State by State

by Matt Weiland

  Ink and tears, apprentices and imitators have all followed the death of Kurt Cobain. There is little more to say. Maybe grunge is what pop sounds like filtered through Washington, after the tune has been dragged through muddy rivers and covered in moss. Cobain’s songs are catchy but not infectious: They are too full of ache to spin incessantly like little twisters in your head. Rather, the songs seize on a moment and wrestle it to the ground; they are intimate and memorable emotional battles, fought and not always won. Cobain wrote shadowy tunes that flirt with but don’t always find the light of day. Exposure can be strange and disorienting for people who spend most of the year under cloudy skies. And when you feel exposed the urge is to disappear.

  Though Nirvana came from the coastal town of Aberdeen, the state capital of Olympia defined the boundaries the band would stretch and eventually break. Olympia, a town of less than 50,000, is Washington’s cultural lens, the place that sizes up the bigger cities, whether they know it or not.

  Olympia was co-founded by two men—one a fisherman reportedly scared of the sea, the other a ministerial student with a weak constitution. These two turned out to be prototypes for a city full of talent yet hampered by self-consciousness. They split the area into two parcels, each promising that whoever died first would cede the entirety of the land to the other. When the minister died following an epileptic seizure, the fisherman inherited the rest of the town: a tale of cooperation, sensitivity, unlikely pairings, and simple luck.

  Today Olympia is still a strange confluence of inhabitants, from the civil servants filing in and out of state capital buildings and keeping artisan bakeries in business during the legislative sessions, to the students of the liberal Evergreen State College, where I went, and where my progress was measured in a three-inch binder of “qualitative evaluations.” The students, state workers, and hipsters mingle with what’s left of the logging trade and fishing industry. And the population that can’t fall asleep without hearing the words “last call” closes out the bars only a few hours before the longshoremen wade in for morning happy hour and a warm breakfast.

  The city is an incubator of music—it hosts the farm team, so to speak. Plenty of bands that expanded well beyond the borders of Washington were informed by or influenced by Olympia bands and labels. From larger independents like Kill Rock Stars and K, to smaller startups such as Chain-saw and Atlas, Olympia put punks behind desks and retro-frock-wearing, knitting-needle-wielding vegans into storefronts. With cheap rent, a penchant for craft and craftsmanship, and the need to stave off small-town boredom, Olympia helped foster the do-it-yourself movement. Those who couldn’t or didn’t want to play music expressed the Olympia sensibility in other mediums. The result was an art movement based on irreverence and earnestness; it strove for originality and took into consideration place, context, and community. Above all, and likely owing to the town’s being outside of the entertainment industry, there was an underlying anti-professionalism—a sense that ambition was anathema to art. This manifested itself as either brave or sophomoric, depending on the execution.

  Olympia and its fellow cities west of the Cascades typify an assumption that political minds are of the same shade, if not altogether homogeneous. It’s true that from Bellingham, up near the border of Canada, to the island communities on the Puget Sound—Bainbridge, Vashon, Whidbey, the San Juans—west of the Cascades is a bastion of liberalism, environmentalism, and progressive thinking. (This ideology extends to the western part of Oregon as well, and all the way down to California—a coastline where the most liberal voters in the country have settled.) Olympia’s bio-diesel-converted Mercedes and Subaru Outback driving populace advertises its philosophy in the most concise means possible: the bumper sticker. Whether it’s IF ONLY CLOSED MINDS CAME WITH CLOSED MOUTHS, PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS AND SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY, or VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS, only in a place where the assumption was that the driver behind you would nod their head and say “Right on,” would one so unabashedly turn one’s means of transportation into a thought bubble on wheels. The sheer number of liberal bumper stickers plastered on the back of a Washington car is also an act of effacement, as if to cover up the shame that one is driving a vehicle at all.

