Guest Contributor
Jacob Eubank is a Photographer and Writer Living and Working in the Greater Seattle Area.
By Jacob Eubank
Gallery Photographs http://www.jacobeubankphotography.com/ltgrant/
Swimming with Water Wings in the River Styx
On December 10, 2007, my father and I embarked on a journey that would take us across much of the Western United States. Just over a year ago, looking back provides an interesting perspective. We were certainly in different times. Driving southward through Washington and the Oregon Coast our minds were focused on the devastation caused by tremendous rain and wind that occurred in the first weeks of the month. Our trip was made possibly only because Interstate 5 had reopened only days before our departure. It had been closed due to flooding. Elsewhere in the country millions of people were struggling to keep their families fed in the midst of one of the worst series of ice storms that have hit the central United States in over a decade. It’s interesting to have come full circle, because as I’m writing today the waters are again receding. Now the second year in a row that I-5 has been closed due to catastrophic flooding. Nearly every river in a hundred mile radius was above its banks for three to four days. The conversations I have nearly everyday with neighbors and people who share my community are eerily similar to the conversations that transpired in the first days of our trip. Nobody can quite seem to recall the weather being this extreme in the past twenty years. It was only three weeks ago that we had over a foot of snow chocking the roadways of the greater Seattle area. This snow stayed on the ground for over a week. It is undeniable that this is irregular. On our long drive to California, we thought much about this. Our leading scientists have concluded that even if our climate were on a normal rising cycle, humanity has still made an impact, and has accelerated this process beyond its normal pattern. Before December 2007, the Oregon Coast had never had a storm on record that had produced Category 3 Hurricane force winds. As we left Oregon and arrived in California adjusting our route to take us through Sacramento, we couldn’t help but see the extraordinary challenge that faces every one of us around every corner.
In Salem, OR I found a need for earplugs due to my fathers boisterous snoring. As I walked into the lobby of our motel I inquired with the clerk at the front desk where I might acquire such a thing. He responded kindly that I could just run over the Wal-Mart across the street. Perhaps I’m foolish and have just been too far removed from an automobile society living in the walk-able city of Seattle, for I took his words literally. As I started walking in my pajamas and flip-flops, I found out it was quite more than just across the street. In all, I ended up walking across roughly three quarters of a mile in each direction. My trek was across many vast parking lots. As I walked I was reminded of one of the neighboring towns where I spent many days as a growing teenager. In the town of Kalispell, there used to be a thriving downtown. Many small independently owned businesses lined the streets; there was quite a lot of diversity for such a small community. Bookstores, art galleries, and many other attractions filled in around the Historic Hotel and saddle and tack store that remain relics of a time before ours. The last time I had come home had been quite the culture shock. I’d been away for almost a year, and upon arriving again it was as I had landed on Mars. In downtown Kalispell where Highway 93 shares the title of Main Street, roughly 40 percent of the business spaces were empty with signs of for lease availability in their windows. It has now been replaced with a development not unlike that of Salem. What once used to be flowing fields of wheat is now covered by asphalt. The aquifer that lies underneath it, which was once pure, untainted glacieral melt water ten thousand years in the making, is now forever linked to those parking lots. Those sewer drains that permeate the surface now carry all of the debris and carcinogens that fall from our vehicles, straight down to that very aquifer.
The next morning as we got back on the interstate with our headings towards Sacramento, the extent of how reliant we are on our automobiles for everything. The amount of cars on the road was staggering. I thought Seattle was terrible for traffic when I first moved there, and upon seeing Sacramento, I couldn’t imagine what Los Angeles is like. The connection between our reliance on the automobile, and our increasingly extreme weather patterns were becoming more unpredictable had become undeniable for me. I felt it was shameful that so few people could realize the true gravity of this situation.
California brought many other realizations as well. As you come over the mountains in Northern California, you pass through Redwoods National Forest. This is one of our last great old growth forests in the United States. In 1991, nearly two decades ago, the National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry concluded that less that six percent of our forests consist of old growth. The tragedy found in the story of the American Redwoods is that there are no old growth Redwood Forests that exist any longer outside the gates of protected land. In just under a hundred and fifty years a once thriving and ancient forest was reduced to near exhaustion. A forest thousands of years in the making disappeared in just over an average persons lifetime. This again hit home for me. Where I spent much of my youth was in the shelter of a similar forest. In the many acres that compose Glacier National Park, reside pockets of some of the oldest growth cedar that is found in Montana. In the past year, the forest that surrounds these protected lands has shared virtually the same tale. Over the last several years the community in the Flathead Valley has felt the same critical stress our forests of Northwest Montana have. As harvestable timber has become consumed faster than it can replenish itself, the radius in which retrieving that wood has expanded. For a short time this business model was sustained by the creation of several trucking companies in the area to haul the materials the extra distance. Slowly but surely though, those additional forested areas became thinned out, and the bubble burst. It quickly became apparent to these business owners that it was no longer cost effective to haul these immature logs as far as they were. As the logging industry began to collapse, larger corporations swallowed up the failing smaller independent sawmills, thus ensuring their business another few months at a time. Last week, Plum Creek, one of the largest timber companies in the country was for the first time forced curtailed its operations, by shutting down its MDF plant at its Northwest Regional Headquarters. This was one of the last large production lines that had remained open over the last several years. It is a huge blow to the community who had relied on Plum Creek as a reliable source of income. Now, with the environment at the edge of falling into chaos, the real costs are falling into the light. The cost of taking our forests in these ways is being set into the lap of “we the people.” It also threatens the species native to these old growth canopies. Disrupting the balance of biodiversity has wide and long-term effects. It leaves our forests prone to disaster, with nothing left standing to keep the balance. In the last decade there have been numerous naturally occurring events that have had huge consequences as there simply were and are not sufficient numbers of trees standing to survive these events. From bacterial and viral diseases such as Red Blister Rust that effects the ever becoming rare white pine trees, to invasive beetles that destroy the bark of several other species of pine to the point at which the trees atrophy and die. The point that kept resurfacing for us came again and again; what will the ultimate cost of our modern expansion be?
