Driving Home, page 4
I read it in a sitting and have owned three separate copies since, but it wasn’t until around the beginning of the second copy that I woke up to the fact that Malamud’s “Cascadia” was Oregon, not an urban Jewish fantasy of some Eden far beyond the range of the road atlas. I hadn’t then been to the United States, and the landscape described by Malamud—a green paradise infected by the encroaching spectre of Senator Joseph McCarthy—rang no specific bells for me. It read like the landscape of allegory, and worked so well in those terms that I wasn’t tempted to go looking for its latitude and longitude.
In the book, Marathon, Cascadia, is a rigidly conformist college cowtown, with a winning football team and a paranoid contempt for Reds, misfits, and intellectuals. Seymour Levin, “from the East,” “formerly a drunkard,” an admitted liberal with a beard, is destined for a painful roasting in this 1950s version of a Puritan township enjoying a witch trial. At every turn in the story, the philistinism and uncharitableness of town and college are set against a landscape of mountains, forest, and ocean so ironically magnificent that any reader bred to the landscape of Newport Pagnell must have doubted its literal existence. A New Life seemed to me to be written in the freehand, fantastic tradition of the Jewish folktale: Malamud was painting the richness and promise of the idea of America—and its betrayal by a mean-spirited citizenry, people too small to deserve to inherit their gigantic land.
It slightly diminished the novel to learn that there were “originals” (or so my knowing American informant claimed) of the Fairchilds, the C. D. Fabrikants, the Buckets and Bullocks, and that Malamud’s poisoned Arcadia was drawn directly from the life—that Marathon was Corvallis, sixty-five miles down the road from Portland. This American, a Berkeley professor, thought I was offbeam when I claimed the novel was a work of ambitious fabulism. No, he said, the landscape of the Pacific Northwest was in itself an unrealistic stretch of country—it was just naturally fabulous.
The uncanny again. Twenty-five years on, I sat out on the deck of the house on Queen Anne on a sunny day in autumn when the visibility was good, rereading A New Life for the umpteenth time. To the right lay the Cascades, to the left the raised and snowy edge of the Olympics, and in the middle the mixed woodlands of the rolling suburbs of Seattle. A big ketch was sliding through the poplars. The sun made the print jump on the page, but now I very nearly had the opening of the novel by heart:
… They were driving along an almost deserted highway, in a broad farm-filled valley between distant mountain ranges laden with forests, the vast sky piled high with towering masses of golden clouds. The trees softly clustered on the river side of the road were for the most part deciduous; those crawling over the green hills to the south and west were spear-tipped fir.
My God, the West, Levin thought. He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time, and found it a moving thought. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him. He shuddered at his good fortune.
“The mountains to the left are the Cascades,” Pauline Gilley was saying. “On the right is the Coastal Range. They’re relatively young mountains, whatever that means. The Pacific lies on the other side of them, about fifty miles.”
“The Pacific Ocean?”
“Yes.”
“Marvelous.”
Just off to the side of the page margin, there was a flittering disturbance in the holly tree in a neighbor’s yard. I shifted my attention from Cascadia to Washington, from the 1950s to the 1990s. A big flock of yellow-bellied waxwings had settled on the holly and were distributed on its branches like so many ornaments on a Christmas tree.
High over the city, above the muffler shops and 7-Elevens and steep streets of pastel-colored frame houses, an eagle wheeled, sublimely.
I was with Seymour Levin. My God, the West—
November 1992, and the snow level, said our TV weatherman Harry Wappler, was down to 3,500 feet and dropping fast. In a week the mountain passes would be tricky and the back roads closed for the winter. I dug out of storage my never-used box of tire chains and set off on a wide swing around the neighborhood.
It was high time to make the trip: though I had been living in Seattle for more than two years, I was still confused as to its whereabouts. I knew the city better than its cabdrivers (a very modest boast), but I’d barely begun to work out how Seattle fitted into the larger story. A long drive, on empty western roads where it’s still possible to think with one’s foot down, would, with luck, thread the oddly assorted bits of the Pacific Northwest onto one string and set them in narrative order.
