About 50 miles northeast of our Farm lies the debris field from the landslide which has brought Snohomish County to the world’s attention. It is unclear how many remain buried there, as the numbers provided by authorities make little sense. But the loss of life has been substantial. The human dead range from infants to the elderly; the death of other life forms is incalculable. The landslide spared nothing and no one in its path, and took life without regard to philosophy, age, infirmity, genus, or species. If something living lay in its path, death was dealt; nothing was spared by the briefly animated wall of mud and debris that scampered down the valley like a screaming banshee, cutting down the living as it frolicked, adding their mass to its malefaction.
Most of the people living in the valley beneath the hill where the landslide originated prefer the rural life; and a large subset of them prefer to live their lives as far away from any seat of authority as possible while still retaining the basic amenities of civilization. Among this subset – among the dead – were those who advocated a withdrawal from Snohomish County, the separation of its northeastern portion into the rebelliously named “Freedom County,” a proposed rural utopia where no one in authority could ever tell anyone where or how to live, or how to site or build a home. Notwithstanding the roar and rant and antics of its advocates, Freedom County never became an official entity, but its nascent spirit is alive and well in the area surrounding the slide.
The hill from which the slide originated dominated the valley where the dead lived. It was the same horseshoe-shaped hill from which five slides have originated since 1949; the same hill considered to have the potential for a large catastrophic failure in a 1999 report filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; the same hill known to geologists and locals alike as ‘Slide Hill’. Either those resident immediately beneath Slide Hill were unaware of the prior slides and/or the report’s warning, or they did not care. There were probably some of each. The dead lived there due to an overwhelming desire to live within the beauty of the valley, a valley lying alongside the Stillaguamish River. Some of the dead probably knew the risk of living there, and consciously chose to accept it; some of the dead probably chose not to be conscious of it, choosing, instead, to ignore the plentiful written, oral, and visual evidence of recent landslides (the most recent in 2006); some of the dead may not have known anything about the risk of landslides, failing, in their bliss of residency, to use any thought or any sight or any hearing whatsoever.
It is difficult to believe in the existence of anyone in the latter category. Consider this extract from an article published in the March 24, 2014 issue of the Seattle Times:
“The 2006 slide took place in winter, on Jan. 25. Three days later, as the new channel cut the land, residents and agency staff reported the eerie sound of trees constantly snapping as the river pushed them over, wrote the Stillaguamish Tribe’s Natural Resource Department on its website. But the sound of construction competed with the sound of snapping trees.
“They didn’t even stop pounding nails.” said Tracy Drury, an environmental engineer and applied geomorphologist who assessed the area with Miller soon after the landslide. We were surprised.” ‘
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“We always thought there was a possibility that a catastrophic event could come,” said Pat Stevenson, environmental manager of the Stillaguamish Tribe. “We were hoping that wouldn’t happen.”
For those of the dead who knowingly chose to live in the slide path, accepting the risk as a matter of their philosophy to live free of governmental authority, their death is either fulfillment or irony, depending upon the beliefs of the commentator. For me, such a death is a waste, coming as it does from a bad habit of constantly spitting into the wind; for those dead who accepted the risk, believing fiercely in their right to do as they wished, whatever the odds, I supposed their death might have seemed, to them, to be a form of culmination a last formal bow to the inevitability of the power of Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune, a salute to her from a fallen warrior. We, the living, will never know what they thought, since their last thoughts are forever hidden from us – but it is difficult for me to imagine that anyone caught in the vast slide of mud and debris could have had such a rational thought amid the terror which ended their life so abruptly.
I, at least, find myself unable to judge those of the dead who knowingly accepted the risk of landslides, even as I marvel at the possibilities of their underlying philosophy; for the remainder of the dead, I feel only pain, a pain shared by all who live here in Humptulips County.
Meanwhile, the search of the debris field for the dead – whatever their respective beliefs or state of awareness may have been – goes on, and will likely continue for many days. Humanity never rests easy until its dead are known; spiritual recovery never begins until the doors of the crypt have closed. And so the massive search continues, despite the miserable weather, despite the horrific conditions, despite the physical and mental weariness of the searchers.
Momus was the Greek god of mockery, tossed out of heaven for mocking the gods themselves – he found fault, for example, with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, finding the noise made by her feet too loud, even while finding no fault with her overall form. I have to wonder if Momus, upon his eviction from Mt. Olympus, resettled himself on the top of Slide Hill, patiently waiting there for someone to come along and be mocked; I have to wonder if the searchers, seeking both the dead and mementos of the dead in order to lessen the grief of the bereaved, will find, instead, only a memento of the god – the sole remaining copy of the Gospel According to Momus.
I pray they will not; I pray, instead, that the living may find knowledge and, in the fullness of that knowledge, a sort of peace.
