By Eric Scigliano

First published in the Seattle Weekly, July 10, 1996

Copyright Seattle Weekly 1996

Reprinted with author’s permission

Forget about the darkest rain forest and farthest islands; Seattle’s terra incognita is. . . Federal Way. With nearly 75,000 people, this suburb is the state’s fifth-largest city and one of its fastest-growing. It sits just 23 miles  from Seattle’s downtown down Highway 99. But as the mind flies and the stereotype travels, it is as remote as Usk or Concrete, much farther from preening, urbane Seattle than Orcas, Olympia, Port Townsend, or even Portland.

It’s the anti-city with the weird name, a synonym for suburban sprawl and banality—a joke, when Seattleites mention it all. If Gertrude Stein stumbled on Federal Way today and lived to tell of it, she might say: Never mind finding a there there, is there anywhere there to even look for a there?

Little would she know. Little do we Seattle snobs know.

Hidden amidst the numbing sprawl of Federal Way, in the most unpromising surroundings imaginable, is a historical anomaly of the first rank: what is probably Seattle’s oldest house. Behind this misplaced monument is an even rarer find: a primeval forest bog that is one of the region’s most unusual and unforgettable natural treasures and one of its best best-kept secrets. This pristine, if fragile, island lies amidst runaway development. Contrary to suburban stereotype, it is also a place with a history, which is largely the story of a very determined woman and her decades-long fight for a dream that seemed crazy to the experts who knew better—until she brought it to fruition. Yes, Federal Way does have a soul. And that soul is a swamp.

Geography is destiny, and geography made Federal Way the in-between, nowhere place it is today. This non-town would seem to be strategically placed, at the elbow of the wobbly arm of Puget Sound. But it sits upon a crinkly pattern of hills, gullies, and high bluffs overlooking the Sound, lacking the good harbors and flat farmland that drew settlement to Seattle, Tacoma, and the Kent Valley to the east. When steamboats gave way to  motorcars, the roads brought a little more growth to the hamlets of southwest King County. Indeed, the first good highway between Seattle and Tacoma—State Road 99, built in 1926—gave Federal Way its inadvertent name. The locals called it “the federal highway,” because the feds had put up the money. Soon after, five rural schools merged and took the name of the highway that had tied them together: the Federal Way School District.

Greyhound and some stubborn locals persisted in calling it “Kitts Corner,” after a Highway 99 roadhouse that was the main local bus stop. But “Federal Way” stuck, despite many best efforts to find a more euphonious name. For years, the proposals flew: “Hub City,” “Sea-Tac,” and something evoking Weyerhaeuser, the resident corporate giant, surfaced briefly. “Twelve Lakes,”  “Evergreen,” and “Soundcrest” were the serious contenders. 

The change effort finally failed in the face of habit, frugality, and disputatiousness. It would cost local businesses too much in signs and stationery, and boosters couldn’t agree on a new choice anyway. But the name games pointed up how tentative and contingent is the sense of place in this in-between land. Otherwise, however, people in Federal Way seem plaintively aware of being between Tacoma and Seattle, and closer to Tacoma. They get the Seattle dailies and The (Tacoma) News Tribune. Many of them maintain two phone numbers, for local calls to Seattle and Tacoma. Another new city, incorporated at the same time as Federal Way in 1990, got the “Seatac” name, but Federal Way already had the Sea-Tac Mall. Worse yet, this mall is the closest thing it has to a downtown, since Federal Way never had a town center, just a scattering of commercial outposts tied together by highway sprawl.

Skip Priest, mayor of the Federal Way City Council, speaks of the urgent need for “downtown revitalization.” Press him, though, and he’ll admit that really means downtown creation.  Federal Way became a city before it ever got to be a town.
 

The mystery cabin and secret swamp

Head south on Highway 99, just a few shopping strips past Federal Way’s “downtown” junction at Southwest 320th Street. Turn west on 348th, past more strip development and a Metro Park ’n Ride. On the left you’ll see a bizarre artifact of the sort of childhood that this precocious instant city never got to have. Or, if you’re like other motorists, you’ll whizz past it. It is a log cabin, missing its roof and windows but still standing straight, painted the color of cheap “redwood” stain. Behind it, invisible from the road in a clearing in the blackberries, alders, and weeds, is the shell of another, smaller, even more weathered cabin.

