Recently, via Facebook, I learned that my close childhood friend, Matt, had died. This came as an unexpected jolt, but as I hadn’t seen Matt since the end of middle school, I just tried to shake it off and move on. After all, I’d lost a more recent friend just two weeks before and was already feeling dizzy and cut up.
Still, there’s really no emotional off switch, and in truth the news had me reeling. I’d heard nothing from Matt for decades, other than that his older brother, Mike, who was also my friend as a kid, had died some years earlier. Suicide, I was told, with a narrative worthy of a grand, tragic novel. But that’s a story for another time.
Despite being out of contact with Matt since 1985, social media worked its magic, and suddenly, just about two years ago, he was back in my orbit. He friended me on Facebook and regularly connected, usually through messages, often at odd hours. He told me that he had been married, but that things had gone south. From the tone of his missives, I could sense something was off. I gathered he was living with his parents, grasping at the soil for all it was worth, while the world spun faster and faster. Despite this, his messages were curious and almost innocent in their sweetness. He saw that I raised animals, and told me about his favorite cat. He was genuinely interested in where I was and what I was doing. He said that he’d like to see me if I ever came home.
“Home,” he said.
*
The Nisqually River pours forth from the icy slide of the Nisqually Glacier on Mt. Rainier (Tahoma, to the natives), the biggest volcanic peak in the Cascade Range. The river tumbles 81 miles westward before slithering out into Puget Sound at Nisqually Valley, a wide delta between Olympia and Tacoma. This is where I grew up. This was my home.
The Valley as I knew it was a stretched-out hand of land bordered by spring-fed McCallister Creek to the south and the glacial flow of Nisqually River to the north. In between was farmland, suburban enclaves, and trailer parks —expansive stretches of mobile hopelessness that housed the poorest residents. Just north was Fort Lewis, one of the most populous military installations in the USA. Many of those enlisted folks and their families chose to live in the trailer parks just south of the base, rather than rely on the notoriously run-down base housing.
Relatively speaking, I had it pretty good. I grew up on a cul-de-sac appropriately named “Memory Court,” which itself lay among the strip of homes on 7th Avenue. Mike and Matt lived just across the way. I suppose we could say on that we were on the good side of the tracks in a place that had no tracks. Of course the top of the valley was host to magnificent homes with magnificent views of Mt. Rainier, the South Sound, and beyond — great, cliff-set estates with windows that reflected the sun as much as the lives of all of us proles grinding away in the dirt below.
But this was land wrested away from native people to begin with. Nisqually Chief Leschi signed the Treaty of Medicine Creek (which flowed behind Mike and Matt’s house), ceding much of what we now call Western Washington to the US government. When the government reneged and he went on the warpath, he was captured and hanged for his efforts. A lonely stone plaque still sits in the grass alongside the old Pacific Highway, proudly marking Governor Isaac Stevens’ triumph in “negotiation,” ignored by everyone who drives past or emerges from the Korean-owned mini mart and gas station just next door.
Of course the Indian tears run deep, but it’s still Indian country. I had a few native friends early on, but soon a tribal school was built, and those buddies of my proto-youth were bussed down the road to learn about their own ways, history, and culture. Of course we knew nothing of this. We just knew they were removed, that they were different, and the racist cancer of our elders quickly took root and grew.
Soon our former friends who passed by in their special Indian bus were met with derision. We happily whooped and performed mock rain dances as they rolled by, their own nascent hatred hardened by our flame throwers of ignorance. We only did this because somehow, in our minds, we thought they had betrayed us by moving schools. Oh, how the irony of history is lost on its children.
Growing up in the Valley, death was all around us. The first person I knew to go was Thomas, one of my original Indian friends. I remember coming home to my father stringing up Christmas lights in our house when he broke the news that Thomas had died in a car crash. That he was driving, at 14 years of age, rolled his car and hit a tree. I would pass that tough ass tree hundreds of times after that. It bore the burn marks for years.
Joey, was next, a beautiful teenage boy with curly dark locks. He jumped from the train trestle into the river channel below —the valley’s ultimate test of manhood —never to emerge from the broiling brown waters.
To me the river meant death. Every summer we’d heard the cry of sirens as they made their way down to its banks. We came to count the minutes from the local station to the trestle. If it was a long call, it was likely a drowning, because almost nothing else took an ambulance all the way to the sand reaches of the Nisqually but a drowning.
This was military country as well. The soundtrack of my youth was the bone rattle of artillery; if often shook the greeting cards and figurines off the shelves. Flares would often splash out the night sky with an amber flood of light around orbs floating like incandescent jellyfish. Heavy machine gun fire was just a constant in the far, far distance. The river was the barrier, serving as the boundary of the base; the actual shooting happened far from there, but civilization just ended on the north bank of the river. Most of us never even considered probing deeply into that tangle.
But death was everywhere. That was just how it was for us valley rats. I remember a natural spring up the Pacific Highway on the Ft. Lewis side. Local families used to make the trek to collect the sweet, cool water. One such group lost their little girl to speeding car that clipped her on the shoulder of the road as they collected their plastic jugs full of mountain water. I hiked to the spot with Matt just days later, only to stare at the map of brown blood soaked into the pavement, swarmed by gangs of tiny black ants.
