At the Maya Lin Fish Cleaning Station

     I have visited the Maya Lin Fish Cleaning Station at Cape Disappointment several times and I have to say that I am always underwhelmed.  There was so much hype when this world-renowned artist/architect agreed to do the seven installations of the Lewis and Clark Confluence Project, and so much adulation when she actually visited the peninsula that I thought I was missing some important aspect of her work.  Finally, however, I have seen the station in use and have talked to a few fishermen about it.  My opinion has not changed.
     The November 2005 issue of Smithsonian magazine said:  At Cape Disappointment, the fish-cleaning table demonstrates the subtlety and nuance of Lin’s work. The table, with a sink at one end, is carved from a 16-foot long block of basalt, which Lin herself selected from a quarry in Eastern Washington. It replaces a battered, rusty industrial sink near the boat launch on Baker Bay. The new table is both beautiful and functional. But it also carries a message. Engraved on the surface is a Chinook creation myth. The etching will help grip the slippery fish while they’re being cleaned. It’s also a reminder that Chinook fishermen were catching salmon here thousands of years before white men came. “It’s subtle,” says Lin. “I hate to preach. But we can give insight.” 
       Insight maybe; backache for sure, according to the fishermen I spoke with.  “The table is just too low to be practical,” said one of the men.  He was cleaning tuna – nine beautiful fish just caught out in blue water eighteen miles beyond the Columbia’s mouth.
     I didn’t ask if the words etched on the table top do, in fact, help “grip the slippery fish.”  Maybe.  However, so shallowly incised are the letters that the Chinook legend told by them cannot be read, even when the station is not in use.  And, when the seagulls have spattered it with their droppings, the words disappear entirely.  Not much of a reminder about the Chinook fishermen of generations past.
     The basalt table is pretty.  That I will concede.  And the setting is gorgeous.  But it is functional only inasmuch as it is in proximity to the boat launch.  I’ve heard that another, more practical fish cleaning station is to be built nearby.  I don’t know which would be better – to build another “industrial sink” or to just admit that the first one doesn’t work and ask the artist to rethink it and do it again.   But that would be pointing out that the emperor has no clothes…if you know what I mean.