The afternoon rush hour had started by the time I got away, and heading east on Interstate 90, the cars were locked bumper to bumper on the floating bridge over Lake Washington. The sky was lightless, and the windshield wipers scraped on the glass in the fall moisture, typical of these parts, that was something more than mist and less than rain. The traffic jam, too, was typical: a ceremonious and orderly procession, like a funeral, of VWs with ski racks on their tops and I’D RATHER BE SAILING stickers on their rear ends. A great deal of higher education was stuck on the bridge that afternoon. The names of the universities from which the drivers had graduated were posted in their back windows—faraway schools, mostly, like Stanford, MIT, Columbia, U. Mich.
My own car, a low-slung, thirsty black Dodge Daytona with a working ashtray, marked me out as a Yahoo among the Houyhnhnms—too old, dirty, and wasteful to pass, even in this bad light, as a member of Seattle’s uniquely refined middle class. Stuffed into the book bag beside the work of the Northwestern writers whom I had brought along for the ride (Richard Hugo, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, Katherine Dunn, William Stafford, Norman Maclean, James Welch, James Crumley) was a bottle of Teacher’s, two-thirds full, which would have seemed OK to the Northwestern writers but thought a very low touch by these Northwestern drivers. In Seattle, a triple shot of nondecaffeinated espresso was thought to be pushing the boat out farther than was wise.
In shifts and starts, we lurched into Eastside Seattle, Houyhnhnm country, where the VWs started to peel off onto the Bellevue exits. Bellevue and its satellites were not suburbs so much as—in the rising term—an Edge City, with its own economy, sociology, and architecture. Things made on the Eastside were odorless, labor-intensive, and credit-card thin, like computer software and aerospace-related electronics gear. They were assembled in low, tree-shaded factories, whose large grounds were known as “campuses”—for in Bellevue all work was graduate work, and the jargon of school and university leaked naturally into the workplace. Seen from an elevated-freeway distance, Bellevue looked like one of its own products: a giant circuit board of color-coded diodes and resistors, connected by a mazy grid of filaments.
During the presidential campaign, Bill Clinton had jetted around the country calling for the advent of the “high-growth, high-wage, smart-work society”—a fair description of Bellevue, with its lightly rooted, highly trained workforce, its safe streets, its scented malls sprayed with composerless light orchestral music, its air of bland good conscience. Bellevue was the new and hopeful face of American capitalism, and it had a strongly Japanese cast to its features. The one- and two-storey campuses with their radial walkways reflected a style of business management that was closer to the industrial collectives of Tokyo than to the moribund hierarchies of Detroit and the American Rust Belt. They housed entrepreneurial teams in which more or less everybody appeared to be an equal player. In Seattle, I kept meeting people from Microsoft, the biggest of the Eastside corporations, and it was interestingly hard to figure out who was whose boss: as in the layout of the buildings on the ground, all the distinctions appeared to be lateral ones, between division and division, rather than vertical ones between layer on layer of management.
The place looked like somebody’s utopia, more a model city than an actual one, and it appeared to be inhabited by the kinds of people whom architects like to place as strolling figures in the foregrounds of watercolor sketches of their projects. Wherever the eye wandered in Bellevue, it lit on another 31¾-year-old, with a master’s if not a doctorate, dressed for work in hiking shoes and fleece. Thousands of these diagrammatic people were housed along I–90 in white-painted, shingled, faux-New England condo blocks called “villages.” Lakefront Village … Madrona Village … Olde Towne Village … communities in which the villagers met in the evenings at neighboring exercycles in the village health club or at a prebreakfast session on the village driving range.
