“It’s not what it used to be, ‘going off the grid,’” Tuck said, setting his spoon back in his bowl. He spoke softly, a languid Pacific coast lilt, with gravel underneath. “Everything’s on the grid. Or under it,” he said, gesturing to the sky. “It’s longitude and latitude. It’s radio waves and cell signals and drones. The grid is us. Everything on the planet touches everything else. There’s no such thing as ‘off the grid.’”
“You’re the one who used the term,” I said. Katie was sitting next to him with her hand on his leg under the table. She didn’t say anything.
“You’re right,” he said, taking a bite and wiping his mouth with a bandanna from his pocket. “I meant something else by it. It means living as far off the industrial food supply chain as possible. Avoiding fossil fuel consumption . . .” He went on, but I tuned him out. I made eye contact and nodded occasionally, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I had heard it all before. Even men who should’ve known better—overeducated, progressive types who probably considered themselves feminists—had no compunction explaining things to me. I learned early on to use their inclinations against them when I was reporting. I got the best quotes from men like this; they loved to tell me how it is—whatever the subject was, as if I didn’t live in the world, didn’t do research or even read. They wouldn’t even know they had said something damning until it was in the paper.
Women were different; women told me as much with their silences as their words.
I glanced at Katie; she was devouring a bowl of greens while Tuck made his point. She looked up at him as if she were listening, but her gaze was glassy and distant. Her brow furrowed when she looked into her bowl of kale, like she was divining the leaves, then stabbed and carefully inserted a bushy forkful into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully, thoroughly. Tuck seemed about done, spooned porridge into his mouth.
Folks around us at the table had been listening. I could feel them, tuned to our conversation. I waited for someone to say something, to offer some other thought. A few toward the ends chatted with each other, but those near us kept eating, quietly, watching the two of us. They were watching me, waiting for my response.
“That sounds about right,” I offered. I added a thoughtful nod for good measure.
Tuck leaned back, looked up the table to Maggie. They made eye contact for what seemed like an awkward amount of time.
“You should try these.” Katie passed a bowl of greens across the table to me. “So good this time of year,” she said.
I had finished my amaranth, so I scooped the greens into my bowl. They were wilted and glistening, dressed with something tart and pungent. I passed the bowl to Jen, the woman next to me, thirty-something and covered in tattoos, her short hair almost completely gray. Katie had introduced us and I had liked her instantly.
“Thanks.” She smiled and served herself some greens.
“So, Lucie,” she started, “I read an article you wrote for the Pacific Standard.” I shoveled greens into my mouth. “Do you write for them a lot?”
“No, not really. That was a freelance gig.”
“Well, it was good. It was the one on gentrification and the housing crises in West Coast cities.”
“Yeah, that was just a few months ago.”
“I liked that you emphasized the post-quake bubble. Not a lot of people talk about that.”
One of the older colonists asked what “bubble” she was talking about.
“The demographics of neighborhoods changed when developers”—Jen’s cheeks went red, like developers was a profanity she couldn’t stand to hear come out of her own mouth—“came in and bought up swaths of property from homeowners who couldn’t afford to rebuild. Insurance payments were slow in coming or they were denied, and people had these HUD vouchers for temporary rentals, but I mean not ideal living situations. So people took these offers of cash for their houses, either to move out of the city altogether or try to find somewhere else to live. But because of the lack of livable housing, the displaced were forced into less desirable parts of the city, and those neighborhoods, that should have been temporary, just stuck. Created new ghettos.
“We lived in South Park at the time, which was very working class. Our house survived the quake, but the Duwamish River flooded—our whole neighborhood was two blocks beyond the hundred-year flood mark, and we had water three feet up the walls—that’s how far it came. We didn’t have flood insurance. A developer paid cash—half its value before the quake—for the house, along with most of our neighbors’ houses. Over the next ten years, we looked into moving back, but they leveled the whole place and rebuilt from the ground up: lofts, a yoga studio, a Whole Paycheck—the full nine yards. It’s this wealthy bohemian enclave now. And you know what the sick motherfuckers renamed the neighborhood? Duwamish Plains.”
