Ruby McConnell - Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life

Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it.Dave Johnston

R aven-haired, fair-skinned, quick to laughter, and filled with fire, I am my fathers true Irish child in America, the youngest of three girls in a displaced clan, born of water and earth. As a black Irish lass, my midnight hair casts me as a character of the ocean, a descendant of the selkies, the seal-women sirens known to sing sailors off their ships and out to sea. Legends say that any man who stole a selkies skin could keep her as his wife, marrying her for all eternity to the land. Those same ancient Celts believed that humans were formed of clay, shaped out of the very hills and bogs that nurtured and sustained them until life returned them to the ground. And it is true. The woman that I am today is the result of the processes and forces of this brutal and beautiful land to which I was born and am forever married to, a land of transformation and continuity in which I am destined to abide, endure, and ultimately return. To understand me is to understand the land from which I come.

The Pacific Northwest that you see today is the result of forty years of radical changes in the culture and economics of what was once a resource-extraction and agriculture-driven region. They are changes so fundamental in nature and scope that they effectively erased the regions history of pioneerism and work-a-day libertarianism. Changes that, for those of us from this place, will always be marked by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980. On that day, I was just two years old. Everything that I have stood direct witness to since, everything I know about this place, happened after we watched the mountain crumble. The Pacific Northwest I was born to was a region digging out.

For a short time in the late 1970s and early 80s, my family lived in Seattle in a hilly, mostly residential neighborhood northwest of the city called Magnolia. Today, Magnolia is a reasonable approximation of a stereotypical Pacific Northwest urban neighborhood. It remains residential, with a small commercial district known as the village at its center. To the west is Seattles largest public parkland, Discovery Park, home to the oldest lighthouse on Puget Sound. Smith Cove, at the base of the bluff, is a major port for the cruise ship industry. There is a sense of growth, prosperity, and progress created by new construction, businesses, and the accoutrements of the booming tech industry. It is populated almost entirely by white, middle-class, moderate liberals.

Like many things in the Pacific Northwest, though, the Magnolia neighborhood is not what it appears. Its namesake trees are really Madrones. Discovery Park is a former military installation. The lighthouse is one of the City of Seattles primary sewage disposal points, which until the 1990s discharged largely untreated sewage out a twelve-foot-diameter pipe directly into the sound. Beneath the new development, the tech, the hipsters, and even the pioneer story lies a long history of racism, exploitation, thuggery, and environmental tragedy that gives Magnolia, and the entire region, a dualistic nature that allows both Twin Peaks and Portlandia to be true.