Eastside Seattle was a new kind of American city, though it had a lot in common with the long-established retirement paradises of Florida and Southern California. People in their twenties and thirties were now moving (as their parents had done only toward the ends of their lives) for the sake of the climate and the natural amenities of a place rather than just for the jobs on offer there. They were coming to Seattle much as people had gone to Venice, California, and Miami Beach; the difference was that they were coming at the beginnings of their careers. They arrived as kayakers, hikers, balloonists, birdwatchers, skiers, and mountain bikers who also happened to have degrees in math and marketing and computer science. Their Pacific Northwest was really a civic park, roughly the same size as France, equipped with golf courses, hiking trails, rock-climbing routes, boat-launch ramps, ski lifts, campgrounds, and scenic overlooks. This great migration of open-air hobbyists (which dated from about 1980—the early Reagan years) had won Seattle a curious niche in urban history, as the first big city to which people had fled in order to be closer to nature.
As part of the migration, I was in no position to affect a haughty tone about it, but it was tough to see one’s own bold and original move so nakedly mirrored by the Bellevue villagers in their hand-crafted Peruvian wool outfits and their radical crusades on behalf of the wolf, the whale, and the spotted owl. There was a bad smell of metropolitan imperialism in the way in which all of us, from London as from the burned-out urban hulks of Brooklyn and Queens, were moving in on this working landscape and bringing the news that its traditional rural industries must stop forthwith. Of course, it was the enlightened mission of the incomers to save the planet; of course, the loggers and mill workers saw the mission rather differently, as an attempt by strangers to rescue the Pacific Northwest as an unspoiled recreational site for themselves and their children.
Sixteen miles out of Seattle, the eastward march of the city was stopped in its tracks by the foothills of the Cascades. Beyond Issaquah the black cliffs of the forest began, and the social character of the road abruptly changed when the last of the VWs melted into the last of the white condo blocks. Up till now, I’d been in the fast lane; no longer. Mud-slathered pickups with jumbo tires charged past the Dodge wearing angry slogans on their tailgates. JOBS BEFORE OWLS. SUPPORT THE TIMBER INDUSTRY. SAVE A LOGGER—SHOOT AN OWL. Behind the glass of a cab window, a Zippo lighter flashed in the gloaming.
Small charcoal-colored clouds were snagged in the firs. We were climbing steadily now, the road wet, the light failing fast. At just over 3,000 feet, Snoqualmie Pass was much the lowest of the Cascades’ passes, but it was a long slow haul to reach it with the highway weaving up through the contour lines, shouldering the hills aside. Each bend in the road opened on another wall of Douglas fir, the trees as dense and regularly spaced as the bristles on a broom.
This wasn’t true forest, though it had the enormous blackness of the forest of German fairy tales; it was a “tree farm,” a second- or third-growth plantation now ready for “harvesting.” The terms were those of the industry, and after two years of seeing them in use, I still found myself putting quotation marks around them in my head. To me, farm and harvest meant a two-acre wheatfield in Essex, with rabbits scarpering from between the cornstalks, and the words refused to stick when I tried to attach them to mountains with hundred-and-fifty-foot trees, where bears and cougars ranged instead of rabbits and twin-rotor helicopters served as baling machines. But my perspective was altering: each time I thought of the seventeenth-century farmhouses of the Dengie marshes, their checkerboard crops neatly hedged and ditched, they looked less like farms and more like cottage gardens.
The road veered sharply left around a dripping wall of rock and disclosed a harvest. Harvest? It was like seeing a dynamited factory chimney, or a disused housing project blown to smithereens. It was magnificent. A rectangle of forest a mile square had been shaved from the face of the mountain: the straight lines of the clearcut were contemptuous of the natural bulges and fissures of the landscape; they sliced through gully and ridge as cleanly as if someone had done the job with a steel ruler and a Stanley knife. Every tree was gone.
In close-up, where the bottom edge of the clearcut grazed the next hairpin turn, one saw the mess of it: the blackened stumps and upended root systems, the yawning mud craters, their outlines softening now with a healing overgrowth of blackberry and salal, with, here and there, the green spike of a sapling fir breaking through. It looked like photos of the Flanders battlefields in 1918. A whole world of burnings, explosions, amputations, random excavations, it wanted only the tin hats of the dead to be hung on the blasted stumps. Then it was gone, this enormous combat zone between man and nature, borne away by the fast-swerving road.
