North Cascades Culture

North Cascades National Park from Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Summer 2010. 

North Cascades National Park, Summer 2010.

Some readers may have noticed that it has been a while since I last posted. Some will also note that this post is pretty long. I think the posts over the last two years have painted a fairly accurate picture of my life in the North Cascades. Though I have held back in certain areas, particularly concerning my family, I have tried to be honest about my various successes and mistakes as I, like everyone else, fumble through my imperfect life. Rather than go through another year of the cycle of my life which, though different from other years, would also fall into somewhat monotonous regularity (this monotony is part and parcel of the subject of this post/essay), I will be doing a series of essays. These will take a lot longer to put together into something that resembles coherency. So please bear with me.

For over 100 years, non-Native American settlers and the people that followed them have been making a living and interacting with and using the resources in the North Cascades. A culture has evolved from this. This non-Native culture isn’t as distinct as cultures in other places that evolved in isolation. The connectedness of the world for last hundred years or more has ensured that the people here adhere to many of same societal norms as the rest of the country. This lack of obvious distinctiveness is even more pronounced due to the recent increase in globalization. Yet this culture is as unique in its own way as any other culture in the world. One should consider that even the oldest culture in the world didn’t start out being thousands of years old.

The non-Native American culture here also isn’t as distinct as the Native American cultures that it impacted, in many ways adversely. It is important to note that the non-Native peoples living in the North Cascades owe their presence here, in part, to the displacement and often marginalization of the Native people that had lived here for millennia. It is also important to note that no one living today is responsible for these past practices, most, if not all, of which were wrong. If those practices were wrong then, similar practices today are also wrong.

So, what exactly creates a culture? I don’t know what textbooks say but my own personal observation on this question is that the immediate environment of the people living in a given area is an important factor in shaping a culture. A culture is molded and shaped by, among other things, climate, geography and availability of resources.

People living in a given area adjust their lives to what resources are available and the timing of when these resources are available. They also adjust their lives to the limitations of that area. These adjustments, some obvious and some more subtle, I think, are a strong base for a culture because they cause people to view the world in a certain way, which is often unique.

A favorite example of mine of adjusting your life to timing of resource availability is putting up hay in western Washington. If you want to put up dry hay for livestock, you need to do it when the grass is ready and you have enough sunny days to cure your hay so it won’t mold or burn your barn down. In western Washington this can be a tricky proposition. Early July is usually the prime time for haying in our area though, depending on where you live and the weather conditions of a particular year, successful hay crops can be harvested from May through September. Early July is usually the best time though. This is when the grass is tall enough to make a good crop and when the weather conditions are right for curing the cut hay.
 

Therefore, I keep my schedule clear and don’t make any commitments in early to mid July (unless my hay has already been put up, a rare occurrence for me) because I don’t know when we will get haying weather. In order to successfully put up a hay crop you quite often have to take action quickly and you can’t afford to be overcommitted or overextended. Haying weather doesn’t always fall on weekends either, so you have to be ready to take days off work to get the hay done.

I have also noticed that July is a popular time for people nowadays to have parties because the weather is typically nicer. I have a hunch that this wouldn’t have been the case here not too long ago, at least not for people who had to make hay to feed their stock and maintain their livelihoods. Back in those days the weather forecasting wasn’t very good and everyone hustled to get the hay in before it got rained on, working well after dark many times, as I have heard. At that point, I imagine everyone would have been too tired to party much and besides, unless they were done for the year, they had to get up early the next day and do it all over again.

Hay is a kind of high stakes all-or-nothing crop. One way around the high stakes risks of making hay for livestock fodder is to do silage or forage root crops like mangel beets or turnips. By the number of old unused silos around, especially when I was younger, it is evident that silage was a more common crop in the old days. There might have been a cultural shift from silage and root crops to more hay before my time. This shift may have occurred due to improved technology, weather forecasting and equipment that made it a better bet to do hay but, from all the stories I’ve heard, they still made a lot of hay in the old days too.