There were murmurs of commiseration. It was a common story for those who had lived anywhere on the West Coast in the last twenty years.
Jen looked at me. “Sorry, I should’ve let you explain. I get all worked up about it. You tell a lot of stories like that in your article.”
“No, you’re right: those wounds haven’t really healed for a lot of people. The gap between people who can afford to own their homes and those who can’t is getting bigger, so the cities themselves—the land, the resources, the access to open spaces, to things like the amazing vistas of Elliott Bay and the Olympics—all of those things are owned by fewer and fewer people, leased out at enormous rates to the rest of us. And it behooves those people to lobby for the status quo with elected officials, so the bubble never went away; it’s like it—” I paused; the sun was shining directly in my face and my head tingled, felt airy. “It’s like it grew a thicker membrane.”
“With help from people like your stepdad,” Katie cut in. She said it casually, but there was something brittle in her voice, its edges crystallized. The table went quiet again. I stared at her, the pulse behind my eye throbbing a little harder. I blinked.
“You’re right. He’s a developer. My mom married a motherfucker.” I half smiled. “Not a neighborhood-leveling motherfucker, but I’m sure he did his share.”
“Hey, my folks are Silicon Valley millionaires,” Tuck said, getting up from the table. “We can’t help where we come from.”
I almost liked him for a minute.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t generalize,” Jen said.
“Don’t apologize.” I touched her arm. “I’m really glad that article spoke to you.”
It had been my last big published piece; my editor at the newspaper had rejected it, then I was laid off. Pacific Standard had picked it up two months later.
After that, we talked about the weather—the longer dry seasons, the disappearance of the rain the Northwest was known for—it was what everyone talked about through the heat waves of every summer. The rains last week had done little to fill the two small streams on the island.
After lunch, they decided that Tuck would take me to the edge of the Colony, to show me something they referred to as “the project.” It was something started in the early days of the Colony and carried on ever since. Katie had work to do with Sister J. in the Colony House, their office. I wasn’t thrilled to be alone with Tuck, but he was Katie’s husband, and I was curious about him and about “the project.”
We started from a hidden path behind the barn. For a while, I could still hear the younger goats playing on the mossy roof and bed of an old pickup truck that had been slowly rotting away in the pasture for years. But soon all I heard was the wind in the tops of the trees, birdsong, and the water—always the low murmur of the waves.
“How long have you been here?” I asked him.
“About ten years.”
“That’s a long time. You’re what—thirty-five?”
“Thirty-six.”
“What made you come out here, at twenty-six?”
“This,” he said. “I wanted to do some good, somewhere.”
He stopped and looked around h
im, over the ground—there were leaves all over, yellow and red and brown, normal fall foliage—then he put his hands on his hips and tilted his head back, surveying the arch of trees over us. The tops of many of the firs were rusted on the windward side, though not quite dead; new growth had sprouted from the old, the desiccated. Lichen clung to the rusted patches where branches had fewer or no leaves or needles at all.
“Noxious gases released during the refinery fire,” he noted, pointing for me. “And the fire retardants ArPac sprayed from crop dusters to keep the fire from spreading.”
“That was two decades ago,” I said. “You came here ten years after the fire. What did it look like then?”
“Still pretty dead. The Colony itself was well-established. They were cleaning up the soil in the fields, using water filtration, graywater systems, composting toilets, but the rest of the island was still suffering. The heavy metals and chemicals they use in petroleum extraction and production stick around. As long as the rest of the island was still sick, the Colony was sick.”
As we started walking again, I looked up every now and then, watching the bald, singed areas increase the farther we were from the Colony. He kept talking as we made our way. He grew up in the Bay area with middle-class parents who happened to get rich in the tech industry. He had been a disaffected skateboarding youth who dropped out of Berkeley in his junior year to work for Greenpeace. His parents weren’t pleased, would never understand why he gave up a formal education for a life of activism.
