“Jesus H. Christ!” I snarled. “Does it ever stop?”
“What’s the matter?” Leslie said. She recognized the reemergence of Phil-the-Crank. But I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep him in the box.
“I hate wind farms. I loathe them. They totally fuck up a landscape. They make me love oil and coal companies.”
“Phil, we use energy at home, and we’re using a lot in this truck,” she said reasonably. “Wind doesn’t pollute like other energies do. And sorry, but this landscape isn’t all that attractive anyway.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Would you rather see some coal-fired plant blowing crap into the air?”
“A generating plant takes up a few acres, not a zillion square miles.”
“So you’d rather see that?”
I felt liberated from the bonds of environmental correctness as I answered, “Yes. Damn right I would.”
She replied that a desk was waiting for me in a coal company’s PR agency. A really nasty coal company that blasts the tops off mountains and poisons streams and runs up safety violations.
* * *
Leslie phoned her mother, Molly Ware, from our campsite in a state park on the Columbia, and mentioned that I was in high agita about the wind towers. Molly suggested that I talk to locals to find out what they thought, and so I did. While Leslie stayed behind to wrangle dogs and edit a story on wrinkle creams, I drove a few miles north into Goldendale, the Klickitat County seat. Ever since we’d arrived in the county, Leslie had said “Klickitat” at every opportunity; it rattled off the tongue, though the consonants sometimes collided and it came out “klickityclack.”
Like a lot of the counties on the Great Plains, Klickitat was in a state of chronic recession, which gave its twenty thousand inhabitants this one consolation: they’d barely noticed the nationwide recession. Goldendale occupies a few square miles on a rolling plateau of cattle pastures and wheat and alfalfa fields. To the southwest, Mount Hood, symmetrical as a pyramid, rises in Oregon; northwest, Mount Adams lords it over the Cascade Range. It was mid-July, and both were white two-thirds of the way down.
I drove around town for a while. Although fine Victorian houses graced the streets and the absence of farm-size shopping malls had saved the downtown from becoming “historic,” signs of dilapidation appeared almost everywhere: double-wide trailers on cement blocks, houses that hadn’t felt a paint brush for a long time, junk-cluttered yards, potholed pavement. The town, and Klickitat County, had been doing fairly well up into the nineties. Agriculture was a mainstay of the economy, as it still is. Logging and a lumber mill provided jobs, and the Columbia Gorge Aluminum smelter, a few miles upriver, employed twelve hundred people. Then the county got whacked by a three-punch combination. A left hook from the environmental movement restricted logging to save the northern spotted owl, and the timber industry, already in decline, tanked. Reaganite Republicans followed up with a right cross by deregulating electrical utilities; soaring, unpredictable energy costs rocked the Columbia Gorge plant. Low world prices for aluminum threw the knockout blow. The smelter shut down in 2003, almost overnight, and most of its workers packed up to find jobs elsewhere. Goldendale’s population plummeted from five thousand to three thousand. The only new residents were welfare recipients. The state government encouraged people on public assistance and food stamps to move to Klickitat County because the low cost of living saved the state money. I presumed that the down-and-outers shambling down Goldendale’s sidewalks or idling on front stoops were among the refugees.
But the county had one thing that no one could take away: it had literally inherited the wind.
Mike Canon retired in Goldendale after a career with the United Nations, working on redevelopment projects in eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet empire. After he and his wife renovated a Victorian house, he needed something to keep himself busy and he landed a position as the county’s director of economic development. It was keeping him busier than perhaps a sixty-eight-year-old man would want to be.
I dropped in at his office, in a nondescript building across the street from the handsome, art deco county courthouse. Canon had the look of an eminence, dark brows peppered with gray, a swirl of foam-white hair. A few years ago, he said in a scratchy voice, Klickitat County reminded him of eastern Europe in the early nineties.
