A FALL '87 Z f. X Sept- A HISTORY OF SEXUALITY 1 10 27 A PERFORMA world premiere with new video, 1 4 I music, performance and text from THEATER X I • ' and NEW CITY. Wed-Sun. 8 pm/$8.& $5. • ' Get in on it. Subscribe. Call 467-6000. Nov. 12Dec. 7 Sept 22- Nov 24 Dec. 14 Late- Nite Oct. 8-31 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LITTLE BABY DILLER? A new musical from Seattle artist Bruce Hurlbut presented in a nightclub setting. A world premiere. Wed-Sun 8 pm / $8. & $5. BLUE WINDOW A haunting comedy from American playwright Craig Lucas. A NW premiere. Wed-Sun 8 pm / $8.&$5. NEW JAZZ/NEW CITY #2 EARSHOT presents 10 concerts of NWjazz, every Tues at 8 pm. Sept. 14-Monday night programs from 911 Every Sat at 10:30 pm - THE LIFE & TIMES OF BABY M. plus new work in dance, music, video theatre, $.99 admission. NEW CITY THEATER 1634 11TH AVE 323-6800 ’ ANGRY HOUSEWIVES ’FIFTH SMASH YEAR' CALL PIONEER SQUARE THEATER 622-2016 512 Second Avenue Seattle, WA 98104 2 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1987
ECOCOMPLACENCY Account Representative— Washington Philip Minehan Ad Production Stacey Fletcher, Qualitype, Robert Williamson Typesetting Harrison Typesetting, Inc., Lee Emmett, Marmilmar, Qualitype Camerawork Tim Braun, Craftsman Lithoplate, Inc. Cover Photographer Bill Bachhuber Cover Separations Portland Prep Center, Inc. Printing Tualatin-Yamhill Press Thanks Judy & Stew Albert, Dave Ball, Randy Clark, Helen DeMichiel, Dru Duniway, Jeannine Edelblut, Camille Gage, Anne Hughes, Maria Kahn, Craig Karp, Deborah Levin, Peggy Lindquist, Kimbark MacColl, David Madson, Julie Mancini, Theresa Marquez, Melissa Marsland, Doug Milholland, Kevin Mulligan, Julie Phillips, Sherry Prowda, Jeremy Rice, Julie Ristau, Missy Stewart, Sandy Wallsmith, John Wanberg, The Clinton 500 f t Artist Claudia Cave, a native and resident of Salem, Oregon, won First Place in the Illustration category of this year’s regional Sigma Delta Chi competition with her drawing for “Return of the Skunk” in the Fall 1985 CSQ . She is represented by Portland’s Laura Russo Gallery. This is a self-portrait. EThe Clinton St. Quarterly is published in 3 ! Oregon, Washington and National edi- 5 . tions by CSQ—A Project of Out of the 5 ! Ashes Press. Oregon address: P.O. Box 5 3588, Portland, OR 97208—(503) J222-6039. Washington address: 1520 j ; Western Avenue, Seattle, WA. 98101— ) j (206) 682-2404. Unless otherwise ! [ noted, all contents copyright ®1987 j • Clinton St. Quarterly. W. At Play in the Paradise of Bombs— £ Scott Russell Sanders Growing up among war machines and trapped animals in the near-mythic Arsenal in Ohio. Beyond Sanctions: U.S. Policy and the Reagan Doctrine— Ronald Walters Another approach to bringing apartheid to its knees—an alliance with the frontline states. & ■recently attended a concert, “Of Time and Rivers Flowing,” sponsored by Boeing and Weyerhauser, along with REI and Pacific Northwest magazine. Mason Williams, the Oregon-based composer of “Classical Gas, ” led his group in a cycle of songs about water. The music’s content neither challenged nor demanded. Its message, rather, stroked, soothed and lulled. In conclusion, the announcers thanked the corporate sponsors for caring so much about this region of which they were a part. They praised the audience as well for our noble concern, insisting that we did indeed care because the mountains taught us how. I’m not demeaning the Cascades, the Columbia, the back country trails, or even the equipment that allows ordinary mortals to view what this corner of the earth was like before we came to inhabit it. Paying heed to what humans did not create may give us that sense of the sacred that, as poet Gary Snyder writes, “helps take us out of our little selves, into the larger self to the whole universe.” The wildflowers on Mount Rainier do not erase the import of Bangor and Boeing, Bremerton, Ft. Lewis or the anti-submarine warfare My Sexual Scrapbook John Callahan Sexual pioneer and chroni Callahan unbares all. Another in his series of real-life, no- holds-barred adventures. Rated XX. ... or not to Smokt Cynthia Morgan One woman's hum memoirs of a life up in smoke. Should you take a puff? Not unless you want to live with your own Throat Monster. preparations at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics lab. We mislead ourselves if we believe we are morally superior for merely living in a place where the mountains are in bloom. The best of environmental activists recognize this and work accordingly. Yet too often we accept the image of the mist rising from clear mountain lakes to indicate that all is well. Think of The Nature Company, which stocks whale pictures, travel guides and expensive animal toys—whose bookshelves hold nothing on Hanford or toxic waste, because that is the realm of politics. REI stores now sell designer trailwear in ten different states, but the cooperative is similiarly shy about going beyond helping individuals consume wilderness experiences to pose questions regarding responsibility to a broader world. Group Health, once a pioneering medical alternative cooperative, an institution continually cited as exemplifying the best of our Northwest values, recently forced the disbanding of a “Nuclear Awareness Special Interest Group” among employees and members which had begun to question Hanford, and thereby threatened backlash against a newly opened TriCities affiliate. The Washington Environmental Council endorsed Scoop Oregon Boy Bur Kremlin— Walt Curtis John Reed, a native son who shot out of the Northwest to early literary fame and death, was the true-life star of Reds. Diet for a Change- Peter Carroll Francis Moore Lappe, for her Diet for a Small Planet, reveals her sources and her recipe for democracy. Jackson's final election campaign, because he brought us national parks along with our submarine bases. In the same spirit, the local Sierra Club backed the recent election of Congressman John Miller—endorsing him as a rare environmentally concerned Republican while ignoring his support