  But leave the (semi-)urban environment, and the political and cultural slogans shift toward the right. In Chehalis, thirty miles south of Olympia, is the notorious Uncle Sam billboard, which was originally put up by a farmer named Alfred Hamilton when the freeway was built on his land. Uncle Sam looks like Mr. Potato Head with a George Washington wig on, and his succinct messages have been inflaming lefties for years, inspiring paintball vandalism and momentary road rage before drivers calm themselves with a “free speech for all, free speech for all” meditation. Messages range from the outrageously offensive—AIDS TURNS FRUITS INTO VEGETABLES—to clever jabs at state officials, such as, BOOTH GARDNER: A MAN WHO THINKS TWICE BEFORE HE SAYS NOTHING. The looming, anonymous messages provide a stark reminder that just because we’re all drinking the same coffee doesn’t mean we’re all here for the same reasons.

  Part of any new freedom or discovery is erasing what came before. Washington’s titular trend, from city names to housing developments, tells of what used to be. Evergreen Place—that business park where I went from digging for first gear as if it were in the bottom of a duffel bag to gliding between second and third with only the faintest implication of whiplash—speaks to the felled trees, but place names like Leschi, Alki Point, Lummi, Tenino, Mukilteo, and Tillicum are signs of loss that speak of a far more egregious trespass. So numerous were Native Americans on the land that it would be easier to make a list of Washington cities’ etymologies not based on a Native American word or tribe.

  Seattle takes its name from Chief Seattle, who on the occasion of Washington’s first governor, Isaac Stevens, establishing the first Indian Reservation said simply, presciently: “It matters little where we pass the remnants of our days. They will not be many. … A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours. But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.”

  The name Evergreen Place was a half-hearted apology, its woods relegated to the corner of the lot, a ragged green border on a polished drawing. But even that was short-lived: A computer company moved its headquarters from California into the Redmond office park. Within a few years, the “Evergreen” on the sign was gone, replaced by “Microsoft.” Little did I know that Microsoft would become a metonym of Redmond. Never again would I need to clarify that my hometown is a “suburb of Seattle.”

  Redmond, like Washington State, has been found. But there will always be wilderness to discover, and wilderness we’ll never know.

  WEST VIRGINIA

  CAPITAL Charleston

  ENTERED UNION 1863 (35th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME In honor of Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen” of England

  NICKNAME Mountain State

  MOTTO Montani semper liberi (“Mountaineers are always free”)

  RESIDENTS West Virginian

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 3

  STATE BIRD cardinal

  STATE FLOWER rhododendron

  STATE TREE sugarmaple

  STATE SONGS “West Virginia, My Home Sweet Home,” “The West Virginia Hills,” and “This Is My West Virginia”

  LAND AREA 24,077 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Braxton Co., 4 mi. E of Sutton

  POPULATION 1,816,856

  WHITE 95.0%

  BLACK 3.2%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.2%<
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  ASIAN 0.5%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 0.7%

  UNDER 18 22.3%

  65 AND OVER 15.3%

  MEDIAN AGE 38.9

  WEST VIRGINIA

  Jayne Anne Phillips

  First: the land, so mountainous and intransigent, so verdant and densely forested as to be nearly uninhabitable. Here, in the highest average altitude east of the Rockies, the Appalachian Mountains isolated a thousand years of paradise for animals, flora, fauna, all fed by interlacing rivers and countless clear streams that ran from the highest elevations to the deepest valleys. European settlers came to claim and fight over what seemed an untapped frontier, unaware the Indians used the land only for hunting and attendant ceremonies and rituals. Hunting parties of Tuscarora, Mingo, Shawnee, and Delaware fed whole tribes with the spoils of twice or thrice yearly excursions. The mountains were full of game and bear, deer, even bison; rival tribes seldom fought over sustenance. Fish were so plentiful that hunters had only to aim knives or spears at schools of blue pike and trout flashing by in the rapids. They stood downriver of falls and runs, gathering the exhausted fish in their arms and storing them in submerged baskets. Predatory birds scaled peaks that folded and flung ever upward: ten species of hawk, bald eagles, even the rare golden eagle, falcons, ospreys. The tent-like canopy of trees was a form of deciduous jungle, and topography varied so extremely from the heights of the mountains to the shaded valleys that plants from three life zones thrived. As recently as the 1930s there were 3,400 plant species in West Virginia: thirty species of orchid, sixty of fern. Before names and records, there were miles of towering evergreens, mountain glades that suggested northern tundra, acres of rhododendron and the ancient box huckleberry, oldest plant on earth; fields of wild lilies, lobelia, meadow rue, virgin’s bower. The trees, unmolested for hundreds of years, were typically so large that two men could not clasp hands around them. George Washington remarked in his 1747 diary that a tree on Three Brother Island was sixty feet in circumference. The land was virgin country marked only by three Indian trails, the Seneca, the Kanawha, and the Monongahela. No tribe claimed the land or lived upon it. The mountains were considered spiritual ground and left to themselves, towering, untamed, bountiful.

