Terry Point will never forget the summer Musqueam Creek smelled of soap, as if too much laundry detergent was poured in the sink under a running faucet.

The creek was at a seasonal low after a dry June and July in 1997, and the 21-year-old volunteer with the newly formed Musqueam Watershed Restoration Project was taking a routine walk along the creek when a foamy, milky-looking substance caught his attention.

The shallow stream was frothing, pushing a thin, white lather into roots and branches that dipped into the water. The suds drifted farther downstream toward the mouth of Musqueam Creek where the water becomes increasingly salinated as it nears the Fraser River and the open ocean of the Strait of Georgia.

“It smelled like a laundromat,” said Point. “It was foamy.”

Whatever the froth was, it threatened the lives of hundreds of juvenile coho and chum, some of the only salmon to return naturally and without interruption to Musqueam Creek, the last of Vancouver’s 50 salmon-bearing streams.

Point and four more volunteers from the Musqueam Indian Band and the David Suzuki Foundation—who were already strategizing for the long-term future of the threatened stream—grabbed dip nets, buckets or pails and slipped into boots if they were nearby.

“We used our hands—anything we could,” said Point. They lurched into action, urgently collecting, counting and relocating the tiny fish to nearby Cutthroat Creek, itself a tributary to the poisoned Musqueam Creek that had been diverted from its natural path decades earlier by city engineers. Point said the frantic action was hectic and determined.

“We’re not sure how successful we were. They were alive when we put them in.”

Point estimates more than 600 juvenile cutthroat trout and juvenile coho were smothered. He said the toxins killed everything in the water for 180 metres downstream, from resilient bloodworms to more sensitive salamanders. The word he chooses is obliterate.

Splashing through the poisoned water made one man so sick his naturopath diagnosed him with chemical poisoning. None of the Musqueam volunteers fell ill.

“We were all in it, but we probably have some kind of tolerance,” speculated Point. “We grew up playing in that creek, so that’s why we might have a resistance to whatever’s in it.”

A federal fisheries investigation in 2005 sampled 39 different pesticides in the stream but the chemicals in the 1997 spill and fish kill were never identified. Point concludes the source was any one of hundreds of toxic household products dumped unconsciously and undiluted down the drain and sewer system into Musqueam Creek. He shakes his head and contemplates what he sums up as “some careless act.” He now believes the contamination resulted from repeated and slapdash corner-cutting as homes were built, but can’t place specific blame.

“Who do you point the finger at?”

Musqueam reserve is under federal jurisdiction, but health inspectors with the city of Vancouver, which is responsible for water and sewer line maintenance, traced the source of the pollution to at least six homes. Instead of using septic tanks, a handful of homes within a housing complex flushed all household refuse down drains and sewer pipes that led directly to the creek. The houses are on property leased from the Musqueam and located adjacent to the two-kilometre stream, the same waterway that has been a site of Musqueam habitation for thousands of years.

City water inspectors used coloured dyes to locate the source houses sending domestic refuse into the environment and disconnected the sewer and water hook-ups that didn’t meet regulation standards.

“Trying to recover from that takes years and years,” said Point, the chairperson for the Musqueam Ecological Conservation Society, a non-profit that emerged out of the initial watershed revitalization project.

The smell and sights of the soapy creek stick with him and he keeps his eye on the culvert that carried the pollutants. He’s not convinced such devastating contamination won’t happen again.

“I think about it all the time but we’re not sure how to go about it and how much we can aggressively push the city to figure out. You could plug it up and find out pretty quickly.”

But more than a decade later, the recovery and maintenance of Musqueam Creek is underway. Each year more fish are returning and the stream-keepers, as the volunteers are sometimes known, have reason to be optimistic.

In 1997, a meager number of fish managed to spawn: six coho and six chum. The demise of the salmon stock was written in their spent bodies, but then the remarkable happened. On the return cycle four years later, 20 chum and 25 coho returned to Musqueam Creek. “We’ve had no returns under 20 since then,” said Point.

Bigleaf and sycamore leaves, red alder and burdock branches overhang the banks of Musqueam Creek, a creek less than two kilometers long with headwaters in Pacific Spirit Regional Park. Cedar and hemlock trees shade the steep inclines where licorice and sword ferns, salmonberry and salal pack the space around decaying tree trunks and lichens of the rain forest.

Bitter cherry saplings were reintroduced to the soil earlier this summer in the ongoing revitalization efforts. So too were devil’s club, a thorny plant with broad leaves and bright berries that holds significance for many aboriginal cultural practices in this part of the world.

Christina Nahanee was careful with her choices. Charged with rebuilding the floodgate near the mouth of Musqueam Creek and creating fish-friendly habitat in the estuary and along the creek, Nahanee is thinking about the long-term health of the watercourse and its prominence in the lives of the Musqueam.

Garbage—beer cans, cigarette packs, an abandoned mitten, fast food containers—along the banks are evidence the creek is a social place visited by more than just fish. Committed clean-up efforts don’t always keep pace with less conscientious users.

As a child, Nahanee listened along with Terry Point and other adolescents to stories about the creek, salmon and fishing from her great-grandfather, Dominic Point.