of Star Wars, Contra aid and continued nuclear testing—quite possibly making the difference in a campaign decided by just a few thousand votes. The mountains may well speak with a powerful voice, but if so we need to be their interpreters. Nature nearby has not yet challenged what we have created, and allowed to be created, within its bounty. In as much as we view it solely offering individual experience-escape or therapeutic solace—we risk blurring fundamental lessons regarding that larger whole of which we are a minute part. That our region's beauty comes so cheaply and easily is a mixed blessing. Such an environment may breed its own particular brand of complacency, one embodying no more vision or courage than that carried by our worst stereotypes of drunken Texan rednecks with twenty gallon hats and fifteen gallon bellies. We may be fine climbers, hikers and canoers. But we need to stand strongly in the world as well. Paul Loeb Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 3
Seattle Central Community College's Broadway Performance Hall performances 8 pm • Free Parking. BREITENBUSH HEALING RETREAT COMMUNITY > CONFERENCE CENTER D A N C E Jeff Bickford F E S T I V A L By subscribing to ALLEGRO! you receive guaranteed tickets at 8 shows for $56.00, a savings of more than 25%. Subscribers pay $7 per ticket. General admission is $9.50 per ticket. Long Nguyen Weekly Allegro!— “A { world where art- ists . . . may j find space to j create dance that’s powerful j and poignant and restorative. ” (The October 29-31 Klauniada Movement Theatre November 4 -8 Robert Davidson Llory Wilson Choreographers ' Thomas A rth u r^tf r Ingrid Hurlen Gregg Lh The ALLEGRO! Dance Festival is a forum where choreographers are free to create and focus all their energies on their art. ALLEGRO! gives you the exciting opportunity to participate in the evolution of this contemporary art form. Subscribe now to ALLEGRO! ’S fifth season ofpresenting Seattle’s finest modern dance. I Use your Mastercard or Visa to order by phone. Call weekdays 32-DANCE (323-2623) I Dates Workshop or Seminar Presenters Price AUG. 28-30 Oregon School of Massage $100 SEPT. 11-16 Women’s Vipassana Julie Webster $27/day 11-13 Follow Your Heart Melanie &Jack Crocker $150 18-20 Sixth Annual Breitenbush Herbal Retreat $175 20-26 The Power or Reiki and Phil Morgan & Marta Rebirthing Getty $550 25-27 The Man Passionate John Darling & Lee (For men only) Schnitze $115 25-27 Awakening to the Heart of the Feminine Judith Tripp & Crystal Surrenda $165 OCT. 2-4 Channeling Steve Durfois $135 2-4 A Course in Miracles Charley Thweatt & Robert Varley $110 2-4 Yoga and Health Shoshanan Thielle $150 8-10 The Healer Within Raymond Diaz, ND $295 9-11 Beyond the Power Peg Mayo & Linda Struggle Carroll $200 9-11 Energy Medicine Dr. Ullman & Reichenberg $150 9-11 Creating Successful Relationships Donna Miller $220 15-20 Women Spirit Gathering Gai & Native Grandmothers $135 23-25 Oregon Massage Technicians Association Annual Conference $100 Oct. 29Nov. 1 Wild Mushroom Gathering $150 Reservations necessary. For information & registration, please contact: BREITENBUSH P.O. Box 578, Detroit OR 97342'- 503- 854-3501, 854-3314 ARTISTS! ON THE BOARDS IS NOW SEEKING PERFORMANCE PROPOSALS FOR THE 1988 NORTHWEST NEW WORKS FESTIVAL. DEADLINE OCTOBER 1. CALL 325-7901 FOR INFORMATION. NOW OPEN!!! Next to Pioneer Square Theater's "Angry Housewives" at the foot of historic Smith Tower... CAFE Serving Lunch - Dinner Cocktails - Expresso Special Bar Menu Reservations 624-5987 Weekdays 11 A.M.-2 A.M. Weekends 4 P.M.-2 A.M. ART SHOWS: JULY - Art Messer / AUGUST - Wallace Baird STAGE LEFT CAFE — 508 2nd Avenue in PIONEER SQUARE SPECIAL AFTER THEATER HAPPY HOUR 10-12 4 Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987
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AT PLAY IN THE PARADISE OF BOMBS Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 His flat voice ricocheted against the rolled-up windows of the back seat where I huddled beside my sister. I hid my face in the upholstery, to erase the barbed wire and tanks and mirror-eyed soldier, and tried to wind myself into a ball as tight as the fist of fear in my stomach. By and by, our car eased forward into the Arsenal, the paradise of bombs. This was in April of 1951, in Ohio. We had driven north from Tennessee, where spring had already burst the buds of trees and cracked the flowers open. Up here on the hem of Lake Erie the earth was bleak with snow. I had been told about northern winters, but in the red clay country south of Memphis I had seen only occasional flurries, harmless as confetti, never this smothering quilt of white. My mother had been crying since Kentucky. Sight of the Arsenal’s fences and guard shacks looming out of the snow brought her misery to the boil. “It's like a concentration camp,” she whispered to my father. I had no idea what she meant. I was not quite six, born two months after the gutting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, My birth sign was the mushroom cloud. “It looks exactly like those pictures of the German camps,” she lamented. Back in Tennessee, the strangers who had bought our farm were snipping bouquets from her garden. Those strangers had inherited everything—the barn and jittery cow, the billy goat fond of cornsilks, the crops of beans BY SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS ILLUSTRATION BY LOUISE WILLIAMS MY FATHER STOPPED OUR CAR. HE LEANED OUT THE WINDOW AND HANDED THE GUARD SOME PAPERS WHICH MY MOTHER HAD BEEN NERVOUSLY CLUTCHING. “WITH THAT LICENSE PLATE, I HAD YOU PEGGED FOR VISITORS,” SAID THE GUARD. “BUT I SEE YOU’VE COME TO STAY.” WICE A MAN’S HEIGHT AND TOPPED BY STRANDS OF BARBED WIRE, A CHAIN-LINK FENCE STRETCHED FOR MILES ALONG THE HIGHWAY LEADING UP TO THE MAIN GATE OF THE ARSENAL. BESIDE THE GATE WERE TANKS, HULKING DINOSAURS OF STEEL, ONE ON EACH SIDE, THEIR LONG MUZZLES SLANTING DOWN TO CATCH TRESPASSERS IN A CROSS-FIRE. A SOLDIER EMERGED FROM THE GATEHOUSE, GUN ON HIP, SILVERED SUNGLASSES BLANKING HIS EYES.
