A Smattering of America, Ancient Skeletons, and Radioactive Waste | Post 35 | Washington
The final state of my virtual trip is serving comprehensive slices of American pie. Southeastern Washington may not be a microcosm of the U.S., but in just 160 miles of clicking, I encountered countless reminders of the swath of Street View America behind me.
There was, as always, the picturesque:
Too: the pastoral; the Main Street; the revealing; and, of course, history on a scale proving again that vital stories are everywhere — this time, in Kennewick and Hanford, stories that span creation to destruction.
Perhaps I latched to familiar themes along this segment because, with the Pacific nearing, it is time to be wistful. I have scanned untold numbers of farms on my cross-country journey, and swiveled and zoomed for screenshots of just as many farmhouses and barns. Which field of crops will be the last I see, I wonder? This one?
As so many times before, the eastern Washington rural landscape feels most broad with the insertion of solitary detail: The stack of hay; the lonely homestead (with ancient gas pump); the far-flung equipment shed.
I am sure cross-country drivers and cyclists experience the same nostalgia for sights and experiences past as they approach their long-sought end points. But unlike the brick-and-mortar traveler, I cannot control or pace many of these “last” encounters. Though I choose my route due west, I have left much in the hands of Street View, not least time and scenery. I may click several days more, but will this be my last twilight?
I will pass more rural towns, but will Dayton and Waitsburg be the last time I see small town America with all the clarity of Google’s highest-definition cameras?
As elsewhere, eastern Washington handed me certain regional insights on a platter. While Wikipedia informed me potatoes are a productive crop, the vines of wineries were obvious.
When I rolled into the Tri-Cities region, it was clear which of Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland is home to the highest percentage of Latinos.
(Pasco, Wikipedia confirms, a semi-urban indicator of the surrounding farming economy).
Kennewick and Richland seemed to have plucked several samples from the pan-America menu of urban design and lived space. In Street View, the two cities veered from mundane and faceless to specific and neighborly; from nondescript to high-character.
Near the colossal mall and soulless big boxes, I saw a motorized disabled man helping his manually-powered friend:
Someone else walked these very parts nearly 9000 years ago: The Ancient One, a.k.a. Kennewick Man. Now ranked among the most complete prehistoric skeletons ever unearthed, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 by two young men wading along the banks of the Columbia River for a better view of the ripping Water Follies hydroplane races. An area newspaper article placed the finding “a quarter-mile west of the Columbia Park Golf Course,” and so I squinted from the Pasco-Kennewick bridge, entered the park, and strolled down Columbia Park Trail in search of some kind of marker of the discovery — never found one, but suspect I got close.
Kennewick Man’s pelvis contained a serrated stone projectile and his elbow evidence of arthritis, but his remains endured tribulations nearly as severe. While the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) generally grants Native American tribes control of ancestors’ remains, the scientists with first access to Kennewick Man claimed the Ancient One could be of Polynesian or Southeast Asian descent and the bones too old to prove otherwise — Kennewick Man, they contended (and sued), should be beyond NAGPRA’s scope and studied to advance understanding of early migrations and prehistoric lifestyles. The ensuing stalemate permitted ongoing scientific study, but as DNA dating technology improved it became clear the area tribes were correct: Kennewick Man, a lead study affirmed, “is closer to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide.” Columbia Plateau tribes reburied him in 2017.
On the Tri-Cities’ outskirts, the story shifts from the emergence of early man to the destructive forces of latter day mankind. Richland gives way to RV parks, a very remote paintball facility…
…and then Hanford.
In Street View, knowledge that Hanford was a key Manhattan Project site — the first full-scale plutonium production reactor came online here — only adds to the ambiance of low, brown brush and October skies. Along Washington State Route 240 there is nothing to indicate this nearly 600 square-mile expanse was once a massive nuclear production complex and is now the country’s most contaminated nuclear site and the world’s largest environmental cleanup operation. Nothing is signposted here. Not even the access road to a current Hanford Site tenant, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a benign physics project detecting cosmic gravitational waves.
Only at LIGO’s gates does some kind of non-navigational signage appear, and only where Street View has devolved to grainy 2009 imagery.
Back on 240, I tried to circle Hanford, surveying the horizon for glimpses of the historic B Reactor — and remediation. Was that a facility on the horizon? Did these power lines serve the Inner Area, where over 50 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste are being dealt with? A Green Zone-esque guard post was the only hint of something inside the perimeter fencing.
Route 240 appears to be Hanford’s only bypass, but when I returned to the southeastern edge of the site, I discovered the grounds are not quite as clandestine as they initially appeared. Department of Energy laboratories on a road adjacent to the primary site are readily visible, and signs announce a “hazardous area.”
Also right there, downriver from Hanford’s original, retired plutonium production reactors, is the Columbia Generating Station, a commercial nuclear power plant commissioned in 1984 and operational today. The sign outside tells you what to do if a siren goes off.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Clarkston, Wash.
- Pomeroy, Wash.
- Dayton, Wash.
- Waitsburg, Wash.
- Burbank, Wash.
- Kennewick, Wash.
- End: Mattawa, Wash.
Trip to date:
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I Can Click from Sea to Shining Sea and So Can You | Post 36 | Washington