  The mighty rivers fed paradise and doomed it. The rivers, coursing through valleys sculpted by rushing water, brought the Europeans, the explorers, and speculators, those with a Western vision of ownership and industry. They were oppressors or fled oppression into a frontier that entirely dominated effort at human settlement for two hundred years. White men, fur traders seeking a route to a “western ocean,” first saw New River Gorge in 1641; sixty years later, befuddled traders still believed they’d found a source of “ye South Sea” at the Falls of the Great Kanawha. England had secured only a thin strip of New World along the east coast; the English challenged France on her claim to the limitless west bordered by the Mississippi. Morgan ap Morgan, a Welshman who recognized no Crown, settled at Mill Creek in western Virginia by 1726. Settlers of Dutch, Scotch, Irish descent ignored the French/English disputes and filtered in. The frugal Germans, driven from Pennsylvania by Penn’s heirs, were 200 strong in Mecklenberg (the name was changed to Shepherdstown as the Germans lost dominion) in 1748. A nephew of Lord Fairfax became the first presiding justice at Romney by 1762, but government was fiction.

  The land was territory. Blood flowed in the rivers and along the banks of the burgeoning streams. There are stories of isolated settlements massacred to the last man and woman. Children old enough to walk were sometimes taken. No one to bury the dead; only the snow, the rain, layers and layers of bright leaves. Foraging animals and fertile soil enfolded the bodies where they lay. Marauding Shawnee slaughtered the entire population of Draper’s Meadows in the New River Valley, save William Ingles, who fled through the woods, and Mary, his wife. She was kidnapped by the Indians and taken beyond the Ohio, “forced to make salt for her captors … the first made by a white person in Western Virginia.” The Shawnee taught her other skills, apparently; she escaped later that year and found her way back alone, in the winter of 1755, to “rejoin her husband,” but the mountains remained a battleground. The Indians allied with the French. The English hacked roads through the wilderness to supply British forts, but only the French defeat at Fort Duquesne encouraged George III to make a deal with native Americans. Paradise was lost to them, but the King of England proclaimed colonists forbidden in the Trans-Allegheny.

  Settlers, walking the road to revolution, ignored the law and marked their squatters claims, slashing the trees with axes, stating boundaries. Drunken whites murdered the family of Logan, a Mingo chief, in Hancock County, and Lord Dunmore used the ensuing uprising as a diversion. Settlers momentarily forgot their resistance to the Crown and united to win the Northwest for the Colonials. Lord Dunmore’s War left them a mobilized force and cleared the way for the Revolution, sweeping away Benjamin Franklin’s already approved proposal that western Virginia be declared a fourteenth colony. The colony was to be called Vandalia. Vandalia: a name for a paradise, a word Cervantes used to denote an imaginary place in his mythical Don Quixote. Had revolution held off another year, western Virginia’s secession from Virginia eight decades later need never have happened; Vandalians might have forged a more viable world in the mountains and forests, a world not so easily bought and sold.