and potatoes already planted, the creek bottom cleared of locust trees, the drawling voices of neighbors, the smell of cotton dust. My father had worked through the Second World War at a munitions plant near his hometown in Mississippi. Now his company, hired by the Pentagon to run this Ohio Arsenal, was moving him north to supervise the production lines where artillery shells and land mines and bombs were loaded with explosives. Later I would hear stories about those loadlines. The concrete floors were so saturated with TNT that any chance spark would set off a quake. The workers used tools of brass to guard against sparks, but every now and again a careless chump would drop a pocket knife or shell casing, and lose a leg. Once a forklift dumped a pallet of barrels and blew out an entire factory wall, along with three munitions loaders. In 1951 I was too young to realize that what had brought on all this bustle in our lives was the war in Korea; too green to notice which way the political winds were blowing. Asia was absorbing bullets and bombs as quickly as the Arsenal could ship them. At successive news conferences, President Truman meditated aloud on whether or not to spill the Bomb—the sip of planetary hemlock- over China. Senator McCarthy was denouncing Reds from every available podium, pinning a single handy label on THE CONCRETE FLOORS WERE SO SATURATED WITH TNT THAT ANY CHANCE SPARK WOULD SET OFF A QUAKE. EVERY NOW AND AGAIN A CARELESS CHUMP WOULD DROP A POCKET KNIFE OR SHELL CASING, AND LOSE A LEG. all the bugbears of the nation. Congress had recently passed bills designed to hamstring unions and slam the doors of America in the faces of immigrants. The Soviet Union had detonated its own atomic weapons, and the search was on for the culprits who had sold our secret. How else but through treachery could such a benighted nation ever have built such a clever bomb? In the very month of our move to the Arsenal, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death. Too late, J. Robert Oppenheimer was voicing second thoughts about the weapon he had helped build. In an effort to preserve our lead in the race toward oblivion, our scientists were perfecting the hydrogen bomb. Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 7
We rolled to our new home in the Arsenal over the impossible snow, between parking lots filled with armored troop carriers, jeeps, strafing helicopters, wheeled howitzers, bulldozers, Sherman tanks, all the brawny machines of war. On the front porch of our Memphis home I had read Gl Joe comic books, and so I knew the names and shapes of these death-dealing engines. In the gaudy cartoons the soldiers had seemed like two- legged chunks of pure glory, muttering speeches between bursts on their machine guns, clenching the pins of grenades between their dazzling teeth. Their weapons had seemed like tackle worthy of gods. But as we drove between those parking lots crowded with real tanks, past guard houses manned by actual soldiers, a needle of dread pierced my brain. Thirty years later the needle is still there, and is festering. I realize now that in moving from a scrape-dirt farm in Tennessee to a munitions factory in Ohio I had leaped overnight from the nineteenth century into the heart of the twentieth. I had landed in a place that concentrates the truth about our condition more potently than any metropolis or suburb. If, one hundred years from now, there are still human beings capable of thinking about the past, and if they turn their sights on our own time, what they will see through the cross hairs of memory will be a place very like the Arsenal, a fenced wilderness devoted to the building and harboring of the instruments of death. DANGER. RESTRICTED AREA! __ ur house was one of the twenty white frame ■ ■ boxes arrayed in a circle I K about a swatch of lawn. J Originally built for the high-ranking military brass, some of these --------------------government quarters now also held civilians—the doctors assigned to the base hospital, the engineers who carried slide-rules dangling from their belts, the accountants and supervisors, the managerial honchos. In our children’s argot, this hoop of houses became the Circle, the beginning and ending point of all our journeys. Like campers drawn up around a fire, like wagons wound into a fearful ring, the houses faced inward on the Circle, as if to reassure the occupants, for immediately outside that tamed hoop the forest began, a tangled, beast-haunted woods stretching for miles in every direction. Through our front door I looked out on mowed grass, flower boxes, parked cars, the curves of concrete, the wink of windows. From the back door I saw only trees, bare dark bones thrust up from the snow in that first April, snarled green shadows in all the following summers. Not many nights after we had settled in, I glimpsed a white-tailed deer lurking along the edge of that woods out back, the first of thousands I would see over the years. The Arsenal was a sanctuary for deer, I soon learned, and also for beaver, fox, turkey, geese, every manner of beast smaller than wolves and bears. Protected by that chain-link fence, which kept out hunters and woodcutters as well as spies, the animals had multiplied to THE ARSENAL WAS A SANCTUARY FOR DEER AND EVERY MANNER OF BEAST SMALLER THAN WOLVES AND BEARS. PROTECTED BY THAT CHAIN-LINK FENCE, WHICH KEPT OUT HUNTERS AS WELL AS SPIES, THE ANIMALS HAD MULTIPLIED TO VERY NEARLY THEIR ANCIENT NUMBERS. very nearly their ancient numbers, and the trees grew thick and old until they died with their roots on. So throughout my childhood I had a choice of where to play—inside the charmed Circle or outside in the wild thickets. Viewed on a map against Ohio’s bulldozed land, the Arsenal was only a tiny patch of green, about thirty square miles; some of it had been pasture as recently as ten years earlier, when the government bought the land. It was broken up by airstrips and bunkers and munitions depots; guards cruised its perimeter and bored through its heart twenty-four hours a day. But to my young eyes it seemed like an unbounded wilderness. The biggest parcel of land for the Arsenal had belonged to a U.S. senator, who—in the selfless tradition of public servants— grew stinking rich from the sale. The rest was purchased from farmers, some of them descendants of the hardbitten New England folks who had settled that corner of Ohio, most of them reluctant to move. One of the old-timers refused to budge from his house until the wrecking crew arrived, and then he slung himself from a noose tied to a rafter in his barn. By the time I came along to investigate, all that remained of his place was a crumbling silo; but I found it easy to imagine him strung up there, roped to his roofbeam, riding his ship as it went down. Every other year or so, the older children