The Federal Way Historical Society moved the cabins to this protected patch of state park land from their previous refuge at the Federal Shopping Way center on 99, where expansion was about to overtake them. The smaller structure is called the Barker Cabin, and was the only 19th-century building the historical society could find still standing in the Federal Way area; it did locate another log cabin, but that one was built in the 1930s, when the Depression made milled lumber once again unaffordable.

The cabin by the road is an even bigger anomaly, and a mystery. It is called “the Denny Cabin,” though the stories vary as to which of Seattle’s founders actually built it. According to a handpainted plaque, The Seattle Times  reported in 1939 that Chief Seattle himself had built the cabin, and that Asa Mercer was believed to have lived in it. What’s known is that David Denny used it as a real estate office near what’s now Seattle Center in the 1880s. Then came the 1962 World’s Fair and booming redevelopment on Queen Anne, and the cabin was forced out. Perhaps Seattleites should stop joking about the suburbs’ lack of roots and weak sense of history. Seattle gave its oldest house to Federal Way.

Just past the cabin, an inconspicuous driveway marked by a drab “State Park” sign heads south into the brush. Follow it, past a dignified farmhouse on the left and a lowslung rambler on the right, past which you may catch an inviting glimpse of a lake. A turn-off on the left descends to a small dirt parking lot with a portable potty and a wooden sign kiosk that tells you you’ve reached “Hylebos State Park.” Straight ahead, a boardwalk cuts into the wood. Follow it a few yards, and you’re in another world.

 Perhaps, if you’re lucky as I was, you’ll have a Virgil to guide you—one of a circle of neighbors and other nature lovers who’ve banded together as the “Friends of the Hylebos” to watch over this swamp. Perhaps even the godmother of the swamp herself: 85-year-old Ilene Marckx, still feisty and playful as someone half or a quarter that age, who used to own the Hylebos, who understands it better than anyone else, and who’s done more than anyone to save it.

At first, the vegetation growing along and arching over the walkway is the usual sort for the damp Puget Sound lowlands: ferns, rhododendrons, vine maple, salmonberry. Hemlocks and cedars scramble to top the canopy and reach the upper light. Large black cottonwoods—a thirsty streamside species—make clear the area is full of water. As the walkway jags from east to south, a geologic anomaly—a relic of the last glacial retreat, some 12,000 years ago—provides more evidence. This is a elegantly sculpted, perpetually wet sinkhole, one of several in the Hylebos wetland. Though it descends just 20 feet, to an underlying aquifer, it looks as though it were a bottomless hole to China of childhood tales.

The sinkhole has its denizens. Last year and this I’ve seen a red-legged frog—once the region’s dominant species, now vanished from much of it—perched by its rim. Marckx has recorded all the usual wildlife suspects, and a few unusual ones, in these few dozen acres: racoons, coyotes, skunks, muskrats, mink, weasels, porcupines, and mountain beaver, flying squirrels, hares, and various species of mouse, bat, mole, and shrew. Douglas squirrels, the graceful native red squirrels, still forage in its glades; they haven’t yet been displaced from this refuge by the larger, predatory Eastern gray squirrels that have overrun Seattle.

Birds let off a fine din in the boughs above, and now and then show themselves. A pileated woodpecker, with its blazing big red head, lights up the landscape. Here stands the pockmarked hulk of a tree bored to death by bark beetles; to get the beetles, the woodpeckers have pecked out fissures deep enough to cram your hand into. Otherwise, the Hylebos’ wildlife is relatively inconspicuous, as befits its landscape; the lusher the forest, the less visible its inhabitants.

The Hylebos’ floral community is, by contrast, wildly varied, brazen, and distinctive, almost tropical in its abundance. A few score paces down the walkway and you step into park-like glens reminiscent of the great natural cathedrals of the western Olympic Peninsula. Great trees form a high canopy, and much greater ones rot expressively, bearded in moss and lichens, nursing new saplings as they decay. Look a little closer and you’ll see that the moss is not a uniform carpet but a mottled field of different colors and textures: dark and light, coarse and fine, shaggy and cropped.

This swamp is a living conservatory, reportedly celebrated among botanists around the country. Marckx and visiting botanists have catalogued 27 species of moss, 37 lichens, 30 fungi, six ferns, and six liverworts here—not to mention 15 tree species and dozens of shrubs and herbs, including all three of the region’s wild roses and several rare, or locally rare, species.. She lamented when some other plant inhabitants—bog laurel, bog orchid, swamp violet, kneeling angelica—disappeared, either because of the walkway’s construction or natural succession. But she and the park’s other caretakers decided not to replant them: “If we’re going to try to preserve the bog, we can’t go trying to remodel it just to suit ourselves.”

