MD was more confused than ever, but despite our chorus of what-the-hells, we followed her instructions, lefting and righting into … a cul-de-sac in front of a suburban house. Resorting to traditional land navigation, I looked at a map and found a way to Dash Point State Park. CAMPGROUND FULL, read a sign pasted to the entrance booth.
And that was why, for the second time on the trip, we stayed at a motel.
* * *
In a steady drizzle, fog, and bumper-kissing traffic, we inched up I-5 through Seattle. If Seattleites were a little more like the folks in the South and built churches instead of coffee bars, they would have been worshipping, and the freeway would have looked as a freeway should on a Sunday morning.
On a trip like ours, the two of us crammed for weeks on end in the truck’s cab, it becomes almost impossible to ignore annoying quirks that would be otherwise overlooked. One of mine that bugs Leslie is what she calls “the wiper thing.” When driving in rainy weather, I leave the windshield wipers off until there’s a monsoon, then keep them whapping long after the sun has emerged. Also, I tend not to signal when changing lanes, and when I do I forget to turn the blinkers off. Personally, I think these traits are signs of advancing age, but Leslie has a friend whose nongeezer husband’s driving habits are identical, and she and her friend have concluded they are linked to gender. Usually, my wiper/blinker behavior elicits a mild reminder from her to turn them on or off, as circumstances require. Now, it drove her nuts. To stop herself from grabbing the wiper controls, she spelled me at Fred’s helm.
Bored with our sluggish progress, I made the mistake of reading an article in the Seattle Times about the city’s attempts to deal with its traffic problems—not as bad as L.A.’s but getting there—by extending a light rail line out to its suburbs. Voters had overwhelmingly approved the project in a referendum in 2008, but it couldn’t proceed because a commercial real estate developer named Kemper Freeman opposed it. He’d filed a lawsuit and sunk $1.1 million of his personal fortune into a political campaign to stop its construction. It seemed that Freeman, a kind of minor-league Donald Trump, thought that cars made America free and prosperous and that building mass transit was a socialist plot.
It was a mistake to read this article because I had been feeling pretty good about the country, much better than before we’d begun our travels. We hadn’t run into hysterics in colonial militia outfits, calling for secession or spouting nonsense like “Government keep your hands off my Medicare.” We’d met the couple from West Virginia who’d given up all they owned to succor the lost and the addicted, and black and white volunteers working side by side in the rubble of Tuscaloosa, and Red Cross women who’d come hundreds of miles to aid flood victims in Montana. Almost everyone we’d encountered had been kind and generous to us, reasonable in voicing their opinions when we asked for them. We’d heard from ordinary people some perceptive ideas about what put the unum in the American pluribus. I was encouraged and felt like whistling Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Now this newspaper story made me wonder if I was deluding myself. Did the thoughts and wishes and opinions of the common man and woman count any longer, assuming they ever had? Here was a project that had won broad public approval and could do nothing but benefit the public, and it had been stymied by one plutocrat flexing his financial biceps, as if to remind us all that Democracy in America has become a process not of one man, one vote but of one million dollars, one vote.
31.
We liked Anacortes, a lively town with enchanting views of the San Juan Islands and, in the opposite direction, of the northern Cascades. We did not like it so much that we wanted to spend an entire week there, but Fred and Ethel delayed us.
He needed servicing in preparation for the three-thousand-mile haul to the Arctic Ocean, but every garage in the area was booked up for days, so we had to wait our turn. She threw another of her tantrums. In the middle of the night, water began leaking from the toilet, and when I flushed it the leak exploded into a fountain that flooded the compartment. I determined that a valve had cracked and, after consulting the manual, further determined that fixing it was beyond my pay grade. We dragged the trailer to a Camping World RV center fifteen miles away. The service manager confirmed my diagnosis but said he would have to order a new valve. Another wait.
