Storytime
For untold millenia, men and women were born here to be free, have families and put down roots.
Time was spent trading, fishing or harvesting native potatoes, berries and wild tobacco.
They were an ancient, generous and loving nation, but it was to be their undoing.
Two-hundred years ago, the people of Wappato shared dinner with a starving Lewis and Clark expedition.
Before long, the land gave way to a new name and different kind of citizen.
One sick sailor on a trading ship killed almost the entire Multnomah tribe.
By 1845 or so, all of the Willamette Valley was without many Natives, because of illness, not war.
Thousands of years of history came to an end.
Perhaps it is only a dark coincidence, but after a few years of sending the world west,
Meriwether Lewis commited suicide.
Beyond the sacred oaks, a successful dig near Sam's Cracker Barrel and a few isolated finds,
the last remnant of Wappato is a huge block carved from granite.
A magical monolith illustrated with the powers of the gods.
One day, it was pushed over the bank into the channel by an impatient farmer.
Never to be found again.
You can still feel troubled spirits on Sauvie Island.
Historically, it is unclear who discovered this region.
A cave in Fort Rock revealed sandals and a backpack from twelve centuries ago.
Today, we call it home.
It may have been hundreds of years after China first engaged in trading,
but Britain and Spain were joined by the usual other Europeans.
Claims were made by many and most were disputed.
Colonialism was only thought of by the insular few who hid with their wealth on military bases.
For most folks, every day was hard work.
Before it was chopped to bits, the Oregon Territory had a southern border with Mexico
and a northern border with England's claims in Canada.
The boundary on the east was the Continental Divide -- then known as the Oregon Mountains.
The Oregon Trail sprouted west from St. Louis, sending the hopeful, the greedy and the pious to adventure.
Plans had been made for conquest long before the ink was dry on reports from Lewis & Clark.
The wheels of wagons and industry were all gaining westward momentum.
By and large, everybody got along in an increasingly diverse population.
A lot of fishing, farming, trapping and trading.
At first, not much Bible-thumping.
It didn't take long before the dreams of the empires faded.
"New Albion" and "New Georgia" became mere footnotes.
John McLaughlin was the white haired emperor of the region.
From Fort Vancouver, he controlled virtually every aspect of the economy for hundreds of miles.
With the blessing of England, the Hudson Bay Company ruled with an golden fist.
Predictably, a small group of people became very wealthy
until a larger group of less wealthy people gathered in strength at Champoeg.
There was alot of discussion, wrangling and arguing over the details
-- even the women folk had a say.
The guns rang out a clear signal in the sky.
They had created democracy in the Oregon Country.
Independent from England.
Independent from the United States.
It had a future, but by treaty it was to last a short decade.
American intentions were clear and the Whitman Mission was used to spread smallpox to the Cayuse and Nez Perce.
When children became sick and died, the once trusting Natives suspected the missionaries.
Violence was a natural reaction and change was immediate.
The United States came in force, bringing soldiers that outnumbered the population.
Control was vested in a foolish notion from thousands of miles away: "Manifest Destiny."
It pushed the territory to the brink of war with the British.
It chased Chief Joseph and his tribe hundreds of miles -- killing many along the way.
Silent massacres were widespread -- often with a nod from Capitol Hill.
Native nations, Basque settlers, French trappers and any others opposed to westward expansion.
Hungry and resigned to the future, Oregonians ratified statehood on St. Valentine's Day, 1859.
Not long after, war began between the Union and Confederate States
and in the bloody wake this once autonomous region was carved and parceled like so much beef.
Soon, greed would kill anybody who dared get in the way of the railroads.
With Congressional approval, it would be the exact same folks behind the timber companies.
Though most date back over 150 years, and could be repealed by any Congress, many of those laws are still on the books.
It is hard to do the history any justice.
It is hard to find any justice in the history.
More than a century has come and gone, but we are still ruled by industry.
Over the years, many Portlanders have wondered what secrets might lay beyond the sleepy shores of Sauvie Island.
A timber and farming community with ties to the old world, this past century could have brought a whole new type of settler to this quiet urban paradise.
"What became the Sauvie Island Moon Rocket Factory unofficially began operations during the First World War.
At that time, it was just an extension of some of the Naval activities that were going on across the channel.
