The Flannel Revolution

My Parents built a small retirement house last year out on the Olympic Peninsula, the most northwesterly place you can go in the contiguous United States without falling into the Pacific Ocean. It's a lovely shank of land, mossy and evergreen, an area where trees tickle the feet of the gods and the very mist seems impregnated with Miracle-Gro. But like other pockets of paradise in the Pacific Northwest, there's a dark humor, bordering on outright lunacy, entangled in the fog.

Long ago, British mariners claimed that the Olympic Peninsula was full of cannibals, a perception born in the experience of some sailors from the Royal Navy who washed ashore and ended upas jerky, passed around between courses by coastal Indians. The regional diet is more traditional now, but that's about all that is. A carpenter's level applied to the psychic foundation of the Northwest would still find the place to be more or less off-kilter.

The new family house in Sequim (pronounced SKWIM) was built in farm country between Kitchen-Dick Lane and Schmuck Road. When I asked my mother about this, she said the roads had been there forever, named for a pair of pioneers, Dick and Schmuck. And Kitchen-Dick? Oh...well, that's to distinguish him from the other Dicks around town, my mother told me. Of course. Why set off a subdivision with something banal like Easy Vista Heights when a practical joke of the potato-in-the-tail-pipe variety can be had?

The Pacific Northwest has never tried to hide its true self. Like an island cut off from the main currents of evolution, this far corner of the United States is something of a freak of nature that has developed a culture to match its surroundings. And now that much of the world is being exposed to this peculiar strain of the American character, some interpretation is in order. My family has lived in the Northwest for nearly a hundred years, so I will assume--with apologies to all who disagree--the role of regional anthropologist.

For the first time in its history, the Northwest is enjoying a major influence on popular culture, fashion and attitude. Perry Ellis and other trendmeisters have adopted for their high-end line this year the thrift-shop uniform that my little brother has been buying at Value Village in Spokane for ten years. Chris, the soft-voiced radio philosopher on Northern Exposure--which is filmed in the Seattle area and the Cascade Mountain town of Roslyn--has become an archetypal man of the Nineties. In ripped logger's shirt and greasy hair, Chris answers to a voice that seems to ride with the wind. A fresh-steamed jolt of latté, far better than the acidic imitation of ship-canal bilge that used to pass for morning coffee here, is available at any convenience store from the Idaho border to the Pacific Coast. Starbucks coffee, born in Portland, is drawing converts across the land.

As the gospel of plaid, grunge and latté-sipping spreads--along with the dark elements of neo-Nazi survivalism and New Age religion-by-credit-card--a basic question arises: Are Northwesterners naturally weird, possessing an indigenous streak of wacko? Or does this part of the world just attract people who are already on the edge--people who, having sloshed around the country, have nowhere else to go? It may be a bit of both.

The physical isolation of being walled in by mountains to the east and the ocean to the west has led to a psychological detachment. Seattle is 2841 miles from New York. But distance alone doesn't explain a name like Schmuck Road. It's something more, something that comes from the sky and sea: In the Northwest, more than in any other place in the country, the elements--earth and air, wind and fire--shape character.

The Northwest was born with geologic birth defects, an unfinished land sculpted by earthquakes, mud slides and volcanoes that still haunt and refine the area. Between mood swings, nature has a sense of humor, and from it the residents have taken their cue. How else to explain the official mascot of Evergreen State College in Olympia--the Puget Sound geoduck (pronounced gooey duck), a clam with a neck the size, shape and texture of a five-foot-long penis? Or the psychotropic mushrooms that sprout in cow pastures after autumn rainstorms? Or Bigfoot? You may not believe in the foul-smelling, eight-foot-tall hominid of the old-growth woods, but the people here do. In Skamania County, on the Washington side of the Columbia River, it's against the law to hunt the phantom of the forest.

Sitting in, say, Titonka, Iowa, it may seem that the Northwest has become a sanctuary for pond scum and religious experimenters with large bank accounts. But the neon flashing Quirky in the left-hand corner of the map is generated, in many respects, by all Americans. And therein lies the second half of the explanation for this region's personality. A hundred years after historian Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the American frontier closed, we still cannot shake restlessness from our souls. In the mid-19th century, upstate New York was where the free-love advocates, Utopian communitarians and promiscuous Mormons planted their stakes. Later, it was California.