Another good example of seasonal resource availability is berry picking. There is usually a short window when a given berry species is available so, if you want some, you had better concentrate on getting them in their season before they are gone for the year.

I don’t think many groups of people in history that depended heavily on seasonal availability of any resource, whether it was crops grown in the field or something hunted, caught or gathered from the landscape, held many celebratory events during the peak of resource availability. I do think most people held big blow out celebratory events but I have a hunch that most of those events were held in lull times before and after peak seasonal availability of crucial resources.  

Some other examples of how resource limitations shape the way one thinks and the culture are some trips that I made Down Below at the end of March and early April. Eastern Skagit County isn’t really very remote compared to many parts of the world but the population density is low enough that many goods and services are not available here. To get these things necessitates a trip of between eight and fifty miles (eight miles is still local, fifty miles is Down Below) from where I live. Quite often a trip Down Below can burn up the better part of a day.  

When you burn the time and fuel to go fifty miles, you generally want to get the most bang for your buck so to speak. So I had a list of things to take care of when I went Down Below in the afternoon. I got blood drawn for some tests, the studded tires off my car (the shop did quicker than could have done myself and for free), a medicated worm block for the cows and groceries on way home. The next week in the afternoon, I got a haircut, new work clothes, some things for Easter, had an appointment with a urologist about fixing my failed vasectomy (not going to be any fun), got some non prescription medication that I can’t get locally and got groceries again.

If I had made special trip for all of these things separately, it would have probably taken a total of about four days of my time, most of which would have been on the road traveling. So I saved a lot of time by doing multiple errands on each trip, about three days worth, and I saved several tanks of fuel.

Many people who don’t live here don’t understand the whole trip Down Below thing. I don’t know how many times have seen people new to the area try to start car pools. But usually when you have to go Down Below for any reason, you have list of errands and this list is probably going to conflict with the schedule of anyone who would be riding with you, who probably has a list of their own to work through. The system of individual trips to do multiple errands is probably pretty efficient unless you are only going down for single items or events, which sometimes happens. In this case, car pooling with people with the same schedule as yours would make a lot of sense. To really know which system is better in a given situation, one would actually have to do a scientific study to compare the two.

When my dad was a little kid, they went Down Below maybe once a month. Undoubtedly this shaped his thinking. You didn’t waste things and you didn’t throw something away if it was still good or had useful parts because you couldn’t just go to the store and get one if you needed it at some later date. Some of this thinking and behavior was passed down to me. I think there was probably already some tendency toward hoarding in my family but this type of thinking and behavior, born from a lack of resources in the past undoubtedly amplified it in today’s world of overabundance. Hence we wound up with an old house stacked full of stuff.

Finally, one last resource limitation in eastern Skagit County that is highly relevant in today’s world is the lack of reliable internet access and even power. I must admit, the power outages have been minimal in the last several years, kudos to Puget Sound Energy, they seem to be doing something right or maybe its just the last few winters have been very mild. And, while internet access and general connectivity have also been improving, neither can be counted on in the way that they are in more populated areas. Small, relatively isolated areas like this are always going to be behind the curve when it comes to the technology that drives our urban centric society.

The North Cascades are, and probably always will be, my home. Except for the six years I spent in the U.S. Navy, I have never called another place home. This place was literally the entire world to me as I growing up and I viewed the rest of the world through this lens, even after I started learning about other lands and people in school. When I was really young I thought the whole world was like the North Cascades. Who knows how this informs and creates a unique point of view based on this place?

Undoubtedly having grown up here shapes my view of the world in ways that I am not even aware of. I have read of studies that indicate that every time we retrieve a memory, it is altered. So oral histories will naturally shift over time. I don’t remember every story or bit of information that I have heard in my life verbatim and I don’t remember every experience. I, like probably everyone else, carry around in my head a lot of information that can’t be retrieved at will. That is, it is almost as if I didn’t know the information at all and am unaware of its existence except that, if the right question is asked, or the right context given, it comes to mind, usually without effort. I have no doubt that this subconscious information, a lot of which is based on a lifetime of experiences in this place, has an influence on the conscious mind, shaping a unique perspective on the world.

