In here it smells like Ivar's restaurant a few days after the power went out. The walls feel like wet broken glass. Your feet splash in cold, ankle deep water and they crunch and squish on a carpet of muscles, barnacles and anemones. When it's empty the big lock is an 800 foot long concrete fish tank. It's slippery in spots but DO NOT grab at the wall to keep your balance.

"You won't know you're cut until you bleed," says Army Corps' Dru Butterfield, giving a safety talk before the tour. The audience of television news crews looked confident and professional, even with slacks tucked into galoshes. Butterfield suggested keeping gloves on. One fool photographer didn't have any gloves, print media budgets being what they are, and used one wall at the bottom of the lock for balance during a shot and spackled his hand with tiny cuts.

The shot was out of focus and my hand still hurts.

The Army Corps of Engineers is performing annual maintenance at the Ballard Locks through December 2nd and they had a tour last Tuesday, November 22nd. Tours don't happen much after 9/11 according to John Post, who runs operations at the locks. Maybe the Corps is feeling generous after getting their budget restored. Maybe they feel like they need to give back to the community that rattled the congressional cage hard enough to find money so nobody got laid off and no operating hours were cut.

Whatever the reason, the tour of the big lock at the Hiram H. Chittenden Locks was a departure from Ballard to what is, for 50 weeks a year, at the bottom of the Lake Washington Ship Canal.

Butterfield mentioned the tour wasn't for the squeamish. Getting to the bottom of the lock required stepping down a series of ladders that looked flimsy enough to be the aluminum kind dad uses to dig the Christmas tree stand from the attic, the kind that folds up nicely for closet storage. The scaffolding for the locks tour was like a series of such ladders, zigging and zagging several flights. A quivering stack of "Z"s, descending 55 feet to the lock floor.

The expanse of the large lock is amazing from within it. It looks wrong so empty, this burly chamber with high walls, clearly meant to hold something. On the walls there are organic striations, salt water barnacles and muscles up to about 30 feet. Beyond that, green algae, a fresh water product, covers the rest of the wall to the top.

The lock is a concentrated, artificial estuary. Natural versions of the places where fresh and salt water meet can stretch on, fanning out into deltas miles long. All of that occurs in the locks, with some spillover, in an area 80 wide and not a thousand feet long.

Engineering with ecology in mind is part of the Army Corps' mission. Along with Butterfield is Fred Goetz, a biologist employed by the Corps to watch over the health of the habitat. The crew at the Ballard Locks comes off as conscientious, albeit industrial strength stewards of the environment. New equipment uses vegetable grade oil because it's less toxic if it spills. Valve intakes that move water between locks have a set of strobe lights that frighten away juvenile salmon. The culverts, lined with barnacles, would act like cheese graters to the fish.

The culverts run the length of the big lock and they are big too. A couple of men can walk abreast in them and they rise three times that height. Their job is to make the locks work. When a boat from the ship canal enters the lock, the water level is higher than Puget Sound beyond it. So after the doors shut behind a boat, the vents, garage-door sized, drop from the culvert on the fresh water end. On the salt water end they open, and out flows the fresh water and down sinks the boat. The culverts are essentially pipes. Very big pipes capable of draining almost 8 million gallons of water in 15 minutes.

In the lock itself, a series of vents, most two feet high and four long, run across the bottom. They let the water get to the culverts and out to the Sound or, when the process is reversed, they pass fresh water into the lock after the Puget Sound side door has closed, and the tub fills up, taking boats, ships and thousand ton barges with it.

The architecture of these vents is what most boaters notice when boaters come to the locks. The vents are placed across from one another on the bottom and flows of water come from each culvert, collide in the middle, and surge up towards the boats above them, and then back towards the lock walls when they come to the surface. The fresh water flow on a filling lock is like a pair of mirrored brackets - ][ - that happily push boats against the lock walls where they need to be as the water rises.

A somewhat less convenient quirk of an 800 foot long estuary is that inside the lock, where freshwater and saltwater meet, the freshwater tends to sit on top of the salt water and tumble from side to side as a small wave. This is why the lockmaster tells boats to wait before moving off the wall, so a boat's bow isn't grabbed by this wave and spun around into other boats. Making "all hell break lose" is the technical description locks employees use.

Much of the maintenance work done while the big lock is closed is scrapping barnacles off walls. They get stacked up in big piles in the center of the lock and what the seagulls and crows don't take is pulled out by crane. The sound of that process - done on concrete walls by metal troughs in a culvert that acts like an echo chamber, seems just loud enough to crack the enamel on your teeth.

The last part of the tour is looking up at the western lock gate that keeps Shilshole Bay at bay. It's quite an ending - several hundred tons of steel doors with hydraulic rams and lots of bolts, resisting the weight of five stories of water for almost a century now, and looking really good for their age.

Then the tour ended and we had to climb up the rickety ziggurat back to Ballard. The climb was less pleasant than getting down, like getting up to that point on the house ladder that says DO NOT CLIMB ON OR ABOVE THIS STEP and then taking another 700-800 steps. Thankfully, the entire scaffold was wrapped in orange netting so it was hard to see. With the shaking as violent as it was, you probably wouldn't even know the structure was collapsing until that grim convergence with a carpet of hungry shellfish.

As I got to the top, I looked down at the men and the hard hats and took in the whole scene. It had an unreal feel too it, the size, the wet, the primordial ooze of sea creatures here and there gives the whole place a Precambrian land-that-time-forgot feel. The kind of thing best left underwater, which it will be again for another year, in a few more days.

It smells like Skippers restaurant.doc - 1 -