Primitivism and Deep Ecology

This fortnight's post is a little different. Among the many fascinating blog series over at Sea Lion Press, home of alternate history publishing, is one by their author David Hoggard examining unsuccessful or fringe political ideologies. I contributed a guest article to the series this Friday (Other Ideologies: Primitivism), and I thought I'd link it here.

The notion that industrial civilization is not worth the benefits didn't originate here in the Northwest. Nor is its story confined here. Yet while researching the article, I returned to our neck of the (old-growth) woods time and time again. Earth First!, the ecological monkeywrenchers who gave us tree-sits and tree-spiking, did some of their most famous work in the timber belt of Oregon and Northern California. Their descendants in the ELF torched McMansions and GMO crops in the suburbs of Portland and Seattle. John Zerzan, the original anarcho-primitivist, lives and teaches in Eugene. A little further inland, in the mountains of western Montana, Ted Kaczynski hid from society as he built his bombs.

One of the central paradoxes of the Northwest is that we are close to, and often reverent of, nature and yet the economy built here after white settlement has been dominated by extractive industry. That is not an irreconcilable conflict - as I'll cover in later posts, loggers have often considered themselves stewards of the land - but it is difficult to deal with for many people. It's easy to feel disgust and anger at the sight of clearcuts or dams or vistas of suburban shitboxes encroaching on what still feels like a very wild place. Combine that with the Western USA's history as a breeding ground for wild ideas of all political stripes and you get the perfect recruiting ground for anti-civilization radicals.

That's my psychoanalytic introduction - now pop on over to Sea Lion Press and learn the harder facts.

Thornton Creek

Every place has its story. Even the suburbs.

I live a few blocks inside Seattle’s city limits. The double yellow line on NE 145^th St separates the Emerald City from the quiet residential community of Shoreline, and even downtown Lake City has a strong suburban flavor to it. The area just south of the neighborhood was home to both an elaborate Prohibition-era speakeasy operation and a historic civil rights campaign against a racist restaurant, both of which I’ll be writing about in future posts. But Lake City proper’s main claim to fame is hosting some of the oldest continuously operating dive bars in Seattle. There won’t be a period drama set here anytime soon.

History isn’t just thrilling stories, though: it’s about how people have lived and worked and loved and struggled every day. Instead of tracing a narrative story, this week I decided to take a walk that would show me new parts of my neighborhood and allow me to give some little vignettes about what Shoreline and North Seattle are like, and how they got that way. I was going to follow Thornton Creek.

Fig 3.1: It was also a really nice day out, so I needed an excuse for a walk.

Thornton Creek drains twelve square miles of city and suburb in Seattle and Shoreline, including almost all of Lake City. After an intensive restoration campaign in the 2000s, about ninety percent of it is aboveground, which is pretty remarkable for an urban river and makes it easy to walk along even when it disappears into private property. One branch flows from Shoreline south, the other flows east from underneath the Northgate Mall, and they converge in a specially constructed flood-control park before issuing into Lake Washington at Matthews Beach. I couldn’t follow both routes, but the North Branch was the obvious choice. Northgate is about as historically interesting as a mall can get – it was one of the first enclosed shopping centers in the United States, and Ted Bundy used to pick up his victims in the parking lot – but that’s still not saying much, and besides, the route of the North Branch is longer and more varied. I got on the bus and headed to Ronald Bog Park.

The Thornton Creek Watershed is originally home to the Xacuabš (Lake People), now part of the Duwamish tribe. A village was located on the lake at the mouth of the creek, the bogs at the creek’s headwaters were harvested for cranberries, and controlled burns were used to create hunting meadows all across the watershed. If you’re ever in the area, the Shoreline Historical Society has a beautiful hand-painted map of North Seattle as it appeared before colonization, which is worth the visit alone.