Anyway, the whole of the West Hylebos’ botanical repertory is greater than any individual species. “In terms of diversity, it’s wonderful,” says the University of Washington’s Sarah Spear Cooke, a leading authority on wetland flora. who has inventoried King, Snohomish, and Island Counties’ wetlands and written the upcoming Audubon Field Guide to the Common Wetland Plants of Western Washington and Northwest Oregon. “Regionally, it’s absolutely exceptional—I could count on one hand the number of [such] climax bogs left in the whole Puget Trough. At other wetlands where you can so see one or two species; the nice things about the Hylebos they’re all there.  I always recommend to teachers that they take their classes their—it’s such a magical place, it’s very easy for kids to get an appreciation of the ecosystem.’’

The three dominant conifer giants of the Puget lowlands—Douglas fir, Western hemlock, and red cedar—all stand tall, if tippily, in the West Hylebos, as does a rather more unusual conifer: Sitka spruce, a species whose exceptional lightness and strength made it the essential frame material of old-time airplanes—a renewable aluminum. Howard Hughes, in his most audacious flight of megalomania, built the world’s largest airplane, the  “Spruce Goose,” out of the stuff in 1947. Lesser airplane makers combed the woods for Sitka spruce. Marckx remembers one forestry expert who claimed that all the Sitka spruce had been logged on this side of Puget Sound. Come see the Hylebos, she told him.

Double and triple-trunked conifers, bizarre Siamese-twin trees, abound here, a phenomenon that’s stumped every forester Marckx has queried for an explanation. “There’s got to be a reason,” she mutters determinedly. In fact, there are two, says Cooke: Saplings grow in a crazy fashion in the sodden, shallow base of the bog’s nurse logs, splitting into several trunks. And sometimes nursed saplings will grow into each other, fusing their bark.

One old cedar by the boardwalk wears the notches left by some woodsman’s ax. Otherwise, the loggers missed the trees in this accidental ancient-forest preserve. But nature itself has been rough on what the chainsaws have spared. Swamps may keep loggers out, but they also set trees up for a fall. In such wet ground, the trees don’t have to dig for water and so, in effect, float on their roots, ripe for a tumble. The biggest tumble of recent years came on January 20, 1993 a night enshrined in the records as the Inauguration Day Storm—the night Bill Clinton managed to keep his windiness in check but the local weather didn’t. The storm left many of the West Hylebos’ grandest trees stretched out on the moss, their massive “rootcakes” up-ended. One 12-foot rootcake pulled a whole section of boardwalk up with it. That platform now climbs toward the sky, eloquent as a war ruin and perfectly perpendicular, beside a sapling parallel to the ground.

The downed trees only enhance the forest’s sense of antiquity. Sit on one of the iron park benches set on the walkway (lately rickety from vandals’ attempts to disassemble them) or, better, on one of the vandal-proof seats chainsawed out of the nearest fallen trees. Breathe deep, and you may feel you’re on the Hoh River in the off season. The quiet is palpable—until the even more palpable roar of a jet making a low descent to SeaTac Airport. “They fly low because they think there’s nothing down here,” Marckx notes dryly.

Serenity returns quickly to a place like this. Rather than galloping straight ahead or looping smoothly, the boardwalk curves and meanders, opening and closing upon one intimate vista after another. This makes the trail seem longer than it is (a little over a mile) and reinforces the sense of protective enclosure in the wood and  esacape from the outside hurly burly. Artful landscape architecture? No, another lucky accident.

The trail was not built by official crews with an eye to efficiency and the manpower to push through the thickets. Instead, Marckx, her husband Francis, and a friend cut it as best they could. “Francis went first with a chainsaw, then Bror came along with a machete, and I followed throwing everything aside. We’d get into a thicket, then have to back up and go around it. No one had ever been in there, that we know of, except for these two old white-haired men whon said they’d been in there as kids. But the state parks engineer told the crew to follow that path, don’t change a jot or tittle.” So it was, it’s said, that the streets of Boston followed the paths trod by the first colonists’ cows.