Despite this ever-creeping specter of death, the Valley was largely a happy place to grow up, at least for most of us. It was a lush sprawl of woods, pastures, and creeks just begging for exploration. We were all outfitted with BMX bikes and spent our days and much of our nights peddling the streets and scurrying along trails we’d carved out through the impenetrable thickets of blackberry bushes or undergrowth.
This was the 1980’s, before the umbilical cord cell phones or the fun-killing scourge of the helicopter parent. We were set free upon a massive playground — both natural and man made —and every day was an adventure accordingly. Sure, we were given times to come back home, which we largely stuck to; otherwise we were reeled in by the echo of our parents’ voices calling out into the dark, where hopefully we were in earshot.
We were industrious little fuckers, especially with shovels. We mainly went to work in a multi-acre undeveloped lot adjacent to our houses made up of tall grass, stinging nettles, alder, Douglas fir, and the ever-present blooms of thorny blackberry. We landscaped a BMX track complete with berms and a jump, where Matt managed to break his leg after hitting the ramp with too much velocity.
We then turned our shovels to digging; at first we just dug several pits in the hopes of finding fossils or gold. Eventually we tunneled horizontally into the earth a good fifteen feet, with flimsy plywood and two-by-four supports that would really do nothing in the case of a collapse. This project was eventually shut down by my friend Brian’s father when we saw just what a death trap we had created.
Our greatest creation was a tree house of sorts that we built over the bubbling effluviant flow of Medicine Creek at the edge of Mike and Matt’s property. A tree growing sideways out from the bank offered up two strong limbs just feet above the brown waters; once again, employing two-by-fours, nails, and cheap plywood, we constructed a platform using the limbs as a support. This served as our secret gathering place, a kind of open-air clubhouse in the shade of the gully far from the eyes of any adults. Here we were free to cuss, spit, and act like the badasses we so wanted to be.
This Eden was short-lived however. The father of the family on the other side of the creek (devout Jehova’s Witnesses) took exception to our project, as it technically crossed the property line into their horse pasture. One day we approached our secret fort, only to discover a pile of ruin. The dad had ripped the whole thing down and thrown the mutilated remains back onto our side of the creek. We took this to be nothing short of pure violation and reacted with rage, howling at the sky.
I cursed Jehova’s name, screaming from my guts that he was “living cow shit.” I was later horrified to learn that “Jehova” was just another name for the same God that my very Catholic family worshipped, and spent years fearing that I would be roasted by the flames of Hell for my deep blasphemy. After all, I had broken the Third Commandment something fierce and I’d be lying if I said that there’s not at least a tiny part of me that still sweats it today.
Explosives and fire leap into my mind when thinking back of my childhood in the valley. Of course the constant rumbling of the guns of Ft. Lewis is part of this, but there was also our proximity to Frank’s Landing, the outpost of the Nisqually Indian Reservation just a mile and half down the road from us. In addition to tax-free smokes and booze, they sold unregulated fireworks for a good month before the 4th of July, and sometimes after. This meant that our street and the land around it became a veritable war zone for a good six weeks out of the year.
Black Cats, Jumping Jacks, bottle rockets, M-80’s and M-100’s —these were all in the arsenal —technically illegal but that never stopped us from blowing the shit out of everything we cold. At first we’d just light off these firecrackers for explosion’s sake, but soon grew bored and would blow up cans and bottles and fruit and tennis balls.
One summer Brian got the idea to construct guns by drilling a hole in lengths of metal pipe and nailing them to pieces of two-by-four, a true technological level-up in our ongoing fireworks war. We’d pluck the baby apples from myriad trees around our houses and stuff them into the front end of the pipe. We’d then put a firecracker in the hole, light it, point, and shoot, like a miniature musket. The embryonic apple would fly out a good fifteen or twenty feet, and could even leave a welt.
Of course there were more targets for our explosives than each other. One time I accompanied Mike and Matt to the big field where we caught a garter snake. Matt lit a firecracker, stuffed it in its mouth, which blew the pitiful creature apart with predicable results. Matt was spattered by mini-droplets of snake blood, which his mom detected as soon as he went home. She was an animal-lover who kept six or seven cats and was rightfully horrified by our cruelty. Both Mike and Matt were grounded for two weeks, while I was haunted with the gory image of that poor, split-open little snake.
We were little shits, without a doubt, though this was no doubt exacerbate by Mike and Matt, who possessed a certain wildness that was contagious. As we got older, we spent more time prowling around after dark, and our antics escalated. One of our favorite night time missions was to sneak across the cow pasture that separated the actual houses on our road from the white trash backwater of Claudia’ Mobile Home Park.
Directly across from the road from the barbed-wire border of the pasture was the catastrophe of a little trailer occupied by a woman we all called “Wombat,” along with her shifting number of grandchildren. Wombat was a wild-eyed old mama with maybe six teeth left in her mouth. She was rawhide tough, scary and mean —the culmination of a life of hardship and ruin —with a shrill, growling voice that sounded like a rusty wheat thresher.