No real rocketry existed until the ASPC was built and then nothing really amazing happened 'til the forties
-- once they captured enough Germans to run the place.
For awhile, it stunk less than the old lumber mill."
-- Sergeant Major Franklin Choad (retired)
Many odd contraptions were constructed and tested in Lagoon Number 7
-- especially in the years between wars.
In 1924, several young swabs were discharged from testing duties
after scaring a college rowing team near the Sauvie Island ferry terminal.
This stunt would be repeated in the 50s with predictable results
and may have spawned the legend of "Grumbly Sam."
"Sam was a creature that lived at the bottom of the channel and popped his two heads up and made a gurgly-grumbly noise.
The locals down near the south end would hear it pretty often and it scared the hell out of 'em.
'Course we all know now that it was those goddamn Navy boys..."
-- Sergeant Major Franklin Choad (retired), ASPC Security Chief (1947-1955), longtime resident
The original headquarters for the Amalgamated Sauvie Propulsion Center
under construction in 1932 -- completed the following spring.
Dr. Goddard spent as little time as possible in the stylish, yet cramped little offices and laboratories.
With both the shipyards and the Swan Island airport nearby, the operation could try all types of new technologies.
While many such things might be tested openly just up the river, buzzing downtown bridges meant the end of a test pilot's career.
Fortunately, the gorgeous St. John's was tantalizingly close to the seaplane facility.
After a hurried and unofficial visit to the testing area for yet another contract revision, a paranoid Howard Hughes
insisted that signs be placed around the facility and guard stations manned to keep out the Japanese.
They were now Americans, but farmers and workers from the island were still detained with their families.
Victims of Civilian Order No. 54 went to the Stockyards -- now the Expo Center --
until they could be sent to a camp like Tule Lake in Northern California.
Many of the elderly did not survive.
In June of 1942, the Japanese attacked Oregon.
Battery Russell at Fort Stevens was fired on by submarine I-25.
Aiming at distant lights, chief gunner Sensuke Tao cut a powerline and destroyed a backstop on the baseball diamond.
Legend holds that a commander woke in the middle of the night to a panicked voice on the phone crying,
"Fire on the ocean! Fire on the ocean! Fire on the ocean!"
He replied groggily, "It will put itself out"
-- hung up the phone and went back to sleep.
The rocket plant was unaffected by the catastrophic flooding that hit the region immediately after the war,
but players and families of the Portland Beavers baseball team were among the thousands who had to flee Vanport.
Much of a top secret robotic aircraft program may have been destroyed
when it was caught outside during the Columbus Day storm.
For months there were fears that Russian satellites had photographed the wreckage.
This is a spy photo taken the morning after the storm -- by an American plane.
You can almost see fruit stands along the road.
No official acknowledgement of the activities on the island was ever made, but as pressure mounted from NASA and others,
accidents happened with much more frequency through the mid-1960s.
"It's as if somebody up there -- I mean way up there -- said,
'Those people and their little berries can go to hell -- we're gonna do what JFK promised we'd do.'
We ended up with Saran Wrap an' freeze dried ice cream an' a pretty streak when Skylab came barrellin' into Australia.
And I still have a whole lot of junk buried 300 yards from my barn.
Of course, keeping promises for dead people has always paid off..."
-- Franklin Choad
Since the build-up to World War II, spy technologies had been tested using barrage balloons.
In the winter of 1967, they were the last overt activities on the island.
The previous year, Lady Bird Johnson had suggested in a closed door meeting that a wildlife refuge could hide anything.
It was tried around a nuclear plant and several high security installations.
A public relations coup was born.
"Everybody thought Cape Canaveral was a beautiful success.
Soon all the dinky research places wanted that kind of view.
Of course, in the long-run, the decision to close any of them was up to the agencies that ran them.
No guns or motor vehicles, plenty of binoculars to be sure, but everyone is focused on the birdies an' th' cute little whatevermajigits.
Most of the antennas and odd shaped buildings were explained away as wildlife
related and things went on in alot of places as if nothing happened..."
-- Franklin Choad
"Of course, the Sauvie Island Moon Rocket Factory is a myth, but it's a mighty good one because so much of it is true..."
-- Franklin Choad
Things around this region are spooky.
There was nothing in Iraq that the United Nations inspectors couldn't find leaking into the Columbia River at Umatilla
-- named for a decimated tribe and just a few hours drive upstream from Portland.