When the Northwest was settled by whites, it attracted a certain type of character. A story about the Oregon Trail, which opened 150 years ago, helps to explain why. As Americans pushed toward the Pacific in wagon trains, they came to a big Y in the rutted road just west of the Continental Divide. Those who chose the southern route headed for California and the promise of sunshine and gold-rush good times. Those who chose the northern route were on a course for rain country and winter days when the sun sets shortly after four P.M. Early on, the settlers in the Northwest developed a reputation for tolerance, and a certain edge. The Cascade Range and the Olympic Mountains walled them in; the jagged coast kept out interlopers. The feeling was, and still is: You could be left alone at the edge of the continent. New arrivals have no past; nosiness is a low crime.

Today two types of people are still drawn to the Northwest: those seeking liberation in the scenery--the poets and idealists, the artists and tree-huggers with modems back at the cabin--and those who come here to hide and who view the mountains and raging surf as protection from a world they can no longer control. Thus, Eugene, Oregon is the center of alternative lifestyles, with a vaguely Sixties, Grateful Dead-loving tinge to it. But Springfield, its neighboring city across the Willamette River, is a hotbed of skinheads, mad-at-the-world loggers and religious fundamentalists who whipped the populace into such a frenzy against homosexuals that they passed a law prohibiting protection for gays six months before Colorado gave itself the same distinction.

Sandpoint, Idaho, at the base of the Selkirk Mountains on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille, can look like Sun Valley without the celebrities, or Lake Tahoe a hundred years ago. The city has well-stocked bookstores and cappuccino bars with National Public Radio playing in the background. But the woods around Sandpoint are full of folks who think a public-school levy is part of an international conspiracy, and these people have loaded semiautomatic weapons to back up theirnotions.

Free from the restraints of tradition and inspired by the extremes of landscape, Northwesterners have gone their own ways--sometimes to great disaster and embarrassment, other times to triumph. Consider Dr. John Kitzhaber, an emergency-room physician who until last year was president of the Oregon Senate, one of the most powerful political positions in the state. Well before national health insurance became a presidential concern, Dr. Kitzhaber fashioned a plan to give every person in his state guaranteed health care, a law that is being phased in through the Nineties.

But he is better known to some Oregonians as the author of a song about stupid salmon, the kind raised in fish hatcheries instead of the wild. Now, try to imagine a bunch of Chicago aldermen getting together in the proverbial smoke-filled room to pen an ode to kielbasa, and you have an idea why things are different in the Northwest.

Politics, particularly in Oregon, has long been practiced like an extended comedy skit.

Bud Clark, a bartender with a paintbrush beard, ran for mayor of Portland in the mid-Eighties. His experience? He had posed as a flasher in the famous poster with the inscription Expose yourself to art. He was elected to two terms as leader of Oregon's largest city. When he left office in December 1992, he rode off into a snowstorm on his bicycle.

Last year, Absolutely Nobody, age 35, was a candidate for lieutenant governor in Washington state. A onetime manager at Winchell's Donuts, the candidate had his name legally changed from David Powers. He ran on a campaign promise to abolish the office and got 148,021 votes. He finished third.

More traditional politicians also provide much humor, but the punch line is usually delayed. The most recent examples are a couple of United States senators, Brock Adams of Washington and Bob Packwood of Oregon--both accused of sexual harrassment. Packwood did wonders for the Oregon retail economy by inspiring T-shirts such as the one with a pair of handprints over the front, reading, Bob Packwood was here. Not long after Adams was accused by a former aide of trying to seduce her with a pink drug-laced drink (a charge he denied), bartenders in Seattle began serving a strawberry-colored Brock cocktail. Tom Foley, the Speaker of the House, hails from the farm country of eastern Washington and seldom passes over a federal handout relating to agriculture. Thus, Washington State University, in Pullman, received a government grant to study bovine belching.