would string a scarecrow from a rafter in one of the few surviving barns, and then lead the younger children- in for a grisly look. I only fell for the trick once, but the image of that dangling husk is burned into my mind. Rambling through the Arsenal’s twenty-one thousand acres, at first in the safe back seats of our parents’ cars, then on bicycles over the gravel roads, and later on foot through the backcountry, we children searched out the ruins of those abandoned farms. Usually the buildings had been torn down and carted away, and all that remained were the cellar holes half-filled with rubble, the skewed limestone foundations, the stubborn flowers. What used to be lawns were grown up in sumac, maple, blackberry. The rare concrete walks and driveways were shattered, sown to ferns, Moss grew in the chiseled names of the dead on headstones in backyard cemeteries. We could spy a house site in the spring by the blaze on jonquils, the blue fountain of lilacs, the forsythia and starry columbine; in the summer by roses; in the fall by the glow of mums and zinnias. Asparagus and rhubarb kept pushing up through the meadows. The blasted orchards kept squeezing out plums and knotty apples and bee-thick pears. From the cellar holes wild grapevines twisted up to en- snarl the shade trees. In the ruins we discovered marbles, bottles, the bone handles of knives, the rusty heads of hammers, and the tips of plows. And we dug up keys by the fistful, keys of brass and black iron, skeleton keys to ghostly doors. We gathered the fruits of other people’s planting, staggering home with armfuls of flowers, sprays of pussywillow and bittersweet, baskets of berries, our faces sticky with juice. Even where the army’s poisons had been dumped, nature did not give up. Ina remote corner of the Arsenal, on land which had been used as a Boy Scout camp before the war, the ground was so filthy with the discarded makings of bombs that not even guards would go there. But we children went, lured on by the scarlet warning signs. DANGER. RESTRICTED AREA. The skull-and- crossbones aroused in us dreams of pirates. We found the log huts overgrown with vines, the swimming lake a bog of algae and cattails, the stone walls scattered by the heave of frost. The only scrap of metal we discovered was a bell, its clapper rusted solid to the rim. In rm- bone marrow I carry traces of the poison from that graveyard of bombs, as we all carry a smidgen of radioactivity from every atomic blast. Perhaps at this very moment one of those alien molecules, like a grain of sand in an oyster, is irritating some cell in my body, or in your body, to fashion a pearl of cancer. Poking about in the ruins of camp and farms, I felt a wrestle of emotions, half sick with loss, half exultant over the return of forest. It was terrifying and at the same time comforting to see how quickly the green wave lapped over the human remains, scouring away the bold marks of occupation. The displaced farmers, gone only a decade, had left scarcely more trace than the ancient Indians who had heaped up burial mounds in this territory. We hunted for Indian treasure, too, digging in every suspicious hillock until our arms ached. We turned up shards of pottery, iridescent shells, fiery bits of flint; but never any bones. The best arrow points and ax-heads we invariably discovered not by looking, but by chance, when jumping over a creek or scratching in the dirt with a bare incurious toe. This was my first lesson in the Zen of seeing, seeing by not-looking. With or without looking, we constantly stumbled across the more common variety of mound in the arsenal, the humpbacked bunkers where munitions were stored. Implausibly enough, they were called igloos. There were rows and rows of them, strung out along rail beds like lethal beads. Over the concrete vaults grass had been planted, so that from the air, glimpsed by enemy bombers, they would look like undulating hills. Sheep kept them mowed. The signs surrounding the igloos were larger and more strident than those warning us to keep away from the waste dumps. These we respected, for we feared that even a heavy footfall on the grassy roof of a bunker might set it off. Three of four had blown up over the years, from clumsy handling or the quirk of chemicals. Once a jet trainer crashed into a field of them and skidded far enough to trigger a pair. These numbers multiplied in our minds, until we imagined the igloos popping like corn. No, no, they were set far enough apart to avoid a chain reaction if one should explode, my father assured me. But in my reckoning the munitions bunkers were vaults of annihilation. I stubbornly believed that one day they all would blow, touc'hed off by lightning, maybe, or by an enemy agent. Whenever I stole past those fields of bunkers or whenever they drifted like a flotilla of green humpbacked whales through my dreams, I imagined fire leaping from one to another, the spark flying outward to consume the whole creation. This poison I also carry in my bones, this conviction that we build our lives in mine fields. Long before I learned what new sort of bombs had devoured Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I knew from creeping among those igloos full of old-fashioned explosives that, on any given day, someone else’s reckless step might consume us all. GI’s AGAINST THE UNIVERSE f course we played constantly at war. How could we avoid it? At the five-and-dime we bought soldiers, their fists molded permanently around machine guns and grenades, their faces frozen into expressions of bravery or bloodlust. They were all men, all except the weaponless nurse who stood with uplifted lantern to inspect the 0 ZENITH SUPPLIES PICCOLO'S 5301 Roosevelt Way NE 522-8828 “Pies to Fly” - Piccolo's is Seattle's finest gourmet Pizzeria, serving over 30 toppings including steak, lamb, bacon, spinach, fata cheeae. All Ingredients are fresh, including our dough, which is hand-spun daily using whole wheat flour. Y o u r well-being is our business. We carry products to help you feel good: massage equipment health care supplies, books, crystals, VITA-LITES and relaxation products of all kinds. Our New Age music selection is the largest in the Northwest — over 600 titles AND you can listen before you buy. Send $1.00 for our catalog 6319 Roosevelt Way NS • Seattle, WA • 98115 • 525-7997 TOU. 