THE SKAGIT VALLEY MASSACRE

                                     

The Skagit Valley, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skagit_County,_ some sixty miles north of Seattle, stretches like a northern Plain of Jars from the Cascade Mountains west to Anacortes and the San Juan Islands of the upper reaches of the Puget Sound. Encompassing some 1900 square miles and a population of 117,000, it is a quietly flourishing land but not a densely settled one. In many ways, it is a place time has left largely alone.

When I lived there, in the small fishing village of LaConner, my neighbors included novelist Tom Robbins, Washington State poet laureate Robert Sund and abstract artist Guy Anderson. Stormy in winter, radiant in spring, tulip fields lovely in summer and hauntingly lonely in autumn, it was, as well, a magical and pervasively mystical place, thanks in large part to the strong presence of the Swinomish (Indian) Confederation and their reservation on Fidalgo Island, across the Swinomish Channel from LaConner.

This week, thanks to a Tuesday rampage by a lone white male with a history of mental problems, six people up there, including a woman deputy sheriff, are dead and two are seriously wounded. At this writing, the media are still gathering information but enough has come out to easily visualize the bloody and random trail of carnage he left before turning himself into the Sheriff’s Department in Mount Vernon, the Skagit County seat. http://www.kirotv.com/news/index.html

In Seattle, it is a story which has overshadowed the war in Iraq, the aftermath of Gustaff and the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. For all the diversity of our neighborhoods and what would only pass as a metropolitan lifestyle this far removed from places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York, we remain perhaps embarrassingly rural in orientation and predilection.

As much as we abhor this kind of violence within our own county and city limits, we accept it as a tradeoff. And as enchanting as places like the Skagit are, it’s tough to make a living if you’re not either from there or hired into the area. But we weekend and vacation there. Some of us retire there. A few of us, self-employed, do make lives for ourselves there.

For the rest of us, it’s the hope and belief that people can live among one another without fearing such excesses of human behavior. As naïve as that might seem east of the Mississippi, it’s worked in the Pacific Northwest pretty successfully, even in the boisterous days when timber was in trouble in Oregon and marijuana replaced it for awhile as the state’s top cash crop.

Long after the vigils, the tributes, the funerals and the memorials, we will wonder if this could have been prevented. We will pressure the courts to compel the man who did these things to explain why. Small town city councils will meet to discuss law enforcement issues and there will be an upsurge in the purchase of firearms and home protection systems. And neighbors will be watching other neighbors for indications of silent stress about ready to go ballistic.

In time, like after fire, flood, earthquake, volcanic eruption or sea-borne storm, the wounded will heal and the bereaved at peace. This will the subject of family Bibles and local history. Despite our innocence, we realize that of all the natural disasters which can and have afflicted us, what we are capable of doing to one another in rage, fear or madness is perhaps the most unpredictable and profoundly resonating.

We need not seek to know for whom John Donne’s bell tolls. Certainly it tolls for us.