“Why did you give that up?” I asked.
“My first protest on the Berkeley campus: divestment from oil. Something about being in the crowd, feeling the strength in our voices, urging the university to do what was right. Then seeing how the university ignored us, shrugged us off. It made me more determined.”
He turned to look at me, trailing behind him.
“Why do you write about the environment?” He seemed to be trying to compare us, somehow.
“I’m sure you already know my dad worked at ArPac.”
“Katie told me a lot about you.”
“My dad was in environmental compliance. He had warned the company about potential violations to safety regulations before the earthquake, but ArPac was dragging its feet about making the necessary upgrades to equipment. The explosions, the fire, all of this might have been prevented.”
Tuck didn’t say anything.
“My mom didn’t talk about him much. I came across information about the settlements by accident when I was eighteen.”
“But you didn’t want to come back here until now?”
“Has Katie ever talked to you about what it was like—the earthquake? the aftermath?”
“Yeah, of course,” he said, sure of himself. He was confident that his wife wouldn’t keep anything from him.
But she wouldn’t have told him everything. How we slept in the school gym that first night, yes. How we were always within arms’ reach of each other, or how we concocted a plan to trick our harried teachers and find our own ways home, maybe. But how her menses had started the week before, how she worried the earthquake might make it start again? Or how we had our first kiss under the blankets in the dark, my hand on the small of her back, her hand on my cheek? She wouldn’t have told him. No one would ever know. My father was missing in the burning refinery; her house had been crushed under a hundred-year-old cedar. It would always be our secret, the things we did to comfort each other after the quake.
“Without Katie, I don’t know how I would’ve coped. My mother was in shock. Everyone was in shock.”
“I understand that it was traumatic.” He sounded less confrontational now, more sympathetic. “I’m just wondering why now? Why not ten years ago? Weren’t you curious? About Kate? About the house?”
I swallowed. “I guess enough time has passed for the—” I stopped myself. Guilt. I was going to say guilt. “For the trauma to subside,” I finished.
Half a mile from the barn, we came to a paved road: the only one on the island, laid by ArPac when they built the refinery; used by almost no one then and absolutely deserted now. Perhaps ArPac once had development plans for the rest of the island, after the costly investment in the refinery; in any case, the road, much like the electricity, was never viewed by islanders as the gift it was purported to be. The earthquake had wrinkled and warped the blacktop, leaving a deep cleft down the center through which weeds and saplings thrust their bodies. Tuck stepped onto the road and placed a hand tenderly around a fir sapling that barely scraped his knee.
“Conifers take their time,” he said. “A human year is only a few weeks, a month for a fir tree. I’ll never see the day this tree is taller than me.”
An airplane droned overhead, a small one, loud and low. I wondered what we looked like standing there on the reclaimed blacktop. We watched it fly away toward Vancouver, then crossed the road and picked up the trail again.
We both fell silent for a while. My headache waned, then returned, several times along the walk. It made organizing my thoughts difficult. My head felt clearest when we were just walking or stopping for water. I noticed fading blazes on some of the trees and the occasional cairn trailside. I asked how old the trail was, but Tuck didn’t know—he guessed it predated the Colony, though, because it was a favorite of the few deer on the island.
“How are there still deer on the island?” It seemed crazy to me that they could have survived when the island was covered with oily ash and chemical flame retardants.
“We think they swam over from Orwell.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’ve seen them swim at super low tides.”
“I grew up on these islands, and I’ve never seen a deer swim that far.”
“They survived, they swam—whichever: they mate. They have young. They love our berries and veggies, so we watch them. Right now we think there are around six to ten on the island. We don’t know much about the health of the population—maybe your park ranger friend will look into that—but we have found dead deer around the island over the years. No natural predators on the island though, so right now we hunt one or two a year, in season.”
“The dead deer—the dead animals you find—Maggie mentioned them. Do you know how or why they’ve died? If it’s not predators, is it toxicity?”
Tuck didn’t answer at first.