This unique perspective, based on, and specific to, this place is not something that can simply be re-created if I move away to somewhere else. The same is true for just about every kid who grows up here. Like me, this place, to a large degree, is literally the world during their formative years. As they grow up they are accumulating information, stories and experiences based on their immediate surroundings. You can’t buy this, you can’t teach it in a few short days or weeks and you can’t read about it in a book. You have to live it and living it results in the authenticity that certain segments of our society seem to yearn for so much. I think this unique perspective, among other things, is a cultural base and, like any other culture, the only way you can really preserve it and have it continue into the future is to have people who continue to live it.

Almost everywhere I go, I am literally moving through history. My previous Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Posts highlight this experience. I generally can’t go more than a quarter mile on the North Cascades Highway (State Route 20) without passing one or more spots that have some story attached to them. There are stories and history everywhere, not just along the highway, and, though I am not particularly religious or spiritual, I often feel like I am communing with my ancestors and relatives and the people they knew as well as my own past. For me it gives the experience of living here an extra dimension, that of personal history, layered on to my existence.

This is also something that you can’t buy that or read it in a book. I never experienced this type of feeling of being surrounded and enveloped in personal history in the six years I spent in far flung places in the U.S. Navy. Hawaii and Guam, though certainly beautiful, seemed kind of flat and one dimensional to me. This extra dimension of personal history as well as the traditions I still practice while living and making a living here that create a deep relationship with the place are some of the reasons I stay in the North Cascades, not for something as superficial as the beautiful surroundings.

At this stage of my life I do appreciate the aspect of the beauty of this place but if there was nothing more to it than that, the experience would be as flat and superficial as the ones I had in the U.S. Navy. While I was in Hawaii and Guam, I was basically a tourist, observing but not taking part in the deeper experience of participating in the daily life of those places.

By the time they are adults, my kids will be heir to over 140 years of local and family history here. I understand that this is a drop in the bucket compared to many people the world over but it is significant for the descendants of European American settlers in the North Cascades. How powerful would it be for them to read my grandma’s journals and have the sense of connection not only to the ancestor who wrote of her experiences here but also to the experience of still dealing with some of the situations and using some of same resources in a similar manner that she did? Obviously you can read the journals but you have to live the life to get the rest of it.

The culture here isn’t limited to just the people who grew up here either. Throughout history people all over the world have moved around. It is no different here. People have always come and gone and you always need a certain influx of new people to keep your community fresh. My mom didn’t live here until she was eleven years old and my dad’s parents weren’t born here either. So obviously they didn’t start their lives and experiences here as old timers. They started first at a day, then a month, then a year, then decades, the same as many others who came here from somewhere else.

As I stated previously, all through a person’s life they accumulate stories about their surroundings and experiences and make myriad observations. When someone new arrives here this process continues, only the stories and experiences are now related to this place. So someone who has lived here and made a living here for a significant amount of time will also have a large store of knowledge and experience about this place that informs a unique perspective.

Many people who have arrived here relatively recently are my highly valued friends and are great contributors to my community. I have learned many interesting and valuable things from many of these folks. They have thrown their lot in with the community and I consider them to be as much a part of the culture here as anyone else. Because they have thrown their lot in with the community, in so many ways, their experience is indistinguishable from the old timers. Again, these experiences help shape a cultural perspective on the world specific to living and making a living in the North Cascades.

There is a saying in Africa that goes something like “when an old person dies, a library is destroyed”. Something similar happens to the knowledge carried by the people of this culture when they leave this place. It isn’t necessarily destroyed but it is quite often out of context and useless in new settings and is lost to the people who stay behind and quite often to the knowledge carrier as well, something I will expand upon shortly. This loss may, in some respects, be more significant when someone who has grown up here and has a family history here leaves but, in a small place like this, with limited resources, the loss of anyone who has gained unique knowledge and a unique perspective on this place from having lived here and made a living here, whether it be relatively few years or many, is significant.

