In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau

In the Shadow of the Government’s Blind Eye

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IntheShadowoftheGovernment’sBlindEye H iking between the towns of Tukwila and Kent, not far from Seattle, I came upon a place where no grass grew, a scorched plat of land in Washington, the Evergreen State. Industrial rubbish lay in heaps there, and colossal tanks on stilt legs towered. Pheasants cackled from patches of blackberry briars. Pintail ducks drove wedges overhead, and dairy cattle lowed from flood-lush fields. That scar upon the landscape rattled me for days. Its blacks and grays collided with clusters of native bunchgrass on its perimeter and clashed with the red of the rosehips, causing me to object aesthetically , in my teenage way. Not that I could smell anything. As a sight animal trained from youth to hunt and gather—marbles and pop bottles, rail spikes and mushrooms, pheasants, berries, trout—my susceptible vision overwhelmed my companion senses. Most mammals , more sensitive than we humans are, tune into the complexities of Earth through a refined olfactory capacity to sense chemicals. And so my eyes despised the outsized tanks for storing fluids, the ponds of acids that teetered between liquid and gas, the makeshift foundry and its dusty heaps of fly ash, and the tangibly dangerous disorder. With its six-foot cyclone fence and rusty barbed wire, the Western Processing Company site might have been a compound for prisoners during World War II, a test plot for nuclear bombs, or the scorched aftermath of a widespread fire. I could smell none of its history, though. I could sniff nothing strictly astray. A year later I agreed to work in that place and discount the damning evidence of my own eyes. Now, wearing shorts in the morning sun some decades later, I can see traces of the accident, corrugations on my thighs, scars where hair refuses to grow, marks like contour lines on a map. In good light they In the Shadow of Government 19 resemble stretch marks, vestiges of new growth, reminders of another size and time. Once I graduated from high school in Seattle, I turned to blue-collar work, just as my father before me had done. I swung hammers, molded molten plastic, canned seafood, and drove forklifts. Adrift in industrial America, I learned how to tell myself stories to hide the truth about my family, region, and culture. Twelve years after I worked there, Western Processing became the largest Superfund site in the coastal Northwest, a landscape that inspired sophisticated engineering feats and required some seventy million dollars to try to restore . At about that same time, I became the first descendant in my paternal line to aspire to a higher education. Away from the smokestacks and hardhats, I gravitated to libraries . In those sanctuaries I sniffed out whatever I could about Western Processing and its effluents, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recriminations and the company’s denials, the corporate consent decrees and the extravagant cleanup costs. I needed to find how far I’d compromised my bioregion and my health. The technical brochures of my continuing education, the newspaper stories, interviews, and visits with former coworkers, renovated my memories and impressed me with the brute force of American big industry and business. Herb Gaskell began overseeing Superfund remediation at Western Processing when the Boeing Company bought the site in 1984. Over the phone, Herb sounded keen to talk when he learned I had worked there ten years earlier. He invited me to tour the former factory grounds. Nature and industry appear to purr in harmony at the site today, a testimony to technical resourcefulness. Tidy roads, fences, dikes, grass, and gravel have transformed it into a location fit for picnicking and capering with the kids. But Herb himself seems much in need of serious intervention. He chain-smokes Chesterfield straights, and the gouged pouches beneath his bloodshot eyes make him seem hound-sorry to see his career conclude in such a way. “You’ll need to put on this hardhat and goggles,” he tells me between coughs. “EPA requires it.” Putting on the hardhat takes me back to 1974. The nylon riggings suspend my skull inside the yellow shell. I nod at Herb and knock 20 In the Shadow of Government my knuckles on the plastic noggin, which amplifies the hollow sound. Herb nods back. The goggles fog up once we get outdoors, though, and very soon we’re gaping through a haze of condensation. Why the...