Ethel was hauled back to our campground, on an Indian reservation outside Anacortes belonging to a small coastal tribe, the Samish. The weather—low skies, rain, fog—was perfect for a Bergman film, but we could have been stuck in a worse place. For 270 degrees on the compass, the views were captivating. Seagulls wheeled over Fidalgo Bay with quarrelsome cries, dropping crabs on the rocks to crack the shells and get at the meat; great blue herons patiently stalked tidal flats; harbor seals poked their whiskered, doglike faces out of the water. When the sun raised the curtain of morning fog, the San Juans were unveiled little by little, conveying an impression that they were being created as you beheld them. Inland, in the rare moments when the clouds parted and the rain stopped, Mount Baker, nearly eleven thousand feet high, revealed itself in all its whitened massiveness.
The other ninety degrees, to the southeast, illustrated the principle that no attractive scenery shall go unpunished by industry. The Shell and Tesoro oil refineries defaced a long peninsula with mazes of pipes, colonies of storage tanks, and forests of stacks pumping mephitic billows of smoke.
A Samish, Larry Thomas, told me that the land for the refineries had been leased from his tribe during World War II for one hundred years, on favorable terms—favorable, that is, to the oil companies, not the Indians.
“All the tribes around here had been pushed onto that land,” he said. “We’re all related.” He was a well-built, handsome man with a nutmeg complexion and an easygoing manner. “Because the refineries are so close is the reason why gas around here is so expensive,” he quipped. “I’ll bet if you filled up right under one of those stacks, it would be five bucks a gallon.”
Thomas wore a plastic tag on his T-shirt identifying him as a SHELLFISH COMPLIANCE OFFICER. His job was to make sure that commercial and recreational fishermen did not harvest oysters, clams, and mussels from the bays. Dire warnings with skulls and crossbones were posted all over. DANGER. TOXIC SHELLFISH. SHELLFISH IN THIS AREA ARE UNSAFE TO EAT DUE TO BIOTOXINS PARALYTIC SHELLFISH POISONING (PSP) AND/OR AMNESIC SHELLFISH POISONING (ASP). DO NOT EAT CLAMS, OYSTERS, MUSSELS OR SCALLOPS.
Abnormally heavy rainfall, Thomas explained, had raised the levels of the rivers spilling into the bays, and when that happened, fecal contamination increased. In a phrase, too much shit in the water. Human shit (faulty septic systems), animal shit (livestock, pets), manufactured shit (farm fertilizers). The bays had been closed for six weeks this year, he said.
“Been clamming here ever since I can remember and since before I could remember,” he said wistfully. “I’m sure I was propped up on a stump when I was one or two while my grandfather and father dug for clams.”
For some reason the toxins had not affected the salmon that assembled in the bays for their epic voyages up the rivers to their spawning grounds.
“Caught so many last year that the meat was equal to what you’d get off an elk. My wife told me to stop. The freezer was full up, she said, so just stop.”
He was an avid hunter as well and had bought some land in eastern Washington, near the Canadian border.
“There’s elk and deer up there, and I’m going to take my dad. He’s seventy-eight, and he can still shoot straight. But he can’t hike the hills like he used to. So I’ll just sit him on a stump and push the elk into him, like he did with me when I was a little kid. I’ll be paying him back.”
He asked how long we were staying. I told him I didn’t know; I was waiting for a trailer part to arrive.
“Hope you can stick around for the great canoe journey,” he said, and described an annual event in which coastal tribes from Oregon and Washington, British Columbia, and as far away as southern Alaska paddle hand-built ceda
r canoes to converge on the reservation of a host tribe for a week of dancing and feasting.
This year’s host was the Swinomish, cousins to the Samish, and the canoes would be arriving in Fidalgo Bay by the weekend.
“There’ll be sixty of them,” Thomas said. “Some of them have been paddling thirty, forty miles a day, on the water for three weeks.”
* * *
Keeping ourselves occupied became an occupation in itself. With Sage and Sky in tow, we rode a ferry to the San Juans one chilly morning, when a fog bank that looked as solid as the earth lay on the water and only the upper halves of the islands were visible, so that they appeared to be resting on a crust of vaporous gray. Salt air, the clanging of bell buoys—Leslie was in her element. It’s said that the chemical composition of human blood is remarkably similar to seawater. Hers must be identical. She is a sailor descended from a long line of Yankee sailors.