In nearby towns, it is hard to hide such a very large monster.
Kids in school have evacuation drills every week.
They giggle grimly and scurry to underground shelters.
If you move to Boardman, for instance, they give you a huge folder of information before you unpack.
In Hermiston, the welcome wagon drops off a box of goodies that includes rolls of plastic,
duct tape and instructions on how to perform various exercises in futility.
The dangers are real, but there is very little information for anyone
outside of the immediate area of the Umatilla Weapons Depot.
Tons and tons of nerve agents, gasses and biological weapons are waiting to be burned.
Every morning the engineers see if the weather is calm enough to fire up the incinerator.
Trains and trucks filled with gas and other chemical weapons from all over the United States
wind toward the depot through California, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.
In the immediate region, they have learned to live with fear and dread.
Folks of every sort have a twenty-four hour ear out for the wailing sirens.
Millions of people live downstream, downwind and along the transportation routes,
but go blissfully on without a clue.
One of the many treasures of Idaho, the Craters of the Moon National Monument
-- a wonderfully surreal place -- is made even more eerie by the many warnings along the road.
You see, it has a neighbor where spent nuclear rods from submarines have been buried by the Navy since 1957.
Although it had been in operation for some time, the epic and tragic saga of Hanford began
with plutonium
for the orignal Trinity Project and later for Little Boy.
One morning in 1945, the timidly named bomb murdered the citizens of Nagasaki, Japan.
The legacy continued when high level radiation was released over 50 different times to see how it affected the population.
Decades of unintentional spills, releases and other accidents were even more damaging.
Today, thousands of warheads on our planet contain a dubious fruit from this rural farming region.
Like their neighbors downstream, nearby Washington residents are vigilant about the crying klaxons.
They have lost thousands and thousands of friends and family to leukemia and other cancers.
In addition to hosting a pioneering facility in atomic weapons production,
many miles along the Columbia River are home to enough nuclear waste
to be called the most polluted place in North America.
Just three little examples.
Just our little corner of the world.
It's the same everywhere you go.
It's worth trying to go beyond the bounds of earth, isn't it?
Our space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 had this nice shiny etched plaque attached to them.
This was the United States first official attempt at contact with extraterrestrial life.
It included a basic map of the solar system with the trajectory of the probe,
naked pictures of two white people and the position of our sun relative to the closest pulsars.
After that conceptual success, we included phonograph records on Voyager 1 and 2.
They were a reflection of the times with some western anthropology tossed in for good measure.
The first transmission of video into space of any real significance was a speech given by Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics.
A fine howdy-do from your wonderful friends on earth.
Fortunately, years have passed and those folks are now watching Opie Taylor cryin' when he kills a songbird.
They know that some of us were born with hearts.
Of course, the news is coming on next.
This transmission from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico contains the digits one through ten,
the atomic numbers of life elements, a spiral of DNA, the United States,
people, probes, the solar system and the telescope itself.
The signal was made up of strong on/off pulses.
Digital smoke signals.
An electric interstellar cave painting.
It was sent to the universe in November of 1974.
Chimpanzees may have made it into space several years before humans,
but they never developed pixels or the atomic bomb.
Humans are unbelievably desperate for attention and scared as hell of the results.
It has been the foundation of our folklore and dogmatic principles for untold centuries.
We behave much like a dog who has shit in the bed.
We anticipate return and punishment.
We are conditioned to want the negative response.
It is the easy way.
Blind belief in an imaginary home in the sky still justifies every form of bigotry, oppression and bloodshed.
Holy nihilists spread panic and lies, accelerating the exploitation of our planet while moving unfettered toward global fascism.
As ancient superstition forms our "New World Order," the apocalypse becomes a goal to achieve and a promise to be kept.
Of course, we could gain the tools to move beyond those silly fears.
When science finally rolls the corpse of theology into the sunlight, our world might finally be free.
Praying for others will replace preying on others as the course of the righteous.
Who gives a damn if your spiritless God isn't up to the challenge?
If we are to evolve, the blindly greedy, the doomsday deity and the violent zealot must join the dodo in extinction.
Perhaps then, the earth will ring with the laughter of Galileo and the songs of the lost children of Wappato.
We can destroy ourselves.
Or save ourselves.
Either way, it's a good story.
