A river runs through it
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
“Hey,
they’ve made a difference,” the blackjack dealer with a name tag
that says Larry informs me after I blew $25 at the table where he
shuffled and dealt. The pit boss listening to the conversation did
not look like a Spokane Indian
or a member of any other native tribe.
Indian owned — but not Indian managed — casinos dot the landscape
of eastern Washington.
“I
didn’t have a regular job before this place opened up,” he said
as he waited for another sucker on a slow morning, just before the
Labor Day weekend. Families and tourists returned to houseboats
across the road after having motored up and down the Columbia and
Spokane Rivers and gotten their share of sunburn as well.
The
Two Rivers Casino, owned by the Spokane Tribe, specializes in the
slots. Indeed, some casinos don’t even have black jack tables and
roulette wheels.
“It’s
not the high rollers who come here,” the dealer informed me,
flashing a smile and showing gaps where some of his teeth had once
been. “But my two brothers went into the service, you know. I
didn’t want to get into that stuff, you know, over there in
whatchamacallit. Too dangerous and I didn’t want to go too far from
home. So, I trained for this job and it pays OK, you know.”
From
Gifford, a ferry ride — free and 10 minutes long — crosses the
Columbia River. On the other side, Inchelium looks like reservation
towns I saw in South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico and California’s
Salton Sea. The front yards contain car carcasses and worn out
household machinery. Kids run around. A shabby general store faced a
dingy café where the coffee, sitting and evaporating on the
hot plate, smelled like someone had made it earlier. A lot earlier!
Around
the village, majestic pines cast shadows and aromas throughout the
area, those that remain after Boise Cascade and the other “timber
companies” hacked away at the forests.
In
Colville, from my motel window, I watched the robot-driven crane send
its claw down and scoop up the logs and place them on a conveyer
belt, one more torturous step on a once mighty
tree’s
transformation into plywood, toothpicks or chopsticks.
The
waitress at the “best Eye-talian restaurant in Colville” — her
description — thinks of Boise Cascade as the company. It provides
jobs and keeps customers coming into the restaurant. While I waited
for my lasagna and eggplant parmesan
take-out
orders, I asked her if she knew about Boise Cascade’s adventures in
Guerrero
Mexico in the 1990s
where the company colluded with corrupt village bosses to clear cut
pieces of the local forest.
She
shrugged. None of that appeared in the Colville newspaper or on the
nightly news. The preacher didn’t mention it. Boise Cascade doesn’t
want that kind of publicity in a town of some 5,000 people where it
runs a 24/7 operation.
Logging
and tourism, Indian reservations and the Grand Coulee Dam have
stamped eastern Washington with their indelible identification marks.
The
Dam dominates — as it should. It dwarfs other huge electric power
producing facilities. It contains more concrete than any other
structure in the country. The Dam measures almost a mile in length.
All the pyramids at Giza could fit inside its base. It is twice as
high as Niagara Falls, the tour guide informs us.
The
structure, looming 1,330 feet above sea level, looms like a surreal
structure from the river below. The very quantity of concrete in its
exterior produces awe and wonder at how engineers and architects
could have conceived such a mammoth notion back in 1933 when FDR’s
Public Works Administration initiated giant projects to spur the
economy and provide jobs. The project took almost eight years to
complete, during which time the plans changed and engineers enlarged
the dam’s irrigation capacity.
World
War II produced further changes. Irrigation took second place to
electricity generation needed for war production. The
power produced there also became crucial for generation electricity
needed for war production during World War II. Grand Coulee also
powered plutonium production reactors and reprocessing facilities at
Hanford, Washington, part of the then-top secret Manhattan Project to
produce the atomic bomb a far cry from the spirit of Woody Guthrie
song. “Roll
on, Columbia, roll on, your power is turning our darkness to dawn,”
The
Hanford plant leaked nuclear material. Former employees have suffered
from the toxic material as have the fish, which must make their way
under the concrete dam. “Most of them squeeze underneath,” said
the tour guide responding to my question. “Some die from something
like the bends, what divers get. But it’s good for the sea eagles.”
He pointed skyward where the predators should have been.
The
dam did prove crucial for industrial development in the Pacific
Northwest, and irrigation again resumed its proper place after the
war. The project itself also provided thousands of jobs during the
Great Depression and it still functions as a job provider and a
center of the area economy; but not enough to keep everyone employed.
July unemployment figures for white adults ran at around 5%, slightly
higher than the government reported national average of 4.9; blacks,
Hispanics and Native American figure ran at double or more that
amount.
In
Spokane, scores of homeless men sat on stoops, predominantly whites,
but some Indians a few Latinos with shabby backpacks; others rode
rusty bicycles. Single Room Occupancy hotels dot
the poorer and downtown streets. The
Spokane River winds
its way through the city. On its banks, like those of other urban
rivers and public beaches, litter has accumulated. The ubiquitous
Styrofoam trail, the tell-tale beer and whiskey bottles from river
bank parties and the occasional condom floating in the shallows loom
as clues for future archeologists and historians who will try to
understand what we did here in the early 21st
Century — the time when science and technology had broken boundaries
that as a kid I thought of as science fiction. Knowledge and
ignorance, concern and carelessness for the earth and its people and
other living things!
As
we walked toward the river bank in the humid mid morning air a
middle-aged man tending his garden said: “Hey, you like grapes?”
Of
course!
He
filled a plastic bag with bunches of tiny green morsels that exploded
with tart succulence against the palate. We thanked him, He nodded.
“I’d
hate to throw them away.”
We
ate grapes and stared at the bridge above us, crossing the Spokane
River. Like the dams, many of the infrastructural foundations of the
country were built in the 1930s. Few Americans then would have
predicted that within decades that “defense” would claim the
lion’s share of the tax wealth, that a nation that had no permanent
armed force would have an institutionalized military that got sent
routinely to wars around the world while dikes in New Orleans
collapsed from poor maintenance and a bridge in Minnesota fell apart
from fatigue.
The
majestic northeast Washington scenery, mountains, dotted with pines,
mighty rivers and vast areas covered by newly cut wheat fields —
with a rich yellow color that Van Gogh would have admired — share
the landscape with man-made structures, dams, bridges and cities like
Spokane.
On
the highway one can’t avoid the contrast
to the
tacky billboards pushing SUV sales. Listening to AM radio as a deer
nimbly leaped into the trees. I heard exciting news: a new drug has
hit the market that cures erectile dysfunction. Then the radio barked
the same old “news” — wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latest
banalities from Rudy Giuliani who stands for “victory” —
whatever that might mean, and more melting of arctic ice.
The
river flowed as it has done. The Indian blackjack dealer had told my
wife that “fishing ain’t too good in the warm weather. Folks rent
houseboats and then don’t catch nothing. Real disappointing, you
know? But that’s how fish are.”
The
blue-green mountains with the valiant pines cast their shadow over
the valley. The cool wind sent its omen. Fall would soon arrive.
Meanwhile, the highway billboards and radio ads beckoned consumers to
pay attention to the important things in life.
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. His new book is A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.
His new film, WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE,
is available on DVD from roundworldproductions@gmail.com.