 
The bog tells its tale

Its tall trees and lush, varied vegetation make the West Hylebos Wetland doubly unusual, and enigmatic as well. Marckx likes to boast that “the West Hylebos contains every type of wetland there is”—from cedar swamp to open marsh. But its predominant, and distinctive, type is peat bog. Such bogs form in wet basins over thousands of years, as sphagnum mosses grow, die, and compact into thick layers of peat. The continual waterlogging and decomposing peat produce a highly acidic, oxygen-poor environment, in which decay progresses and nutrients are released at an extremely slow pace. This makes peat bogs terrific natural time capsules. They preserve precise ash records of past volcanic eruptions and pollen samples of ancient flora, and even the hair, hide, and tissues of prehistoric peoples and creatures.

Worldwide, bogs are coming to be recognized as unique and endangered ecosystems and, perhaps, essential factors in moderating global climate. According to The New York Times (2/9/93), a University of Exeter study “found that while peat bogs cover only half the area that rain forests do, they hold more than three times the carbon.” Extracting the peat may be “contributing to global warming by liberating millions of tons of stored carbon in the form of carbon dioxide,” either through burning or through decomposition in gardens.

In the British Isles, once-vast bogs have been largely depleted by peat mining, first for fuel and now for gardening, and battles now rage over the few that are left; green-minded gardeners have called for a spaghnum boycott. (It’s no big sacrifice; leaves, grass clippings, and other compost work as well or better for mulch and soil conditioner.) Canada and one state, Minnesota, still have vast peat bogs, but these too are fast being mined. “Of the wetlands we’ve inventoried in King County,” says Louise Kulzer, a bog expert at the County’s Surface Water Management Division, “only 3 percent are bogs.” And these, along with their endemic species, “are probably threatened”—not by mining but by development and the hydrologic disruptions it brings. “We’re super-concerned about the chemistry in the bogs,” says Kulzer. “You can kill sphagnum even with unpolluted water, if it has lots of calcium and other cations, which overwhelm the sphagnum.” (Cations are light metallic elements—calcium, sodium, magnesium, potassium—that make water more alkaline. Sphagnum absorbs these and makes the water acidic.)

Aside from the Hylebos, notes King County wetlands ecologist Ruth Schaefer, “pretty much all the other bogs in urban areas have been really hosed. One of the most remarkable things about [West Hylebos] is its existence in a very highly developed urban area.”

The other is its lavish variety of lifeforms. Peat bogs tend to be rather austere and specialized habitats, inhabited by a narrow and specialized range of plants and animals that may survive nowhere else: bog cranberries, insect-eating sundews, copepods, a few types of beetles, and many, many spiders. Some trees may grow in stunted form. Louise Kulzer, a bog expert, says that hemlocks growing at Queen’s Bog on the East Sammamish Plateau are “quite old, but just three feet tall.” Schaefer says lodgepole pines grow in the Spring Lake bog near Renton, but are likewise stunted: “Some are dying.”

The heart of the West Hylebos Wetland is a classic bog, but with a puzzling difference. It has a bog’s acidic, mahogany-colored water and deep sphagnum moss. (“I’ve heard guesses of 35 feet [of moss],” says Marckx. “Some say much deeper. We don’t even know how many acres of moss are here. We’re all just guessing, all the time.”) It feels not like solid ground but like a thick mattress—or the dozens of mattresses piled under the finicky princess in the old tale. And yet, along with the usual scrabbling bog plants, there grow all those lush thickets and splendid trees. Why? “I have to confess, it’s a mystery,” says Schaefer. “I don’t know why the trees are so big.” The West Hylebos seems caught at a peculiar point of transition between bog and forest, with vigorous qualities of both (though it’s lost any sundews and cranberries it had).

The county may yet solve these and other local bog mysteries, if it can hold on to its bogs. Its surface-water division has proposed new rules to better protect bogs, through what Kulzer calls “a three-tiered treatment system” to remove “almost all the dirt and nutrients” from the water. Otherwise, the sphagnum will get choked and the bogs will fill in, eventually becoming solid land. The distinctive habitats and inhabitants they support will be lost. So will the pollutant-cleansing, water-absorbing, flood-regulating functions they perform.  And so will the peculiar beauty of a place like the West Hylebos.

 
His lake, her arboretum

Filling in is just what people everywhere and at almost every time have wanted to do with swamps and bogs. The West Hylebos survives because Ilene and Francis Marckx (he died four years ago) had different ideas.