It is truly tragic when a culture that has existed for hundreds or thousands of years goes extinct because each different culture has a unique perspective on the world and many of these perspectives are quite specific to living in a place. The loss of more recently evolved cultures with unique perspectives and knowledge particular to a place, while not as great as much older cultures is, nonetheless, significant.

Cultural knowledge and practices as well as languages can be recorded but if no one uses them any more, the culture and any language linked to it die. All that is left is whatever historians have managed to capture. I think pursuing and recording history is a very admirable endeavor but a recorded history is a dry and dead thing compared to a living culture of people actively interacting with the conditions and environment that are responsible for the evolution of their culture. A good analogy to this is trying to learn about the behavior of the great auk by observing the last stuffed member of this species in a museum (I don’t know what museum the last great auk is in, if there is one, and didn’t take the time to look it up). Depending upon the taxidermist’s skill, you can see what the bird looked like from the mounting and get some information about its behavior by the shapes and forms of its various body parts but you won’t learn nearly as much as you would by observing the living creature in its habitat because many subtle details are lost.

Maintaining a culture, I think, is closely tied to enough people, a critical mass, practicing that culture, usually in the place where it evolved. In order to do that, there has to be enough of an economy or at least enough venues and options for people to make a decent living in that place. Lack of economic opportunity is a plague in the North Cascades though it is hardly unique here. I think that lack of economic opportunity is closely tied to loss of culture all over the world as poor people leave their ancestral homelands for a chance at a better life.

It doesn’t bother me if someone who grew up here leaves to seek opportunity elsewhere of their own free choice. But it breaks my heart to see someone who grew up here and wants to stay but can’t due to lack of opportunity. I think it should be the right of everyone to have a decent opportunity to live, and have a decent quality of life, in the place where they were raised, assuming the resources to support this still exist. This doesn’t mean a handout. It means a fair chance.

Resources still exist here that could provide much more than they currently do for the well being of the communities in the North Cascades. Societal decisions that limit the prospects of economy here to one that is based largely on tourism which typically generates some of the poorest paying jobs in this country, that has, as the main attraction, public lands where wilderness designations and, more recently, road closures deny access to the majority of the general public is not a decent opportunity or a fair chance. Such an economy generates very few stable, living wage jobs for the people who want to live here. 

As I have stated earlier, I often think that the beauty of this place causes a lot of problems for the people who are trying to make a living here. I often think that my personality would have led me to be just as attached any other place if I had happened to grow up there, even if the surroundings were much less dramatic. I sometimes wish I had grown up somewhere less dramatic where I wasn’t beholden to fantasies projected by people from the outside.

As I also stated before, in small communities like this the loss of even one person can be significant. A good example is the Marblemount Community Hall. Every one of us involved with the hall is swamped with things we need to take care of in our personal lives yet currently there is a small group of us who is willing to make the time to show up on a regular basis and put work into it.

In a situation like this, loss of even one or two people means those that are left who already have work hard, have to work that much harder and become more prone to burnout and dropping out. This can create a cycle of burnout and dropout, this tends to create a self-perpetuating downward spiral that greatly lessens overall quality of life and results in a cultural decline. The same holds true for volunteer fire departments. I have also been told that the presence of more kids with parents well off enough to create stable homes lives goes a long way to stabilizing classrooms in school. In a small school, every student with a stable home life is very important.

Protection of endangered species is another reason given for the resource use restrictions that are so detrimental to rural economies. I have nothing against logical, socially just measures taken to try to protect endangered species. I hope this blog project to this point has made it abundantly clear that I appreciate this place and everything that lives here as much as anyone else. I certainly don’t want to see the extinction of any species and there are arguments that I think are valid that every species lost damages the resilience of an ecosystem and, if you lose enough species, the ecosystem collapses and loses much of its function. This is somewhat analogous to the cultural decline described above.