The Xacuabš were dispossessed and driven off their land by white settlers in 1854, and since then the story has been one of continuous construction and rising population density. The latest chapter was visible immediately when I arrived at Ronald Bog Park.

Fig. 3.2: Notices of Proposed Land Use Action are the Seattle area’s answer to red phone boxes or Benson Bubblers.

Two signs, listing far out into the sidewalk, notified passersby that the park will be undergoing some changes. A good chunk of it will be converted into artificial wetlands in order to “mitigate” the destruction of wetlands elsewhere. In a few years’ time, city engineers will be laying light rail tracks along the other side of the freeway, grubbing up boggy habitats as they extend the train up to Shoreline. Even development that’s good for the planet in the long run, like public transit infrastructure, can be pretty destructive in the moment.

Ronald Bog Park was quiet this Sunday afternoon. A couple snoozed on the grass. Ducks paddled on the water. An old man with a beard and bucket hat cooled his feet in the pond, Thornton Creek’s headwaters springing up between his toes. The cherry blossoms were out.

 You wouldn’t know it looking at the smooth green lawn, but this area was once a true cranberry bog, covered in peat moss and grazed upon by deer and bears. In the 1940s, a peat mining operation dug up most of the moss (leaving a hole that the pond fills today), and within a few years it became an urban wilderness, overgrown and contaminated by spillover from the Shoreline dump then located immediately to the south. It wasn’t until the 70s that neighbors got it cleaned up and parkified.

I hoped to find a way out through the park to the south, where Thornton Creek emerged from the pond, so I plunged into the remaining overgrown boggy area on the eastern edge, up against the highway. The ground bristled with poky dead reeds and Himalayan blackberry. A collapsed barbed-wire fence no longer marked the boundary between park property and the domain of the Department of Transportation; the highway was so close that I could’ve scrambled up and stood on top of the concrete berm. I couldn’t see a way south. The tents and tarps of a small encampment were visible through the trees in this jurisdictional limbo, complete with a handmade bridge across a drainage ditch and gates built from orange construction webbing. Even here, eleven miles from downtown Seattle, the housing crisis is plain as day.

Fig. 3.3: A quiet corner of the park.

I decided I’d have to circle the park instead. Back on N 175^th St, a gargantuan sign welcomed me to the City of Shoreline, Incorporated 1995. Incorporated 1995 it might have been, but this has been a commuter suburb since long before that date. The interurban from Seattle to Everett used to run right through this neighborhood. Like so many other transit systems of the early 20^th century, though, it fell afoul of mismanagement, the Depression, and – if you believe the story – General Motors’s nefarious plot to wipe out trolleys across the nation. Ronald Bog was de-bogged by the development generated by one light rail line, and is now being re-bogged to mitigate the construction of another. It’s a neat little historical poem.

Fig. 3.4: You can tell I posted this a little late. The park's statues were still dressed up for St. Paddy's when I went through.

South of the park, Thornton Creek begins its flow underground. I walked along Meridian Ave, dipping in and out of tidy culs-de-sac that had once been dump, but not seeing a sign of the stream yet. People were out working on their cars or yards in the sun. A girl was biking in circles in the street; a few blocks over, a bald man was doing the same. Every other household seemed to have a home improvement business: there were vans belonging to plumbers, landscapers, solar panel installers and even a chimney sweep. On Corliss Place, I finally spotted the creek bed running through a landscaped front yard.

Just as it hits daylight, though, Thornton Creek disappears again into forbidden property: a tangled stretch of woods posted with NO TRESPASSING and NO DUMPING signs. Through the trees, I could see the low bulk of the Shoreline Recycling & Transfer Station. Not wanting to have to circle around on Meridian again, I looked for a back way in, but all I found was a cell tower and a desolate park.

Fig 3.5: Fifteen-foot trees growing through the tennis court at James Keogh Park.

The signs on the other side of the woods, by the bustling entrance to the recycling station, caught my eye. One was dotted with lichen devouring the black paint of the letters, while the other had the pre-2006 insignia of King County on it.