“A lot of time we spent with him. We would all go meet with him. Now when I look back and I think about the things he told me, the stories register and it all makes sense,” she said. “I didn’t understand why he’d tell me about the creek or even why our stream survived. It’s here because it runs through first nation territory, because it runs through Musqueam. For it to survive, we have to take pride in it and take care of it and if that creek had run anywhere else it would probably be covered in cement today.”

Musqueam Creek was buried once. In 2004, a decade after Point began his work to revitalize the watershed, a car accident on Southwest Marine Drive near 41st Avenue caused the rupture of a giant pipe. The sudden flash flood, likened to an environmental disaster that might happen only once every 200 years, pushed more gravel and mud than can fit in the back of eight mid-size pick-up trucks into the small creek, burying salmon alive and washing away or suffocating what eggs were already laid. The chlorinated water also killed bacteria and insects and other small life forms integral to the ecosystem.

The destruction came with a blessing in the form of a $219,000 grant from the City of Vancouver to repair the damaged creek.

Nicholas Scapillati, the executive director of the Musqueam Ecological Conservation Society and the David Suzuki Foundation conservationist who initially joined Point to begin revitalization work in the late ’90s, said the flood was catastrophic—with the silver lining of the municipal cash to fix that catastrophe.

This was also the time Nahanee began working in earnest to help restore the last wild salmon fishery in Vancouver.

They dug out pool beds, shovelled gravel and used cranes to position root wads and massive rocks in the creek. They also built sequences of riffles and pools, a naturally occurring hydraulic system that creates deeper pools with much shallower beds of pebbles and gravel, a riffle. The effect is the quintessential burbling brook.

“Salmon pick up echoes of these sounds and come back in,” said Nahanee, 27. “It’s a little bit of a reminder to draw them back to the stream. They know that this is their place.”

Part of the reparation also meant undoing the work of others, she said. In earlier attempts guided by the city, municipal workers removed boulders, rotting wood, fallen trees and other debris they considered an obstacle.

“For years there, people believed fish couldn’t get past things like rocks and logs in the creek so they spent a decade pulling those out.” The creek was over-managed in an attempt to keep it functioning, but the efforts worked against the trout and salmon in the stream.

“Little did they realize they were destroying their habitat.”

Nahanee worked alongside Point and Scapillati to return the natural debris that had been culled from the creek or displaced in the flood. “Our philosophy is that the creek will take care of itself,” said Point. “We just need to enhance it a little bit. We really try to stay far away from the overly engineered solutions, what we call band-aid solutions. As our elders have told us, the stream will take care of itself, we need to take care of the people that are around it. If we can stop the degradation, the creek will be fine.”

Nature has conspired in ways Point sees perfectly fitting and right on time. When they intended to build a rock weir that had washed away near Marine Drive following the flood, Point planned to add woody debris, peat gravel and a few large boulders to speed up the process that would eventually happen naturally.

They didn’t need to. Point chuckles, his round shoulders lifting and his friendly, impish smile slowly spreading in to a grin.

“A huge maple tree fell into the stream and did exactly what needed to be done. Even our enhancement of nature was taken care of by nature.”

A handful of man-made changes have had the greatest impact on the condition of the Musqueam watershed. The 50 other salmon streams in Vancouver may be paved over, diverted or dried up, but Point is pleased to know the Musqueam Creek of today would be recognizable to his ancestors—even if the surrounding area is dramatically different and responsible for changes to the creek’s ecosystem.

Point attributes one of the major transformations to dyking around the Fraser River and the installation and subsequent lengthening of the Iona Island jetty, which carries the filtered refuse from Vancouver’s 600,000 citizens to open water. Point says tidal flow is restricted just enough that the Musqueam Creek estuary has become increasingly waterlogged and marshy.

“It impedes the ocean from coming in like it used to and, essentially, it’s why the marsh is here and why it’s as big as it is now. The estuary is now the largest on Fraser River and it’s still growing.”

The floodgate that protected the golf course and reserve from seasonal flooding during high tides was replaced this fall. Nahanee oversaw the installation of a new hydraulic floodgate in place of the old one adjacent to the 16th hole of the Musqueam golf course.

In addition to the new gate, the creek and estuary were graded so juvenile coho, chum and cutthroat trout could ease into higher concentrations of salt water during their maturation, an important phase of their development. Perhaps a small detail, not one Nahanee and Point intended to overlook. Because the previous transition forced the fish to reach saltier water before they may have been ready, they believe countless lives were compromised in the journey to the Pacific.

The Musqueam have little influence on the growth of the city and the consequences of their 190-hectare reserve being hemmed in by urban development. But Point says the First Nation will endeavour to control what assets it can, although interference in the form of government regulation and oversight is the norm. Seven hundred band members live on Musqueam Reserve No. 2 near the mouth of the Fraser River along with 600 other non-Musqueam residents.

For Nahanee, she wants to prove to her community that the creek is theirs to manage and sustain. She and her young daughter once lived close enough to the creek they could hear salmon moving upstream in the night. They’d head out with their flashlights to see the progress. Nahanee hopes to instill a sense of responsibility and accomplishment in the revitalization of Musqueam Creek.

“Showing to our younger youth and other generations that it’s important to us and that we need to take care of it because if we don’t, no one else will,” she says. “If it’s one thing that we do have control of, it’s our stream.”

mstewart@vancourier.com