Not long ago I saw the word “clearcutting” in a list of wanton evils that culminated in “genocide”: utter abhorrence is the politically correct response to the miles of razored forest. Yet it was only yesterday afternoon that the logger was the greatest of all American folk heroes, his activities hymned as the moral triumphs of civilization over the unruly wilderness. Even now, American children are being raised on the stories of the craggy giant Paul Bunyan, with his lopsided lantern-jawed grin, whose blue ox, Babe, measured forty-two axe handles and one Star tobacco tin from eye to eye. I imagine, though, that these stories are being drastically rewritten or withdrawn from circulation: Paul Bunyan, the first clearcutter, is too vulnerable on the character issue to remain for long in his position as a demigod in the American nursery.
Bunyan is the embodiment of unbridled masculine power. In Wisconsin one December he felled “a hundred million feet of lumber” to find a suitably tall Christmas tree; he logged Minnesota with a saw half a mile in length. On a detour from his walk from Fargo to Seattle, he dragged a spike behind him and created the Grand Canyon. After meeting the Seattle timber barons (Paul habitually sides with the industrial bosses) he harnessed Babe to a plow and dug out Puget Sound. Tramping in the Cascades (he walked from Seattle to Minneapolis in an afternoon), he went swinging an axe with a sixteen-foot cutting blade on the end of a woven flexible handle fifty feet long. This cleared a path conveniently wide for him and his ox, and the trees fell symmetrically in a perfect corduroy.
The clearcut was a true-life Paul Bunyan story—exuberant, exaggerated, so far out of fashion that it was criminal. It stood for an American way of thinking and feeling about nature that was not easily going to be wiped out by a generation’s worth of environmentalist education. For more than four hundred years of white settlement, this was what you did with the wild—taming it with bold rectangles and straight lines. There was a stirring kind of American poetry in the rifle-shot road; the ambitiously projected grid of the infant city, its numbered streets-to-be laid out across the swamp; the single-file march of power pylons over a mountain; the rigid outline of the clear-cut. This was order, reason, and discipline imposed on an adversarial and unregenerate nature. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, Americans had come within sight of the end of wild nature—but the habit of mind, bred in cold Protestant theology, was now as deeply embedded in the national character as an instinct. If I were a logger, I thought, I’d be brimming with pride at what I had done to that mountain, and I would hate with a passion the whining townies who were trying to demonize my kind. Save a logger, shoot an owl!
The road got darker and darker as it climbed toward the blue snowfields on the peaks. The tree farms dripped. The car’s automatic transmission kept on flubbing its gear changes as the gradient steepened. At the top of the hour, on the top of Snoqualmie Pass, National Public Radio, lost since Issaquah, returned with the news that John Major had carried the motion on the Treaty of Maastricht in the House of Commons by the skin of his teeth. In England, I realized with as unexpected twinge of homesickness, it was “Bonfire Night.”
Bowling downhill east of the summit, I ran out of the rain into a cold dry night with a waxing lemony quarter moon overhead. The trees began to shrink in height and there were lightsome spaces between them, for the climate of eastern Washington, in the lee of the Cascades, is arid. At one side of the state there’s a rainforest, at the other a desert, and the Cascade Ridge splits the state in two, giving a kind of geographical reality to Washington’s schizoid personality, its fierce divisions between wet liberals and dry conservatives.
At Cle Elum, down near the foot of the range, I pulled off the highway and stopped for a drink. The small town’s too-wide main street was empty of people. The air was icy. But there was a good bar: in the rancid fog of cigarette smoke, a line of broad-brimmed hats, broad bums, and red plaid jackets. Conversation, which had been brisk when I walked in, stopped dead when I hoisted myself onto the only vacant stool.
“Hi. Mind if I—?”
I got a fishy stare for an answer. Then the man resumed the interrupted sentence he’d been speaking to his neighbor: “… like I was saying, they got some over in Wenatchee …” I was caught in the crossfire of the war between the country and the city. Too late in the season to be a hiker, too early to be a skier, I was a likely member of that most despicable of all urban species, the birdwatchers.