King County was organized in December 1852 and named after then-Vice-President-elect William Rufus DeVane King. A Southern plantation owner and slaveholder, King is best known for founding Selma, Alabama, and for probably being James Buchanan’s lover. (The two men spoke about each other in terms that would be sweetly endearing if they weren’t the people they were.) King was dying of tuberculosis in Cuba when he won the election. He expired only two days after returning to the United States. As a closeted Romantic consumptive and a hideous racist, King is probably our most nineteenth-century Vice President.

It took 134 years for Seattle-metro officialdom to recognize that honoring a proud defender of slavery wasn’t a very good look. The solution was brilliantly simple: they kept the name King County, but proclaimed that it now referred to Martin Luther King, Jr., instead. It was another 20 years before they got the designation officially recognized by the State of Washington and the logos updated to match. I’m almost certainly going to do a post on the Guerrilla Theater of the Absurd when I get back to Portland, and you’ll see how surprisingly controversial honoring MLK could be in the 90s.

(The county councilman who led the renaming effort, by the way, was Ron Sims, who later served as Obama’s HUD secretary and ran for Governor on a platform of fixing Washington’s grossly regressive tax system – unfortunately he was less successful in the latter effort.)

Fig 3.6: Urban wilderness.

Thornton Creek runs somewhere underneath this zone of civic infrastructure. I walked through a grassy park bounded by the Metro bus garage and a clutch of humming electrical transformers, my eyes peeled for open water.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t see the creek again for a while. It emerges on private property and remains there for the next mile, tracing a property line between people’s backyards and the interstate. As I walked through more suburban streets, smiling at the cherry blossoms and getting scowled at by two men washing a vintage car, I spotted snatches of ivy-coated gully behind fences. I was too far back to see the flowing water, and it was too close to the interstate to hear it.

The creek became public property again in Twin Ponds Park. Now this place was bustling. A junior soccer game was in progress. Less competitively inclined kids were scrambling over the huge banks of tree roots that lined the ponds. A dad was trying to play frisbee while smoking a cigarette: an athletic feat I hadn’t seen since college.

Fig. 3.7: A Twin Pond.

On the southern edge of the park, where the creek jogged back to join the freeway, I spotted the first signs of watershed volunteerism: the Washington Native Plant Society had been by to replace invasives. This walk could easily have been a trudge along a culverted dump, and the fact that it was a fun adventure instead is due to volunteer effort. If you're in the area, you can get involved with the Thornton Creek Alliance; if not, your local watershed probably has a similar group that could use your help.

Once I emerged on NE 145^th St I’d reached the city limits. Seattle was right there on the other side of the street. The interstate was in sight, too, and I was about to get a new perspective on my local exit. Walking through highway infrastructure, even when it’s built with pedestrian accommodations, is always an uncomfortable and revelatory experience. It’s an ecosystem built for a different species, larger, louder, and tougher than human beings. I had diesel fume flashbacks to walking on the barricaded bridges during the anti-Trump rallies in Portland, and dodging big rigs on my way to work at a freight company off Columbia Boulevard. In my hustle across the overpass, I didn’t even stop to take a picture.

Catty-corner across the highway, I followed the creek down the edge of the Jackson Park Golf Course. The highway faded to a low growl and the scenery to pleasant monotony. On my left, a fence shielded me from errant balls; on my right, the creek ran by in the underbrush. I passed two joggers. Someone had chalked an enigmatic face on a beech.

Fig. 3.8: Shielded from balls and pinecones.

The creek eventually passed beneath me into the golf course, and I had to continue on alone until I reached Jackson Park proper. By the time we were reunited, the creek was lined with signs warning of invasive New Zealand mud snails. These tenacious bastards are about 1/5 of an inch long and are so tough they can survive passage through animals’ digestive tracts. They are hideously prolific. In New Zealand their numbers are kept down by an unlikely hero – a parasitic nematode called Microphallus which sterilizes snails – but elsewhere in the world they’ve become a hazard to local mollusks and to the fish that depend on them, including our own salmon species.

