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There are a lot of different ways to look at our situation from up here, with the clock rolled back about 6 generations:
What would we have done differently had we known where we were headed? Could we have ended up anyplace else? Can we steer the situation now? Do we need to?
I've got a story for you. I got this one second hand, when I'd only been here a while, and now I've been telling it for over 30 years. But it's definitely not mine. It's bigger than my story. It's OUR story.
There's this farmer sitting in his kitchen over a second cup of coffee, watching the morning sun light up the hillside on the other side of his field, thinking, as he's thought just about every morning for the past 15 years, about the house he's gonna build to catch that patch of sunlight. And somehow, 30 years goes by, him watching the hillside light up and thinking about the house he is going to build until one day he realizes he is not young and that he's gotta get his teeth fixed and he's gotta get his knees fixed and the price of milk is not keeping up with the cost of feed and the taxes are killing him and that it's time to sell the hillside. And he does.
And this bright guy who's 30 years his junior comes in with an architect and an engineer and puts in culvert, and then a road, and then he puts in the house, and he misses the right spot by about 50 yards and the new road and the detached garage wrecks the peekaboo of the mountains from his kitchen window and now every morning he looks at the window and he hurts.
Because the guy never even asked. You'd think that he might have had the sense to ask someone whose been looking at the place for the best part of 50 years where the house ought to go.
Birds-eye view of the Puget Sound country : an accurate perspective
projection, showing the topography, resources and development of
northwestern Washington and British Columbia (1891)
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