Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "No Place to Hide" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 265-267). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, April 1987
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
“What are you going to do when you retire?” they asked me. “More of the same? Will you travel?”
Yes and yes, I said. First I’d recuperate from the years of forced association with City of Seattle management and lawyers. This I would accomplish by scrubbing the bathroom and excavating the recesses of my closet — good, clean, private work with no dissembling bureaucrats prying into my drawers and picking nits from my job performance.
Then, if post-traumatic stress didn’t syndromize me, I would visit some powderkeg countries whose agonies were a direct result of the overseer mindset and systemic military-financial arrogance of the same breed of power brokers who bring us industrial soap operas like the endless City Light story.
Well, I travelled, but not to the battlefronts. I managed to escape to Utopia. The Freedom Socialist Party asked me to undertake editorial work for our national convention, and a rustic retreat setting was needed for the job.
So I sailed awayinto the Puget Sound sunset alongside Guerry Hoddersen, the FSP’s dynamic and prolific national secretary, and we set up shop in a comparative Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous milieu on fabled Marrowstone Island, near Port Townsend. The waters murmured, the breezes caressed, the trees rustled. Name your cliché for tranquility — we had it.
Come to find out that the serenely beautiful hills across from us — Indian Island, a naval underseas research station — was a storage dump for weapons. Shades of Chernobyl, Hanford, Three Mile Island, and all the other lethal factories and depots! Visions of atomized plutonium 239 zapping the breezes danced through our heads, along with scenes from Dr. Strangelove and On the Beach.
The plutonium didn’t leak out but the news did, front page stuff. Protest meetings, of all things, were called. Real estate values plummetted. Everyone was scared. The bucolic site of our idyll was immersed in spooky, sinister miasmas.
Then the wells and the septic tank got all mixed up and the water boycotted our pipes. A polluted, arid paradise with the imminent prospect of becoming a raging inferno shed its charms. We moved our word processor and files and groceries from the inlet to a brave new wonderland — a cottage on the Olympic Peninsula, just outside Port Angeles, facing the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the mountains of Vancouver Island in Canada — and no nukes!
We loved our gorgeous grove of windswept cypresses, cedars, madronas, firs and pines. We gathered rocks and shells, saw Indians fishing the Elwha river, watched the giant containerized cargo ships of the world chum past, studied the tide charts. We revelled in the ever-changing play of light, clouds and colors, the roar and crash of the ocean, the thrill of sighting our first whale (practically on our doorstep and too huge to be considered for gefülte fish). Our productivity soared.
And then the rains came. Port Angeles hit the headlines, thanks to nature. The surging breakers surged up to our picture windows, around the house to the woodpile and patio, and under the foundation. Saltwater flooded the well and the overflow took up residence in the septic tank — and guess what couldn’t flush. Once again — Toxicsland.
Why does such a primitive infrastructure afflict the waterfront estates of Washington’s fabled Northwest Passages? A little matter of ideology. Too many country-dwellers up here are cantankerous, anti-social individualists, and, from the time their forebears stole the beaches from the Indians, they scorned cooperative ventures with their neighbors to build civilized water and sewage systems. So contaminated water and regurgitative toilets coexist with huge cable TV antennas and computerized microwave ovens.
Weary of deluges and medieval technologies, we occasionally sought respite in Sequim, a quaint and prosperous retirement village near Dungeness and the juicy crabs. Soon the news stories broke — controversy with Indians over clam digging on Sequim Bay. Tribal harvesting of shellfish is a treaty right, but the Chamber of Commerce was in a stew over it, hungry to make chowder of the Jamestown Klallam Tribe.
“Weren’t you lucky to find hideaways for five months?”
Yes and no. We had a taste of living amidst natural grandeur that everyone should know. But there is no fairyland, no peace, no harmony anyplace in a profit-obsessed capitalist orbit that breeds nuclear warships and warlike neo-nazis and rural idiots. The world is too much with us, wherever.