CURSE OF THE I-5 CORRIDOR

I drove far north this weekend to visit my beloved cousin. I passed so many places I have lived and remember; Vancouver, Tacoma, Seattle, Lynwood, Bellingham, Lynden, etc. I-5 goes right through the center of my brain. I was inundated with memories as I drove. Some I relaxed into like a pleasant car wash with giant multicolored brushes swishing over my windshield, some I swerved to avoid, and some I gunned it to run down. I beg the circling turkey vultures to devour them on the side of the interstate and purify my heart. I have read all the road signs thousands of times and each place name is a rosary bead; Hazel Dell, Battleground, Vader, Kalama, Castle Rock, Fort Steilacoom, Lacey, Fife, Marysville, Sedro Wooley, Acme, and so on. I think of the fun my cousins and I had together as kids, like watching Mount Saint Helens erupt from their tree fort and building jumps for our bikes in the woods . Darker thoughts of feeling trapped and miserable in Vancouver, Wa seep in too; school bullies, poverty and loneliness. I remember different cars we’d had over the years, and what schools I attended. I remember my friend who overdosed in Chehalis. His family listed his death officially as a “heart attack.” Then I think of the several other people I knew who did the same thing. All listed as heart attacks. The other thing they all had in common was they were clean for five minutes then decided to have families. They all left their children. I can’t forgive them for that. I’m a child of addicts and alcoholics and I don’t have a very tolerant or compassionate feeling about it. I know this is wrong, but I suffered so much at their hands and hearts and lack of feeling I can’t square it. Like I said, I know this is wrong, near compassionlessness, that is, especially considering that my heart overwhelms me with compassion for so much and often.  I guess my soul feels betrayed by our society. If you have an alcohol or substance abuse problem there are places to turn, but if you are collateral damage my generation was told to “get over it.” And again, for anyone who wants to school me, I know it’s wrong, so you don’t have to remind me. 

I pass the Tacoma dome and blow a kiss to my town. Mount Tahoma. Seattle traffic, the Ebey Slough, sweet Everett. Arlington where I worked as set dec on the movie “Dancer in the Dark” with my friend Paul. I remember how seeing the finished product was both beautiful (Bjork singing and dancing) and a crushing blow; the cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Yet another woman destroyed in front of our eyes as entertainment. And at the end of all that they spelled my name wrong in the credits, oh well… I pass the out-of-season tulip fields of Mount Vernon in their relaxed green and make my way up the winding stretch of trees into Bellingham. The grass in the middle of the highway looks so soft I want to touch it. When I was little I imagined living in the middle of that highway in a small, cozy rock house. I pass many tribal casinos and vast lumber yards. When I finally exit I-5 and snake my way east I look up at the Mount Baker hills to see fucking huge, obscene swaths of clear-cuttings of timber along the faces and contours of the mountainsides. Many are miles wide. It stabs like seeing it the very first time, every time. This has greatly offended and disturbed me for as long as I can remember. There are other ways, this is the laziest and most greedy. Important and fragile plant and animal species cannot survive this. This place is very sacred and to see it so abused wounds deep. I think of the photography book of all the old growth trees being cut down in black and white. I think of the Nooksack nation so much is named for here. I feel tears at the corners of my eyes and wipe them on my sleeve. 

I trace the road into the woods I have known forever and will always know. The way to my grandmother’s and my cousin’s house. They aren’t from the same sides of the family yet they ended up just a half mile apart which is a lovely detail in our shared history. So many of the old farms I remember are for sale and being split up into residential lots, and often large huge subdivisions. The farms left seem like they are either growing GMO corn that pushes every other plant, animal, atom and dragon fly and gnat away from their denser-than-dense fortress walls of harmless looking green, or factory dairy who’s muddy cows never get to see the outside. This is nothing new. I remember my uncle telling me one day that he had to quit working for our other uncle because the cows on his large scale dairy would give birth and not even recognize their own babies. He was shaken and upset. He had grown up on my maternal grandfather’s farm who let the animals be themselves as much as they could in an agricultural setting. He knew what that bond was supposed to look like. I thought of all the creatures I had seen come into the world and how lovely it was every time, and yet this memory of my uncle stuck with me like a canker sore that never goes away. I think of the song “Fox Confessor Brings The Flood” which I wrote about this road and these fields. I was mourning the death of my grandmother before she actually died. I have often done that. I thought of her voice saying “They’d better get that hay up!” as we would drive along this same road. I laughed. She was always worried about everyone else’s hay despite her claim that she hated farming. 

I arrived at my cousin’s place exhausted. She was working the night shift so I was greeted by my sweet niece and their two dogs. It was so nice to see them all. I felt loved and accepted. I went to bed early and fell into a deep sleep. The sun came up violet and backlit the giant climbing hydrangea in the window. There is the green I remember. No other place is this kind of green. I think of all the Emily Carr paintings that capture this hue that is its own universe. 

Later after some coffee, my cousin and I set out to visit both sets of grandparent’s graves. First was my maternal grandparents. I had never been to their graves. Gramma and my grandpa Clyde were buried together in a small cemetery in the woods. As I stood over their graves I felt nothing. I imagined their bodies six feet under us. I was visualizing a cross section drawing of something in an anthropology textbook. They were here but they were nowhere to be found. I did find several other of my relatives who I knew by name only, including my gramma’s brother who she had once been in a harmony singing group with. This pinched a little for some reason I could not explain. We then drove to Lynden to visit the Case grandparents, the link that binds us by blood. My dad and grandpa and grandma are buried together which is convenient but cold comfort to the dead. I felt for my grandma who died, not unhappy, in an assisted living facility for people with Alzheimer’s. My cousin showed me photos of her that the home had given her when she died just shy of her one hundred and first birthday . My grandma had thick, straight hair in the photos. What the??? She had always curled it up into the old lady cloud system that seems to float above the skull. It must be a leftover from feeling fashionable in the 40’s and 50’s? The caregivers at the home had also written her name as “Lucy” on her photo which would have boiled her blood. “My name is LUCILLE.” “These made me cry,” said my cousin of the photos. I can see why; they poked me too. She had been the closest person to my grandma Case. 

We exited the graveyard and drove to a nearby diner. We were greeted by a friendly server “Hello! What are you ladies up to today?” “Gravehopping,” I answered. “We are a really good time.” She said nothing and showed us to a large booth. My cousin and I ate and talked. We are very open with each other and nothing is off limits. We are each other’s witness to what really happened, how bad it was sometimes, a lot of the time… We confirmed and validated each other’s memories of being told that no matter what we witnessed, felt, thought or knew was true, it was wrong and false, and even a lie if the adults said so, and that THEY were the truth. My own father was particularly fond of “If I say black is blue, it’s blue.” Complete erasure of our personhood, for almost the first two decades of our lives, and sometimes longer depending on the adult. We outlived them all. We felt like twin babies found at a crash site and carried off to a new life, but had been the ones who carried us also. We’d had to play all the roles ourselves. 

Truth and validation is wonderful and healing but really exhausting so we watched a couple movies and went to bed early. I was up at 4:45 am as I had to be back in the studio in Portland by around noon that day. We had coffee and reminisced about the little things we loved and things that made us laugh, all the dogs and cats we’d had. How good it was to have a companion witness. I drove out toward I-5 the back way. It was a pre-fall tableau without rain; soft fog that would burn off by noon. Golden apples on the ground everywhere. Pine needles and moss covering the underbrush. Up on the clearcut mountainsides the fog drifted across in tilting columns. It looked like spirits looking down and searching for their lost ones on a fresh battlefield. It broke my heart all over again. Clear cutting really needs to be made illegal.