Driving Home, page 5
It wasn’t so much that the spotted owlers were the direct cause of the closed sawmills, the bankrupted log-hauling companies, and the rest of the miseries of the timber industry. What rankled most deeply in the depressed towns of the Cascades was the righteous triumphalism of the owlers as they rejoiced in the industry’s decline. That the owlers came (or so the timber interests surmised) from the environs of Bellevue, which appeared to grow fatter, richer, and smugger by the day, was the final affront.
For Seattle had always used to be a timber town, and there had been a continuous and productive intercourse between the city and its rural hinterlands. Seattle’s first industry was Henry Yesler’s sawmill, established in 1853 on Elliott Bay at the foot of the original Skid Road; and most things that were manufactured in Seattle—paper, pulp, furniture, ships, and boats—had started life as trees. The aircraft industry had roots in the forest: William Boeing’s factory was a bankrupt boatbuilder’s yard, and the first planes had boatlike skeletons constructed from local fir, pine, and Sitka spruce.
It was only lately that the city’s economy had broken free of its dependence on the countryside. The new Seattle, where babyfaced entrepreneurs from out of state trafficked in semiconductors, was as remote from the local concerns of places like Cle Elum as Tokyo itself—while for tourists from the city, the world they found on a short drive out of Seattle was as alien as that of rural Appalachia. The loggers and the urban tourists had come to regard one another with an intense bafflement and dislike.
Sipping without pleasure at my beer, I saw in the bar mirror the man who was sitting on my stool—a fern kisser, a prairie fairy, a watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside). A sumbitch preservationist. The Dodge Daytona parked on the street outside was marginally in my favor, but the copy of Peterson’s Western Birds parked on its passenger seat was definitely not.
In a week or two, when the snow settled on the slopes, the skirmishes would begin. The preferred winter sport of the Houyhnhnms was cross-country skiing, and they came to the eastern side of the Cascades because the snow was drier here (the west side of the range was known as Slushqualmie). The Yahoos went in for snowmobiles. Astride 750cc Yamaha Vmaxes, Super Brute 440s, Thundercats, and Exciters with psychedelic purple-and-silver custom paint jobs, they roared through the woods, guzzling gas and scaring the owls into Canada.
The big sleds could go 120 miles an hour on the flat, and an enthusiastic snowmobiler could run through a hundred gallons of high-octane mix in the course of a good day. The language of snowmobiling was untainted by sissy environmentalism. Snowgoer ads were phrased in a virile prose that I thought had died in the 1960s: “Hammer the throttle for a split-second response and that menacing 581cc liquid-cooled snarl tells you it’s got the cc’s to take on all comers”; “It’s raw power. It’s pure adrenaline … There’s really only two things you have to remember about the SX. One, it comes from Yamaha. And two, it goes like hell.”
So family parties from Seattle would go telemarking silently through the trees with bird books and binocs—and be met by families from Roslyn and Cle Elum putting the pedal to the metal and making their banshee winter music. There were “incidents” and “altercations”: the nature-loving townies, offended by the technology-loving country folk, came back with their own kind of machinery in the form of injunctions, ordinances, filed suits, and hitherto unnoticed regulations in the small print.
I left the bar and returned to the highway, slowing in front of the Cle Elum snowmobile dealership, a Yamaha outfit with a display of Exciters and Phazers. They had condom names and looked like cheeky cocks-and-balls, their protuberant scarlet nose cones supported by pairs of fat pistons over abbreviated, wide-apart skis. Paul Bunyan might have been equipped with something similar.
I lacked the cojones to stay the night in Cle Elum. Half an hour down the road lay Ellensburg, the farm metropolis of central Washington. One of the many cities of the Far West that had had great expectations when its founders laid it out as the coming Chicago of the Yakima Valley, Ellensburg had 1890-ish yellowbrick shoebox buildings with grandiloquent stucco facades. It had a college, a J. C. Penney’s, and an Italian restaurant. Next to the lingerie shop on Pearl Street was Giovanni’s, and it was open.