“Working for the aluminum company had been like working for General Motors or Ford. It was going to be there forever, and suddenly it wasn’t there. You had people who lost their whole careers. You don’t restart, you’re done. That’s what hit ’em. When I first moved here, I loved to go to antiques shops. Well, the antiques stores in Goldendale were selling used plates, used glasses, not necessarily that old, not anything like fine, collectible antiques. These were people selling their furniture just to get through the next year.”
“More like pawn shops?”
“That would be it. People were downhearted. And that’s what’s turning around. Now there’s a whole sense of hope.”
Hope generated by the wind, blowing from the west down the Columbia River corridor, from the north, south, and east across the unbroken plateaus. In 2009, a San Diego company, the Canon Power Group (no connection to Mike Canon), broke ground for a wind farm that will be the largest in Washington when it’s finished. One hundred and seventy-six towers, representing a billion-dollar investment, will cover ninety square miles and generate enough power to light up a million homes.
Nature’s endowment of wind might have been returned to sender if not for a man-made gift: transmission lines. Installing transmission lines is astronomically expensive, but here they were already in place, built years ago by the Bonneville Power Administration, which operates hydroelectric dams on the river. Put simply, all that Canon Power had to do was tap into the grid and export electricity to its customers in southern California.
The project, called Windy Point / Windy Flats, was about two-thirds completed and already paying the county two million dollars a year in property taxes. The money was going to repaving roads and streets, improving schools and hospitals and firefighting districts. An isolated hamlet of one hundred souls, Bickleton, had bought an ambulance with the revenues, its first. The farmers and ranchers who leased their land to the power company felt like they’d found oil. In addition to lease fees, they shared in the profits. “Turn and earn” was how they put it, and what they earned was up to eighteen thousand dollars per year per tower.
“That’s very good for a dryland wheat farmer,” Canon said. “That’s big time.”
I thought that would be big time for just about anybody—a dryland writer, for example.
There had been objections about the aesthetics, the ruination of the skyline, but most people welcomed the wind farm. “They’re happy to see it,” said Canon. “It makes money for them.”
Brandy Meyers was happy. I met her at a restaurant, Marie’s Sod Busters, where she dined on coffee and a protein drink. “Lost thirty pounds, so far,” she said.
Meyers was a Goldendale native who’d left and returned. She graduated from college in 2000 with an accounting degree and worked for an engineering firm in Kennewick that sent her all over the country. Yet she always felt a tug, pulling her back to the land her great-great-grandparents homesteaded in the nineteenth century.
“No place like Goldendale, where the mountains meet the river,” she said. “But there were no opportunities, no reason to come home.”
Until the Windy Flats project gave her a reason.
“I said, all right, I’m ready to go back.”
She was hired as the wind farm’s administrative manager, her husband worked on the construction of the towers, and some of them rose on the leased pastures of her parents’ wheat and cattle ranch. The whole family reaped the harvest of wind.
“We round up cattle right under the towers,” she said, laughing at the picture. “The key is, there’s hope.”
I strolled around the business district for a while.
It wasn’t bustling, but it was a lot more alive than the haunted downtowns on the Great Plains. A few coffee shops, four bar and grills, and the offices of the Goldendale Sentinel, a weekly. A newspaper! I had a soft spot in my ink-stained heart for print journalism, so I popped into the Sentinel, which had a staff of four: Lou Marzeles, the editor and publisher; a general manager, Karen Henslee, and two reporters. The most recent edition was in a hallway rack—fourteen pages brimming with local news, ads, and classifieds. STATE, CITY TAKE ON MORE STREET PROJECTS … HONOR ROLL OUT FOR GOLDENDALE HIGH SCHOOL … BASKETBALL YOUTH LEAGUE STARTS MONDAY … But it wasn’t quaint. A line above the masthead read: THE SENTINEL IS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER.
Marzeles made some time for me. My memories of newspaper executives were of the Chicago Tribune’s editor Clayton Kirkpatrick and its publisher Stanton Cook, WASPs supreme in sober suits and ties. Marzeles, with his shock of rebellious gray hair and open-neck shirt, looked like a Beat poet. He had, however, played in journalism’s big leagues in New York and as a reporter and assistant features editor at the Washington Times in Washington, D.C. Two years ago, he moved to Goldendale, a long way, in more than mileage, from where he’d been. Was it a culture shock?