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In matters of the spirit, Oregonians are justifiably proud of the 24-hour Church of Elvis in Portland (one of the better shrines to the King), but other religious oddities have been deliberately kept off the tourist map. Remember Rajneeshpuram, named for Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian guru who owned 85 Rolls-Royces? The Baghwan turned the Oregon desert town of Antelope into a community of exiled yuppies dressed in sunset red and chanting at his feet. Within four years of founding Rajneeshpuram, the holy one was piloting his fleet of English performance automobiles off to a grand jury, criminal charges and eventual deportation. Now, he is but an asterisk from the Eighties. His 64,000-acre ranch went into foreclosure and became a ghost town.

In the shadow of Mount Rainier, a former Tacoma housewife summons the whiskey-voiced spirit of a 35,000-year-old warrior named Ramtha--for a considerable fee, of course. Many people have left their jobs and homes and moved to the town of Yelm, where Ramtha hangs. On warm-weather weekends, they crawl through a vast maze inside a walled compound, hoping to find their inner selves while trying to avoid head injuries. They call themselves Ramsters, as in hamsters; most of them have advanced degrees.

Rainier, which the Indians believed was inhabited by noxious, gabby spirits inside its crater cauldron, has always had a psychic effect on people. It looks like an exclamation point on the skyline, a 14,411-foot cone covered with ice from centuries of storms. People see things near the mountain that are not apparent at sea level. The term flying saucer came into the language in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot from Meridian, Idaho, flew near the mountain and reported seeing a fleet of fast-moving objects about 25 miles from his plane. They weren't Boeing test planes zipping around the big volcano, Arnold said.

Another kind of religion, the worship of the atom, flourishes in the desert where the Snake River joins the Columbia, around Hanford. Sections of three towns built virtually overnight during World War Two, in the rush to manufacture an atomic bomb, look like an aging set from a Fifties science-fiction movie. Richland High School is home of the Bombers--yes, named for the Big One--and their official logo, plastered around the school and on football helmets, is a mushroom cloud.

Even with the nucleophiles of Hanford, the Northwest is often referred to as Ecotopia, from the Ernest Callenbach novel of the same name. There is a great deal of truth in the stereotype, from which flows many of the Birkenstock-clad characters who people the land. Seattle may have 2 million people in its metro area, but these urbanites want to feel connected to the natural world. Within a two-hour drive south of the city, you can howl at the moon with a pack of four-legged carnivores at Wolf Haven, an orphanage for what used to be the most feared animal in America.

Out of respect for the scenery, recycling is done with maniacal devotion. Portland was so concerned about violations of a regulation against packaging food in polystyrene that the city hired a man known as the Styro-Cop to hang around fast-food restaurants looking for violators. Hey, drop that french-fry container!

During a water shortage in Seattle last summer, homeowners were told to conserve. They did. Toilet-flushing dropped by nearly two thirds. It got so bad that the Water Department had to raise the rates to make up for the fact that people were using so much less of its product.

The most famous residents of all that clean water, the salmon, are worshiped. The Indians treated them as gods, edible icons, and current residents exhibit no less passion. The University of Washington is the only college in the nation to have its own salmon run; the big chinook return to the doorstep of the school every fall. At the Pike Place Market, Seattle's most popular attraction, the fish literally fly as vendors toss them to the fillet men, who swiftly disembowel and behead them. Spike Lee used this scene as the visual centerpiece for a Levi's commercial.

And a few hours before child-killer Westley Allan Dodd was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, he ate as his last meal--what else?--fresh salmon.

Much was made of the way film director David Lynch wrapped the body of Laura Palmer in plastic for the opening sequence of his ill-fated and ultimately incomprehensible television show Twin Peaks. But Lynch, a former Boy Scout from Missoula and Spokane who helped to define Northwest noir style, was only holding up a mirror, as they say. Granted, the Log Lady, his timber-petting creation, was a bit of a stretch. But Lynch was onto something with his theme of darkness lurking amid the towering Douglas firs. For every glowing innovation there is a counter impulse. The worst crimes are not the property heists or S&L failures that drain an entire region, but inexplicable, self-hating acts of violence.

Perhaps the most prolific serial murderer in American history was the one who killed nearly 50 women in the Northwest during the mid-Eighties. He was known as the Green River Killer, named after the meandering stretch of water south of Seattle where many of the bodies were dumped. He was never found, and police have no idea why the killings started or why they stopped. Nearly a decade earlier, Ted Bundy was a law student at the University of Washington, a young Republican invariably described as clean-scrubbed and nice. One of his routines was to show up at the beach with his arm in a sling. He would then ask some woman to help him load his boat onto his car. Who could refuse him? He looked like a Northwest guy with a windsurfing injury. Bundy was electrocuted in Florida in 1989 after confessing to the murders of more than 30 young women.