That night, the restaurant and the lingerie shop had confusingly joined forces. Before an audience of a dozen diners, mostly men and apparently unprimed for the event, a fashion show was taking place, and what I took to be the menu was full of descriptions like “Jackie, last but not least, in our Lacy, Romantic, Sassy, Sexy chemise of poly-lace chiffon, $49.95.” The Chicken Cacciatore and Veal Parmigiana turned out to be on a separate sheet—though the procession of young women in intimate apparel added a note of powerful double entendre to the sassy and romantic restaurant-English of the menu.
Giovanni himself waited on my table.
“Sorry about the dreadful music,” he said. “It’s not our usual thing at all. It’s for the fashions.” His voice wasn’t from Italy, or Ellensburg. Giovanni was John, from Monmouthshire, between Newport and Pontypool.
Later, after I had eaten and Jackie had swirled past in her chemise to a Mantovani accompaniment, John and I talked. An old North America hand, he’d sailed from Liverpool to St. John, Newfoundland, in 1964, settling first in Canada, then in Seattle. Like a Hollywood Englishman, his public-school accent had become more rather than less pronounced in the nearly thirty years he’d spent out here. Trim, pink, and beginning to grizzle at the edges, he was the kind of affable Britisher who put one instantly in mind of country pubs, thatch, hollyhocks, and Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre.
He had been Giovanni since the fall of ’89, when he moved from Seattle to Ellensburg to set up shop in a defunct restaurant then known as the Carriage House. I said that he seemed a strange bird to discover in an eastern Washington cattle town.
“Oh, do you think so? I feel comfortable here. I’m getting to know people now, I’m becoming accepted, I think. Ellensburg’s a nice-sized town—a market town, really. I was getting tired of the hassle of the big city, and going to Ellensburg was sort of like a homecoming for me.”
“But the landscape … I’ve been here nearly three years, but it hasn’t begun to look normal to me. I sometimes wake up in the mornings, forgetfully, and think I’m in London, and then I see the mountains and the forest, and I wonder what on earth I’m doing here. That never happens to you?”
“I hear what you’re saying,” John said. “But no, I don’t think so. We’re in quite a small valley here, with hills on both sides. And the fields are small. Relatively small. Well, I mean, compared with Texas, it’s restful. It’s … bucolic.”
For a moment, I saw Ellensburg as I imagined John did: the Cascades somewhat squashed, to about the size of the Black Mountains, the Yakima River leaking into the Usk, Pearl Street narrowed and given a dog’s-leg twist to it. This was how people with a real talent for expatriation organized the landscapes in which they lived. They cultivated a benign astigmatism toward all the unheimlich aspects on which I dwelled with morbid interest. When I was in Bahrain a dozen years ago, I used to drink at the British Club, whose members were all under the (to me wild) delusion that they had just dropped in for a snifter at the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck in East Molesey; and Giovanni–John had a similar knack for making himself improbably at home. Had he been placed on the lip of a crater on the moon, he would probably have said that it strongly reminded him of Wales.
“It’s nice,” he said. “I like the countryside ’round here. Whenever I can, I go for drives. I get in the car and take the first right, first left, first right … you know. And wherever I land up, that’s fine by me.”
I went on poking and prying. I wanted him to confess homesickness, alienation, something more in my line. He had tried returning permanently to Britain once, ten years ago, but it hadn’t worked out, and he had been back in Seattle after eleven months. “Now I’m resigned to staying here. I don’t have much to go back for, really, not now. To be frank, I can’t afford to go back. I couldn’t afford to buy a restaurant over there. Right now, I’m in the middle of buying some land here. A nice house, with a garage and a workshop, on three acres of its own land, just outside town. I’m paying seventy-six thousand dollars. That’s—what? Forty, forty-five thousand pounds?”
“People pay that for dinner in London now—”
“I like it here,” he said, with just enough emphasis to allow me room to doubt if he entirely meant it.
Next morning, a kindly fog filled the valley. It shrouded the outline of the Super 8 Motel, built and furnished like a low-security prison, where I had spent the night, and hid the worst of the blood-and-mustard gas-station architecture around the highway. I tucked the Dodge behind a slow-moving truck with Pennsylvania plates (I–90 is an epic that starts in downtown Seattle and finishes at Boston Harbor) and followed it blindly into the gray.
