The Sound of Diamonds: A Modern Anthology about Life around Puget Sound

By Bill Barker

What does living around present-day Puget Sound in western Washington and growing up in New Jersey across the Hudson River from the Big Apple have to do with the latest crop of pictures being beamed down to Earth from the James Webb Space Telescope? Everything, according to the author of The Sound of Diamonds. This book is an anthology of stories by Bill Barker that provides a mix of autobiography, history, and commentary on the issues and complexities of modern-day life—stories that he believes collectively suggest what science seems to be pointing to today: that we are all, in fact, inextricably connected to this universe as far back as we can see into it. This is an old concept, passed down through the ages. Ironically, it was perhaps an early nineteenth-century poet rather than a modern-day physicist who best described this incredible idea. In the words of William Blake (1757–1827):
Each grain of sand,
Every stone in the land,
Each rock and each hill,
Each fountain and rill,
Each herb and each tree,
Mountain, hill, earth, and sea,
Cloud, meteor, and star,
Are men seen afar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667878102

Bill Barker

I was born and raised in Charter Oak, California, and have lived my whole life in California. I guess you could say I’m a California dreamer. I would like to dedicate this book to my mom and dad who raised me to believe in myself and that anything is possible. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Book preview

Preface

I SEEM TO have a strong preference for peninsulas. Likely it’s from being born and raised on one. Admittedly, most folks don’t usually think of the state of New Jersey as a peninsula. But when you look at any detailed map of the great Garden State, it’s as plainly a peninsula as the nose on your face: the storied Hudson River separates New Jersey from New York in the northeast; then for 130 miles down its eastern coast lies the famous Jersey Shore, washed by the even more fabled Atlantic Ocean; until it reaches and curves round Cape May, marking the northern entrance to the capacious Delaware Bay; fed by its namesake, the historic Delaware River; which, almost undetectably on most large-scale maps, completes the watery circuit of what some might say is the open secret of this peculiar peninsula, since this singular stream then serves to separate the rather sizable Garden of a State from the eastern boundary of the equally great Keystone State, Pennsylvania.

Cape May Diamonds like these could be said to be the Cinderella story of so many plain old grains of sand, crystallized together (some as clear as glass, others clouded like ice), that wash up on beaches on the southernmost promontory—Cape May—of the famous Jersey Shore.

CLARK PERKS AT EN.WIKIPEDIA/CC-BY-SA-3.0

And how far does the Delaware River separate eastern Pennsylvania from western New Jersey? All the way north through their shared section of the geographically acclaimed Appalachian Mountains, from whence Cape May Diamonds are said to come.

Okay. So, what exactly are Cape May Diamonds? Glad you asked, dear reader. Cape May Diamonds are little pebbles of quartz—mere crystallized silica—silicon dioxide, the major ingredient of sand, which of course can be found by the billions of grains on most beaches round our rocky world. Only, these particular little pebbles of quartz that erode into the Delaware River way upstream are said to then start on an incredible journey, tumbling and tumbling down that ever-winding waterway for thousands of years, eventually tumbling right into Delaware Bay.

But that’s not the end of their adventure. Oh, no. For then the Delaware Bay goes to work on them. For how long? Again, who knows? Certainly not me. Let’s say, though, that these poor little pebbles have to suffer through thousands of more years of being tumbled about inside Delaware Bay, as if trapped inside a huge, natural rock polisher, before some beneficent storm blows in off the Atlantic. Then some of these precious little pebbles make a daring break for it. Why? To spend the rest of their hardscrabble lives in utterly lazy luxury, lying effortlessly all around the beautiful beaches surrounding Cape May, New Jersey.

In effect, Cape May Diamonds are basically just Mother Nature’s own personal Cinderella story of what can sometimes happen to things as simple as small bits of sand, if only they can stick together long enough.

And if, by and by, mere little pieces of stuck-together sand can ultimately become beautiful Cape May Diamonds, why not you and me, I say. For if Shakespeare got it right, aren’t we all indeed quintessence of dust, and if so, not really that far from grains of sand ourselves?