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wounded; and those of who toyed at this mayhem were all boys. In the unused garden plot out back of the Circle, we excavated trenches and foxholes, embedded cannons inside rings of pebbles, heaped dirt into mounds to simulate ammo bunkers. Our miniature tanks left treadmarks in the dust exactly like those cut into the blacktop roads by real tanks. Running miniature trucks, our throats caught the exact groan of the diesel convoys that hauled army reservists past our door every summer weekend. When we grew tired of our Lilliputian battles, we took up weapons in our own hands. Any stick would do for a gun, any rock for a bomb. At the drugstore we bought war comics and on wet afternoons we studied war movies on television to instruct us in the plots for our games. No one ever chose to play the roles of Japs or Nazis or Commies, and so the hateful labels were hung on the smallest or shabbiest kids. For the better part of my first three years in the Arsenal I was a villain, consigned to the Yellow Peril or the Red Plague. Like many of the runts, even wearing the guise of a bad guy I refused to go down, protesting every lethal shot from the good guys. If all the kids eligible to serve as enemies quit the game, the Americans just blasted away at invisible foes, Gl’s against the universe. Whenever we cared to we could glance up from our play in the garden battlefield and see the dish of a radar antenna spinning silently beyond the next ridge. We knew it scoured the sky for enemy bombers and, later, missiles. The air was filled with electronic threats. Every mile or so along the roads there were spiky transmitters, like six-foot-tall models of the Empire State Building, to magnify and boom along radio messages between security headquarters and the cruising guards. Imagining dire secrets whispered in code, I keened my ears to catch these broadcasts, as if by one particular resonance of brain cells I might snare the voices inside my skull. What I eventually heard, over a shortwave radio owned by one of the older boys, were guards jawing about lunch, muttering about the weather, about wives or bills or bowling, swearing aimlessly, or counting deer. Our favorite family outing on the long summer evenings, after supper, after the washing of dishes, was to drive the gravel roads of the Arsenal and count deer. We would surprise them in clearings, a pair or a dozen, grass drooping from their narrow muzzles, jaws working. They would lift their delicate heads and gaze at us with slick dark eyes, some of the bucks hefting intricate antlers, the fresh does thick-uddered, the fawns still dappled. If the herd was large enough to make counting tricky, my father would stop the car. And if we kept very still, the deer, after studying us awhile, would go back to their grazing. But any slight twitch, a throat cleared or the squeak of a window crank, would startle them. First one white tail would jerk up, then another and another, the tawny bodies wheeling, legs flashing, and the deer would vanish like smoke. Some nights we counted over three hundred. There were so many deer that in bad winters the managers of the Arsenal ordered the dumping of hay on the snow to keep the herds from starving. When my father had charge of this chore, I rode atop the truckload of bales, watching the NO ONE EVER CHOSE TO PLAY THE ROLES OF JAPS OR NAZIS OR COMMIES, AND SO THE HATEFUL LABELS WERE HUNG ON THE SMALLEST OR SHABBIEST KIDS. IF ALL THE KIDS ELIGIBLE TO SERVE AS ENEMIES QUIT THE GAME, THE AMERICANS JUST BLASTED AWAY AT INVISIBLE FOES, GI’S AGAINST THE UNIVERSE. tire slices trail away behind us in the frozen crust. Still the weak went hungry. Sledding, we would find their withered carcasses beside the gnawed stems of elderberry bushes. A few generations earlier, wolves and mountain lions would have helped out the snow, culling the slow-of-foot. But since the only predators left were two-legged ones, men took on the task of thinning the herds, and naturally they culled out the strongest, the heavy-antlered bucks, the meaty does. Early each winter the game officials would guess how many deer ought to be killed, and would sell that many hunting tags. Most of the licenses went to men who worked on the Arsenal, the carpenters and munitions loaders and firemen. But a quantity would always be reserved for visiting military brass. They rolled into the Arsenal in chauf-. feured sedans or swooped down in star- spangled planes, these generals and colonels. Their hunting clothes smelled of moth balls. Their shotguns glistened with oil. Jeeps driven by orderlies delivered them to the brushwood blinds, where they slouched on canvas chairs and slugged whiskey to keep warm, waiting for the deer to run by. The deer always ran obligingly by, because men and boys hired from nearby towns would have been out since dawn beating the bushes, scaring up a herd and driving it down the ravine past the hidden generals, who pumped lead into the torrent of flesh. Each deer season of my childhood I heard about this hunt. It swelled in my imagination to the scale of myth, outstripped in glory the remote battles of the last war, seemed more grand even than the bloody feuds between frontiersmen and Indians. I itched to go along, cradling my own shotgun, but my father said no, not until the winter after my thirteenth birthday. If I can’t carry a gun, I begged, let me watch the hunt with empty hands. And so, the year I turned eleven he let my join the beaters, who would be herding deer for a party of shooters from the Pentagon. A freezing rain the night before had turned the world to glass. As we fanned out over the brittle snow, our bootsteps sounded like the shattering of windows. We soon found our deer, lurking where they had to be, in the frozen field where hay had been dumped. Casting about them our net of bodies, we left open only the path that led to the ravine where the officers waited. With a clap of hands we set them scurrying, the white tails like an avalanche, black hoofs punching the snow, lank hams kicking skyward. Not long after, we heard the crackle of shotguns. When the shooting was safely over, I hurried up to inspect the kills. The deer lay with legs crumpled beneath their bellies or jutting stiffly out, heads askew, tongues dangling like handles of leather. The wounded ones had stumbled away, trailing behind them ropes of blood; my father and the other seasoned hunters had run after to finish them off. The generals were tramping about in the red snow, noisily claiming their trophies, pinning tags on the ear of each downed beast. The local men gutted the deer. They heaped the steaming entrails on the snow and tied ropes through the tendons of each hind leg and dragged them to the waiting jeeps. I watched it all to the end that once, rubbed my face in it, and never again asked to work as a beater, or to watch the grown men shoot, or to hunt. MISSILES AND MADNESS ith the money I was paid for herding deer, I bought the fixings for rocket fuel. That was the next stage in our playing at war, the launching of miniature missiles. We started by wrapping tinfoil around the heads of kitchen matches, graduated to aluminum pipes crammed with gunpowder, and then to machined tubes that burned w zinc or magnesium. On the walls of our bedrooms we tacked photos of