She wiped her hand on her coveralls again and shook mine, leaving a bit of grit behind in spite of her best efforts. Being a woman who often works in messy situations, I didn’t mind. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “I’m Rhiannon Held. I’m the archaeological site monitor. I wasn’t here when the launch pit collapsed, so I’m not sure how much I can help you.”
“I’ll settle for whatever you can tell me—how the collapse might have happened, what an archaeologist is doing here . . . that sort of thing.”
She looked intrigued and glanced around. “I don’t think anyone’s going to care if I’m not watching them insert bracing sections for a few minutes. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll find you a hard hat and I can give you a general idea of what’s going on—if that will help. It’s got to be more interesting than watching dirt get shoved out of the hole.”
She waved me through and manhandled the plywood back into place between us and the traffic. She may have looked adorable, but she was no weakling. On the other side of the plywood barrier stretched the site of the tunnel’s southern mouth. Right now it looked like the human equivalent of an anthill—a long open pit supported by poured-concrete walls and walkways across the top that was the focus of furious activity by men and excavating equipment in the middle of a huge expanse of mud about a block wide and three city blocks long. The ground shivered around the hole and a distant growling sound issued from the opening. I noticed that we were several feet below the level of the pavement outside the barriers.
“So,” I said, “this is the famous tunnel.”
“It will be once it’s done. This is the launch pit—it’s where the excavator entered the ground to start the dig. It had to be shored up and angled so the boring machine could get into position to make the tunnel without risk of the mouth collapsing and burying the machine—it’ll also be the basis of the ramp into the southern end of the tunnel once the project is ready for traffic. The small collapse you were talking about happened before the excavator was brought in. The area is a little wetter than everyone hoped it would be. We also found some bottles and other debris at the historic level, but no significant artifacts. All that’s been cleared away long ago, though. The project is into the serious tunneling now and that’s actually kind of dull to observe. But that’s my job—watch the site and keep an eye out for anything that the department will want to take a closer look at.” Held led me to a trailer and went inside to grab a hard hat and a sort of coverall coat, which she handed to me.
“Put these on,” she said.
As I did, I asked her, “Why do they need an archaeologist on site to look at bottles? Couldn’t they send them to you?”
“Legal complications. This area is mostly landfill over tidal mud flats that the local Indians used to fish and go clamming on. The original landfill is kind of interesting on its own, too, so there’s potential historical interest and artifacts. Ever since the Kennewick Man find and all the legal wrangling that went with it, Washington has had pretty stringent requirements about working in areas that may present anything of significant archaeological interest. So much of the area around Puget Sound was populated or used by the local tribes that all construction projects have to be investigated and cleared before any work can go ahead—we already did that stage here—and then there has to be a monitor standing by during the construction in case they dig into something unexpected that could be significant. Usually they don’t, but that’s the bread and butter that keeps most archaeologists employed and in Washington there are enough projects to keep a whole lot of people busy year-round. There’s really not a lot of work for us, otherwise. It’s not all whips and fedoras out here, as you can see,” she added with a derisive snort. “Mostly it’s either preparation work screening buckets full of mud for significant items—that’s the fun part— or it’s sitting on a site like I am, waiting to see if anything pops up. Lots of tedious sorting and grubbing around or sitting and waiting and looking at more buckets full of muck. And I mean a
“The excavator—which is named Bertha, incidentally—is about five stories tall and it’ll remove about eighty- six thousand cubic yards of mud before it’s done. And I get to look at every yard, just in case there’s something interesting in it. The hard part is figuring out what’s significant and what’s just grunge. Mud’s not as bland as it seems, though this stuff is pretty cold and nasty. It’s mostly seawater here, you know.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. The seawall leaks. It’s over a hundred years old and it wasn’t the best construction to begin with, so that’s being replaced—that’s another part of the project. The whole area’s unstable due to seawater infiltration and the type of fill they used. First they dumped in sawdust from the mill, then they dumped in mud from when they did the regrades. People threw in all sorts of junk and garbage. There’s a small artificial island of old ships’ ballast stones that was completely buried between Washington Street and Main—we just found some of the cores and minerals that aren’t native to Washington, so now we know right where the island was—parts of the buildings that burned down in the Great Fire were thrown in, and there’s even a shipwreck in here somewhere at the north end.”
“You’re kidding.”
She glanced up at me and grinned. “No. Some old wooden sailing ship—not a big one—that was beached before they built the seawall. No one wanted to pay to move it, so they just buried it. This part of the harbor was below the mill and the original sewer outflow, so it’s got a lot of weird stuff in it that came down from the bluff in the sewage as well as the landfill and junk that was dropped or lost over time—the prep team found some old patent medicine bottles and things like that at the historic level.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, before you get to anything interesting, you have to get past all the modern debris, roads, dirt, and so on that builds up or gets dumped on top of older layers. About ten feet down is where you get to the historic level in Seattle—you’ll notice the whole site is about six to ten feet lower than the streets around it. That’s because the prep and investigation teams had to basically scrape off the modern layer and look for deposits or sediment that would indicate an area of archaeological significance. That was done back in 2010. For instance, there used to be a coal wharf here before the first seawall was built, so the early team found bits of old anthracite coal and ships’ hardware. That kind of stuff is interesting, but the work going on now should be well below even that level. I don’t think they’ve found any of the bodies, though.”
I was startled. “Bodies?”
“Yeah. This is where the bad part of town started. It’s pretty awful, but during the diphtheria epidemic of 1875, a lot of people died—especially children—and they couldn’t bury them fast enough, so they dumped a lot of the bodies that went unclaimed or whose families couldn’t afford a burial into the landfill down here. People used to get killed in brawls and accidents around the brothels and saloons, and the poor died of disease and starvation, and the bodies got put in the graveyard here or thrown in the bay. Sometimes they washed out and then floated back on the tide, so the city offered money to any mortuary that would pick them up and bury them. So there was an upswing in ‘accidental deaths’ for a while down here. Sometimes people who wanted the cash would ambush or drug a sailor or a lumberjack or someone like that and then tie the body under the piers so they could ‘find’ it the next morning. Then they’d take it to one of the mortuaries in town, like Butterworth’s, and split the fifty bucks the city paid the business for dealing with the bodies. Not very nice. This is a great place for gruesome stories— like the car that went down around here.”
“Hang on—a car went into the bay?”
“Yes, but it was a long time after the seawall was completed and way out there,” Held replied, pointing nearly due west toward the waters of Elliott Bay. “Before the container docks, the bit straight out from here used to be the King Street pier. I think it was 1929 or ’30 . . . the family who owned the dock came to look it over and left the car in gear, so the car drove off the end of the pier by itself. The husband and both of the boys who were in the car got out, but the wife drowned, along with their dog. Horrible.” She closed her eyes and looked a little ill. Then she shook herself and added, “Anyhow, they pulled it out later, but I always wondered what might have drifted out of the car and into the mud there. I guess it’s the morbid streak in me. Probably an archaeologist thing. We’re all a little creepy that way—we want to dig up dead people and their homes and find out how they lived and died. There’s a lot of freaky things to be found in the mud—it’s waterlogged history with teredo worms. This end of the old shoreline is fairly wet and it’ll take a while after the new seawall is in place for the landfill to dry out and solidify.”
“How long?”
“Years. Personally, I plan never to drive through this tunnel once it’s finished. Ugh. I even shudder at the idea of taking the train while they’re building this. Everything built on the fill or supported by it would be