“It’s the smallest town I’ve lived in in a long, long time. I grew up in New Hampshire. It’s definitely a unique place. I’ll tell you the impact it had on me. Shortly after moving here, April of 2009, within six weeks my wife passed away. We’d come here because her family was from Yakima, she was born and grew up in this area, so we came here because she had this strong sense that she had to get back to her family. We had no idea anything was seriously wrong with her till we got here, and she was found to have very advanced liver cancer. She was gone very quickly.”
Marzeles found himself alone in a strange place. No family, no friends, no one he knew. He chose to stay, captivated by the beauty of the mountains and the Columbia, and by the warmth of the townspeople. They made him feel at home.
“Living in big cities, you think that a sense of community is a kind of fable,” he said. “You see the old Andy Griffith Show, and you think, yeah, that’s a fantasy. But it does exist.”
In 2010, the Sentinel, published every week since its founding in 1879, went up for sale, and Marzeles bought it with a partner. Given the state of print journalism, you could say that was foolish, rather like the famed tale told in business schools about the man who starts a buggy-whip factory the year that the first Model T’s rolled off the line. On the other hand, small, local papers were flourishing, while the grand flagships (like the Chicago Tribune) were foundering. And Marzeles’s instincts told him Goldendale was where he should be. He’d caught the contagion of optimism, of expectation spread by those white blades, turning in the wind.
“I always get the feeling that something is about to break through in a significant way around here. I can’t put my finger on it, but I want to be a part of it.”
* * *
On July 11, a day late, we celebrated Sage’s thirteenth birthday, something of a bittersweet occasion. We knew she wouldn’t be with us much longer; she’d already outlasted the average setter by a year. We gave her an extra helping of canned food and two extra milkbones. Then I took her for a walk.
“That little pest isn’t coming with us?” she asked.
“Nope. Just you and me.”
“Like the old days.”
“Right.”
We trooped across the park to the banks of the Columbia, where I sat her down for a lecture.
“Now listen. I’m taking you off lead. Do not jump into that river. That’s the Columbia. It will take you right down to the Pacific Ocean. I repeat, do not jump in.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
She ran off, with a semblance of her old, graceful lope. True to her vow, she stayed ashore, ranging through corridors of cottonwoods and birch, sniffing the rushes along a tranquil backwater. A great blue heron lofted from the branch of a dead tree leaning over the pond. Sage stood momentarily still, content to watch it fly.
* * *
The man and his girlfriend stood outside the Simcoe Café & Desert Room, smoking cigarettes. Like all smokers in these times, they had a furtive air, as if they were junkies shooting up in a back alley. As we approached the door, the man looked at me in surprise.
“Hey! You’ve got a brother in town!”
“I don’t have a brother anywhere.”
“Yeah. Dave Johnson at the coffee shop. Your brother. You look just like him!”
“Sorry. A sister is all I’ve got.”
We went inside and sat at a table in the crowded little bar and ordered dinner. Leslie confined herself to a club sandwich. Sticking to my no-fruits-and-vegetables vow, I selected hot turkey with gravy on white bread and mashed potatoes.
The nicotine addicts returned and sat down with their friends. The man pointed at me.
“He’s got to be Dave’s brother. Doesn’t he look just like Dave at the coffee shop?”
The drink in front of him wasn’t his first of the night. A dozen or more pairs of eyes fixed on me, and everyone agreed that yes, I bore a striking resemblance to coffee-shop Dave. A fantasy flitted through my brain. My father had spent much of his working life on the road, so maybe … But no … Feeling uncomfortable as the object of the patrons’ stares, I motioned at a row of Plexiglas cylinders suspended over the bar that could be spun like lottery bins. They were filled with dollar bills, enough to tempt a virtuous soul to robbery.
