Continued from page 5 serves many of the people who work and reside at Bangor. It has aisles filled with meats, fish cakes (“ a Norsky treat for generations” ), Perrier, specialty wines, baskets made in China, and full shopping carts. As we leave, I pick up The Trident Tides, the official Bangor publication, with its announcement of such hot tips as: “ The USS Ohio recently received ComSubPac’s Ney Award nomination in the Small Mess Afloat category. Capt. William G. Lange, Com- SubGru 9, presented the mess specialist division of the submarine with a plaque, honoring them for being selected to represent ComSubPac in the competition.” It is filled with real estate ads, career- descrips of “ Sailors of the Quarter,” and a photo spread on a boxing smoker “ which draws 600.” Life goes on at Bangor. At the next stop, Doug moves bread while a headline in the P.l. beckons me to read: “ Reagan Asking for Even More Tridents.” It describes a $60 billion program, with a request to up the number of Tridents constructed from 15 to 20 by 1993. The subs would carry up to 24 missiles, with 10-15 warheads per missile, each carrying 475,000 TNT impact. They would be capable of travelling up to 6,000 miles and of striking within 400 ft. of target, destroying a hardened, reinforced steel and concrete target. This is the Trident II, D5 missile. “ It seems to be in the air,” I muse. Drip, drip, drip. The great Northwest. We drive up through the Suquamish Reservation, resting place of Chief Seattle, to a private home . . . a food buying club. . . whose owner contends "This used to be a really rural, peaceful community. Now it 's ju s t the opposite — one o f the biggest war communities in the world ." David Kukkola “ the Trident Base is not employing many from around here. And I’m not sure the people who come here for Trident appreciate the Sound.” Over tea at the Salt Water Cafe in Winslow, we chat with a local family. Coincidentally, they are among the founders of the Kitsap Peace Coalition which would soon be sending 2 delegates to Washington D.C. to lobby for the Nuclear Freeze. Their family-run school for mentally retarded adolescents, built in 1887, had lost its federal funding in March of 1982, a victim of the Reagan budget priorities. And they claim the growth caused by all the local Naval spending has raised their taxes 200-300% to pay for “ infrastructure.” One family member, David Kukkola says, “This used to be a really rural, peaceful community. Now it ’s just the opposite — one of the biggest war communities in the world.” At another table, a Lutheran minister relaxing after Sunday service talks of his denomination’s recent Peace Conference in Seattle. He refers to Romans 13 and the power of “ I love you.” He says, “ fighting is impotent . . . only out of fear of our own annihilation will much change happen.” He talks of the problems of ministering to those who work at Trident. “They have a real conflict.” Driving out of town, it still feels rural to me. As the road turns windy, my brother recounts: “ It was Hiroshima Day, and I was driving the bread truck, and I was coming down this road to the food co-op. And there, walking along the road, beating their drums were about 60 people, led by these monks. So I drove ahead of Gyo Foku, a Japanese monk, speaks of Trident them, did my transaction at the co-op and then I picked up a tray of day old bread, set it on the ground and stood their bowing. Within a minute or two they had reached me, came over and in a whisper said, ‘Is this for us? Is this all for us?' And I said, ‘Yes, please take it as a gift.’ ‘Ahhh!’ ” This has since come to be a regular practice. We suddenly drive off the road onto a scantly marked lane. We’re among Buddhists. Ill We are ushered out of the drizzle into a squat, primitive building, where we are warmly’’ received and immediately served tea and Port Townsend Bread pudding. A number of people sit around the large table, some recent arrivals from the East Coast. Conversation flows to the subject of the Pagoda, a peace shrine constructed by this, the Nihonzan Myohoji order, at Ground Zero, a site immediately adjacent to the Bangor Base owned by peace activists Shelley and Jim Douglass. Unknown arsons had burned it to the ground on May 27,1982, and since that time the order has fought a legal battle to obtain the necessary permits to rebuild. They have been resolutely opposed by the Kitsap County Commissioners and a shadow group called Citizens Against the Pagoda (CAP, though it ’s dubbed CRAP by someone at the table). The Pagoda has become a symbol offering various constructs, and to some i t ’s an alien presence in a Christian world. The presence of these chanters of NA-MY MYO-HO- REN-GE-KYO, who have spread across the planet working and beating their drums for peace, has provided a target for those unable to understand or accept the peace movement. I talk briefly with Gyo Foku, a young Japanese monk. Gyo is awed by the connections that brought his orders holy text, the Lotus Sutra, into the hands of New Englanders Emerson and Thoreau 150 years ago, and thence to their local benefactors, the Kukkolas, who had allowed the order to reconstruct a residence and a shrine temporarily on family land after the Pagoda was