If sturgeon could talk

It’s hard not to anthropomorphize. What must that old Lake Washington sturgeon have somehow remembered into the age of Microsoft if it really had lived there since the A-Y-P? Did it retain some dim recollection of President William Howard Taft, who visited the fair at the end of September, a wavering, inverted image of a 300-pound politician in a top hat, looking down into its shallow pool? Probably not.

Feeding and resting in the murky depths, a sturgeon couldn’t see much even if it had great vision — and, like other undersea critters, it doesn’t. What sturgeon do have, Brennan explains, is a set of “very effective sensory organs used to smell, taste, and feel their environment, including a lateral line system, a large nasal rosette for olfaction, barbels, and sensory organs along the underside of the snout, similar to the [ampullae of Lorenzini that sharks use to detect weak electrical fields.]” Still, a fish might conceivably have noticed the difference between light and dark, or a difference in temperature when a 300-pound President blocked out the sun.

We have no reason to believe that Taft ever looked into the sturgeon pool, and even if he did, one somehow doubts that a fish would have found it memorable. Nevertheless, one is tempted to load the old sturgeon down with historical associations. First, there was the Olmsted-designed A-Y-P itself, where visitors could marvel at the “big stick,” a milled Douglas fir beam 156.5 feet long, sip oolong at the Formosa tea house, sample whatever the chef at the Alaska exhibit made that day with canned salmon, admire the view of Mount Rainier from Drumheller Fountain, and explore a fisheries building (the most popular exhibit at the fair).

And, of course, one might have seen Taft, who arrived in Seattle by train. (He had stopped off in North Yakima, where he had admired the apples and acknowledged the Civil War veterans in the crowd.) He spent a whole day at the A-Y-P, touring the exhibits before lunch. Did he admire the sturgeon? The fisheries exhibit stood just a little east of the U.S. government building’s 200-foot dome, but accounts of Taft’s visit don’t suggest he stopped in. They do suggest that before the president left town, he spent part of the next day golfing with the one-armed lumber baron C.D. Stimson (grandfather of Stimson Bullitt) at the Seattle Golf and Country Club, north of the city.

Presumably the outbreak of World War I only five years after the A-Y-P, the Seattle General Strike 10 years later, the Depression, World War II, the economic cycles of boom and bust, weren’t widely noted underwater. But the fish knew and may have remembered the lake as it once was and as it evolved.

When the A-Y-P ended, Lake Washington was deeper and larger than it is now, and it drained to the south, through the long-vanished Black River. The fish could have swum down the Black to the winding Duwamish, not yet straightened or dredged, then out through the channels and shallows of a wide estuary to Elliott Bay. Within the lake, it could have swum through the shallows that separated the Seattle shore from the island that has long since become the Bailey Peninsula, site of Seward Park. It may have smelled sodden ash spewed by Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern locomotives hauling lumber and coal along the shore.

It must have noticed when the Montlake Cut was opened in 1916, for the lake level dropped 9 feet, and water stopped running south into the Black River. It must have found that the shallows behind Seward Park and elsewhere were now high and dry.

The fish may have sensed something new when workers built the first floating bridge across the lake in 1940. Did it taste aviation fuel leaking from the wreckage of World War II aircraft that took off from the Sand Point Naval Air Station and crashed into the water? Did it feel vibrations from the first Seafair hydroplane race in 1951, and encounter strange objects after the Quicksilver disintegrated at high speed and sank in 80 feet of water?

How could it not have noticed the algae that bloomed after World War II, as growing communities dumped treated sewage into the lake, and not have altered its behavior as the algae died and rotted, using up much of the dissolved oxygen in the depths? Conversely, how can it not have noticed when the oxygen concentration increased after Metro started piping sewage around the lake, treating it, and releasing it into Puget Sound?

The fish didn’t live long enough to notice the old floating bridge sink in 1990 or the completion of Bill Gates‘ lakefront mansion seven years later, but if it really was dumped into the lake in 1909, it experienced a lot. As Seattle gets set to celebrate the A-Y-P centennial, most people probably envision a temporary city filled with women in long dresses and men in straw hats. I picture a young sturgeon exchanging a long, meaningful look with William Howard Taft.