Rafts of gulls floated in calm Friday Harbor, and the town with its ferry docks and seafood shacks and ice cream parlors reminded us of Martha’s Vineyard. We were in the West, yet the West, as the term is commonly understood, seemed far away, and the steamy Everglades, two months and five thousand miles behind us, might as well have been in another hemisphere.
We hiked in Deception Pass State Park on Whidbey Island, the largest island in Washington and definitely the noisiest. A naval air station is located on its northern end, and the pilots practice touch-and-goes daily, shattering the stillness of the old-growth forests. The trees—Douglas fir, western hemlock, western red cedar—rose higher than radio towers. The New England oaks and pines were mere shrubbery by comparison. We paced around one cedar and estimated its circumference to be greater than twenty feet. It had been a sapling when Columbus mistook a Caribbean Island for India; in its adolescence when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It will be standing five hundred years from now, when fragments of the naval air station’s runways and hangars and radar dishes will be dug up by the archaeologists of the twenty-sixth century and placed in museums, as we today display medieval broadswords and armor.1 I recalled an oft-quoted line from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”: “Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?” It is a good thing to walk under such giants, not only for the large and melodious thoughts that descend. It puts things in perspective for those who think the transient trends and events of the present really mean something, and I highly recommend it as an exercise in humility for the self-important and the self-involved.
We climbed to the summit of Goose Rock, from which we could see the Pacific and, directly below, Deception Pass, between Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands. An outgoing tide surged along. In places, slick water flowed seaward like sheets of jade-green ice; in others, white water sparkled, whirlpools spun. But it was hard to appreciate the beauty and hear melodious thoughts with the planes screaming overhead.
Wordsworth, I thought, you had no idea how much the world would be too much with us.
* * *
We were driving back to the campground when we saw them, clustered at each corner at the intersection of Commercial Avenue and Twelfth Street. On the northwest corner, about twenty people, mostly silver-haired, carrying signs that said things like THANK YOU U.S. MILITARY and LET FREEDOM RING while a Merle Haggard tune blared from speakers hung from a light post and a row of American flags snapped in the breeze alongside the Gadsden flag from the Revolutionary War, with its segmented rattlesnake and motto DON’T TREAD ON ME.
On the northeast corner: a dozen citizens flew the UN’s flag, and their signs flashed, UNITE FOR PEACE and WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. We couldn’t tell if the smaller assemblies on the other corners were allied with the northwest corner or its opposition.
The scene looked out of place in relaxed Anacortes; it almost looked staged, as if it were background for a TV movie about polarized America. We pulled over at the patriotic corner and got out of the truck.
The demonstrations were staged, in a way: a ritual that had begun two weeks after 9/11 and had been going on for one hour every Sunday since, as regularly as church services. Patriots on one side, peaceniks on the other. We learned this from a stocky, seventyish fellow named Dan, a retired California cop who’d flown fighters for the U.S. Air Force between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He and the others belonged to an organization that started in Anacortes and now had chapters all over the state of Washington.
“That’s our major point right here,” he said, pointing at the sign he held with another man. Emblazoned with the emblems of the four armed services and the U.S. Coast Guard, it said, WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.
“We’ve got a Web site,” he added over the music and the honking of car horns signaling support of the troops supporters. “Go hyphen Patriots dot com. Look it up.”
I did, though not right then. The Go hyphen Patriots was founded by a couple, Andy and Mary Stevens, its stated purpose to hold a vigil in recognition of the soldiers in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. I quote from the Web site:
We stand in direct opposition to the “peace at any cost, “no war for oil,” “anti-Bush, anti-establishment” crowd who organize and gather at the other corners of the intersection where we stand each Sunday … The group we stand in direct opposition to is organized and consists mainly of members of The Left Wing Socialist Celebration church … temporarily augmented by other fragmented groups with their own political agenda.
