MAY1997
Matt Briggs
Who Killed Yesler?
Climax Forest
Who Killed Yesler?
by Matt Briggs
Climax Forest: taco huts & three car garages
The interior West is no longer a faraway land. Our great emptiness is filling with people, and we are experiencing a time of profound transition, which can be thought of as the second colonization. Many are being reduced to the tourist business, in which locals feature as servants, hunting guides and motel maids, or local color. People want to enclose our lives in theirs, as decor.
The Native American people were living coherent lives, at one with their circumstances, when our people displaced them, leaving them mostly disenfranchised and cut off from possibility in our society, their reservations like little beleaguered nations battling to survive in our larger, one as we continue wrecking the traditional resources of their cultures. The result for them, is anomie, nothing to hang onto, powerlessness. We are ashamed and look away, do little to help.
So, it is deeply ironic that the Native Americans are being joined in their disenfranchisement by loggers and miners and ranchers, and the towns that depend on them. Our ancestors came to the West and made homes for themselves, where they could live independent lives. Because of their sacrifices, we in the dominant society think we own the West, we think they earned it for us. But, as we know, nobody owns anything absolutely, except their sense of who they are.
page 160, Who Owns the West? William Kittredge, Mercury House, San Francisco's, 1996.
At the NorthWest Bookfestival in 1995, during a panel about Mythic Character in the West, featuring Craig Lesley, William Kittredge, and David Guterson, the writers were reluctant to discuss character types but talked instead about the relationship of people to the land. I wasn't sure what the topic meant anyway by types of characters unless it concerned the kind of stock characters found in tv mini-series Westerns, The Old Doc and the Drunk sheriff and the Mystery Gunman.
Instead,
they talked about the radical transformation of the area around all the
region's sizable cities into huge suburbs and the theme-park preservation
of a few of Montana's towns by Hollywood money, from Bruce Willis and Robert
Redford. Mr. Guterson coined this term: The Yuppificiation of the West.
"I don't think the suburbs are a bad thing," he said. "After
a while the climate will take over and the fauna will occupy yards and the
people will become Western. You saw this happen in the seventies with rural
hippies," he said. "Who moved into small communities and were
regarded with suspicion by the locals until they learned to trust one another."
I grew up
in Fall City, then a very small town along the often flooding banks of the
Snoqualmie River, and ostensibly the last stop of a steamboat that once
traveled up the Snoqualmie from Everett. I went to school with children
whose parents operated dairies or worked at the Weyerhauser Mill in Snoqualmie.
My parents belonged to the very beginning of the current wave of commuters.
They worked in Seattle. My mother waited tables at the Denny's on Fourth
Avenue in the middle of the Duwamps. My father worked the grill at the Copper
Kitchen on Westlake. They moved to the country because they wanted to return
to the land and live like their grandparents on a small farm. We failed
to keep chickens and ducks and failed to grow corn or even pumpkins. But
the blueberry bushes crouched in the moldy orchard behind our house continued
to pour out more berries than we could eat, and the plum trees dumped stinking
and rotting fruit over the hillside. The raspberry bushes grew into a gigantic,
tangled patch. They spent a great deal of time commuting on I-90 and not
much time farming, and the 4H Club and loggers didn't notice us or that
the timberland was being turned over to developers.
Somehow
Mr. Guterson didn't sound like he meant what he was saying, but sounded
instead like he was defending the sprawling suburbs. As old and established
as the 'burbs are between Everett and Lacey, there just aren't many saw
mills or dairy farms or stands of climax growth forest. I haven't seen many
maple trees and sword ferns and Devil's Club thriving in the beauty bark.
What I do find are Lucky 7s, and the shells of Hoagies Corners converted
into Kwick Marts and housing projects housing poor immigrants and endless
new suburbs like the developed Issaquah plateau housing well to do immigrants.
A local culture doesn't co-exist or learn to adapt to bulldozers. The local
culture is paved over and works at the drive-thru windows.
I think
the assumption that new immigrants to the Northwest will somehow become
transformed into members of a vital regional culture is fairly uninformed.
The people, like many folks who grew up here, aren't staying. They come
because of their careers and leave because of their careers. I work at Fred
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center on a large study that employees about
a hundred people per floor. There are two Seattlites (and one guy from Oceanview)
who work on my floor. The rest have been imported from across country. The
upper level workers live in Issaquah or Kirkland in pressboard deluxe houses
on city blocks that didn't exist ten years ago and sometimes I hear them
talking about back yards that I should bestands of second growth just now
beginning to ripen into conifers.
It has always
been rare to meet a native. Now it is rare to meet someone who lived in
Seattle when Ben Paris still stood on Westlake.
Sometimes,
I feel like the whole of Seattle's past is as real as the castles I used
to make in my front yard out of a stool, a kitchen chair, and an old linen
bed sheet. The future of the city is the same: insubstantial and unreal,
a sprawling mess of instant construction.
On the walk
from my bus stop on Westlake to my work place at the base of Denny, I watched
a construct crew last spring throw-up a Marriot, built from a rebar and
cement frame and faced with styrofoam blocks. The blocks were sprayed with
a hi-tech ceramic cement. I have a friend in construction who says this
is the way to build buildings because these structures can't fall down.
"It's the earthquake regulations," he says. "Wood's obsolete."
So these building don't use any wood, which is handy because there isn't
any left. The big beams that you see in the ceiling of the waterfront wharves
can no longer be found because trees just don't have a chance to grow that
big. New beams are built from boards glued together, which seems like building
a baseball out of toothpicks. And this Hampton Inn being built now, stands
like a plastic monopoly piece. It isn't something you can add onto, because
you'd have to nail the boards into a wall faced with styrofoam and spray-on-cement.
All over, Seattle crumbling structures that used to house businesses like
Go Guy Drugs are being torn down and replaced by bubbles of cement and styrofoam.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997