Here at the end of the golf course, the creek plunged into a deep gully of apparently public land; I tried to follow it but quickly got stuck in the mud. There was no trail here. Lost golf balls sank inexorably beneath the skunk cabbages. I scrambled up a slope, found myself in a community garden, kicked the mud off my shoes and headed onwards.

Fig. 3.9: No, I didn't pose the ball.

I liked the next neighborhood immediately. Technically, I live here, since the boundaries of the Olympic Hills neighborhood reach over to Lake City Way, but the enormous trees and pleasantly dated houses over here look nothing like the view from my apartment. I wondered idly if these trees might be old-growth that escaped logging because of the hilly terrain. Probably not. I spotted the only political sign of my walk here – a stakeboard for Trotskyite city councilor Kshama Sawant, who doesn’t represent this district – and one of the houses had an enormous, handmade wooden halfpipe in the driveway, disintegrating under a coat of pine needles. I’d like to settle down in a neighborhood like this.

Fig. 3.10: The Olympic Hills.

The creek had disappeared again, this time into a wildlife reserve that wasn’t open to the public, so I didn’t get another glimpse until it emerged from a condo parking lot at 15^th Ave. From here on, it was visible in backyards and side yards, and unlike up in Shoreline it wasn’t buried in a government gully next to the highway. It divided some properties in two, and people had put up little bridges across it and pulled up lawn chairs beside it.

By the time I reached the commercial strip on Lake City Way there was already a blue note in the afternoon sun. The little wedge of park across from Wendy’s, where Thornton Creek plunged down into a ravine again, was almost twilit. This park was the first place I’d seen the creek when I first moved into the neighborhood, and it was as much of a hideous mess as always. Native plants choked out by Himalayan blackberry, branches hacked off to stobs, Fireball bottles and busted shoes and Top Ramen flung everywhere, Satanic glyphs painted on the trees. I assume that the little ravine park’s seclusion and its proximity to a big, filthy strip of fast food outlets means that cleaning it is a Sisyphean task for the Thornton Creek Alliance.

Fig. 3.11: I didn't stand in the grove for very long.

The creek runs under Lake City Way (under Pacific Northwest Flooring and its weird brick monolith, specifically) before plunging on into more residential neighborhoods. Lake City Way started life as a nineteenth-century logging road, and it’s still unusually wiggly for a major right of way.

Heading down NE 117^th, now more than halfway to my destination and on a steep decline towards the water, I spotted the first really ugly houses I’d passed so far: skinny new builds with hard angles, gravel yards, and oddly scattered windows. I don’t need to include a picture. You know what I’m talking about.

What I do need to include a picture of is the sight that awaited me at the bottom of the hill: a giant vulva, kitted out for Saint Patrick’s Day and spouting out a stream of road reflectors. I’m not sure whether they’re meant to be love beads, a golden shower or a leprechaun’s treasure.

Fig. 3.12: The little text on the inside says "No New Taxes - Bush." Get it?

This incredible piece of public art is officially a commentary on the creeping forces of real-estate homogenization represented by the ugly houses up the street – the Showbox is a historic theater downtown, currently slated for demolition despite fierce protest from Seattleites, and the pun is obvious – but its origins are a little smaller-time. The owner was slagged off by his neighbors for leaving two giant stumps in his yard, so he decided to turn them into something they could really complain about.

A few blocks past the roadside attraction, I came to Thornton Creek’s confluence. The North Fork, which I’d just walked, and the South Fork, fed by parking lot runoff and the ghosts of Bundy victims, converge here in Meadowbrook Park. I’ll let Meadowbrook speak for itself. It was beautiful, and it’s the only park I’ve ever visited that requires a diagram to explain.

