MAY1997
Matt Briggs
Who Killed Yesler?
Who Killed Yesler?
by Matt Briggs
Walking along the waterfront last week, I realized that another era of Seattle's history had finally passed without my noticing it. Although I grew up in Snoqualmie in the seventies, my parents worked downtown and my mother and I spent long hours waiting for my father to finish his late shift. We waited at Ben Paris or sorted through the secondhand bookstores like Fillippes on the west side of Capitol Hill. With two thousand homes going onto the edge of Rattlesnake Ridge, above the Snoqualmie Falls, and with the passage of Woolworths and Go Guy Drugs and the transformation of the Coliseum Theater into a Banana Republic, it's pretty clear that the replacement Seattle, that started construction in 1985, has finally been completed. Of course, the next upgrade is currently being built.
My father, complaining about the perpetual construction in Seattle, often says, "I can't wait until they finish downtown."
Feeder Stumps
Throughout
the forest where I grew up, huge feeder stumps rose up almost to the height
of the house I lived in. They were covered with moss, and huckleberries
grew like afros from their scalps. Many of them were hollow and I would
climb up on them and lower myself into their cavernous insides, smelling
the ancient root wood of cedar and wait for my father or my brother to pass.
I could hear them walking through the woods for a long ways off. Sticks
cracked. Bushes rattled like ghost chains. The forest wasn't quiet. The
tall trees always made noise as they rubbed against the other trees and
their whole length shifted back and forth in the wind. Birds called to each
other. Wood peckers tapped at rotting trees. But it was still quiet enough
to hear people walking. And these stumps were there because they grew there.
They weren't planted. They weren't landscape designed. They fell into a
bed of shady moss and slowly grew up, in a crush of competing seedlings,
and one of them won out centuries ago, this tree that is now a decaying
stump that'll be in somebody's backyard if a good landscape engineer gets
his hands on this suburb, or otherwise it'll be chipped and sent off to
cushion the fall of children from swings.
Last summer,
while hiking in the Northfork Valley of the Snoqualmie, I passed piles of
virgin cedar. Bulldozers with chains sat in the shade. During the week,
workmen shaved down old cedar stumps, the remains of the rapid logging operations
from the forties and fifties. Only virgin cedar provides wood clear from
notes and useful for cedar siding or roofing. And these stumps are all that
are left, the value now high enough that someone bothers to sort through
old wood.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997