real rockets, the V-2 and Viking; the homely Snark, Hound Dog, Bullpup, Honest John, Little John, Mighty Mouse, Davy Crockett; and the beauties with godly names—Atlas, Titan, Jupiter, Juno, Nike- Hercules—the pantheon of power. By then I knew what rode in the nose cones, I knew what sort of bombs had exploded in Japan two months before my birth, Ieven knew, from reading physics books, how we had snared those fierce bits of sun. But I grasped these awesome facts in the same numb way I grasped the definition of infinity. I carried the knowledge in me like an ungerminated seed. There was a rumor among the children that atomic bombs were stored in the Arsenal. The adults denied it, as they denied our belief that ghosts of Indians haunted the burial mounds of that shades of strung-up farmers paced in the haylofts of barns, as they dismissed all our bogies. We went searching anyway. Wasting no time among the igloos, which were too obvious, too vulnerable, we searched instead in the boondocks for secret vaults that we felt certain would be surrounded by deadly electronics and would be perfect in their camouflage. Traipsing along railway spurs, following every set of wheeltracks, we eventually came to a fenced compound that satisfied all our suspicions. Through the gridwork or wire and above the earthen ramparts we could see the gray concrete skulls of bunkers. We felt certain that the eggs of annihilation had been laid in those vaults, but none of us dared climb the fence to investigate. It was as if, having sought out the lair of a god, we could not bring ourselves to approach the throne. In our searches for the Bomb we happened across a good many other spots we were not supposed to see—dumps and man-made deserts, ponds once used for hatching fish and now smothered in oil, machine guns rusting in weeds, clicking signal boxes. But the most alluring discovery of all was the graveyard of bombers. This was a field crammed with the ratty hulks of World War II Flying Fortresses, their crumpled green skins painted with enigmatic numbers and symbols, their wings twisted, propellers shattered, cockpits open to the rain. In one of them we found a pair of mannequins rigged up in flight gear, complete with helmets, wires running from every joint in their artificial bodies. What tests they had been used for in these crashed planes we had no way of guessing; we borrowed their gear and propped them in back to serve as navigators and bombadiers. Most of the instruments had been salvaged, but enough remained for us to climb into the cockpits and fly imaginary bombing runs. Sitting where actual pilots had sat, clutching the butterfly wings of a steering wheel, gazing out through a cracked windshield, we rained fire and fury on the cities of the world. Not even the sight of the deer’s guts steaming on the red snow had yet given me an inkling of how real streets would look beneath our storm of bombs. I was drunk on the fancied splendor of riding those metal leviathans, making them dance by a touch of my fingers. At the age when Samuel Clemens sat on the bank of the Mississippi River smitten by the power of steamboats, I watched ACADIA HEALTH CENTER Massage • Reflexology Deep Tissue Manipulation Chinese Ear Cleaning Sauna M-F 10-9 Sat 10-6 5720 Roosevelt Way N.E. 526-8331 • BRIGHT • CHEERFUL • BED &. BREAKFAST • IN CHINA- TOWN/NORTH BEACH • BASQUE CUISINE • ROOMS FROM $30 • 1208 STOCKTON ST. • SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 94133 • (415)989-3960 • OBRERO HOTEL & RESTAURANT IN THE BASQUE TRADITION Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 9
rockets sputter on their firing stand, I sat in the gutted cockpits of old bombers, hungry to pilot sky ships. Every year or so one of the career soldiers, having stared too long into the muzzle of his own gun, would go berserk or break down weeping. A guard began shooting deer from his jeep and leaving the carcasses in heaps on the roads. A janitor poured muriatic acid into the swimming pool and then down his own throat. One Christmastime, the lieutenant colonel who played Santa Claus started raving at the annual gift-giving and terrified the expectant children out of their wi,ts. It took five fathers to muscle him down and make him quit heaving presents from his bag of gewgaws. To this day I cannot see Santa’s white beard and red suit without flinching. Life on military reservations had also crazed many of the army wives, who turned to drink and drugs. Now and again an ambulance would purr into the Circle and cart one of them away for therapy. When at home, they usually kept hidden, stewing in bedrooms, their children grown and gone or off to school or buried in toys. Outside, with faces cracked like the leather of old purses, loaded up with consoling chemicals, the crazed women teetered carefully down the sidewalk, as if down a tightrope over an abyss. HARVESTING THE RUMORS OF WAR , . he arsenal fed on war and the rumors of war. When the Pentagon’s budget was fat, the Arse- nal’s economy pros- pe/ed. We could tell how good or bad the times ----------------- —Jwere by reading our fathers’ faces, or by counting the pickup trucks in the parking lots. The folks who lived just outside the chain-link fence in trailers and tarpaper shacks did poorly in the slow spells, but did just fine whenever an outbreak of Red Scare swept through Congress. In the lulls between wars, the men used to scan the headlines looking for omens of strife in the way farmers would scan the horizon for promises or rain. In 1957, when the Arsenal was in the doldrums and parents were bickering across the dinner table, one October afternoon between innings of a softball game somebody read aloud the news about the launching of Sputnik. The mothers clucked their tongues and the fathers groaned; but soon the wise heads among them gloated, for they knew this Russian feat would set the loadlines humming, and it did. Our model rocketeering took on a new cast. It occurred to us that any launcher capable of parking a satellite in orbit could plant an H-bomb in the Circle. If one of those bitter pills ever landed, we realized from our reading, there would be no Circle, no dallying deer, no forests, no Arsenal. Suddenly there were explosives AT THE AGE WHEN SAMUEL CLEMENS SAT ON THE BANK OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER SMITTEN BY THE POWER OF STEAMBOATS, I WATCHED ROCKETS SPUTTER ON THEIR FIRING STAND, I SAT IN THE GUTTED COCKPITS OF OLD BOMBERS, HUNGRY TO PILOT SKY SHIPS. above our heads as well as beneath our feet. The cracks in the faces of the crazed ladies deepened. Guards no longer joked with us as we passed through the gates to school. We children forgot how to sleep. For hours after darkness we squirmed in our beds, staring skyward. “Why don’t you eat?” our mothers scolded. Aged thirteen or fourteen, I stood one day