As the road climbed and the fog turned shallow and silvery, bits and pieces of the landscape started to show through: outcrops of shale, balding rye grass, chain link fencing, a stationary group of beige-colored cattle. It wasn’t nymph-and-shepherd country, the “bucolic” pastoral of Giovanni–John’s Cwmbran-on-the-Yakima; it was an irrigated desert, tan not green, stony, a congenial habitat for the rattlesnake and the coyote.
The last rags of fog faded into the air and suddenly one could see for miles: a huge tract of unrelieved ochre under an empty ice blue sky. At Vantage, the road crossed the mile-wide Columbia River, yet even here there was no vegetation to speak of. The river, bigger even than my memory of the Mississippi, ran through a cutting of frost-crumbled rock. Furrowed by a wind I hadn’t noticed until I saw the water, the Columbia was breaking like a sea. Until that moment, I had thought that someday I’d like to ride a boat down the thirteen-hundred-mile-long river; an ambition canceled on sight. It was the most inhospitable-looking stretch of inland water I’d ever seen—no shading trees, no riverside bars, no islands; nothing but wind and shale, and between the two an enormous and bad-tempered black canal.
The bluffs on the east side of the river had the texture and color of a cracked Cheddar cheese after the mice had been at it. From a short distance, they looked quite bare; close-up, they turned out to have a thin covering of sagebrush. It was not much of a vegetable. More dead than alive, its twiggy, burned-out stalks shivered in the wind.
I left the highway for a blacktop road, straight as a compass bearing, that led across the plateau to Ephrata and Odessa. On the car radio, the airwaves seemed to be drying out in sympathy with the landscape. National Public Radio had drifted into a tindery crackle miles ago. Then I found a country music station, with an early-period Merle Haggard song: “… Fever caused my momma’s loss of hearing / And Daddy Frank was born without his sight …” But that went too after I’d crossed the Columbia. I tried the AM band and got a phone-in exorcism program. The exorcist, who sounded as if he was moonlighting from a regular job of promoting sales of cars at unbeatable giveaway prices, was casting out the evil spirit that had taken possession of a female caller. She wept and moaned down the line. The exorcist ordered the spirit to speak its name—and got an answer, from a ventriloquist’s bogeyman voice, halfway between a chuckle and a screech.
“I can’t hear you. Say it again!’
“My—name—is—Satan—”
I switched off. I’d run into this show before, and it was the kind of thing that I used to find amusing in the United States before I lived here but was hard to bear as part of the everyday furniture of home.
The plateau was dead level from horizon to horizon; the road tapered evenly to a dot in the middle distance. Half a dozen small farms went by. Although this land was parched, its soil was rich. It had been a desert until the 1940s, when the building of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia enabled a network of water pipes and irrigation ditches to spread across eastern Washington and homesteaders moved in on the unlikely, monochrome terrain.
I kept on driving past the same farm: same trailer home parked on the same dusty plot; same Chevy pickup; same chained yellow dog; same great tilted silver satellite dish collecting messages from the heavens. The best-kept farms announced themselves from several miles off with a lone poplar tree, four times as tall as the telephone poles that were otherwise the most commanding feature of the landscape. The plateau was dotted with these flagstaff poplars, each one a signal of someone’s long-standing residence and patient husbandry.
It was a big thing to raise a tree here, where nothing grew naturally except stunted sagebrush. A Seattle friend who’d visited eastern Washington since his childhood in the 1940s told me these were known on any of these farms as the Tree; whenever the dishes were washed or a bath was taken, the dirty water was carried out and fed tenderly to the Tree, whose inch-by-inch growth was monitored as carefully as a child’s.
Rusty “walking johnnies” littered the landscape. Quarter-mile-long water sprinklers on wheels, they were permanently tethered at one end to a spigot, the free end attached to a tractor so as to be trundled over the ground, making a disc of wetted soil. I’d noticed these circular fields from the window of an overflying 747; they were dark and granular, like treacle tarts randomly scattered in the desert.