“What are those?”
“Those bills used to paper the walls before the smoking ban,” answered a customer at the bar, a tall man with a bandito mustache. “Three layers thick, grimy with smoke. So the owner washed them in a washing machine and then iron dried ’em, each and every one, and put ’em in there.”
“Guilty of money laundering,” Leslie said.
Mustache laughed. “Yeah. One guy had accidentally pinned a hundred-dollar bill to the wall. Too drunk to see the difference. So after the washing, he came in to reclaim it, and he got it back.”
On the way out after dinner, we passed the establishment’s Desert Room, where tournament poker games were held every Wednesday and Sunday nights. A sign listed the prices for chips, ranging from ten to a thousand dollars.
A hundred pinned to a wall, by mistake. Thousand-dollar chips. Maybe things in Goldendale weren’t so bad, after all.
“All right,” I said to Leslie, “I’m trying to learn to love wind farms.”
“How’s that coming along?”
“I might be able to tolerate them, but I’ll never love them.”
* * *
We were in the Sentinel’s office the next day. In a role-reversal, Marzeles had asked to interview us about our trip for a story in the next week’s edition. While we waited for him, we chatted with Karen Henslee, a crisp, businesslike strawberry blonde. Among other things, she handled the classifieds, and she’d observed that there were considerably more help-wanted ads since the wind farm began to revive the county’s fortunes.
But her optimism was more tempered than others’. She wasn’t sure how many permanent jobs would be created; the wind farm’s scale troubled her, the towers’ lights going on forever at night; and, she said, she and a lot of people were “holding their breath” waiting to see if the power company was going “to come in and utilize our wind and make our skyline less attractive and then run on down the road without leaving something here for us.”
“They’ve talked about removing the [hydroelectric] dams from the river. We’ve got to figure out some way to get our power, unless we’re going to go back to dirt floors and candles and lamps.”
“Or whale oil,” I said.
“Right. It’s really difficult to run your computer on that.”
She felt protective of her little town, liked “the wilderness look to it,” and didn’t want to see that spoiled.
“My husband was born and raised here; his grand
father was the livery stable blacksmith. So his family has been here forever. And my great-grandfather built the Loops Road in 1913. We have generations and generations, and I like that. I love driving through the gorge. It’s the most amazing view. Every time I drive down it, I’m overwhelmed by it. I like that I know a lot of people in town … You stop and talk … One thing that happens in small towns that you probably wouldn’t get in a big town is that when personal disaster happens, you’re going to have so much more community that gathers around. It’s an incredible thing. I know personally because I lost my youngest daughter five years ago, and it was different here than I can imagine it would be in a big city where you’ve got people who’ll come around and talk to you for a couple of weeks and then everybody’s life goes back to normal, and there you are. Here you’ve got people who will invest time, a community who knows who you are.”
And, she said, echoing many others we’d spoken to, those bonds of family and community and neighbors helping neighbors were the bonds that held the country together. The laws and regulations passed in Congress or by the state legislature affected the citizens of Klickitat County, of course they did, but to them Washington, D.C., and Olympia, Washington, seemed to be in foreign countries.
“How about Seattle?”
“Especially Seattle.”
She said that somebody had mentioned that eastern Washington and Oregon should be one state and the western halves another because the politics were so different.
“It was kind of a joke at first, but I’ve heard more and more people talking about it. I don’t think you could do it, but it would be interesting.”
Marzeles stepped in to tell us that he was ready. “The Cascade Curtain. Washington keeps its liberals west of the Cascades,” he said. “Kind of a liberal reservation. A few renegades escape now and then. They’re usually caught and sent back.”
29.
In spite of my newfound toleration of wind farms, I was delighted to see the towers in the rearview mirror as we proceeded west on State Route 14 into the Columbia River Gorge. Our destination, two hundred miles away, was Fort Clatsop, Oregon. There, on the Pacific coast, the Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter of 1805–6 before setting off on its return to civilization.
The Longest Road Page 24