But then again, I’m from New Jersey, and rather partial to peninsulas. And having been living for some while now around the Puget Sound region of western Washington State, with all its peninsulas and scores and scores of rocky beaches surrounding this sublime inland sea, I’ll be damned if I don’t see ever more Cape May Diamonds—in both their rocky and human iterations—everywhere I look! Hence, the title of this book: The Sound of Diamonds.

—Bill Barker

Introduction

WHENEVER I read a book, I always want to know a little more about its author—in particular, any and all details they may care to share about their personal life, especially about their early childhood. It’s not necessary, of course. Still, the more writers share about themselves, the more I like it—especially if I enjoy the read.

With that in mind, dear reader, I have concluded this collection of mostly previously published essays of mine about Puget Sound and its people with a short, heretofore unpublished story I call, About a Boy and a Bookie, which I think gives a fair account of my youth within what I consider to be the greatest Garden State in our union.

I do hope it might satisfy any similar childhood curiosities you may have about me after perusing my modest scribblings.

CHAPTER 1

When Rhododendrons Rain Again, Alki

(December 2010)

ON TUESDAY, December 4, 1928, a soft, scattered shower fell in the heart of downtown Seattle. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported it as front-page news: BLOOMS DROPPED FROM SKY. The blooms referred to were petals from rhododendrons, Washington’s state flower. They fell from the heavens in a rain of color.

The noteworthy shower occurred when two airplanes, which had taken off from Boeing Field a short time earlier and reached their designated downtown target above the most famous hotel in the city, had strategically dipped their wings in salute and the pilots released their blossoms. They performed this high-flying feat to honor the passing of Ezra Meeker, Pacific Northwest pioneer and patriot extraordinaire, who had died at dawn in a room at the Frye Hotel the day before, twenty-six days before his ninety-eighth birthday.

Despite the flowery tribute, Ezra Meeker seems to me to be one of the least well-known of our great Americans—even here in the Evergreen State, his chosen and beloved home, where he lived and worked most of his long, busy, and event-filled life. Born in a cabin in Huntsville, Ohio, he first crossed the Oregon Trail in 1852 as a spry twenty-one-year-old in an ox-drawn covered wagon, averaging two miles per hour. Meeker stood up for Leschi, the leader of an outgunned Indigenous people, during his 1856 territorial trial; platted and founded the town of Puyallup; deliberately and diligently developed the hop industry in the Puyallup Valley in the mid-1860s until the once dirt-poor farmer was duly crowned Hop King of the World in the late 1880s; and stalwartly and loudly spoke out against expelling Tacoma’s outnumbered Chinese immigrants in 1885.

During his life, Meeker met such significant and sundry historical figures as Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, Jay Cooke, Queen Victoria, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, and Henry Ford. He authored several books despite having had less than six months of formal schooling. He is perhaps best known for retracing the Oregon Trail numerous times in a tireless effort to memorialize the pioneer route. In 1924, at the age of ninety-three, he made his last journey west-to-east, flying over the Oregon Trail in a four-hundred-horse-power, open-cockpit US Army Fokker T-2 at one hundred miles per hour.

Ezra Meeker at age 23.

FROM SEVENTY YEARS OF PROGRESS IN WASHINGTON (1922), BY EZRA MEEKER

Ironically, I would never have delved into the life and times of Ezra Meeker if Pierce County had not spent millions of dollars converting a played-out gravel pit by a creek in the South Sound area into a tony golf course and then invited the world to come marvel at it in 2015 when it played host to the US Open Championship golf tournament. The county ignored a paradise island just a few miles away where, I learned, Ezra Meeker and his family first settled in the Puget Sound region. If you go to the official Chambers Bay Golf Course website, you can see a series of striking photographs of our truly sublime southern Puget Sound: the snow-covered saw-toothed Olympics and the lovely islands of emerald-jeweled evergreens set in the South Sound’s watery crown—all save one: McNeil Island.