Janet Yoder

Where Do You Come From? (Eight Times Asked) 

Where do you come from?

I was born October 14, 1951, in Richland, Washington, a place nicknamed Atomic Town, a place where you could (from 1948 to 1960) celebrate Atomic Frontier Days, where you can still go bowling at Atomic Bowl, where you can have your house painted by Atomic Painting or wired by Atomic Electric, have your car’s dents fixed at Atomic Auto Body, have your own body modified at Atomic City Tattoo and Piercing, or relax with a cool one from Atomic Ale Brewpub while reading the Atomic Town Entertainment Guide. It’s a place where Hanford’s nuclear scientists took pride in atomic accomplishments, of “breeding” the first operating plutonium reactor, of fueling the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, of generating nuclear power.

In the 1970s, the nuclear tide turned—think Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome; think the birth of Earth Day, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act; think leaks from underground storage tanks at Hanford. In the 1970s, fewer businesses were called atomic. But the name has not gone away and may be coming back in that midcentury modern, retro, ironic sense.

Fact: I would not be from Kennewick if not for atomic energy. My father came from Kansas in 1949 to work as a chemical engineer at Hanford. He returned to Kansas in 1950 to marry my mother and bring her west to set up house in a government-built, 545-square-foot “prefab” in Richland. A year and three months later, I was born into this brave new atomic world. Three years later we moved to nearby Kennewick

 
Where do you come from?

I come from east of the mountains. The mountains are the Cascades—known as the Cascade curtain—which divide Washington State into two distinct worlds. I live in Seattle, epicenter of the hip, green, liberal, Boeing-Amazon-Microsoft-Starbucks-infused, traffic-clogged, high-priced western side; but I am from Kennewick on the dry, conservative, nuclear, hydroelectric, irrigated, agricultural eastern side.

 
Where do you come from?

I hate this question. Here is how it often goes:

“I come from Kennewick,”

“Is that near Kennebunkport?”

“No, it’s in eastern Washington.”

“Near Spokane?”

“No, it’s one of the Tri-Cities.”

“Oh. Is that near the nuclear place—Hanford?”

“Yes, near Hanford.”

Then the conversation can a) peter out, b) devolve into a joking comment about glow-in-the-dark rabbits or double-tailed rattlesnakes, or c) lead to a question like, “Have you been exposed to radiation?”

Of course we are all exposed to radiation every time we fly in an airplane, go through security screening, have our ankle x-rayed, wear a glow-in-the-dark watch, use a microwave oven, or talk on a cell phone. There is naturally-occurring radioactive material in space and in the earth itself. In the early days, Hanford secretly released “relatively small” amounts of radiation into the air and into the Columbia River. For 18 years, I drank the river water that ran from our taps; I swam in the river; I ate salmon that swam in the river; I breathed the air downwind of Hanford; I ate beef from cattle that grazed downwind of Hanford. “Yes, I was exposed.” I get my thyroid tests done, so far so good. But my father died of brain cancer after working at Hanford from 1949 to 1984. And thyroid problems run in my family. You can see how all this does not make for good party conversation.

 
Where do you come from?

I come from shrub-steppe of the vast Columbia Plateau, the basin formed by lava flow after lava flow back in the late Miocene/early Pliocene Epochs—say 17 to 7 million years ago. Red-hot lava pushed up through cracks in the earth’s surface. This thin, molten, fast-flowing lava flooded the plateau and followed the ancestral Snake River and Columbia River all the way out into the Pacific Ocean. More than a hundred lava floods covered the land over the course of 10 million years. At the lowest point—near Hanford—the basalt was two miles thick. The earth’s lava crust sank into the shape of a saucer now known as the Columbia Basin. When lava flows ceased, powerful winds blew sediment over the land.

Then came the Pleistocene Epoch or ice age—roughly a mere 15,000 to 13,000 years ago. Glacial Lake Missoula formed when a finger of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet dammed the Clark Fork River near current Lake Pend Oreille in western Idaho. The ice dam was 2,000 feet high and held back Lake Missoula’s water (half the volume of Lake Michigan). When the ice dam ruptured, torrents of water, ice, and debris surged across eastern Washington. These thunderous floods repeatedly scoured the land, moving rocks and soil, seeking channels and blasting new ones that ran toward the low point near Kennewick. There, the Horse Heaven Hills contained the flow—even with the one-mile wide opening at Wallula Gap—and water backed up more than a hundred miles and created a lake more than 600 feet deep. These floods moved 50 cubic miles of soil and basalt and carved out the Columbia Basin Desert.