The Left Wing Socialist Celebration Church? I’d never heard of it; nor could I find a Web site for it. Maybe, being socialist, its collection plate didn’t gather sufficient funds to afford a Web designer. Safe to assume that it was the fringe of a fringe (though perhaps larger than the Right Wing Socialist Celebration Church). I’m fairly sure that its entire membership, nationwide, was standing on that one street corner.
Dan said that the Go hyphen Patriots were not concerned with the political reasons why the troops had been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, only with the fact that their country had sent them.
“If you remember thirty years ago, it was nasty to be in the military.”
“Yeah, I was in then myself,” I said as another motorist honked his horn.
“Okay. Guys came back from Vietnam and were spit on, this and that. That’s not going to happen this time, because there’s groups all over the country just like we.”
Dan continued, praising the clarity, the consistency, and the politically neutral message of the Go hyphen Patriots, scorning the opposition’s muddled, incoherent slogans. Gesturing at the northeast corner, he heaped contempt on one woman, presumably a priestess in the Left Wing Socialist Celebration Church.
“She takes things out of context she hears on the news and then writes a sign—she’s political,” he scoffed. Then he motioned across Commercial, at the southwest corner. “Do you see that guy’s sign? His signs make no sense whatever.”
Peering through the crowd, I read the only sign visible: RUG SALE.
“So there’s four different groups here?”
No, he answered. The others were considered one; they had split up merely to take possession of three-fourths of the intersection. They were antiwar, which was not to say that the Go hyphen Patriots were prowar.
“Do you want the troops to come back?” asked Leslie.
“When the job’s done, yeah. We want them to come home with their heads held high. We don’t want them to come back with their tails between their legs, like we did in Vietnam. That was a war that could’ve been won early on, but then the politicians got involved. We’re back to it again now, with the change in administrations. The politicians are involved. Most everyone here is a veteran.”
I noticed one, slouched against a light truck plastered with bumper and window stickers (VIETNAM VETERAN, SOCIALISM = CHAINS) and a sign on its rooftop (IMPEACH OBAMA). The man stared at me, arms crossed over his chest, a hip cocked, lips tight beneath a shaggy mustache, and even without the sticker on his truck I would have known he’d fought in Viet
nam by his stance and the air of sullen truculence. I’d run into dozens like him over the years. I’d watched their hairlines retreat as their waistlines advanced (along with my own), but the attitude never changed. Call it the Lost War Warrior syndrome. I’d suffered from it myself and felt relapses whenever I remembered a certain summer day in 1967. I was home on leave and waiting to cross a street in Chicago, my marine buzz cut as obvious as a uniform. A carload of college kids veered toward me, one yelling, “Hey, burrhead!” as he flung a bag of fast food scraps in my face. I can even remember the name on the bag: Burger King.
So I was all for backing the troops and welcoming them home, though the thanks of a grateful nation might be scant comfort to those returning blind or disfigured for life, or with traumatic brain injuries, or missing an arm or a leg or both arms or both legs, not to mention that all expressions of support and gratitude would be lost on the families of the ones coming home in metal boxes.
Turning to Dan, I asked, If the Go hyphen Patriots message was apolitical, then what was with the socialism equals slavery, the impeach Obama slogans? As far as I knew, the president supported the troops and their mission.
Well, yeah, the politics slipped out now and then, replied Dan. Did I see that flag over there, the yellow one? I did—the Gadsden flag. It was his. He’d flown it ever since he’d retired, and now he saw it all over the country because the Tea Party had adopted it. And, he added, the Go hyphen Patriots supported the Tea Party.
He feared that the country could blow apart if the economy worsened, because “there’s a lot of hatred of government right now. We’ve created a society of gimmes. Gimme. Gimme. Gimme a house. Gimme my health care. Gimme my social security. See what I’m saying? We’ve got so many gimmes, who’s going to do the work?”
The Longest Road Page 26