My dear friend Barbara and I grew up in southeastern Washington State, in the golden years of American economic growth following the Second World War, when electric garage door openers and the convenience of TV dinners were all the rage. Major General Leslie Groves and his team calculated that the Oak Ridge site near Knoxville, Tennessee (an early location for the Manhattan Project, along with Los Alamos, New Mexico) was too close to a major population center, were there to be a nuclear accident. So, in 1942 they planned to locate a new facility in the arid desert corner of an otherwise lush and moist state, where Barb and I would later be born. Colonel Franklin Matthias and a group of DuPont engineers determined Hanford was “ideal in virtually all respects”, other than the need to relocate 1,500 residents of the towns of White Bluffs and Hanford, and members of the Wanapum tribe. The proximity of the Columbia River was perfect to cool nuclear plants, notwithstanding Portland and dozens of smaller towns all being downriver. We learned much later about leukemia and other cancers, and the disastrous effects of radioactive leakage on those “downwind”.
Later, the wine industry moved into the desert to eventual worldwide acclaim, tilting the agricultural platform from wheat to grape, with fields of Gewürztraminer, Riesling and Pinot Noir basking in the toxic sunshine.
Barbara is a deeply intuitive poet, and she weaves the ancient past’s old ways of knowing and healing seamlessly alongside impressions of the land, family and the ongoing struggle to come to terms with what we did to this place and its people.
Her most provocative question is, “Do we have the language to speak to people 30,000 years in the future?” The answer is implied in her question.
Barb and I were political comrades many years ago, pressing our youthful questions on the local authorities. Her vision, heart and perspective stir me still.
I offer these three poems from her most recent collection.
-Editor
September 19th Poems While Driving In The Darkness
The Holiness
The holiness of this land
A place of grapes and wheat
Of wine and bread
Of sacrifice and body
The land where I was born
The rolling hills of wheat
The even rows of grapes
Our eyes see beauty beneath an ocean of sky
Blissfully unaware of the work of the plow
No longer fields full of lomatiums and camas, foods and medicines
The subtle aromatics of the healer’s plants persist
On hillsides steep and folded
Hidden in plain sight
Knowing something is missing
The good work of remembering
Shows the way through
To those who pause for a moment
To consider the layers of place
Untitled
Deborah
I read your poem, the one about St. Blaise
I was at that church too, you know, Christ the King
Where they put the candles across our throats and God blessed us
We didn’t know why
I heard the bells ring in the cool darkness of the church
Many years later
My old neighbor, Tina, she grew up on Cottonwood Drive with us
We were talking
She told me about her father’s ashes
Now in a box on the mantelpiece
Waiting for her mother to join
But she also brought up the story of the big scar on her throat
Her thyroid was gone
Tina was three or four years older than me
She was an infant at the time of the Green Run
She didn’t think too much about the scar on her throat
But I thought of your poem
She accepted it as part of the price of living
The price of growing up where we did
Then she sent me a photo of the box of ashes her father was in
It was a carving, Northwest
In it was the story of Raven Steals the Light
I thought, there it was, the light
Brighter than a thousand suns
Testimony
My dad loves to go to meetings
So we went
This one was another intersection between
Bureaucracy and the people
Designed to solicit input
But having a meeting to plan the next meeting was really the agenda
Working in the nuclear industry is a great way to have job security
Because this is a project that is not going to end
For days we worked on my testimony
He had things he wanted me to say
I do not want to stumble when using the jargon of science
So I listened and crafted and revised
He was so happy
We got there and he said, “Don’t say anything”
“Don’t say anything”
He said, “Don’t say anything. Don’t let them know you are my daughter. It might embarrass me”
I sat and listened as people talked
About job loss
About tank vapors
About all these concerns of health and safety
I wasn’t sure I could deliver the message he asked me to give
But then, a woman who had come all the way from Hood River
You know, down river from the effluent
She had the thyroid scar on her neck
And she got up near the end of the meeting
She spoke of Tsagagalal; she spoke of She Who Watches And Waits
She spoke of Buddhism and Joanna Macy and peace
The war for peace
She paved the way so I could get up
And ask the questions that hadn’t been asked
About long-term storage, you know, really long term
30,000 years
Do we have the protections?
Do we have the language to talk to people that far in the future?
About what lies buried beneath the desert sands
When I sat down, my father was happy
I didn’t embarrass him
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