What to make of a defiant man who was arrested more than 50 times during his younger years and accused by our state of a crime that he fought all the way to the United States Supreme Court on the principle that it was, in fact, no crime at all? Who battled for much of his life, was cursed at by state and federal officials and reveled in being a living example of civil disobedience—all to make the larger point that cooperation was the key to our survival?

“We’re all in the same canoe,” Billy Frank Jr. liked to say. “And we have got to learn to paddle together.”

Frank was the cantankerous Nisqually Indian leader whose successful crusade for tribal fishing rights made him one of the most legendary figures in Washington state history. He was quite comfortable with his many contradictions. And though he died three years ago, at the age of 83, I have been thinking of him a lot this year as a living example of how one might navigate the troubled currents of our civic life, both local and national.

To many in the Pacific Northwest, of course, this has been something of an annus horribilis, during which we have felt frustratingly powerless. We’ve been unable, for example, to stop the smoke of forest fires both distant and near from choking our region in ugly acrid haze this summer, or mitigate the effects in any way until the winds themselves simply decided it was time to blow in a different direction. We were caught unawares a few weeks later, when a rupture in giant nets at a Skagit County fish pen abruptly dumped tens of thousands of farmed Atlantic salmon into our waterways, a bizarre yet deadly serious threat to the biological integrity and health of our iconic wild salmon stocks.

And this was just the local misfortune, to say nothing of a national dialogue that at times seemed so profoundly, surreally and dismayingly off-course. How could sickening images from Charlottesville, Virginia, of torches and swastikas and aggrieved young men chanting, “Jew will not replace us,” prompt such an equivocal response from the elected leader of our country?