Converse in the North Cascades: Why the People of this Place, Not Just the Place Alone, Matter

I have just completed a series of posts covering some of the lesser known history of the North Cascades along The North Cascades Highway, a.k.a. Highway 20. There is much more I could write about on the same theme of lesser known history going almost all the way to Rainy Pass.

These posts, amounted to about 57 pages in a Microsoft Word document single spaced with a font of 12, on a stretch of the North Cascades Highway, or Highway 20 that is 25 miles long.

Consider: There is a lot of history known to me and knowledge about this place that is well outside this narrow corridor. The area covered in this series of posts is a small fraction of this knowledge.

I also withheld a lot of information out of privacy concerns for people who live in many of the places along the way. I could have named who lives or lived in many of the houses along this stretch and often who built the house. Considering how long many of the post in this series are, I’m sure any of the readers who had the fortitude to read through the existing material are glad I didn’t go on about things ad nauseum (maybe the proper term would be ad, ad nauseum).

I didn’t write too much about good hunting spots because if a lot of people know about them, well, they won’t be good hunting spots any more. Likewise I didn’t indicate fish bearing streams in the area for same reason. Most people wouldn’t dream that some of these streams had fish in them. The Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife did a lot of surveying of streams to see if they were inhabited with fish in the mid-1990’s so they might know a lot of the unlikely areas where one will find fish. I believe Trout Unlimited has done a lot of similar work as well. But I often wonder if these organizations and other like them have actually captured all the fish bearing streams.

I also didn’t want to get too specific with a lot of the information or put too much information out because there are people and organizations out there who haven’t made the investment of trying to make a living here while actually residing full time here. It seems some of these folks often use such historical information with little or no benefit going back to local, by which I mean eastern Skagit Valley, communities. I have seen bits of local history repackaged for the consuming public and conveyed by some “authority” who only lives here a couple months of the year, if at all.

Many of these same people and groups pursue policies and agendas that are detrimental to the economies of these rural communities. These policies and agendas, for the most part, seem to have a singular focus on the place, mostly the scenery and maybe some wildlife that may or may not live here, while ignoring the detrimental effects that the same policies and agendas have on the economy and people who live here.

Possession of some history gives an air of authority to these folks, who are, I’m sure, good enough people, and I’m sure that the information they pass on is great for the casual tourist. But for someone who has lived their whole life here, it is a little irksome to hear the same stories parroted over and over again with an air of authority by someone who has never lived here and is only here for the summer and makes very little contribution to the community.

I don’t think that a lot of these folks really understand what they are talking about. This is because they haven’t actually lived a life here, dealing with the challenges and limitations this place puts on anyone trying to make a living here year round. And they don’t have any other stories because they haven’t invested the time here to learn them.

Withholding information because I am concerned that it will be misused puts me in an odd spot. Obviously, if you don’t pass the history on, it is useless. I don’t mind at all sharing what I know with people, no matter where they are from, who study history and respect the people that are the source of it. I also usually share freely with anyone, no matter where they are from, if they just ask. And not many people do, which is the whole point of this series of posts, to illustrate the potentially vast amount of knowledge held by people who have lived and made their living in a place for a long time.

So this caution may seem a little paranoid. Obviously, the history of the North Cascades is not a hot item in most circles. What I want to avoid is making a lot of information easily available to be cherry-picked by someone who doesn’t want to take the time and make the investment to talk to the people who have lived here for many years. Once the information is out there, free for the taking, it is quite easy to use it in a manner that disconnects it from the people who are its source and use it to create an image of expertise and authority (many of the organizations that I am cautious about are very good at creating such images of themselves) in order to push the previously mentioned agendas and policies that are detrimental to rural communities.

Maybe some day, if I have the time, I might still write some of this stuff down in more detail. I do hope to pass it on to my children and family and anyone who is trying to make a stake here. If this oral version is all that survives me it will undoubtedly be more garbled but no more so than if it had been misused in the manner I have outlined.

Finally, a lot of information wasn’t included in this series of blog posts simply because I forgot to mention it. I think this is quite common. Over the years, people I have known for my whole life mention something out of the blue about this place that I had never heard before. The subject had never come up, so they didn’t have a reason to think about it or mention it.

Again this highlights a flaw in written historical records. When being interviewed for the historical record, quite often people, myself included, need triggers, the right question or the right situation to retrieve many memories. For one thing, the information gathered is quite often defined and limited by the person asking the questions. I think this is the natural order of things and I think a lot of knowledge is lost between generations, especially if those generations don’t live similar lives in the same or similar place and encounter similar problems and situations.

I have nothing against historical interviews and they are certainly more permanent and, in most ways, more reliable than oral records, depending on how distant from the source they are. But I think it is important to keep in mind that interviews or statements aren’t the be-all and end-all of history. You don’t even come close to capturing all of the knowledge in someone’s head with an interview, even though it may last for hours. You would actually have to live with someone for years as a friend or family member to pick up many of the finer historical details.

As I previously stated, as surely as I write these words, some of the information I put out is wrong, either because it was misremembered either by myself or the person I got it from or it was garbled at some point in the telling. But, overall this was an honest attempt to illustrate some of the lesser known history of the area, the kind that isn’t written down anywhere.

