When Marilyn Liden Bode was a girl spending summers on Apple Tree Cove, the neighborhood baseball games looked a bit different than those played by kids in other small towns across America. While the sunshine, loaded bases and occasional parent joining in was the same as anywhere else, the games Bode and friends played ended with the rising tide. Their field was the enormous tide flat of the cove.
“Before the marina was built there was solid sand all the way out, not mud like it is now,” explained Bode. “If you tried to play baseball on the tide flats today, you’d lose your shoes.”
Back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, prior to the construction of the breakwater and marina, beaches all along the cove were strewn with logs left over from local logging operations, Bode reminisced. The cove was used as a transport point where logs were unloaded from trucks, rolled into the bay and gathered into huge booms for delivery to area mills via tugboats.
“We had a lot of fun with those logs,” Bode recalled. “Dad and the other men would log roll – grown men rolling logs in the water on a summer afternoon. The kids would put outboard motors on the logs and drive them around.”
The beach tracts
Bode’s deep affection for the little cove began in 1942 when her parents, Harry and Beda Liden, purchased a waterfront lot on the north shore of Apple Tree Cove from Pope and Talbot for $800, thus joining the growing ranks of Kingston’s summer-home families. Bode’s father was one of four teachers from Queen Anne High School who purchased beachfront along the cove that year. Soon three of the Liden’s relatives also acquired lots within what was then known as the Apple Tree Cove Beach Tracts. The cove had become a summertime community of friends and family.
“My folks chose this lot because of its good beach and because it was the lowest point on the shore, making it safer for their two young children. We vacationed here every summer from 1942 to 1987,” said Bode, noting that in 1987 she and her husband Ted moved to the site full time.
Bode’s father immediately began work on a cabin, which he built with no plans, no foundation and not much more than a hammer and a handsaw. It was a long process, recalled Bode; even the removal of a single tree required a full day’s hard work with a hatchet and a crosscut saw.
While the cabin was under construction, the family, including Marilyn, then 5, and baby brother Neal, camped out on the lot or spent drenching wet days at the Old Kingston Hotel. The finished cabin had two rooms, a woodstove for cooking and heating, and a wringer-style washing machine. A 10-foot, hand-dug well operated by hand pump served as the family’s fresh water source, and continued in this role – with modernizations – for more than 50 years until city water became available. The limited space of the compact beach cottage encouraged children and adults alike to spend every possible moment – rain or shine – out-of-doors.
“We always found plenty to do,” Bode remembered. “The old ferry dock had a float and the kids would paddle over and spend the day swimming off it. Sometimes we’d go crabbing or clamming. For years my brother Neal and his buddies built kid-sized hydroplanes; the races were a summer-long event. On the Fourth of July they competed in the “Apple Tree Coffee Cup.”
“I spent a lot of time fishing with dad and the uncles. We had a Penguin sailboat with a two-horse Johnson outboard. We always brought home salmon. When we came in, Mom and the aunts would be waiting eagerly on the shore to see what we’d caught. We’d tease them that we didn’t have anything, but there was always a big fish on the bottom of the boat.”
Bombs, boats and bathtubs on the cove
While sailing, Bode and her father would occasionally run across startling reminders of the county’s military connection.
“On the other side of the ferry dock we’d sometimes find what looked like big mines with spikes sticking out all over,” said Bode. “We thought maybe they came from the degaussing station off President Point. Dad would just call the Navy and they’d come pick them up.”
Another memorable event was the dry-docking in Apple Tree Cove of the Wawona, a 165-foot Pacific Schooner. For two summers in 1952 and 1953, this sailing ship, built in 1897, was beached on the tide flats for maintenance. (See sidebar.)
On the cove, big barbecues were the tradition every Memorial Day, Labor Day and – of course – Fourth of July. Then and now, Bode’s cabin is perfectly placed to enjoy the fun and fireworks that Independence Day brings to the cove. From the bathtub races of yesteryear to today’s professional fireworks, Bode has seen it all. Recalling parades of the past, Bode shakes her head at a cold war staple, the Navy float featuring a gleaming white Nike missile.
A life by water
Twenty years ago, Bode came home for good when she and her husband moved into the “new” house, built behind the cabin in 1969. The old cabin is carefully maintained, looking much as it did 60 years ago: the original knotty pine paneling a relic of a bygone era, as are Bode’s father’s fishing pole and her brother’s University of Washington racing oar, both taking pride of place above the hearth. The cabin now serves as a studio for Bode, a printmaker focusing on environmental and political themes.
“My life on the water has been very influential to my work,” Bode said. “I’m a beach person.”
From the cabin’s picture window the view is framed by a huge, gnarled weeping willow which Bode herself planted half a century ago. Owing to the willow and some carefully placed shrubbery, it’s possible for Bode to block out the relentless home construction that is transforming her sleepy little vacation community into a high density neighborhood, due in part to the area’s inclusion within the Kingston urban growth boundary.
“Not much has changed as long as I look straight out,” smiles Bode.
Physical change isn’t the only difference Bode has seen in her lifetime at the cove; behavior has changed as well.
“In past generations, people got out there and enjoyed the beach much more than they do today. As homes have grown bigger and more permanent, the idea of life at the beach has changed. Summer cabins have all but disappeared. Now people tend to sit inside and look out.”
More a participant than a spectator, Bode can often be found on the cove paddling her dinghy or kayak. She also hosts friends’ boats, storing them on her property so the owners have easy access to the water.
Bode hopes the property can remain in her family to continue the tradition of summers at the shore. While there’s no holding back the surrounding development, she intends to retain the spirit of generations past on her own little piece of Apple Tree Cove: “From right here it’s still a sleepy little town.”
A piece of Kingston’s past: The Wawona
In the summers of 1952 and 1953, Kingston’s Apple Tree Cove was the unofficial host to the Wawona, a classic sailing ship of the Pacific Schooner fleet. Built in 1897, the 165-foot Wawona hailed from the boatyard of Hans Ditley Bendixsen of Fairhaven, Calif. One of the largest three-masted schooners ever built in North America, the ship had a reputation as a West Coast workhorse, carrying lumber for Dolbeer & Carson. Entire logs could be loaded into her hull.
In 1914 the schooner, whose name is a Yosemite Indian word for the northern spotted owl, became a fishing vessel in the Bering Sea. She carried 18 dories from which fishermen jigged for cod along the Aleutian Islands and the north Alaskan peninsula. Her recorded lifetime catch of 7.2 million cod surpasses that of any other Pacific schooner.
When World War II began, the U.S. Army conscripted the Wawona. Her masts removed, she served as a barge hauling supplies to Alaska, and Alaskan yellow cedar for the aircraft industry back to Puget Sound. In 1946, her riggings were restored and she returned to cod fishing for two final seasons. Her last commercial voyage was in 1947. After sitting at berth in Seattle for nine years, she was purchased in 1953 by rancher William Studdart to carry cattle to the Soviet Union, but the venture was scrapped as relations between the United States and Russia cooled.
In 1964, a group of concerned citizens from King County banded together to form the organization Save Our Ships, subsequently buying the old schooner. From 1964 to 1981, the ship was moored in Kirkland. It was then moved to its current location at the south end of Lake Union in Seattle. Today, the Wawona is one of only two survivors of nearly 200 Bendixsen sailing ships. In 1970, she became the first ship in the nation to be listed on the National Historic Register.
Save Our Ships, now known as Northwest Seaport, is continuing its efforts to preserve and restore the classic ship and welcomes additional funding to combat the dry rot that currently threatens. Contact Northwest Seaport at 1002 Valley St., Seattle, WA 98101, (206) 447-9800.