gripping the edge of the marble-topped table in our living room, staring through a glass bell at the spinning golden balls of an anniversary clock, and cried, “ I don’t ever want to be a soldier, not ever, ever!” Each weekend in summer the soldiers still played war. They liked to scare up herds of deer with their tanks and pin them against a corner of the fence. Snooping along afterward, we discovered tufts of hair and clots of flesh caught in the barbed wire from the bucks that had leapt over. Once, after a weekend soldier’s cigarette had set of a brushfire, we found the charred bodies of a dozen deer jammed against a fence. We filled ourselves with that sight, and knew what it meant. There we lay, every child in the Arsenal, every adult, every soul within reach of the bombs—twisted black lumps trapped against a fence of steel. I have dreamed of those charred deer ever since. During the war in Vietnam, every time I read or heard about napalm, my head filled with visions of those blackened lumps. To a child, it seemed the only salvation was in running away. Parents and the family roof were no protection from this terror. My notebooks filled with designs for orbiting worlds that we could build from scratch and for rocket ships that would carry us to fresh, unpoisoned planets. But I soon realized that no more than a handful of us could escape to the stars; and there was too much on earth—the blue fountains of lilacs,, the red streak of a fox across snow, the faces of friends— that I could never abandon. I took longer and longer walks through the backwoods of the Arsenal, soaking in the green juices; but as I grew older, the forest seemed to shrink, the fences drew in, the munitions bunkers and the desolate chemical dumps seemed to spread like a rash, until I could not walk far in any direction without stumbling into a reminder of our preparations for doom. Because the foundations of old farms were vanishing beneath the tangle of barriers and saplings, for most of my childhood I had allowed myself to believe that nature would undo whatever mess we made. But the scars from these new chemicals resisted the return of life. The discolored dirt remained bare for years and years. Tank trucks spraying herbicides to save the cost of mowing stripped the roads and meadows of wildflowers. Fish floated belly-up in the scum of ponds. The shells of bird eggs, laced with molecules of our invention, were too flimsy to hold new chicks. The threads of the world were beginning to unravel. In a single winter a hired trapper cleared out the beavers, which had been snarling the waterways, and the foxes, which had troubled the family dogs. Our own collie, brought as a puppy from Memphis, began to chase deer with a pack of dogs. At night he would slink back home with bloody snout and the smell of venison on his laboring breath. The guards warned us to keep him in, but he broke every rope. Once I saw the pack of them, wolves again, running deer across a field. Our collie was in the lead, gaining on a doe, and as I watched he bounded up and seized her by the ear and dragged her down, and the other dogs clamped on at the belly and throat. I preferred this wild killing to the shooting- gallery slaughter of the hunting season. If our own dogs could revert to wildness, perhaps there was still hope for the earth. But one day the guards shot the whole wolfish pack. Nature, in the largest sense of natural laws, would outlast us; but no particular scrap of it, no dog or pond or two-legged beast was guaranteed to survive. There was comfort in the tales forever circulating among the children of marvelous deer glimpsed at dusk or dawn, bucks with white legs, a doe with pale fur in the shape of a saddle on her back, and, one year, a pair of ghostly albinos. Several of the children had seen the all-white deer. In 1962 I spent most of the summer sunsets looking for them, needing to find them, hungering for these tokens of nature’s prodigal energies. By September I had still seen neither hide nor hair of them. That October was the showdown over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba; Kennedy and Khrushchev squared off at the opposite ends of a nuclear street, hands hovering near the butts of their guns. For two weeks, while these desperadoes brooded over whether to start the final shooting, I quit going to school and passed all the hours of daylight outdoors, looking for those albino deer. Once, on the edge of a thicket, on the edge of darkness, I thought I glimpsed them, milky spirits, wisps of fog. But I could not be sure. Eventually the leaders of the superpowers lifted their hands a few inches away from their guns; the missiles did not fly. I returned to my studies, but gazed stupidly rat every page through a meshwork of fear. In December the existence of the albino deer was proven beyond a doubt, for one afternoon in hunting season an Army doctor and his wife drove into the Circle with the pair of ghostly bodies tied onto the hood of their car. The following year—the year when John Kennedy was killed and I registered for the draft and the tide of U.S. soldiers began to lap against the shores of Asia— my family moved from the Arsenal. “You’ll sleep better now,” my mother assured me. “You’ll fatten up in no time.” During the twelve years of our stay inside the chain-link fences, almost every night at suppertime outdated bombs would be detonated at the ammo dump. The concussion rattled the milkglass and willowware in the corner cupboard, rattled the forks against our plates, the cups against our teeth. It was like the muttering of local gods, a reminder of who ruled our neighborhood. From the moment I understood what those explosions meant, what small sparks they were of the engulfing fire, I lost my appetite; But even outside the Arsenal, a mile or an ocean away, every night at suppertime my fork still stuttered against the plate, my teeth still chattered from the remembered explosions. They still do. Everywhere now there are bunkers beneath the humped green hills; electronic challenges and threats needle through the air we breathe; the last wild beasts fling themselves against our steel boundaries. The fences of the Arsenal have stretched outward until they circle the entire planet. I feel, now, I can never move outside. Scott Russell Sanders teaches literature at Indiana University. His previous books include Wilderness Plots and Bad Man Ballad. Reprinted with permission from The Paradise of Bombs, ®1987 Scott Russell Sanders, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia 30602. Artist Louise Williams lives in Lacey, Washington. Her recent work is showing at the Mercer Island Community Art Gallery. 10 Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987