It seemed an extraordinarily grim method of farming. Every sprig of green on the plateau represented an elaborate circumvention of nature by technology and labor. In a summer heatwave or a winter wind, this would be a horrible place to spend time in the vintage trailer houses that passed for farmhouses, and nobody seemed to be making a fortune out of the struggle. Schafer … Reiser … Krupp … Weber … the names on the map matched those on the mailboxes. Where, I wondered, had these German subsistence farmers been before, that they could consider this dry butte hospitable and promising?
On a road so straight, through a landscape so flat, distance dissolves into time and time decelerates to the speed of a watched kettle. The farms seemed to come to a standstill as the car got stuck beside the same telephone pole. Looking down to find the radio on/off button, I noticed that the speedometer needle was securely lodged between 105 and 110. I lifted my foot from the gas pedal and watched the needle drop slowly through the numbers: at 55, the next mailbox appeared to be slightly receding, as if the car were failing to keep up with the rotation of the earth.
At the next townlet (a straggle of prefabricated bungalows along the side of the road, with six poplars constituting a civic park), I stopped at Somebody’s Chuckwagon Diner—Eddie’s, or Bill’s, or Kurt’s. I was the only customer, and I hadn’t finished seating myself at the counter before the woman in charge started to argue with me.
“And another thing he’s for,” she said, glaring at me from behind big lavender-tinted spectacles, “is family leave. And that’s going to do the most tremendous amount of harm to small businesses.”
I didn’t know what my problem was. Perhaps I was wearing a liberal Democrat shirt. At any rate, I wasn’t prepared to ride to the defense of the new president-elect before breakfast. I nodded and smiled and muttered that I liked my eggs over easy. The woman stared through me. Her permed silver curls were wound as tightly as springs, and her lips were rouged in a cherry-red Cupid’s bow. Her whole demeanor was about order, control, the smack of firm government. I had somehow managed to locate the Margaret Thatcher of the western plains.
She stood over the griddle, cracking eggs as if they were the pates of noodle-headed lefties. Splat. Splat. Her head swiveled briefly round in my direction. “You know they’ve got more Christian mandates now in Japan than what we have here? That’s what this country’s coming to.”
For a moment, the irrigated flatlands of eastern Washington merged with the irrigated flatlands of Thatcher’s native Lincolnshire, another hardline, subjugated landscape where nature had to be dominated for humans to live in it.
She overcooked the eggs and petrified the bacon.
“Catch up!” she snapped.
“Sorry?”
“Ketchup?”
It was not a happy meal. I ate one egg that tasted like a dried-up scone, then paid the check. Turning, I saw there was another late-breakfaster in the diner; a very small old man with a shrunken jaw was in the booth behind me, hiding behind the Spokane morning paper. He wore a faded Oro-Wheat baseball cap and looked inoffensive enough, but he must have been the notorious tax-and-spend bleeding-heart socialist of Grant County.
This was the landscape of the Christian Right. In the 1988 primary season, east-of-the-Cascades Republicans had made the televangelist Pat Robertson their first-choice presidential candidate, and Washington was the only one of the United States to back him. In the small towns I was passing through—Stratford and Wilson Creek, Odessa, Harrington, Lamona—the smartest, most important buildings were the churches of the Adventists and the Assembly of Godders. White-painted, picket-fenced, and made of cinder blocks, with late-model parish minibuses in their parking lots, these bunkers of Christian fundamentalism looked as efficient and well capitalized as the software outfits of Bellevue.
Religion was in the air here. The FM band was packed with local gospel stations, and the satellite dish in everyone’s yard could bring in hellfire preachers from Chattanooga to Seoul.
And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by. And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced and are inhabited. Then the heathen that are left round about you shall know that I the LORD build the ruined places, and plant that was desolate: I the LORD have spoken it, and I will do it. Thus saith the Lord GOD …
Ezekiel, Chapter 36, verses 34–37. The land itself, a miracle in its own right, was sufficient testament to the piety of the homesteaders. It was no wonder that the farm families of eastern Washington were inclined to see themselves as an army of light, marching to the beat of God’s own drum.
