Des Moines Creek Ghost Story

Along the sleepy banks of Poverty Bay, I wouldn’t know that it was so. Russian and Vietnamese men fished for squid from the pier, and I walked into the rehabilitated forest, dripping and silent under the occasional squall of an airplane headed toward Sea Tac airport. I had been taking this walk since the park reopened a few years ago. I found the forest peaceful. Mushrooms and moss grew from the sides of the trees. Much of the forest had grown back from the initial logging. It was perhaps second or third growth. My brother asked me once, why do you always say, “second growth,” and I said because the forest is not virgin growth. It has been cut. And he didn’t get this. But the trees are there. They are standing. But you can see the stumps among the trees, I said, and this seeing the stumps among the trees, was the salient fact of a forest in the lowlands where I grew up. All forests not only had stumps but everywhere I looked, there was the accumulation and waste of the process the original pillagers of the forest had used to get rid of the trees. There were piles of rotting limbs, mounds of dirt and moss. I could find grades cut into the side of muddy hills where temporary tracks had been laid so that small steam engines called mules could hull the trees out of the forest. There were moldering trestles, and discarded metal objects rusted to sheets of flaky russet metal. The image elsewhere of Seattle’s rainy paradise was that the area was pure and wild. This image was false. The term second growth for me captured the essential nature of the degradation of my homeland. Everything I saw everywhere in my homeland was the leftovers, the sloppy remains of cutters, diggers, and shippers. Seattle presented itself, traumatized, yet wearing a North Face fleece and drinking a cup of herbal tea sweetened with honey as a kind of high tech, pure, and at heart moral and upstanding place. The reality, though, was this was a region of depredation and systematic and even recent violence. The natural order of the Pacific Northwest was the company town with the veneer of middle-class life on Main-street, the company run comfort stations above street level, and the threat of violence against anyone who disturbed the peace of this cheap lacquer. Seattle, the company town of the Boeing Airplane Company has been handed on from company to company: Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, and whatever is next. At the heart of Seattle’s prosperity is the same culture as any little mine town in Idaho.