Their upbringings seemed to have prepared them more for farming the land than saving wilderness. His family had a chicken-breeding business near Federal Way. She was born on a homestead near Leavenworth, but to escape the snows her father traded “a very good farm” there for a very bad scabrock farm in Cheney, near Spokane. Poverty didn’t faze Ilene: “I spent a lot of time in the woods,” she recalls. “I’d always had that yen for nature.” She followed the yen to what was then Washington State College, taking a major in zoology (one of only two women in the department) and an equivalent in botany. There she met Francis Marckx, who was studying poultry husbandry, and helped him with his research. They married secretly, because she would not be able to get a teaching job if she were married.

After graduating “in the bottom of the Depression,” Ilene became a science teacher. Gradually she came to realize the game was rigged; the jobs went first to football coaches and other men, even if they knew nothing about science. She had to head out to the Olympic Peninsula to find a job teaching science. She returned to join Francis first in expanding the poultry business, then in starting a feed store which became a general farm store and, as much as any place was, the commercial center of the emerging Federal Way.

Francis Marckx bought and developed more properties and became a leading local pillar—head of the local Grange, first president of the Chamber of Commerce. Ilene was just as active on her own community projects; she led the campaign for a Federal Way library and taught and spoke constantly on local natural history. In 1955, they realized their twin dreams: “I wanted to plant trees,” she recalls. “He wanted a lake.” Just as they were about to buy another property, a sudden death brought a larger, largely undeveloped stretch of land south of 348th Street on the market. “Francis leaned down to the ground,” Ilene Marckx recalls, “and said, ‘Listen. Can you hear the water?’”

“My mother could witch water,” Marckx recalls. “Some people have that ability.” But her husband’s affinity for water was different, and it came to be legendary in those parts. During the subsequent years of political battles over the fate of the Hylebos Wetland, she recalls, “Paul Barden [the area’s longtime County Council representative] used to say, ‘You can always hear water running when Francis Marckx walks into a room.’”

 As soon as they heard the water, the Marckxes snatched up the land. They couldn’t help noticing a nationalist coincidence: “Hylebos,” like “Merckx” (the original form of “Marckzis a Belgian name. The West Hylebos, and the East and South tributaries that it joins to form Hylebos Creek, are named after the Belgian-born priest Peter Francis Hylebos, Rome’s advance man and one of the young Washington Territory’s leading developers. Father Hylebos traveled by horseback from the Columbia to Grays Harbor to Commencement Bay, building churches and schools at each stop—and himself wound up one of Tacoma’s largest landowners. The best-known of many features that now bear his name is the Hylebos Waterway, the heavily dredged and polluted industrial channel through which Hylebos Creek empties into Commencement Bay. It’s fair turnabout then that his name should also attach to the upstream bog forest where the last of the area’s once-pristine character is still preserved. Those who think etymology is destiny, consider this: hyle means “wood” in Greek, and bos suggests the Latin/Germanic root for “forest” (as in bosk and bois). Marckx (originally Merckx, till an immigration official screwed it up) corresponds to the English “mark” and means “from the borderland” or “boundary.” Indeed, wetlands mark the borders between land and water.

When Francis Marckx dug his lake, the springs burbled up behind his backhoe and nearly buried it in fresh mud. But his friends remember him as not being the type to let a mud pit or much else get in his way. His “Mar Lake,” beside the house and northwest of the bog, now forms a vista that a prince might pine for, though any pauper can enjoy it. (Ilene Marckx has opened all the grounds—her yard—to the public during daylight hours, no reservation required. She asks only that people pick up their trash and don’t harass the critters, in particular the oversized garter snakes that teem in the garden.) Ducks, grebes, and turtles ply the two-acre Mar Lake (really, just a pond) while lurid dragonflies patrol its shore. Natty waxwings, swallows, and red-winged blackbirds swoop above, scarfing insects on the wing. Marckx has hung bat houses on the other side, to encourage nighttime insect hunters as well.

Past the lake, and next to a 100-year-old pioneer orchard, Ilene Marckx finally got to plant her own private arboretum. She started with all Washington’s native conifers but, inspired by Stephen Lowther, a paleontologist at the University of Puget Sound, she embarked on a more ambitious scheme: a “fossil arboretum” of what fossil pollen shows to be the most ancient tree species. The Federal Way Soroptimists have picked up the theme, and each year donate another prehistoric-type tree. The weird, exquisite collection—China fir, giant sequoia, umbrella pine, maidenhair tree, sweet gum, bald cypress, Kousa dogwood, dawn redwood, coast redwood, giant redwood—marches off toward the swamp.