burned. Gyo is Bob DeWeese, of the Port Townsend Peace Coalition, in his downtown bookstore disappointed that there seems to be less energy being focussed on the arrival of Trident number two, the USS Michigan, due in the ejrea in late March or early April — “ Though it will be big again.” He acknowledges that “ many people have come to help” since the order was burned out of Ground Zero. "They are inspiring me.” The order has constructed another temple on the Kukkola land, its alter gilded and luminescent, piled high with pictures of respected elders, icons, Port Townsend Bread and strangely, Coca Cola. We genuflect and Gyo beats the temple bell for us. When my brother asks how long the order plans on being here, Gyo replies, “ Forever.” IV Ashort distance down the road, we reach the Bainbridge Food Co-op. When I enter the place, the first person I see is reading the Clinton Street Quarterly — Dean Sinclair is dressed for church, and is watching his daughter while his wife buys food unavailable in Bremerton supermarkets. Dean tells me he works for Pan Am World Services, the prime contractor at Bangor for all non-defense operations. (They also operate the airline, this being one of those “ corporate diversification” efforts.) Dean works in a program that is consolidating the variety of hazardous wastes used throughout the base into one bunker area, thus reducing damage to the groundwater and base environment. He is proud of Pan Arn’s “ we do everything” role at Bangor, and describes their program as very cost-efficient compared to the Navy. His wife approaches and I ask her if people at the co-op give her a bad time for her association with the base. She replies, “ One lady said, ‘You eat like this and you work there?’ I said, ‘I like to be healthy as much as anyone else.’ I have a very high view of our surroundings. It makes sense to take care of them.” Dean continues: “ I wouldn’t want a nuclear attack on us. It’s become a cliche. Some people say, ‘Nuke ’em till they glow.” Others, ‘Ban the Bomb.’ Without Trident there would be nothing to prevent them [the Russians] from doing it indiscriminately. People out there [Bangor] feel it is purely defensive. The Lord doesn’t ask us to lay down and let people walk over us. I would like to work so they wouldn’t come down.” “ If we freeze,” his wife concludes, “ I don’t feel another superpower would follow suit.” Dean and his wife are one, projecting their hopes and fears across a vast sea. So they live with Trident, eat at its table, and pray for peace. At the end of the day we arrive back in Port Townsend and swing by the abandoned Coastal Defense Battery at nearby Port Worden. It used to house guns that could fire accurately up to 20 miles across the straits. Built in 1909-10, as a big stick at the end of Teddy Roosevelt's presidency, i t ’s from the time when the U.S. was becoming a naval and imperial power. Yet it feels like the Army, controlling the seas from the land. As my brother puts it, “ it ’s a peaceful defense battery . . . in as much as it doesn’t project itself.” V Monday morning, I join my brother and his family for breakfast at the Quimper Inn in Port Townsend, and then the two of us stroll downtown. There we talk with Bob DeWeese, co-owner (with his wife) of Melville and Company Books. He presides over a store filled with used book “ finds,” neighborliness and the tools of resistance. An early member of the Port Townsend Peace Coalition, he was active in the August "We only have tw o years, a t the most, to do someth ing abou t w ha t is going on. I d o n 't th ink we can w a it un til Reagan is tu rned o u t o f o ffice ." Bob DeWeese boat blockade which greeted the Ohio’s arrival. Now, in its aftermath, he works locally and through the statewide network to foster a change in attitude. I asked him about the money it took to bring off the blockade. Did it come in from “ outside” ? “We never had any money . . . people do it because everybody realizes there isn’t any money, so you find a way to get beyond it. There were several hundred people doing support work . . . a lot of people just dropped their own work for weeks. It’s a classic example of mutual aid in Kropotkin’s sense. People coming together outside of the institutions to create community, instantly.” Though energy is currently at an ebb, Bob does not feel that it has lapsed permanently. “Trident kind of sailed in and sailed into every one of us, kind of sailed into our hearts. It’s been internalized . . . it has to sit in there for a while like a seed, and I think it will grow. I hope it doen’t grow into something evil.” The Peace Coalition has recently focussed much of its energy on education, both in the community and in the schools. “ A lot of people have been so frightened and are so insecure about the issue, that they don’t want to talk about it at all.” They were successful in convincing the City Council to pass a Freeze endorsement, but their real success, this year, has been with high school seniors. “We’ve been using a curricula aimed directly at the secondary school level, developed by National Ground Zero, called The Nuclear Age. It’s five short, concise, tremendously 6 Clinton St. Quarterly
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz