On the mudflats

“Mudflats. Hmph. I wouldn’t live at Warm Beach if you paid me. Grade three waterfront,” said a “friend” several years ago to me.

(I have no idea what Grade Two is!)

I was incredulous. “You mean you don’t like mudflats? That’s half the fun of living here!”

People’s reaction to our mudflats is interesting. You either love ‘em or hate ‘em. My Uncle Hutch, who bought a place at Lake Sammamish in the early 1950s, just could not understand my dad’s love of the place. He kept protesting, “Your boat is high and dry fifty percent of the time, Jim. I don’t get it.”

I guess what people don’t get is the mudflats represent a different kind of beach life. True. You don’t get to take your boat out whenever you want. You have to really watch and know the tide for any boating you do.

But again, that’s what makes us Warm Beachers.

Ask about anyone who lives here, especially in the summer, when high and low tide is on any particular day, and they can tell you.

The mudflats for me were where I had some of the most fun times of my youth.

For one thing, I have never been to an area where there is more space.

It’s like you’re totally free—you can run and run for miles, and other than an occasional river channel you might have to cross, you can walk and walk or run, and still see where home is.

You have to be smart about it though.

If you get out too far, you can get stuck by the water, and there has been more than one “tourist” who has gone out there and had to be rescued by a “native.”

It only takes six hours to go from high to low tide and vice versa. If you do get trapped out there when the tide comes in, you have to remember to walk north, not straight in.

Those of us who live here feel a bit of superiority over the rest of world, in that we understand our flats.

Without fail, almost every spring and summer, a big boat, probably from Seattle or thereabouts, comes flying up the bay with the motors going full bore and we all watch from our yards, thinking, “I wonder when this one is gonna stop.”

Then we invariably hear a high-pitched whirr of their motor, and they’re stuck, usually for the day, on an out-going tide.

My dear husband often walks out to offer a hand, after I sniff, “They should have known better,” (he hasn’t lived here as long as I have) and offers them a phone or some kind of assistance. One time he brought in a “stuck” family and drove them to Kayak Park to wait out the tide in their camp.

When I was between the ages of 6 to 10, the neighborhood kids and I used to play for hours in the mudflats. One of our favorite games was to build a mud boat out on the flats, where we would draw the outline of a dinghy in the sandy mud, and then proceed to build the “walls” of the boat up around us with the mud. The kid whose boat was last to fill up as the tide rolled in, was “the winner.” The prize was the pride felt just knowing you were the superior mudflat engineer for the day.

We also built mudflat cities creating mud houses with streets and river tributaries running through them with trees and bushes made of sticks and seaweed. I always thought those trees looked like palm trees, and my city was in the tropics and so beautiful.

We’d take sticks and draw baseball diamonds in the flats and play baseball out there with plastic balls and bats. Even our parents would get in on the game and we’d play as long as we possibly could. Sometimes running the bases in two feet of water, as the tide always gulped up our “field.”

We’d also play a game where we would draw a big circle in the flats, again with a stick, and then draw two lines splitting the circle in half like a bull’s eye target, and we would play “Tag, you’re it” with the stipulation that you had to stay on the lines when “It” was after you. The center of the crossed lines was “safe,” but you could only stay there until the next person ran to it.

There is also no better place for dogs.

Watching our dogs run with pure unadulterated joy on those flats just makes me cry from happiness.

A neighbor, Loren Larsen, who moved to Warm Beach a couple of years ago, never saw the tide flats when he was buying his house. He walks the beach everyday with his boxer, Gladys, and he said to me when I first met him, “You know, I couldn’t believe it when I saw the mudflats. They’re such a bonus!”

And if we didn’t have our mudflats, we wouldn’t have the warm water that makes Warm Beach, well, Warm Beach!

I love the days when the summer sun heats up those flats and the water comes in “like bath water,” as my mom used to say.

My life has gone on, on the mudflats of Warm Beach. I can’t imagine it any other way.

Grade three waterfront? Puhleez! Grade A plus, number 1 if you ask me!