Figs. 3.13 - 3.15: Ahhhh.

By this point, my legs were getting sore. I’m not in great shape these days, and it felt good to have some muscles working besides my typing fingers. The sun was setting, and the neighborhood was quiet. A clutch of high schoolers were standing in a driveway, passing a basketball back and forth. As I passed, one was pretending to walk away in mock disgust at his friend’s joke. “Shit,” he realized, turning around. “I don’t have a car.”

A few more steep drops later and I hit Sand Point Way, North Seattle’s westernmost arterial, and only a block or two down that I spotted signs for Matthews Beach Park. Not too long ago, this was the site of the Xacuabš village, home to the people who walked the creek every day on their way to pick cranberries at the bog.

Tonight, families were packing up their Sunday picnics, and two friends were hauling their canoe ashore. I’d reached Lake Washington at last, three hours and eight miles later – and just in time for sunset on the Cascades.

Centralia and its Massacre

If you don’t live there, it’s easy to see Centralia, Washington as nothing but an urban milestone. The small city is about 85 miles from Seattle and 90 miles from Portland, and if you’re rushing up or down I-5 its name is handily precise. When you see that Burgerville and the string of factory outlet stores on the banks of the Skookumchuck River you know you’re at the midpoint of your journey.

The humdrum geographic literalism of the name, though, hints at Centralia’s past – and why it became synonymous with one of the most infamous, grisly incidents in the Northwest’s infamous, grisly labor history. A hundred years ago, Centralia was the confluence of four major railroads, and all the products of Southwest Washington passed through its streets. Its depots were jammed with lumber and coal. Its tree-lined avenues housed conservative burghers while the surrounding country teemed with dispossessed, discontented migrant loggers. The city was the midpoint of a social conflict building to explosion.

With all that in mind, I pulled off at Centralia on my way down to Portland last week.

Since the closure of the coal mine a few years ago, the center of economic gravity has tilted towards the ugly strip of drive-thrus and clearance clothing emporia you may have seen from the highway, but the real town lies over the Skookumchuck behind a line of trees. I was welcomed by a clutch of old men in orange hi-vis waving anti-abortion signs at oncoming traffic outside the Planned Parenthood clinic. They were exhorting drivers to honk in solidarity, but nobody did. I slipped past them into the handsome brick downtown.

Fig. 2.1: Tower Avenue at Main. As I parked, a freight train roared through town a block away – I couldn’t have timed it better for the blog if I’d tried.

Almost uniquely for the region, Centralia was founded by an African-American pioneer. The memorably named George Washington was born free in Virginia in 1817 and raised on the Midwestern frontier. Like thousands of other Missouri residents, Washington followed the Oregon Trail west in 1850. Upon arrival in the Northwest, though, Washington found himself barred from staking a claim under the territory’s black exclusion laws. (I’m sure I’ll be touching on these odious laws again and again in this blog.) It wasn’t until the lands north of the Columbia were hived off as the Washington Territory, no longer subject to the exclusion laws, that George Washington was able to claim land of his own. He incorporated his town in 1875 and served as its proprietor until his death in 1905. The city erected a statue on his 201^st birthday last August depicting Washington and his wife Mary Jane gazing at a plat map. It’s in the park – check it out.

Centralia was central even then. There was no I-5 in those days, but Washington had shrewdly plopped his claim equidistant on the rail line between Kalama and Tacoma, and the town boomed. Logging began, coal was discovered just east of town, and by the time George Washington died his town had become a gritty hub of extractive industry.

From Tower Avenue, that past can be hard to spot until a train rolls by. Since Centralia is now so dependent on through-traffic, the historic district has catered to tourists, and Tower is lined with overflowing vintage stores. Signs call attention to the city’s complement of murals, and gorgeous neon art gleams in the sun.

Fig. 2.2: Some pleasant sights before we get into the nasty stuff.