 
The long, bloody struggle

For two decades, the Marckxes tended their little estate and never wondered what lay behind the thick brambles that walled off the greater part of it. “We lost so much time,” Ilene now laments. “We never knew.” Then, one day in the early 1970s, they noticed that the neighbor’s cows would drink from the nearest streams, then turn and go no further into the brush. Francis took his machete and hacked his way in to see what lay behind—and found the primeval, still-secret forest bog. Eager naturalists, the Marckxes recognized the value of land that another owner might see as unfit even for pasture.

  They’d found a treasure and a cause, and immediately had to begin fighting for it. The local sewer district planned to run trunk lines through the length of the wetland; the extensive digging would surely have ruined it. The Marckxes repelled this scheme in 1975. Three years later they succeeded in getting the wetland designated a “forest and recreation zone” and, under a brand new law, a “sensitive area” (a designation other landowners often try to evade). In 1981 they donated the wetland, 23.5 acres, to the state Parks Department; the state will receive the remaining 10 acres, including Mar Lake, after Ilene Marckx leaves.

She says they chose the state because “the county was into playfields” rather than preservation. But the state was scarcely eager to buy up the rest of the wetland, though that was essential if any of it was to be secure. The Brooklake Community Club promptly donated 12 more acres at the other end of the wetland. (A spur of the park boardwalk overlooks little Brook Lake and a retreat center currently leased by the Elks. In the old days, says Marckx, the former provided the community’s water supply, and the latter was its leading house of ill repute.)

The Marckxes then set off on a six-month, 19,000-mile road trip around the United States. Everywhere they visited new parks and proposed parks, trying to discover what elements of design, funding, and politics made them succeed or fail. The information served them in good stead. Upon returning, they joined what proved to be a three-year battle in Olympia for funds to purchase and save more of the wetland. In 1983, Governor John Spellman rejected their plea for $930,000. In 1984, a $600,000 package reached a tie vote in the Senate; Lieutenant Governor John Cherberg broke the tie and killed it. In 1985, the Friends of the Hylebos mustered and made the difference. The Legislature approved, then deleted, $296,000 for Hylebos acquisitions; at the last minute, local legislators managed to get the funds restored. Through it all, Ilene Marckx was there, phoning, mailing, buttonholing, and cajoling in what she herself still calls “the long, bloody struggle.” How do you say “no” to a passionate and determined old lady?

The wetland was still far from fully secure; what wetland is, as long as development continues in its watershed? And development was far along here. The original headwaters of the West Hylebos, about two miles to the north, now lie under Sea-Tac Mall’s park ’n ride lot. And despite the Marckxes’ and others’ best agitations, the county declined to assign a 200-foot protective buffer around the wetland, granting just 100 feet instead.

The battle over the Hylebos raged all the way to the state Supreme Court, and set a landmark precedent in environmental and land-use law. At the north end of the wetland, where the historic cabins now sit, the Presbytery of Seattle sought to build a church and parking lot, contrary to the wetlands zoning. The Presbyterians sued to overturn those restrictions as an unconstitutional taking of property without compensation. Not so, the Supreme Court finally ruled, as long as the property retained some useful value. The property-rights movement then moved on to plead its case against “takings” to the Legislature and public, rather than courts. 

Park boosters did not fare so well with the property just northeast of the wetland. Marckx says Councilmember Barden had assured her that the county would buy and preserve another parcel, and so she desisted agitating over it. Blink. Then Metro (which was at that time separate from the county) bought it and built a park-and-ride lot; Metro and neighbors such as Marckx argue as to whether it has affected the wetland.

One section of the wetland still remains in private, would-be-developers’ hands. Three investment groups—one in Canada—hold properties at the west, south, and southeast ends of the wetlands. Development along this highway stretch is still classic low-end Americana: Fly Wright Helicopters, the Fingers Spa, the Used Tire Warehouse, the Trucker’s Store. But look at the strip malls a half-mile north to see what the market would bear. Trouble is, according to state Parks acquisition agent Carlyle Staab notes, “most of those properties [by the park] can’t be developed because they’re in declared wetlands areas.” But their owners have rejected state offers purchase them for addition to the park—hoping, perhaps, for Congress or the Legislature to change the rules as to what a “declared wetlands area” will allow. And so the game of land-use chicken continues, year after year.

