Dear HCN,
I appreciate your Hanford
issue (HCN, 1/22/96) since I was born and raised in Othello, a
small town to the northeast of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Our
farm, which my brother still owns, lies a little more than a mile
away from the northern border. Our father was also raised nearby,
on a homestead in what is now the Columbia National Wildlife
Refuge.
From childhood I have been consumed by
the history of the area, and as I follow wagon roads of the 1850s,
I find traces of surviving native deer populations, migrating bands
of sandhill cranes, horned larks and coyotes: The land is rich in
native wildlife.
My brother recently went to work
for one of the major Indian tribes of the area. He investigates
toxic waste sites and researches the environmental effects of
proposals that might alter what the Indians continue to consider
their sacred sites. A comment he made about the proposed opening of
the northern bank of the Columbia River to agriculture was
particularly relevant to me. He pointed out that seepage from
existing irrigated farms in the area is already creating massive
land movements on the face of the White Bluffs. As water-saturated
layers of the bluffs sag and slough off toward the Columbia, the
river channel is forced to compensate by eroding the banks of Locke
Island, a prehistoric gravesite that sits beneath the
bluffs.
In my own days as a desert wanderer, I
have watched the White Bluffs turn yellow with saturation and grow
weeds that couldn’t have survived there before. Despite the new
pools of seepage that have accumulated on the desert floor, White
Bluffs remains one of the more interesting historical sites in the
state.
Eastern Washington’s deserts, however, are
being discovered by the motocross crew which has ripped vicious
vertical ruts into the flanks of Saddle Mountain. I have nothing
against motorcycles in the desert, so long as they are kept on
established roads where they won’t damage the extremely fragile
environment.
When I compare the damage done by
motorcyclists in a single afternoon with the remains of footpaths
that date from the Ice Age, I am saddened. But perhaps 200 years
from now, when we have run out of fossil fuels and motorcycles are
all in the museums, hikers will one day add motocross trails to the
catalog of ancient traces that are found on the relatively
untouched slopes of the Northern Hanford reach. That is, if we can
keep the plows out.
Mark E.
Danielson
Bellingham,
Washington
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline On the fate of Hanford.
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