Just around the corner on Main, though, the American Legion post still flies its flag, and it’s here that my morbid walking tour really began.

Fig. 2.3: American Legion Post 17 on Main. There was a very good boy in the window of the store downstairs.

At the turn of the twentieth century, large parts of the American West hung in a sort of colonial limbo – thinly populated, politically disenfranchised, and geared entirely towards the production of raw materials for the industrial East. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the lumber belt of Washington and Oregon. Indigent migratory loggers, many of them recent immigrants from Scandinavia, worked for a pittance in backwoods camps far from civilization. The camps were a morass of “crowded bunkhouses, wooden bunks in tiers, dirty straw, vermin, wet clothes steaming and stinking about the central stove, men pigging together without ventilation, privacy or means of cleanliness.” Because they had no fixed address and often weren’t citizens, the loggers were unable to vote, and they were shut out of traditional union channels by the racist nativism of the American Federation of Labor.

Enter the Wobblies. The Industrial Workers of the World was a revolutionary syndicalist union based in Chicago, but it found its greatest adherents out West, where loggers and miners were attracted to its unflinching militancy and its rejection of the AFL’s elitist hierarchies. Wobblies in the Rockies fought dynamite wars with corporate goon squads and Pinkerton detectives. In the Northwest, IWW agitation swept through the logging camps. Organization was met by deadly reprisals from employers, and during the First World War the entire lumber industry was put under military control to prevent Wobbly interference with wartime production.

It was the start of a coordinated wave of repression against the IWW that only worsened after the war was over. The postwar years were a paranoid and conservative era, and in many places, the American Legion became the standard-bearers of anti-labor reaction. The Legion was a patriotic veterans’ organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and at its very first convention it demanded that Congress “immediately depor[t] every one of those Bolsheviks or Industrial Workers of the World.”

The small IWW hall in Centralia, Local 500, had been under constant attack since it opened in 1917. Sympathizers faced constant harassment and petty arrests. In April 1918, the Wobbly office in the Roderick Hotel was raided and vandalized by a vigilante gang, and anyone with the misfortune to be in the building was dragged into the street and beaten. Knowing that another raid would be coming soon, the Wobblies armed themselves.

The Roderick Hotel sat on the corner of Tower and 2^nd, about eight blocks’ walk from the Legion post. Today this is the northern end of downtown, where small automotive businesses rub shoulders with private residences. In 1919, this was the end of the Armistice Day parade route.

Fig. 2.4: There’s no historical marker in sight, but this is the corner where it all happened. The auto shop sits on the site of the Roderick Hotel.

On November 11, 1919, the newly formed Centralia American Legion took their place in the Armistice Day parade, alongside businessmen and vigilantes armed with rubber hoses, pipes, and nooses. As they neared the end of the parade route, a group of Legionnaires led by the post commander Warren Grimm slowed and broke off. They wheeled around to face the Roderick Hotel.

The Wobblies’ snipers – posted at the Roderick’s windows and on surrounding rooftops – opened fire on the men that appeared to be advancing on their hall. In moments, Warren Grimm and two other Legionnaires collapsed dead. Other paraders burst into the hotel. The Wobblies in the building were seized by the crowd – apart from two of the snipers, who managed to slip out the back. One, “John Doe” Davis, disappeared, never to be seen again. The other, Wesley Everest, fled across town, shooting and killing one of his pursuers before being apprehended on the banks of the Skookumchuck while attempting to reload. As he was marched back, he refused to speak to his captors.

The Wobblies were thrown in jail, and the entire contents of the union hall were dragged into the street and heaped on a bonfire.

That night, the power went out in Centralia. Under cover of darkness, a group of men pulled Wesley Everest from his cell. Not only was he the only confirmed killer, in his silence he had been mistaken for Local 500 leader Britt Smith, and as the presumed ringleader, he would have to die. Everest was thrown in a truck, driven to a bridge over the Chehalis River, and lynched. While his body hung from the bridge, it was shot again and again.

