Enduring Harbors (1890)

Enduring Harbors - A Historical Novel of Port Townsend (Book Five)
Where Two Waters Meet: The Port Townsend Saga
PORT TOWNSEND FACES ITS RECKONING - AS PROSPERITY FADES, THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND HISTORY'S CYCLES PREPARE FOR WHAT ENDURES.
It's 1890, and Port Townsend's grand dream has begun to unravel. The railroad never came. Banks are failing. Victorian mansions stand half-empty, their owners departed or desperate. The "City of Dreams" confronts a harsh awakening as economic collapse reveals the fragility of what once seemed permanent.
For the S'Klallam people, this decline mirrors an older story-the land remembers, even when those who claimed it do not. Michael Túkw-b, now serving as harbormaster, teaches his son Joseph to read both the water's surface and the patterns hidden beneath. Sarah maintains her school amid dwindling resources, preserving traditional knowledge disguised within Victorian curriculum. As prosperity recedes, access to traditional gathering grounds slowly returns through abandoned properties and forgotten pathways.
Elizabeth Morrison, in her seventh decade, transfers her meticulous documentation system to Victoria, ensuring that what was buried will not be forgotten. The Chen family, having weathered exclusion and prejudice, adapts once more as government plans for coastal fortifications promise yet another transformation. When military surveyors arrive to measure Point Wilson for Fort Worden, those who understand history's cycles prepare for selective preservation rather than futile resistance.
Through collapsing banks and abandoned wharves, traditional exchange systems reemerge-circular trading arrangements that value relationship alongside transaction. What Victorian economics dismissed as primitive now provides sustenance as currency grows scarce. Winter gardens grow where ornamental roses once bloomed, knowledge returns to spaces where it was systematically erased, and waters remember their original channels as commercial vessels depart.
Enduring Harbors completes the sweeping saga of Port Townsend's formative era, revealing how true continuity flows beneath the surface of official history-adapting, persisting, and ultimately surviving each wave of proclaimed progress. For when prosperity's tide inevitably recedes, what remains is not what was most loudly celebrated, but what was most deeply rooted.

Ricardo Gomez is a professor of Information Science at University of Washington. He lives and writes in Port Townsend, WA.