  The name and the paradise were forgotten. Frontiersmen fought the Revolution from sixty isolated forts in the mountains, deflecting waves of British-led Indian attacks. They helped win the war but lost the peace: Political skirmishes between eastern and western Virginia began in earnest. The banks and the money were in Richmond (and farther southeast), as were most of the slaves. Geography was morality: There were no plantations in the mountains, no acres of fields. Farmers and woodsmen in the still wild western territory sustained themselves, growing what they ate, trapping, hunting. Virginia law decreed property taxed equally, with one exception: slaves. Human property was taxed at lower rates than “beasts of the field.” Translation: cheaper to own a human being than to own a horse, cow, pig. Western Virginians paid higher taxes than their eastern brethren to sustain a system with which they largely disagreed. The Virginia Legislature did count slaves as population when they apportioned representation, again slighting the (mostly white) population of the western counties, and it kept funds for public works largely in eastern Virginia. In 1860, as the resisting western counties agitated, Virginia did begin construction of a lunatic asylum at Weston—the first public institution funded. Like all the asylums of that era, it was vast, with city blocks of surrounding lawns: Weston State Hospital was the only state mental institution west of the Alleghenies. It was a hospital for indigents and outcasts, for the odd and insane and homeless. Back then, family took care of family. Only those who were unwanted, sexually profligate (women), or violent (men), were sent away.

  Just the previous October, John Brown, mad genius abolitionist, had raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. His subsequent hanging in Charles Town roused deeper secessionist passions against the slave-holding government in Virginia. South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter and Virginia seceded from the Union; western Virginians immediately declared themselves the “restored” government of Virginia, then New Virginia, and finally, by Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation, West Virginia. Paradise was engaged. Families were divided. One of my own ancestors spied for the Confederacy while her sons fought for the Union. Some towns changed hands fifty times. Stonewall Jackson, who boarded at Thomas Phillips’s farm in Coalton as a schoolboy, briefly captured Harpers Ferry for the Confederacy in September of ‘62, but the spirit of John Brown prevailed and the Union held.

  Bitterness continued. West Virginia, that fought and bled for the Union, was forced by the United States Supreme Court to pay over fourteen million dollars of Virginia’s public debt. West Virginia passed the Test Act, which required voters to swear they’d never borne arms against the United States, disenfranchising fifteen thousand Confederate vet
erans. Nearly thirty-seven thousand Union veterans demanded public acknowledgment and first consideration for jobs. There were two sides, two stories, and now that the war was over, the capitalists moved in. They bought timber and mineral rights to the land for almost nothing, and shipped the wealth of paradise to the northern cities.

  First came the timber barons, who finished cutting the giant trees and floated the wood to market on the rivers. Then came the coal companies, with their throbbing deep mines and company stores that turned men into indentured labor. Later, strip mines blasted the faces of the mountains to get at the seams of coal. Largely owned by out-of-state concerns, they employed fewer miners and brought in their own men to drive the machines.

  Mountaintop mining, a contemporary disaster, began in the 1980s and ‘90s. Coal companies simply blast off the tops of the mountains and dump tons of soil and rock into the hollows and streams below, destroying watersheds and the checks and balances of weather itself in the Appalachians. They’ve buried or damaged, to date, over two thousand miles of streams, and cut employment of miners from almost sixty thousand in 1980 to just over fifteen thousand in 2004. Manipulation of the unions in deep mining led to lax safety measures, disasters, and bad publicity; blasting the mountains themselves meant no one had to go underground. Machines and explosives could do the work, and the tight-lipped descendants of Welsh miners, their wood frame houses weakened by the blasting, tended not to complain. Mountaintop mining uses ninety-four metric tons of explosives a year in West Virginia alone. Coal slurry impoundments, towering waste full of toxins and heavy metals, hang over the towns and settlements, waiting to weaken in hundred-year floods that happen more frequently, much more frequently, every other year, it seems: no clear running streams to absorb the storms, the snow melt. The dumped ground that buried the interlacing waters of the mined land (1.4 million acres projected destroyed by 2012) is loose, unstable. The drenched earth turns to rivers of poison mud. The coal companies exhaust the coal, bury the valleys, “restore” the tops of the mountains to level, moon-like landscapes, seeded with grass and little trees, and move on. They pollute the water and air, end hunting and fishing, buy out the disseminated towns, desecrate the cemeteries. Sometimes they’re forced to move the dead to create more death.