Everest’s body was brought back to the jail with the rope still knotted around his neck, and the other prisoners were forced to bury him. He was 28 years old. Born in Newberg, Oregon, he’d spent his life working in the Northwest woods; during the war he’d labored under military discipline as part of the Spruce Production Division but had spent most of his time in the brig for refusing to salute the flag.

Fig. 2.5: The view from the Mellen Street Bridge.

Just like at the site of the battle itself, no memorial exists where the lynching took place. The current bridge was erected in 1959 and looks like any other span in the rural Northwest: same blue-green paint, same Erector Set superstructure. Far from a lonely road, Mellen Street is now spanned by the interstate and the bridge is bounded on one end by a WSDOT carpool lot. Traffic roared by as I walked back and forth, looking for the stumps of the older bridge and coming up empty. Only one grim echo caught my eye: an old tire swing, dangling from a tree into the river.

Fig. 2.6: A morbid metaphor.

No one was ever charged with Everest’s death, but the other captives were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The trial – a media circus conducted in a courtroom packed with uniformed Legionnaires – ended with seven IWW members being convicted of murder and sentenced to between 25 and 40 years in prison. Sixteen-year-old Loren Roberts was pronounced insane and institutionalized. Despite outcry about the slanted verdict, even from the conservative labor bosses of the AFL, the men would remain in prison for years. The last of the Centralia Wobblies wasn’t freed until 1939.

Over the next few years, the IWW was reduced to a shadow of its former self. Activists were jailed, deported, or killed, and any remaining revolutionary activity began to reorient itself around the Communist Party. By the time the Centralia defendants were being freed, the Northwest woods were finally being organized, albeit under the less radical International Woodworkers of America. The shrinking circles of the American left remembered Wesley Everest as a martyr. Lurid stories circulated that he had been castrated by the county coroner before he was killed, or that he’d gone out shouting “Remember that I died for my class!” IWW pamphleteer Ralph Chaplin popularized some of these stories in an incendiary retelling that characterized Warren Grimm as the frontman for a conspiracy of local business interests bent on running the Wobblies out of town for good.

Whether or not Chaplin’s tale was true, Centralia wasn’t interested. Back in town, in the park catty-corner from Legion Post 17 near the sculpture of George Washington and his wife platting Centralia, stands an idealized World War I doughboy staring stoically into the blue sky. Art Deco letters remind visitors to the public library that THE HIGHEST OF US IS BUT A SENTRY AT HIS POST. Around the plinth are plaques commemorating the four Legionnaires who died a hundred years ago this fall: Ben Cassagranda, Warren Grimm, Dale Hubbard, and Arthur McElfresh. For the better part of a century, this was the only marker of what had happened in 1919.

Fig. 2.6: The Sentinel.

A few steps to the southwest of the Sentinel, though, and you’ll see that public memory is never so static.

The ornate Mediterranean Revival façade of Centralia Square would be memorable enough itself, but above its entrance looms a mural of liberatory weirdness. Beneath the motto ORGANIZACIÓN – EDUCACIÓN – EMANCIPACIÓN, sabot cats rain from the sky, a capitalist pig lounges on stacks of money, demons spew shit from their mouths. In the center of it all, Wesley Everest rises from his grave, skin glowing purple like an avenging zombie of labor, to shake his fists over the park in the direction of the Sentinel and Legion Post 17.

The mural was commissioned in 1997 by the owner of the building to tell the side of the story that had been carefully brushed from Centralia’s landscape. Today’s Legionnaires were not happy, but hey, it was on private property. Capitalism has landed a few punches since then: a later proprietor knocked holes in the wall during a remodeling project and their restoration efforts were less than impressive, and the balcony below is now cluttered with swish café furniture that makes it hard to see Everest’s grave from street level. It still catches the eye, though, and is still almost stupefyingly radical for a piece of American public art.