Marckx’s Monument

This is just one link in the blacktop jungle that rings the Hylebos preserve, and which has accelerated flood cycles here as in other developed watersheds. On roads to the west and south of the wetland, says Staab, winter floods now run two to three feet deep. Marckx reports them sweeping just as deeply over the boardwalk in the park. Floodwaters back up for hundreds of feet behind 356th Street, south of Brook Lake, where the creek exits. The city has had to replace the failing culvert and roadbed there; it now concedes the fight and plans to replace them with a bridge. This will be a boon not just for motorists but for wildlife, which will finally have a safe corridor under the roadway.

“It would be nice,” Staab muses, “to preserve that corridor clear down to where it dumps into the Sound.” Bit by bit, many people are trying. South of the park and 356th Street, down to Highway 99, the Hylebos West Fork passes through another spring-rich, still fairly intact wetland corridor called, aptly, Spring Valley. The county’s Schaefer considers Spring Valley “as unusual as the West Hylebos Wetland, and more threatened.” A few chum and coho and the odd Chinook still fight their way up what was a celebrated salmon stream, though flooding on private holdings further downstream has scoured the streambed and sent channels jumping, wiping out much spawning area.

Preoccupied though it is with ambitious plans for playfield parks elsewhere, the city of Federal Way is giving more attention to the streamshed. It has earmarked $750,000 from this fall’s $216-million county open-space bond issue for buying 20 acres in the Spring Valley (just one step in saving this corridor). Even without acquisition, Federal Way’s surface water manager Jeff Pratt hopes to get the Spring Valley’s flooding, siltation, and bank erosion under control as early as this year by adding log weirs and other “bioengineering” tricks. But to do so, the young city must compensate for the long-running failures of state and federal agencies to protect the stream. And it must overcome the resistance of the area’s famously right-leaning, government-wary property owners, some of whom see environmental officials on their property as equivalent of the “revenuers” of old hillbilly cartoons.

Fixing streamsheds begs a bigger question: Can human development still be brought into balance with the area’s complex hydrology and geology? The West Hylebos and Spring Valley wetlands are in sense surface projections of the great Redondo-Milton Aquifer, the main water source for southwest King and northeast Pierce counties; the West Hylebos lies very near to the aquifer’s center. What with development and impervious runoff, water isn’t percolating down to it the way it used to. “The water supply is all from wells, which are sucking the aquifer dry,” says Ted Enticknap, a retired engineer and leading authority on the local watersheds. “The mean well depth was 200 feet. Now they’re going down 1,200, even 2,400 feet.” When human demands for water impinge on the bog’s reserves, which priority will win out?

Ilene Marckx still ponders the big questions, still fires off her letters and op-eds, still tilts at Republican congressmen and other environmental despoilers and ignoramuses. But she doesn’t let the fights distract from the work at hand, of tending her own and, thanks to her, everyone else’s garden swamp. Other Hylebos stalwarts may grumble about the state’s slowness at making repairs and installing such features as interpretive signs. Marckx jumps in and does it herself—cataloging species, querying scientists, writing texts, searching for artists, even helping pay for a de facto park overseer. She patrols the mile-and-a-half boardwalk regularly, checking for unusual blooms and (increasingly usual, it seems) vandalism. She publishes a lively Hylebos Highlights newsletter and convenes monthly meetings of the “Friends of the Hylebos.” At the last, after dealing with the current crop of weighty issues, the dozen-odd attendees decamped to the bog itself for a lesson in water witching from the park’s founding manager, Chris Sherrod. There were, needless to say, plenty of water pockets to locate.

Marckx was slowed for a while last year by cataract and hip surgery. Now and then she fumes at not being able to remember a once-familiar technical term. But she shrugs: “There are alternatives to being 85, but they’re not so great.” And she bustles on to another project.

Call it vision, eccentricity, cussed stubbornness, or some combination of the three. Others with the means leave monuments, library wings, university chairs to posterity—or, if they fancy themselves so gifted, novels and symphonies. Ilene Marckx is leaving a swamp. The gesture has already rippled far beyond the confines of her own private bog, doing more to save the face of the land and change the mind of the future than a hundred ordinary philanthropies.

Eric Scigliano is the News Editor of the Seattle Metropolitan, and author of Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest For Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara and Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationship Between Elephants and Humans (Houghton Mifflin), and Puget Sound: Sea Between the Mountains and Seattle From the Air (both Graphic Arts).  He can be reached at  escigliano@seattlemet.com.