We would tiptoe up to the side of the road, reach under the barbed wire, grab handfuls of tiny rocks, and launch them at the side of her trailer, which pelted the cheap aluminum siding like so much grapeshot. As soon as we saw her porch light zap on we’d turn tail and sprint, zigzagging and stumbling through waves of laugher. We’d then hear her door swing open, followed by her buzz saw voice:
“GODDAMMIT YOU LITTLE SHITS! I’M CALLING THE SHERIFF! DO YA HEAR??? GODDAMIT!!!”
Wombat met every one of our attacks with this screaming threat, a primal rage into the night from a woman who life had continually slapped down. As kids, our empathy meters were still being calibrated; at no point did we realize that our gravel attacks were a kind of torture. We were only concerned with the thrill of the mission, punctuated by the sharp banshee howl of her invariable rage.
We soon got bored with bombarding Wombat’s trailer, however, and decided on a new form of destructive chaos. At this time, most all of our homes were heated by wood stoves. Our families would buy cords of wood every fall, which we’d split, stack, and then bring in each night for the fire. One night Mike got the idea to take some of this split wood and fuck with the drivers on the road where we lived.
I thought this a great idea, if only to get back at the cars that had taken so many dog lives on that road. 7th Avenue itself was a maybe quarter mile straightaway that people treated as their personal drag strip. The result was a lot of dead dogs, including three puppies in a row that we’d taken in. This constant killing crushed my dog-loving heart; it was almost too much to bear.
The worst was when my best friend Bobby’s beautiful golden lab “Ranger” was taken out head on, right in front of us, by yet another asshole driving way too fast. Bobby collapsed at the side of the road and cradled his beloved friend in his arms, while blood seeped forth from Ranger’s nose and mouth. The fat, orange-haired driver just stood there and stupidly stared. I hated that road and I hated the cars on it and was more than happy to exact some form of revenge.
We each grabbed a couple pieces of split wood and walked where Medicine Creek crossed under via an underground culvert. This was the one spot on 7th Avenue without any streetlights, and with the tree canopy overhead it was ink dark. We then lined up the chunks of log tip to tip across both lanes of the road, retreated into the bushes nearby and waited.
Soon we heard a car gunning it from the far end of the strip. It opened up the gas, screaming down the road, heading right into our trap. As the headlights poured over the black asphalt and into the bushes where we crouched, we didn’t know if they’d light up the logs bisecting the street itself enough for the driver to see. Just as we hoped, they didn’t.
WHABAM! WHABAM!
As the car cruised over the logs, the front wheel kicked the hunks of wood into the vehicle’s chassis with shocking force.
SCRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!
The car skidded to halt and sat in the road, idling. Our hearts thumped in our throats, as we heard it kick into reverse, only to stop just feet from our hiding spot. We then made out the creak of an opening door, followed by feet hitting the pavement.
“If I catch one of you motherfuckers, I’ll KILL YOU! YOU UNDERSTAND???”
With that we shot out of our hiding spot into our escape route, the rabbit warren of trails taking us through the woods, across the back of Brian’s property, and into the pasture in front of Claudia’s. From there we could double back and reset the logs after our unseen nemesis was gone.
Our plan worked like this every time. Most cars would hit the wood, stop, and drive on. Others would stop and threaten us, but no one ever caught us. Hearing those logs slam into the bottoms of those cars was immensely gratifying. It really felt like I was somehow striking back at this beast of a road that had taken so much, but I would have never done it on my own. I have Mike and Matt to thank. Like I said, their wild streak was catching.
It was the Thurston County Sheriff who put an end to our log antics. After enough drivers called the cops, they decided to canvass the local houses in search of what were sure to be juvenile culprits. Mine was the first, and as soon as I was face to face with two fully-uniformed and outfitted representatives of the hammer of the state, I broke.
It was a moment of pure cowardice. I didn’t even try to lie, but immediately confessed and gave up all of my friends —Bobby, Brian, Mike, and Matt. Mike had told me to keep quiet if the cops came around, to deny it all, but my mettle was weak, and I sang like a diva.
I’m not sure if Mike or Matt ever really forgave me for narc’ing them out. I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t, as it was a true betrayal. In the end none of us were punished legally, but all of us had to face the wrath of our parents. I was let off easy for coming clean so fast, while Mike and Matt were met with more grounding, their folks’ consequence of choice.
There are so many more stories of life in the Valley, stories that I hope to tell in the future, and stories that everyone else who came of age in that crazy place will hopefully keep alive. This is just a taste of it, but losing both Mike and Matt well before their time has caused these memories to crystallize. I’m gutted that they’re both gone, but this knowledge has propelled me to begin mining these stories.
Shortly after learning of Matt’s passing, I was chatting with Frank, another Valley kid from my era, who will surely appear in any future writing I have about the place. I hadn’t connected with Frank since my early teens, and we spent an hour just catching up and exchanging memories via this miracle of social media. At the end of our chat I felt all the better for it. Frank thanked me for taking the time to reconnect, and all I could say was, “Hey man, us valley rats gotta stick together.”
(Originally published on Medium, December, 2018)
Great writing, all this PNW writing has me inspired haha
Haha it wasn't so bad