On any given day where I now find myself, there are aa many Oregon license plates as there are Washington ones. They intermingle on either side of the Columbia River connected by a single span—the Lewis and Clark Bridge, which was designed by Joseph Strauss, also engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge. Day and night, logging trucks cross over from one side to the other. But as I park and stand in a scenic overlook on the Oregon side, an older man, spotting my California license plates, approaches.
“I’m a local. Got any questions?” I’m somewhat surprised by his forwardness, but other residents whom I’ve met in the area are equally friendly. He wears jeans and a T-shirt, his teeth yellowed and missing a tooth on one side of his mouth.
“Whatever you can tell me,” I reply, not knowing particularly what to ask, standing there and taking pictures with my cellphone of an enormous pulp and paper mill where acres of naked log poles, shorn of branches, await processing, white smoke careening upwards. The scene is so massive that despite wherever you stand on logging and the environment, it’s hard not to be impressed by the industry and scale of the operation. But there is always more to what we can actually see.
He points to Weyerhaeuser plant that dominates the center of the Longview port. “Those log poles are destined for Japan where they are processed and get shipped back to us as lumber,” he says. Weyerhaeuser ships to Asia via a 1,200-foot wharf. Weyerhaeuser is an American timberland company which owns nearly 12,400,000 acres of timberlands in the U.S., and manages an additional 14,000,000 acres under long-term licenses in Canada. From what I gather, companies like Weyerhaeuser are like mortgage companies that occasionally sell off parcels of land to other companies. After all, the company is a real estate investment trust.
There’s also the Reynolds aluminum plant,” my tour guide points to the far left, a plant whose smelter was shut down in 2001. My own research tells me that its operations left elevated levels of fluoride, cyanide and hydrocarbons on the site. A $28 million dollar clean-up operation was begun in 2019 by the Washington Department of Ecology. On the far is right stands Longview Fibre and Packaging. The manager of the AirBnb property where I am staying for the duration, works at the plant. When I first arrived, he explained how that during the height of Covid, Longview Fibre had shifted a large part of its operation to produce those small cardboard boxes which many of us received online from Amazon and other retailers.
Later, I dig deeper into Longview’s history.
The city was originally known as Monticello, named after Thomas Jefferson’s home, changed several times before officially becoming designated as Longview in 1923. On any day you can see plumes of smoke rising above the Columbia River, a rolling swath of blue that shapes the outer edge of the city, which was founded and developed by a handful of industrial-minded men. A bronze statue of R.A Long, president of the Long-Bell Lumber Company, sits at the intersection of Broadway and Commerce Avenue.
A local realtor informs me that shopping malls have only been recently introduced over the last ten years. Fred Meyer with its origins in Oregon has a store in Longview, but I prefer going to WinCo, an employee-owned company, with a large bulk-foods section that includes beans, flours, spices, pasta, pet food, and a large variety of candies. I enjoy the people-watching that such a supermarket offers. Upon my arrival, I thought that Longview was composed mostly of men with beards and tattoos and women with large T-shirts and small backpacks, but like most places, there’s a great variety of people. My eyes just needed time to adjust.
For the first weeks of my visit in June, it kept raining, but coming from drought-battered Northern California, it seemed like a glorious aberration, rain a constant accompaniment to every meal, pooling through the gutters, dripping from the roof like Christmas lights, washing cars in every driveway.
But today the rain has stopped. After leaving the Longview vista point, I drive up the coast to Astoria, a city which is the oldest in the state of Oregon and the first (white) American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, founded in 1811. It feels like an earlier iteration of Provincetown located at the tip of Cape Cod, restaurants, art galleries and microbreweries line the wharf, Black Lives Matter and Gay Pride posters are displayed in many storefronts. It’s also home to the Columbia River Maritime Museum. But there is another reason why I’m here. It’s to visit my son, allowing me to share more informal time than text messaging and phone calling usually allow. It’s also to explore the possibility of my moving to the area.
I’m not sure I can. After making the Bay Area home for more than thirty years, it would require my trading climate for actual weather, no rain for lots of it, and a politically progressive area for a strong Trump aftertaste. My Gig Harbor friends say that they haven’t moved away from their community—they’ve just given their friends a place to visit. Wild flowers bloom along every walkway, yellow buttercups, fringes of vetch can turn an entire hillside purple, oxeye daisies wave at every traffic stop.
So far, the places I’ve explored in Oregon and southern Washington, by Bay Area standards, don’t feel very diverse, something that’s been bred into me after years of living in large urban areas, including growing up in New York City. On the other hand, the idea of change appeals greatly, especially after these too many years of Covid which have kept me locked in a narrow beltway between the supermarket and going for walks. I’ll have to see what change means right now and what form it will take. In the meantime, I’m enjoying looking out on my lawn. Rabbits and a great variety of birds forage at its edges, a half-acre surrounded at the south end by towering Douglas fir, and at the north, a massive willow tree, which is as graceful as any sad dancer.