“Thanks.” She smiled and served herself some greens.
“So, Lucie,” she started, “I read an article you wrote for the Pacific Standard.” I shoveled greens into my mouth. “Do you write for them a lot?”
“No, not really. That was a freelance gig.”
“Well, it was good. It was the one on gentrification and the housing crises in West Coast cities.”
“Yeah, that was just a few months ago.”
“I liked that you emphasized the post-quake bubble. Not a lot of people talk about that.”
One of the older colonists asked what “bubble” she was talking about.
“The demographics of neighborhoods changed when developers”—Jen’s cheeks went red, like developers was a profanity she couldn’t stand to hear come out of her own mouth—“came in and bought up swaths of property from homeowners who couldn’t afford to rebuild. Insurance payments were slow in coming or they were denied, and people had these HUD vouchers for temporary rentals, but I mean not ideal living situations. So people took these offers of cash for their houses, either to move out of the city altogether or try to find somewhere else to live. But because of the lack of livable housing, the displaced were forced into less desirable parts of the city, and those neighborhoods, that should have been temporary, just stuck. Created new ghettos.
“We lived in South Park at the time, which was very working class. Our house survived the quake, but the Duwamish River flooded — our whole neighborhood was two blocks beyond the hundred-year flood mark, and we had water three feet up the walls — that’s how far it came. We didn’t have flood insurance. A developer paid cash — half its value before the quake — for the house, along with most of our neighbors’ houses. Over the next ten years, we looked into moving back, but they leveled the whole place and rebuilt from the ground up: lofts, a yoga studio, a Whole Paycheck — the full nine yards. It’s this wealthy bohemian enclave now. And you know what the sick motherfuckers renamed the neighborhood? Duwamish Plains.”
There were murmurs of commiseration. It was a common story for those who had lived anywhere on the West Coast in the last twenty years.
Jen looked at me. “Sorry, I should’ve let you explain. I get all worked up about it. You tell a lot of stories like that in your article.”
“No, you’re right: those wounds haven’t really healed for a lot of people. The gap between people who can afford to own their homes and those who can’t is getting bigger, so the cities themselves — the land, the resources, the access to open spaces, to things like the amazing vistas of Elliott Bay and the Olympics — all of those things are owned by fewer and fewer people, leased out at enormous rates to the rest of us. And it behooves those people to lobby for the status quo with elected officials, so the bubble never went away; it’s like it—” I paused; the sun was shining directly in my face and my head tingled, felt airy. “It’s like it grew a thicker membrane.”
“With help from people like your stepdad,” Katie cut in. She said it casually, but there was something brittle in her voice, its edges crystallized. The table went quiet again. I stared at her, the pulse behind my eye throbbing a little harder. I blinked.
“You’re right. He’s a developer. My mom married a motherfucker.” I half smiled. “Not a neighborhood-leveling motherfucker, but I’m sure he did his share.”
“Hey, my folks are Silicon Valley millionaires,” Tuck said, getting up from the table. “We can’t help where we come from.”
I almost liked him for a minute.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t generalize,” Jen said.
“Don’t apologize.” I touched her arm. “I’m really glad that article spoke to you.”
It had been my last big published piece; my editor at the newspaper had rejected it, then I was laid off. Pacific Standard had picked it up two months later.
After that, we talked about the weather — the longer dry seasons, the disappearance of the rain the Northwest was known for — it was what everyone talked about through the heat waves of every summer. The rains last week had done little to fill the two small streams on the island.
After lunch, they decided that Tuck would take me to the edge of the Colony, to show me something they referred to as “the project.” It was something started in the early days of the Colony and carried on ever since. Katie had work to do with Sister J. in the Colony House, their office. I wasn’t thrilled to be alone with Tuck, but he was Katie’s husband, and I was curious about him and about “the project.”
We started from a hidden path behind the barn. For a while, I could still hear the younger goats playing on the mossy roof and bed of an old pickup truck that had been slowly rotting away in the pasture for years. But soon all I heard was the wind in the tops of the trees, birdsong, and the water — always the low murmur of the waves.
“How long have you been here?” I asked him.
“About ten years.”
“That’s a long time. You’re what — thirty-five?”
“Thirty-six.”
“What made you come out here, at twenty-six?”
“This,” he said. “I wanted to do some good, somewhere.”
He stopped and looked around him, over the ground — there were leaves all over, yellow and red and brown, normal fall foliage — then he put his hands on his hips and tilted his head back, surveying the arch of trees over us. The tops of many of the firs were rusted on the windward side, though not quite dead; new growth had sprouted from the old, the desiccated. Lichen clung to the rusted patches where branches had fewer or no leaves or needles at all.
“Noxious gases released during the refinery fire,” he noted, pointing for me. “And the fire retardants ArPac sprayed from crop dusters to keep the fire from spreading.”
“That was two decades ago,” I said. “You came here ten years after the fire. What did it look like then?”
“Still pretty dead. The Colony itself was well-established. They were cleaning up the soil in the fields, using water filtration, graywater systems, composting toilets, but the rest of the island was still suffering. The heavy metals and chemicals they use in petroleum extraction and production stick around. As long as the rest of the island was still sick, the Colony was sick.”
As we started walking again, I looked up every now and then, watching the bald, singed areas increase the farther we were from the Colony. He kept talking as we made our way. He grew up in the Bay area with middle-class parents who happened to get rich in the tech industry. He had been a disaffected skateboarding youth who dropped out of Berkeley in his junior year to work for Greenpeace. His parents weren’t pleased, would never understand why he gave up a formal education for a life of activism.
“Why did you give that up?” I asked.
“My first protest on the Berkeley campus: divestment from oil. Something about being in the crowd, feeling the strength in our voices, urging the university to do what was right. Then seeing how the university ignored us, shrugged us off. It made me more determined.”
He turned to look at me, trailing behind him.
“Why do you write about the environment?” He seemed to be trying to compare us, somehow.
“I’m sure you already know my dad worked at ArPac.”
“Katie told me a lot about you.”
“My dad was in environmental compliance. He had warned the company about potential violations to safety regulations before the earthquake, but ArPac was dragging its feet about making the necessary upgrades to equipment. The explosions, the fire, all of this might have been prevented.”
Tuck didn’t say anything.