However, the lifestyles and actions of all of our society are creating most of the extinctions and environmental problems that we face today. Until everyone from top to bottom of society is on board with the pain and sacrifice needed to change things in a significant manner, our environmental problems won’t go away. These problems aren’t going to be fixed by scapegoating a small segment of our population and this isn’t an effective way to deal with real world problems. About the only effect scapegoating will have is to make some of the folks who feel guilty about creating a demand for resources feel good about themselves because they are trying to stop the “bad” people who are producing those resources.

The needs of my family and the people around us should not take a back seat to someone else’s superficial feel good preservation project or recreational experience.

The folks who do feel that rural communities needs are superseded by such projects and recreational experiences could just as well live out here and set examples of how to live a righteous life in harmony with nature, using only a bare minimum of resources to get by. There are actually people out here who, to their credit, live this way and I can tell you that their third world standard of living isn’t what I aspire to. I seriously doubt most people would and I am pretty sure that most of the people in the third world would want to improve on their present conditions. Just because we happen to live in a pretty place I don’t think my family and community should have to pay the price to mitigate the environmental degradation that creates the excess wealth in certain areas of our society that enables preservationist attitudes there. I don’t have any issues with everybody who happens to live in such areas. Nobody should be blamed for trying to make a living in the best way they feel that they can. I have a problem with hypocrites who have their needs met by economies that create near biological wastelands telling other people they can’t have an economy based on practices which create a fraction of the ecological impacts.

Again, if we want to live in a just society, the needs of the people who live in an area and depend on its resources as a means to make a living and to contribute to society need to be considered first, before anything else. We, as a society are all creating the conditions that are leading to the extinction of other species. Again, we all contribute to environmental problems to some degree. No one culture is responsible for it all so no one culture should bear most of the burden in trying to fix the problem. Likewise no one culture has the moral authority to designate itself blameless or another as the sole source of the problem. No one culture has the moral authority to designate another as unimportant or insignificant.

The people of all the cultures here are just as much a part of the American story as any other. People from here have fought and died in this country’s wars and they once helped produce the raw materials, timber and minerals that helped build the economy of this region. Some of the cheapest, cleanest energy available in the form of hydropower produced here still continues to contribute to the regional economy.

The culture here isn’t nearly as old as many other cultures in the world but it is unique and, because of this, it is significant in its own way and it deserves to exist as much as any other culture, certainly as much as those cultures that have recently appeared on the scene that are dedicated to “saving the world” by promoting “protection” of the environment in areas where they don’t live, make a living, or contribute to the community.

It seems to me that the culture here is in steady decline. Of course, I am a pessimist.  Things always change and it isn’t the same here as when I was younger. I don’t doubt the decline of culture has been bemoaned by people all over the world for millennia. That being said, the local economy in the North Cascades is very weak and there are very few ways to make a decent living based on the local resources available here.

Historically much of this area’s wealth was generated from local resources, quite often on public land and quite often by business owners who also lived in the local communities. Now much of the economy depends on resources from outside and, not surprisingly, the communities here are beholden to the desires, whims and availability of excess wealth of people who aren’t trying to make a living here.

Most of the good jobs are far away. So many people either move away and live where their work is or they spend a lot of their time driving back and forth. And, ironically, though this area is isolated enough that people who live here don’t get to partake in many of the advantages of more the populated areas without long commutes, it is not isolated enough to keep from getting overwhelmed by the less attractive aspects of excess wealth in nearby areas. Many homes and properties here are unaffordable because wealthy people from those nearby areas pay more for their second or third “vacation” homes here than someone trying to make a living here can afford to pay for their first, and probably only, home.

The physical location of the natural resources on public lands that are being managed by the various state and federal agencies are in rural areas like the North Cascades and this would lead one to believe that there are a lot of jobs associated with that management here. However, most of these jobs are in the bigger towns and cities miles away. So, if you live here and are in that line of work, you are commuting many miles and many hours a week. Any kind of active use of natural resources is now pretty much restricted to private and Washington State DNR lands. There are still a few decent timber related jobs that pay family wages, mostly related to private land but not nearly as many as there used to be.