A few weeks before Christmas last year, a logger in northern Idaho came upon the frozen body of Johnny Ray Sharbnow, a skinhead. It turned out he had been killed by two other skinheads, according to the Bonner County prosecutor. They suspected he was less than loyal to the cause. The neo-Nazis came to Idaho more than a decade ago, looking for a place to establish a "homeland"for white people with character defects. They chose the Northwest, and more particularly northern Idaho, because it was a place without color or accent. Every year or so, a neo-Nazi makes national news when he holes up in a cabin and starts shooting while shouting about Zionist conspiracies.

With all the attention these loners receive, people begin to wonder if the (concluded on page 144) Flannel Revolution(continued from page 116) woods are crawling with them. In truth, there are probably more FBI informants than card-carrying Hitlerites in the panhandle of Idaho. But it does raise the question of why they keep coming to the Northwest.

The answer is the scenery. When a high peak snags a cloud at sunset, it brings to most people a sense of awe, or gratitude for the artistry of nature. But survivalists see a barbed-wire gate closing with that same sunset. To them, the mountains are a fence. Isolation fosters a distinctive brand of ignorance.

By the same token, the sense of removal from the mainstream, the rhythm that comes from being in the arms of the land, has produced much that is original, life-enhancing and wonderfully weird. Jimi Hendrix was born and buried in Seattle. The Far Side, which revolutionized American cartooning, is the product of Gary Larson, a Northwest native. Katherine Dunn, the Portland author of a novel about circus dwarfs called Geek Love (nominated for the National Book Award), said that freaks are allowed to flourish under the gray skies of the Northwest. Here is the best kind of elbowroom, she said: room to fail.

The most stunning art was done by people who have lived here for nearly 10,000 years, the Salish-speaking natives who carved figures into cedar totem poles that rival Picasso's cubist efforts. And today, the best art is work that tries not to mimic something elsewhere but reflects oddball Northwest sensibilities.

The Seattle Art Museum hired Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi, a darling of critics, todesign the city's new $60 million house of art. After Venturi had collected a geoduck-shellful of favorable press clippings--and the Seattle art foo-foos had all agreed his creation was "stunning" and "divine"--there rose in front of the museum last year a strange image in iron. Weighing more than 20,000 pounds and standing 48 feet tall, Hammering Man--as it is called--looks like a working guy in silhouette, complete with an arm holding a hammer that rotates up and down, powered by a huge motor. It is so out of place for a city's namesake museum, but so in keeping with the region's contrarian impulses, that it fits. Hammering Man will live with the Jetson-age Space Needle as an ageless gag on the city's skyline.

When its 15 minutes are up, the hope among many people here is that the Northwest will hold to its basic rhythms of life, or at least not become, self-conscious about its personality quirks. What happens to American originals is a short road from character to caricature. The rock musicians who made such a splash with the Seattle sound--Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains--already have sworn off the term grunge, fearing it like the K-Tel cliché it will one day be. In an age when the homogenizing reach of mass media is undeterred by distance or geography, Salem, Oregon could easily become indistinguishable from Salem, Massachusetts. With each neighborhood notion that goes national, the local eccentrics lose something.

What may keep the basic Northwesterner one bottle short of a six-pack is what has always nurtured the offbeat in the Far Corner: the moods of sky, sea and quivering earth. Behind the fortress walls of the Cascades are cities of light in the alpenglow of ten P.M. summer sunsets, and cities of gloom in the mid-winter mildew. The volcanoes are alive, though dormant. Light and darkness, fire and ice--the elements are not mere abstractions. And the people who live inside the postcard remain as much a part of the scenery as those doomed flying fish at the Pike Place Market. That Western historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, had it wrong. The frontier is not dead. It's just harder to find.

"Are Northwesterners naturally weird, possessing an indigenous streak of wacko?"

"Rock musicians--Nirvana, Pearl Jam--have sworn off the term grunge, fearing itlike a K-Tel cliché."