“You’re eating the deer, right?”
“It’s as safe as eating factory-farmed hamburger regularly, I’m sure.”
“No, it’s not. The two are not analogous. Hormones and antibiotics in farmed meat might contribute to disease in humans, but they’re not directly tied to carcinogenic activity.”
“Contribution to disease and carcinogenic activity are analogous.” He seemed irritated. “You can find levels of carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and neurotoxins in all the farmers’ market heirloom produce and grass-fed cattle you eat in Seattle. There’s aluminum and mercury in breast milk. There’s no escaping it.”
“But proximity to contamination increases toxicity to more immediately dangerous levels. I get that a couple generations of ‘better living through chemicals’ has affected the food chain everywhere and concentrated in human bodies, too, but you chose to come here, where it’s not just possible but verifiable that the level of contamination is higher and more of a threat.”
Tuck’s jaw tensed; he wanted to argue, it was obvious, but he held back. Why? Why not let me have it?
My temple throbbed and my hand went on its own, massaging the vein there. He handed me his water bottle and I took a swig.
“You will see,” he said, quietly. “Just follow me.”
The forest of the outer island became denser and the undergrowth more diverse, Oregon grape, salal, sword ferns, and hillocks of dense mosses and liverworts. The recent rain, followed by a stretch of unseasonably warm days, had combined to bring out the fungi—many more of them than I ever remembered seeing in the woods on Orwell. The topography of the island was like Orcas, wit
h variations in elevation as the rocky, uneven shoreline rose to small peaks, sometimes with vistas of the entire sound. We climbed steadily up the forested hillside, and I asked more questions about the island’s plant and animal life. I asked questions that I knew the answers to, just to see how Tuck would answer them. I couldn’t tell if he was putting on a show for me. His answers were confident and not economical, so that there were large spaces of time when I tuned him out entirely. He had studied the ecology; he had spent his few years on Marrow building better graywater and waste systems, studying the way forest health affected the well water. He had earned his confidence but not his patronizing tone. I was more and more disgusted that Katie had ended up with a guy who was so deeply a chauvinist.
He quickened his pace up the hill we were climbing, seeming anxious to get to the other side. I heard running water ahead and climbed after him, following as he crested the hill and stepped aside at the top, stood on the stump of a fallen tree. When I arrived, he reached out his hand. I stared at it for a moment, then took it and let him pull me up, joining him on the stump, stepping over the ebullient orange fungi that oozed from the edges. We were looking down into a gully. Every tree still standing on the hills around us was rusted to black over the trunk and branches. The ArPac smokestacks loomed, almost as tall as the trees here, but farther down the creek. The fire—or at least the oily smog of it—had been funneled into this gully. The long, narrow impressions of fallen tree trunks—the ones that would have fallen in the quake, as the topsoil was shaken and roots unearthed—were prostrated over the opposite hillside, pointed straight down into the creek bed. But the forest floor was alive; up and down the hillside, ferns, mosses, grasses, and young trees issued from the singed earth beneath, a vivid chartreuse layer over the decay.
I almost didn’t see them at first—what Tuck had brought me there to see. I stepped down from the stump and carefully made my way down the steep path to the creek. I slipped, skidding down the embankment into a fallen tree, my boot gouging into the red-tinged soil, revealing underneath a network of spidery white threads exposed. I sat up to get a closer look, and there they were, right in front of me: mushrooms—buoyant clusters of chocolate caps on slender, eggy stems. From the ground I could see them everywhere, up the hill behind me, off the trail, farther into the undergrowth. Tuck came down to help me, but I shooed his hand away. I crawled along the ground. Grasses and weedy, spent flowers towered over them, sheltered them, in many places, but lifting fern fronds revealed dozens of them, hundreds. I climbed up and scanned the forest floor all around me. Now that I knew to look for them, I could see them everywhere. Across the creek they grew in the slender trenches of dead wood laid by the fallen trees, like rows of vegetables growing neatly in a garden.
Marrow Island Page 9