I would not at all be surprised if my children were members of the last generation of this culture. If things keep going the way they are, I don’t see much of a future here. I don’t know if I would want them to live here anyway, in a place plagued by perpetual economic depression and all of the peripheral problems this causes. This is not my decision to make though. Hopefully, between Sacha and I, we will raise our kids well enough that, when it is time, they can be trusted to make their own decisions on the matter, based on what is right for them. When the time comes, I will try to let them make this decision without interjecting my own fears and prejudices into it. But I can easily see myself, consciously or unconsciously, telling them to get the hell out of here.

This is very depressing and it makes me reluctant to teach a lot of the local human and natural history that I know about this place to my kids and thus pass some of it on to the next generation. Sometimes it seems like so much of this knowledge is a waste of time in today’s world and, judging from my experience, it is doubtful that it will lead to a stable means to make a living. I probably will pass on a lot of my knowledge about this place, though, just because it is the natural thing to do, like teaching your child another language whether or not it may be useful to them in the future.

Another part of me wants to see my kids and the other kids that are growing up here stay here and carry on cultural and family traditions, but wouldn’t want to see any of them have to scrape by just to carry these traditions on.

Assuming I do pass on much of my knowledge, if my kids don’t stay here, much of it will be out of context, like artifacts removed from an archaeological site. In other words, if my kids aren’t living the life that the knowledge refers to, it will be largely useless to them and it will be completely meaningless to their children. So this out of context knowledge probably won’t get passed down from my kids to their kids. Much of this will be in that subconscious store of knowledge that I referred to earlier that needs a context in order to retrieve it. If they don’t live here, there will be no context to retrieve it in. Since most of this knowledge isn’t in any book, it will be lost. To preserve this type of knowledge you have people living lives where it is relevant.

Ironically, my kid’s contemporaries, who will probably be the future natural resource managers here will be learning at least some things in the classroom as adults that my kids will have known about before they could even read and write. And, once these newcomers show up in the field, they will be learning even more things that weren’t covered in any classroom that my kids will have known for most of their lives. Vashti, before the age of three already knew about cedar trees and salmonberries and quite a few other things relating to this place.

On public lands, the U.S. government protects, among other things, historical artifacts through several vehicles such as the Antiquities Act of 1906, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, and the Archaeological  Resources Protection Act of 1979 which provides for fines up to $500,000. This is done to protect the history and knowledge that belongs to all of us and rightfully so.

I find it quite ironic that the same government seems to care so little for the living heirs of this country’s rural history, many of whom have intimate ties to objects protected by the previously named acts. The federal government once managed federal lands in part with an eye on caring for the well being of the communities that bordered these lands and depended on them for resources to sustain their livelihoods. This no longer seems to be its focus.

The culture of the early non-Native settlers in the North Cascades, probably like so many rural cultures in the U.S. are all part of the national narrative we tell about ourselves as a people. With all the other cultures of this country, Native and otherwise, they are a part of our historical legacy, our national heritage, akin to any biological legacy. These cultures in small areas of the U.S. like the North Cascades and small places around the world are being lost at least in part due to active discrimination, oppression and simply neglect.

To my mind, expending great effort to preserve the artifacts of a culture on the one hand while pursuing policies that cause that culture to wither away on the other is the equivalent of the bygone days when various officials, were vying to shoot the last few individuals of species on the brink of extinction so that these individuals could be stuffed and saved by proper curation. In effect, they were delivering the final blow of extinction so that dry, dead representatives of these species could be preserved for posterity.

Time will tell. I definitely don’t know everything and there may be a whole realm of possibilities for my kids and their contemporaries of which I am not even aware. I find some hope in my ignorance of both the present and future.

 

North Cascades National Park, Summer 2007. It took a solid day of off trail walking to reach this spot. 

North Cascades National Park, Summer 2007. Same area as previous photo. 

Same area as previous photos, Summer 2007.