Within a day of leaving Sacramento, we finally arrived in Death Valley. In the middle of the night we drove into our first unobstructed view of the night sky either of us had seen for some time. As we parked the car in the middle of the highway and shut off the lights, darkness set in. I lit a cigarette and turned my eyes to the sky. Moments before, we had finished a conversation that led us to stop the car. We had been talking about the nature of the sky and the stars. We had been focused on the central theme of how many people have never seen a night sky like we were experiencing. Many of the friends I had made since arriving in Seattle had spent their entire lives in the city. This was something I couldn’t imagine myself. So upon this realization, we stopped the car and got out. As I inhaled my first drag and blew the smoke out through my nose, a giant green fireball tore across the sky. Death Valley really is incredible for one great reason in my mind. At night, you have an almost perfect 180-degree dome view of the sky. As this meteor rumbled over us, we were able perceive the curve of our atmosphere. The brush and dry cracked desert that it scoured were lit up with the green glow we all experience in the momentary flashes on July Fourth, except this lasted for seconds. As the light faded and we were plunged back into darkness we looked towards each other and just chuckled and simultaneously exclaimed, “Whoa…!” We finished our cigarettes and continued driving until we reached Stovepipe Wells. That night we spent many more hours under the night sky, reconnecting with the world our ancestors saw 10,000 years ago. I went to bed that night after a few Johnny Walkers with the thought of how great it is that this truly special place has been set aside. The next day would prove to surprise me once again.
Furnace Creek is an interesting place. It is the second of only about five places in Death Valley where drinkable water has been found by drilling a very deep well. This is because the valley floor used to be an ocean, so the only water on the surface is full of salt, and therefore cannot be consumed. What we found in the late afternoon was something I never expected in a National Park. We pulled into the gas station furnace wells and as we filled up the car we surveyed our new surroundings. There is a small lodge and a few private residences fill the rest of this small settlement. In the middle of it all though, there were hundreds of Date Palms. I’m not kidding, palm trees in the middle of a place that gets less than two inches of water a year. It was even more disheartening to discover their long established golf course. For decades now they’ve been pumping the little water in their special aquifer and using it to maintain that perfect green turf. I’m sorry, but I firmly believe Death Valley is no place for a golf course; A golf course in a desert like Death Valley offers as much purpose as making popsicles in an oven. I was truly shocked to see that the NPS would allow non-native species to be planted within the boundaries of the park. The entire purpose of the NPS is to keep these wildernesses pristine. The golf course was just insult on top of that, a complete mockery of the design we have made for our special places that need to be preserved.
We explored the valley floor for a while longer, and had to make our way on home to Montana. The road out of Death Valley that we took led us on our way back North through Las Vegas. Our entry to the city of lights was the defining moment of our realization that has brought us to this project. As you drive in or out of Las Vegas, on each end of the city you’re greeted by two separate power plants, one of which burns coal to generate electricity to run all of those sparkling lights that make up the Vegas Strip. We couldn’t help but think about how out of harmony we are with our planet.
Our drive continued through Utah, Idaho, and ended in Montana. Through the last leg of our trip we slugged along processing all that we had seen. Deciding we needed a rest, we took up residence in the lodge at Chico Hot Springs, MT. It was the perfect end to our journey into the unknown. In Chico, a few year round employees run a small lodge, the hot-spring pool, and a greenhouse and garden. During the summer months the community central to Chico grows their own food in the garden, much of it ending up used in the lodge’s restaurant. In the winter, they are able to maintain their comfort foods that normally would be out of season. They have a greenhouse that utilizes the hot mineral water to generate enough warmth in the soil for anything they want to grow. They actually maintain an avocado tree year round, and are able to harvest that fruit in even the coldest winter months. They certainly have found a sustainable, low impact way of life in Chico. They don’t take more than is needed off their land, and because of such, will be able to benefit from the natural beauty of the hills and mountains of south-central Montana into the future. This was a glimmer of hope in the wake of such an incredibly desperate time in our history. The challenge is enormous; it is a scale of such magnitude that it will take the cooperation of people across the globe. Our trivial disputes of borders, religion, colors, and many of the things that make us different must stop. Without a decisive move on a global scale to abandon or alter our current trends and ways of life, we are all going to be recipients of the repercussions. If we continue to saw down our forests, pollute our air, destroy our clean water, and poison our land, our planet is going to become a harsh wasteland that is uninhabitable. This is the cost of our expansion. Many of these precious few resources that are still harvestable are dwindling. Much of the material is wasted in inferior quality design, the by-product of which is cities that are devastatingly impaired when it comes to surviving natural disasters. If we keep expanding at our current rates, there will not be enough left to make it through another century before we consume everything on this planet. The degradation we see in the Western United States has only occurred in the last hundred and fifty years, and it’s speed grows exponentially every day. What is going to be the legacy we leave for the next two generations? With the changes that have occurred in the lifetimes of my father and his father, if this arrogant design that is the way we live is allowed to continue, there may not be much left in the world of my future grandson.
Filed under: Art, Art News, Art Prints, Culture Economey, Environment, How to survive as a Working Artists, Journalism, Media, On Art, Photography, Politics , Climate Change, Columbia Falls, Death Valley, Environmental News, Hurricane Winds, Jacob Eubank Photography, Kalispell, Montana Artists, Photography, Seattle Photographers, Washington Artists, Washington Flooding