There are other versions of many of “my” histories of the North Cascades out there as well as histories that I am not aware of. Many of these other histories are held by the other folks who have also lived here for a long time (a long time at least in human reckoning). I am sure their histories are just as flawed as mine. But they also contain little nuggets of information about this area that you can’t get anywhere else.

Flawed as they are, these histories come straight from this place and from having lived here and made a living here for many, many years and the myriad observations gleaned from that living. This, the human experience, is the living soul of this, or any, place. Along with day to day life and the restrictions imposed upon, and opportunities provided by the place, these histories form the culture of the place and a different way of looking at the world than the dominant culture.

You can’t get this from a book. I think it is fine to read history. I have read quite a bit myself. But reading it and living it are two very different things. Reading information in a book is not the same as performing the activity described on paper. Quite often when you live a life you pick out the nuances that weren’t recorded in a history as well as the misinformation that is inherent in any history, whether it was something that happened today or a hundred years ago. This reflects back on my previous comments about people who don’t live here who would use written history to gain credibility or authority to push policies and agendas that come from the point of view of people who are not subject to the limitations of living in this place.

On an interesting side note, there is an analogy in elephants to the importance of having group members with a lot of experience in living in a place.

Elephants, like humans are long lived and and old cow elephants are the keepers of the herd knowledge. They know, for example, where to go to get water during severe droughts that, at least until recently, occurred infrequently, once every several decades or more. They have to be old enough to have seen the previous drought and know, through knowledge passed down from the previous herd matriarchs, where water is still available under those conditions. An elephant that is 20 years old will not have seen, and thus not know, what happened during a drought that occurred 30 years ago but the animals that are older than 30 years will know.

So removing the older cows in an elephant herd has a dramatic impact on the well being of the entire herd. Without these older animals, the chances are more likely that many in the herd will die of thirst in the next drought. I understand this situation is especially dire in areas where elephants are hunted heavily for ivory. Obviously the older the animal is, the larger the tusks, making the old herd matriarchs prime targets for poachers.

I am not applying to be the herd matriarch of the North Cascades or some kind of official historian. I don’t study the history of this area and I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about the North Cascades. Through the chance of birth, I happened to be privy to a lot of info that is not widely available to many other people. But I have a lot to learn about the North Cascades. I am constantly learning new things. And these histories are my version of events or at least the version that was passed down to me, which may, or may not, be completely accurate.

Not too long ago a number of signs were placed at different places and businesses around the town of Concrete that state “This Place Matters”. The unwritten history and knowledge that I have been explaining in this series of Lesser Known History posts are why the people matter who live in places like Concrete or eastern Skagit County or anywhere in the world where people stay and try to make a life. Though many of them might not hold college degrees, they are nonetheless keepers of significant knowledge about their place. If they leave or the people they pass their knowledge on to leave, the knowledge is lost and along with it, part of the living soul of the place.

I don’t see a lot of the next generation staying here. I am sure at least part of this is just the natural course of things. People have always come and gone. Quite often, I have noticed, people feel the need to leave the place where they grew up. And the world is urbanizing and globalizing. But I also believe a lot of young people who would stay here leave because there is very little economic opportunity. It has always been hard to make a living here but it has gotten much worse over the course of my lifetime.

With the loss of the next generation of the keepers of the unwritten knowledge of this place, we are losing a culture. In the overall scheme of things one might not think this is significant. I am sure someone from the dominant culture would find the people who live here indistinguishable from themselves. After all, we all speak English (with a smattering of Spanish here and there) here and participate to a high degree in the dominant culture of the region and the country. The culture is unique though, and different from the dominant culture.

The larger implication of the trend of young people leaving the places where they grew up is that it is also happening in other countries to cultures much older than the one here, probably also largely as a result of globalization and urbanization.

I hear people bemoaning the loss of world languages, and rightfully so because these languages actually constitute a unique way of looking at the world and, as such, are one basis for a culture and important for cultural diversity. If people don’t have economic opportunity where they live, more often than not, they will go somewhere else to seek it. If that somewhere else doesn’t speak their native language or follow their customs, these will be lost because they are no longer relevant to that person’s life.

The non-Native American culture of eastern Skagit County and rural areas like it are in their infancy. I am not comparing them with ancient Native cultures here or around the world that possess their own distinct customs and languages. Still these newer cultures are unique in their own way and, when they are gone, they can’t be replicated and they hold knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere. And, because they aren’t obviously different from the dominant culture, they are, in large part ignored. Time will tell how long they survive in our urbanized, global world.

I freely admit that I have a lot to learn about the North Cascades. I also admit that I can learn many things about this place from people who don’t live here or have only arrived recently. But the people who don’t live here and the recent arrivals need to admit that they too have a lot to learn about this place from the people who have been here for a long time.

Most of my posts on the lesser known history are long and probably could stand some, maybe a lot of, editing but, as I have stated, they are an attempt to illustrate the potentially vast amount of knowledge about this place held by the people and families who have lived here for a long time. They are the best, as far as editing, that I could do at this time. I might take a while to read some of these posts but consider how long it took me to write them. If you haven’t had a chance to look at all of the posts, I invite you to do so. Though I have spared many details, I think they might provide the reader with a good bit of insight into the people who live here.