 
Where do you come from?

The desert. You walk out onto the land and you see miles of sagebrush, bunch grass, needle grass, and cheat grass. Your footsteps make a dry, scrubby sound. You see the Horse Heaven Hills to the south and Rattlesnake Mountain to the west, the Blue Mountains off to the east and the wide Columbia River and open land beyond to the north. This land offers little refuge. Its wind pushes you, whips against you. Its dust scours you. Its vistas sweep out to the horizon and leave you dizzy and without shelter. This land makes you feel bare and revealed and vulnerable, like a small child alone on an alien planet.


Where do you come from?

I come from a place that seemed as homogenized as its dairy milk. Although tribal people had hunted, fished, and wintered in Kennewick for hundreds of years, although tribal people still fished for salmon in the Yakima and Columbia Rivers when I was young, and although we drove to where Indians fished and my father bought salmon from these fisherman, I did not know any Indians, at least not Indians that I knew were Indians. In the 1950s, a “sundown law” meant that no African-Americans lived in Kennewick, so I did not know any African-Americans either.

I knew some Hispanics and one especially well. After Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, many Cuban parents wanted to send their children out of the country. The Catholic Welfare Bureau ran the Peter Pan Operation that quietly brought 14,000 refugee children to the United States. When I was in 6th grade, our school principal announced over the intercom that a Cuban child was coming to our school. Dolores Li—a Chinese Cuban—arrived in 1961 at Hawthorn Elementary School in Kennewick—2,589 miles from her parents in Havana. We became friends and are still friends 50 years later.

I was intrigued by people from elsewhere, because it allowed me to imagine elsewhere. Years later I traveled to Europe, North Africa, and Brazil, lived in Mexico for a year; became an English instructor and taught students from Viet Nam, Japan, China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Korea, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, and Iran. More years later, I understood that most everyone in Kennewick was actually from elsewhere, trying to homogenize.


Where do you come from?

I come from Kennewick where I hiked, biked, and drove through Columbia Park—right past Kennewick Man—hundreds of times before his skeleton surfaced on the banks of the Columbia River. On July 28, 1996, Will Thomas and Dave Deacy—fans of the annual hydroplanes races—came upon these human bones. They called the police, but Kennewick Man proved not to be the victim of a recent crime. Turns out he lived 9,200 years ago and he has become one big controversy between tribal people from Yakama, Colville, Nez Perce, Wanapum, and Umatilla, and scientists (particularly Doug Owsley, a physical anthropologist from the Smithsonian), and the Army Corp of Engineers.

Tribal people call Kennewick Man the Ancient One and want his remains to be blessed and reburied. They lost their legal case to do this. For now Kennewick Man’s remains reside in the Burke Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle. Doug Owsley continues to research Kennewick Man, including recent DNA analysis at a lab in Copenhagen. Though Owlsey has not yet published his research, he has stated that residue in Kennewick Man’s bones indicate that he ate a lot of food from the marine environment. Owsley went on to speculate that, “This is a man from the coast.” But 9,200 years ago sea mammals came up the Columbia as far as Celilo Falls and salmon and lamprey were plentiful in the Columbia. And people have always traveled by river.

So Kennewick Man may or may not be from Kennewick, may or may not have lived in Kennewick, may or may not be related to any modern tribes in the region. Here is what we know: he was buried in Kennewick and now he is not.

 
Where do you come from?

A place that lava flowed over and built up, a place of cataclysmic floods equal to ten times the combined force of every river in the world, a place shaped by wind and dust, a place of rivers, a place that held the bones of a prehistoric man, a place where tribal people hunted, fished, and wintered, a place Lewis and Clark journeyed through, a place just off the Oregon Trail, a place where steamboats plied the Columbia River and trains traveled the rails, a place settlers settled and farmers farmed, a place where rivers were harnessed, where irrigation made the land fertile, where atomic energy was born, an arid place with wide vistas, a place of undeniable power, a place yet forming, the place that formed me.

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Janet Yoder lives with her husband on their Seattle houseboat, the floating nation of Tui Tui. Her writing has appeared in Raven Chronicles, Bayou, Porcupine, Passager, The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly, The Evansville Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pilgrimage, River Teeth, and Chautauqua. She is currently at work on a collection of personal essays inspired by her friendship with Skagit tribal elder, the late Vi Hilbert.