RADIO WORTH WATCHING! Movie reviews. That’s what you’ll get on KUOW Nearly 95FM. Reviews by Tom Shales, Jim D’Anna, Elvis Mitchell, and Jim Emerson. Interviews with producers and directors. News from Lake Wobegon and National Public Radio. And music. Hours of rich classical and folk music from around the world and from all ages. Enjoy it all on KUOW Nearly 95FM. . .with your eyes closed. Call 543-9595 for a free program guide. KUOW Nearly95FM Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 11
BEYOND T i r hen the Reagan administration took office, it de- W velopedits ownparticular rationalefor U.S. relations with South Africa. Among the factors it cited were South Africa’s strategic position on the oil routes around the Cape of Good Hope, the South African market for U.S. goods, U.S. investments in the South African economy, South Africa’s standing as an “anticommunist” state in the region, and, perhaps most important, South Africa’s supply of strategic minerals. Last July, in a White House speech, Reagan reiterated his administration’s view that these considerations determined U.S. interests in the southern African region. BY RONALD WALTERS Yet it makes little sense for the United States to remain so closely connected with South Africa—and hence with apartheid. For one thing, the white minority regime will almost certainly have to give way, sooner or later, to the black majority. Furthermore, South Africa is not the only country in the region where U.S. interests can be served; indeed, a more stable southern Africa can also be a source of raw materials, provide opportunities for investment, and satisfy security concerns. Thus an informed U.S. self-interest does not dictate continued links with Pretoria but, rather, better relations with the governments and 100 million inhabitants of the other regional nations. Take the issue of sea lanes, for instance. If the United States wants to protect oil routes, it could, instead of depending on South Africa, build up the navies of the coastal states of Tanzania, Mozambique, and Angola, and strive more earnestly for the independence of Namibia. Eventually, the United States might secure naval berthing rights in these countries, as it did in Somalia and Kenya. Minerals provide another important example of the available alternatives. Currently, imports from South Africa account for 67 percent of the industrial diamonds used in the United States, 67 percent of the platinum, 56 percent of the chromium, 38 percent of the vanadium, 33 percent of the manganese, 24 percent of the uranium, and an undetermined amount of the gold. It is conceivable, though, that these minerals could be obtained from other countries if the West were to extend the same financial and technical assistance to them that it has given South Africa. Angola is very rich in resources, exporting petroleum, diamonds, and iron; it also has copper, uranium, and manganese. Zambia has cobalt, uranium, and gold, and exports copper. Zimbabwe mines 40 minerals, including gold, nickel, coal, lithium, copper, chrome, and ferrochromium. Botswana exports diamonds, and possesses undeveloped reserves of iron, manganese, chromite, and uranium. Mozambique is also rich in strategic minerals, although its exact potential remains largely unknown because of the lack of exploration prior to independence. The one possible exception to this list of minerals available outside South Africa is platinum-group metals. And even in this case, Zimbabwe may prove to be a source. This uncertainty—reflecting an ignorance of the region’s resources—results from the historical patterns of Western investment, which has developed South Africa’s resources while neglecting those of other countries. By 1984, the total value of all U.S. private bank loans to South Africa was roughly $4.6 billion, whereas between 1980 and 1984 Zimbabwe was suffering a “capital drought.” In some cases, these discrepancies have been a matter of deliberate U.S. policy. The Reagan administration eschewed a strategy of “punitive sanctions” against South Africa at the same time that it was levying just such sanctions against other states in the region. For example, in 1983 Washington huffily withdrew $5 million in aid to Mozambique; by 1985 relations had improved, resulting in a U.S. promise of “nonlethal” military aid—yet no such aid was ever delivered. U.S. aid to Zimbabwe has been steadily reduced, from a high of $75 million in 1982, to $65 million in 1983, $40 million in 1984, $30 million in 1985, and $25 million in 1986—all, apparently, in retaliation for Zimbabwe’s “pro-Soviet” foreign policy. In the fall of 1986, miffed over a July 4 speech by a Zimbabwean official strongly critical of U.S. policy toward South Africa, the White House refused to release $13.5 million in aid already allocated for Zimbabwe. It is the Reagan Doctrine—the recasting of regional issues into East-West terms and the support of insurgencies in a campaign against communism—that leads the administration to make some of its most damaging policy initiatives. Foremost among these was the March 1986 decision to provide aid to the UNITA rebels, thus extending the Reagan Doctrine to southern Africa. At the same time, the White House has issued only the mildest of rebukes to South Africa for its repeated incursions into southern An gola, even though such moves reportedly disrupted U.S. diplomatic efforts to secure an agreement with the Angolan government on Namibian independence Thus the administration has not only heightened the civil war in Angola but, by enshrining anticommunist ideology as the basis for its approach to the region, has also prevented U.S. policy from being as flexible as it should be. The United States needs to make a transition to improved relations with the regional states, looking ahead either to the arrival of a black government in South Africa or to the improved economic viability—including the capacity to supply minerals— of the other countries in the region. A NEW APPROACH he fact that Congress overrode Reagan’s veto of sanctions legislation indicates how much domestic concern there has been over U.S. policy toward southern Africa—particularly toward South Africa. Yet, sanctions alone against South Africa will not be adequate; there will also need to be a complementary strategy of contributing to the economic development and the defense of the frontline states. This kind of approach will have to be worked out in cooperation with leaders in the region, to ensure that U.S. policy reinforces efforts already being made. As Jesse Jackson has stated, Africa needs an economic development scheme on the scale of the post-World War II Marshall Plan. Not only does this analogy indicate the magnitude of the necessary aid, but it also suggests that the United States should treat the leaders and people of southern Africa with 12 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1987
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