High Tide at Our House, Dec. 20, 2018

Toward the end of December here on Willapa Bay, the tides are typically higher than at most other times of the year.  Depending upon which tide table you check, we’ve already had the highest tide of the year – an 11.57-footer at 11:05 a.m. on December 20^th (which was this past Thursday.)  My neighbor Cyndy referred to it as a “King Tide” – a term I’d never heard before.

According to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) “a King Tide is a non-scientific term people often use to describe exceptionally high tides.”  I didn’t know that.  In my (admittedly limited) experience, I’ve just heard winter high tides referred to as… “winter high tides.”

I don’t know what an average high tide is, or even if you can really call a tide’s height “average” but, around here, any high tide in the ten or eleven-foot range is considered pretty high.  If the timing is such that there is a big storm behind such a tide, the incoming water has been known to roll right on into town – over the meadows, up the lanes and onto Territory Road.  Old-timers can tell you about people who have rowed their boats right down the street!

Oysterville by Willard Espy

My favorite high tide story has been told for several generations in our family.  My uncle Willard Espy memorialized it in his book Oysterville, Roads to Grandpa’s Village.  In honor of High Tide Season and of my great-grandfather R.H. Espy, I reprint it here:

One day in the 1850s, a winter tide lifted the Stout home from its location on the bay bank (the house must have been about the size of a two-car garage) and carried it seaward in the midst of a driving rain with Mrs. Stout and their three small children trapped inside.  A neighbor rushed to grandpa with the news.  Grandpa set aside the accounts on which he was working, unlaced and removed his shoes, pulled on wool socks and gum boots, donned slicker and sou’wester, and waded down the flooded lane to his dinghy.  He upped the anchor, settled the oars in their locks, and began to row, using short, even strokes.  The wind was intense, the rain was heavy, and the house had been bearing toward the bar for nearly an hour.  Grandpa, however, followed without hesitation the path of the now retreating tide glancing over his shoulder at intervals to see where he was going.  At last the Stout house hove dimly into view, already listing to starboard, and well down in the water.  Overtaking it, he snubbed his boat to a porch post, waded over the porch, and forced the front door open against the pressure of the water inside.  In the living room he found Mrs. Stout in water up to her balloon-like breasts, which she appeared to be using as water wings.  She was holding the head of her one-year-old above the surface with one hand and that of her two-year old with the other.  Her three-year-old sat on her shoulders, his hands rooted in her hair.     

The Meadow at High Tide, 2017

The building had sunk too deep to be towed back home against the tide.  Grandpa used the painter and anchor from his dinghy to moor the house for future salvage, and rowed the Stouts back to Oysterville.  He could not swim, but he knew how to row.

Beginning on Christmas Day and continuing for a week or so, there will be a series of ten-foot-plus morning tides.  I don’t think any of our houses along the bayside are in danger of floating out to sea, but you might have your dinghies ready for a rescue run just in case!