Fig. 2.7: The Resurrection of Wesley Everest, plus café.

As I shifted back and forth on the sidewalk trying to find the best angle for my picture, I spotted a couple stickers on a nearby pole.

Fig. 2.8: Full circle.

If you’re reading this first post, you’re probably a friend of mine and I don’t need to tell you that the conflict I followed on my morbid walking tour is not over by a long shot. Labor radicalism and reactionary political violence are both alive and well in the Northwest. While our economy has moved away from the old extractive industries – logging is mechanized and milling is outsourced, and Washington state’s thin seams of coal are no longer profitable – corporate exploitation has never gone away. Nor has prejudice against immigrant workers, which is often intertwined with racist fantasies just like those that pushed George Washington north. The IWW is making headlines again, organizing the country’s first fast food unions in Portland. There’s a Burgerville by the highway here – when will the Wobblies return to Centralia?

I was hardly in the right nostalgic mindset when I wandered into the mazelike antiques mall in the basement of the Centralia Square building, and I didn’t end up buying anything. (I’ll admit I was briefly tempted by an array of Olympia Brewing-branded belt buckles.) Instead, as I walked back to my car, I ducked into one of the used bookstores on Tower.

It was midmorning on a workday, and the town had been quiet apart from the occasional roar of freight trains. Now I walked into a conversation. As I browsed, the proprietor was deep in gossipy conversation with an older man, obviously a regular. “Stick around for a game of checkers?” he suggested, but the customer’s wife needed him back home to move some furniture. I apologized for interrupting them with my purchase.

“Are you from around here, or just passing through?” asked the bookseller asked as he rung me up. I explained that I lived in Seattle these days but was on my way back to Portland to visit friends. I’d never been here, so I thought I’d pull off the highway and have a look around.

“Well, it is the midpoint,” he said with a smile.

An Introduction

Hi all, I'm Brian, and I’m a graduate student in library science at the University of Washington. I live in Lake City, a strippy little neighborhood on the north end of Seattle; my apartment is three blocks inside the city limits. Before coming up here for my MLIS, I lived in Portland, Oregon for six years. That was the longest I've spent anywhere in my life.

I grew up on the go. My father worked for what he always described as a "big, politically-incorrect multinational," which shipped us around the world from one hermetically sealed expat enclave to another. While the scenery changed, the place never did; every stop on the way was populated by the same clique of rich people in Moncler jackets. I wasn't a third-culture kid. I was a no-culture kid. I could tell something was missing, and when I moved to Oregon for college I resolved to stay put.

Fig. 1.1: Me, staying put. I shaved the mustache in 2017.

For the first time I'd found myself in a place that felt like a place. I was naturally curious as to why it felt that way. A couple idle questions later – what are those old railway tracks peeking through the tarmac? Why is everybody drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon? Was my dreary apartment complex really once a famous botanical garden? – and I was a full-blown local history addict. Each of those questions had a story behind it, and those stories were entertaining, but they also taught me about broader trends that had shaped the region in which I live. This blog is about those questions and about what the answers can tell us.

My silly title comes from an address by the great regional historian Dorothy O. Johansen. Speaking of the sundial in downtown Longview that commemorates Washington statehood, DoJo hoped that even if the physical monument is “destroyed by the heavy finger of time,” the ideas it represents will not be forgotten. I hope this blog helps you think about the ideas, the personalities, and the forces that made the places you navigate every day, whether you live here or not. As gentrification and climate change wreak tremendous physical change in the Northwest, it’s more important than ever to keep memories alive – both of history’s triumphs and its evils.

Be aware that I am not a professional and may construct appealing narratives based on insufficient evidence. On the other hand, my lack of professionalism means it wouldn’t be fair for me to charge you anything, so please enjoy this anachronistically uncommercial blog format and rest assured I won’t interrupt the story to sell you a Casper mattress.