Legal says I have to tell you not to do that. Even you, mom, if you're reading this.
A second comparison is with Ancestor Tree in North Portland's McCoy Park, which I talked about a bit here. It was another giant tree root, pulled up and positioned above ground and displayed as art. And I say "was" because the wood wasn't preserved very well, and the art only lasted around 7 years before decay made the giant root a safety hazard and it had to be torn out. I don't know if Cradle is at the same risk of decay over time, but at least it doesn't have to support its own weight while towering over the park's soft, puny visitors, so there's that at least.
Our third comparison is with Simpson's 1991 Host Analog outside the Oregon Convention Center. Host Analog went in around the peak of the state's spotted owl wars, and it looks superficially similar to Cradle: A fallen old growth tree transported to the big city, with a support structure holding it in place, and in this case an irrigation system to try to simulate moist old growth forest conditions in an urban environment full of conventiongoers. But the concept behind it is different: The fallen tree is set up to be a nurse log for future tree(s), and the art is the very slow process of decay and regrowth over many decades as they roll by, and -- believe it or not -- it has nothing to do with migrating salmon at all. But that was then; it's the 21st Century now, and the Owl Problem fell out of the headlines years ago thanks to a muddle of federal consent degrees and a few studies saying the owls are doomed no matter what we do because of invasive rival owls. So, long story short, nobody wants owl art anymore. Instead, contemporary public art buyers simply cannot get enough awareness-raising salmon art, regardless of how much of it they already have, and I'm trying to avoid heavyhanded historical analogies with stuff like Confederate memorials, or statues of Lenin, or idealized Bible-thumpin' pioneers, or of assorted local royalty, since that's really, really not where I wanted to go with this.
Although now that you mention it, if you look at a male sockeye salmon in its migration/spawning body form, and compare that with one of the more desperately inbred Habsburgs, say, Charles II of Spain, you have to admit the resemblance is uncanny: The nose, the jawline, the hump, the difficulty in reproducing, everything. They could almost be cousin-uncle-siblings. So I dunno, man. I dunno.
Footnotes
1. That last fish ladder link ("ladders") goes to an Art Deco fish ladder from the 1930s located in... Oklahoma, on a creek that eventually flows into the Gulf of Mexico via the Red and Atchafalaya Rivers. None of which are home to naturally-occurring salmon, nor has the creek ever been stocked with them, and this all happened close to half a century before the word "performative" came into use for this sort of thing. On the other hand it looks kind of cool, and building it created some good honest construction jobs for a while, and the engineers involved apparently meant well by it, so there's that. And semi-relatedly, the one link in this paragraph ("Atchafalaya") goes to a 1987 John McPhee essay about the Mississippi River and engineers' ongoing attempts to control it, which are almost certainly doomed in the long run. It doesn't have much to do with the art here, honestly, or salmon for that matter, but the writing is much better than anything you're likely to encounter here on this humble blog. So go read that instead if you're sick of me babbling on about about art and waterfalls and so forth.
2. Speaking of stream restoration, I took a look at the Utilities corner of PortlandMaps -- which lets you explore the many pipes and wires that lurk beneath city streets -- and from what I can tell the closest natural stream to here is a creek that starts up in the West Hills and comes down from the West Hills south of the VA Hospital. The city sewer/stormwater map starts tracking it here where it flows under the VA hospital service road in a culvert. The creek flows naturally on the surface for a couple of hundred feet, then enters a pipe just uphill of Terwilliger and remains underground after that, trending vaguely northeast in pipes that don't align with the street grid -- which usually means it's an old pipe that followed the original course of the creek. In fact the pipe segment that the last link goes to is dated 1892 and was built with bricks. That diagonal pattern ends at the redeveloped South Waterfront district, where a lot of basic infrastructure was rebuilt in the early 2000s before the condo towers came, so it's hard to tell exactly where the creek used to enter the Willamette River, but it was either right at Curry St., or a block north at Whitaker St., or a bit further than that, somewhere in the Zidell shipyard area. But that doesn't happen anymore; instead it flows into the city's Big Pipe system, as a blend of the original creek plus storm runoff and local sewage, and flows north along Waterfront Park, then into a tunnel under the river, then it gets pumped uphill to cross the North Portland peninsula to the Columbia Wastewater Plant, and after treatment ends up in the Columbia Slough. All of this is to say that if the city (and/or developers) had been serious about doing some actual stream restoration work around here, they missed a golden opportunity to daylight an urban waterway back in the early 2000s. But I haven't seen any indication the city even considered it at the time, and are content to just do symbolic measures instead.
