Sleepy Pueblos on th South Fork of the Nooksack

A native of Seattle, Don Shank has been driving Highway 9 all his life. He moved to Bellingham in April.

Let me confess my bias right from the start: I love Highway 9. So many of my earliest memories are entwined with that stretch of road, heading north from our home in Seattle for camping trips in the Cascades, driving towards Arlington to cut the family Christmas tree. Throughout my adult life, when I’ve wanted to go to the Stillaguamish or the Skagit or Mount Baker, Nine has always been my route of choice, the road less traveled.

But more than just a pleasant path on the road to somewhere else, it has been the source of more Sunday drives than I can count, the journey as destination. Over the years, whenever I’ve felt the concrete and bustle of the city closing in on me, I’ve turned to Highway 9 to find balance, to remind myself of other ways of being, a sort of moving meditation on nature and community. Ever the dutiful tourist, I make sure to drop some coin along the way for coffee or lunch or a pint of beer, fuel up if I need to, stimulating the local economy as my way of saying thanks.

So when I heard about the proposed “Commerce Corridor,” a plan to bulldoze ten lanes of concrete plus pipelines, power lines and railways down Highway 9 through Whatcom, Skagit and Snohomish counties, I took it personally. This was more than just bad planning, it was a violation of the very character of the Cascade foothills, the essence of what gives this area a sense of place. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) had scheduled a forum to discuss the projects feasibility study for July 16 in Bellevue, and knew I had to be there, had to drive down from Bellingham. Down Highway 9, of course.

I left on Thursday, going to spend the night at a friend’s home in Everett so that I could take the afternoon to study the object at hand. Starting at Deming, I turned south on Nine and headed down the valley. Nine isn’t a very efficient road. It’s full of twists and turns, and no sooner do you reach 50 m.p.h. when there’s another yellow sign warning of a sharp curve, slow to 30 m.p.h. please, or a 25 m.p.h. speed zone as you pass through one of the small towns on the way. The kind of road motorcyclists love and truckers hate. Time consuming. Inefficient. Unproductive. And beautiful. The writer Joseph Wood Krutch once said that many a good piece of land has been saved by bad roads, and while those who live along Highway 9 and those who travel it would not consider it a “bad road,” it’s bad by big business standards, and therein lies its saving grace.

I drove along through what one proponent of the project called “all that useless Mayberry crap,” past bales of hay, grazing cows, barns, homes and churches. I stopped for a while for a swim in “Commerce Corridor Storm Water Detention Facility Number Fourteen” or, as the locals with their quaint community sensibilities still insist on calling it, the South Fork of the Nooksack River. I watched an old man fishing with his grandson, saw three kids splashing around an inner tube while Mom sat on the bank in the shade, reading. Slackers one and all, producing or consuming nothing, just frittering away their time while standing firmly in the path of progress. God bless them.

Friday morning I left my truck parked in Everett, took one bus to Bellevue, transferred to another to arrive at the WSDOT permit office where the hearing was scheduled to take place. Was being the operative word here. The permit office is a small, roughly 30’x30’ two story building, too small for the forums panelists, let alone the audience.

A pleasant young woman met me at the door, handed me a map and explained that the meeting had been moved to the Ramada Inn two miles away. By car. Two and a half miles if you have to walk, and since the WSDOT hadn’t bothered to provide alternative transportation, I did. Let’s see now, poor planning, lack of transportation choices… give WSDOT high marks for consistency if nothing else.

I set out on foot on a street with no sidewalks, hoofing it through the bushes and weeds half of a mile uphill in 10 minutes to catch a bus to the Ramada. I arrived late, but I need not have worried. They saved their “A” material for my arrival. A lawyer for Wilbur Smith Associates (WSA), the lead consulting firm for the study, was explaining the economic benefits of infrastructure in bringing growth and prosperity to rural areas. “Why if it hadn’t been for the Los Angeles Aqueduct” he extolled “L.A. would still be a sleepy little pueblo.”

There was an audible gasp from the crowd, mixed with incredulous laughter. “And this is a good thing?” asked a member of the audience. When the city of Los Angeles expropriated the Owens River to fuel their growth, it was a social and environmental disaster for the people of the Owens River valley, destroying farms and the communities that depended on them. It led to an armed rebellion and acts of sabotage that only ended when the military was called in. The reward for all that grief and destruction was the corruption and land speculation that went on to consume the entire Los Angeles Basin.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. WSA and WSDOT had envisioned this as a meet and greet session to get local governments on board with the plan, good old boys charting out the future out of the glare of publicity. They failed to anticipate the intense level of public interest, and the response of local government representatives took them completely by surprise.

The folks from Councils of Government and regional transportation planners from the study area didn’t seem to want to talk about their enthusiasm for the “Foothills Freeway.” No, they wanted to talk about addressing current needs, about funding targets to maintain existing infrastructure going unmet. They talked about how the proposed corridor would fly in the face of years of cooperative regional planning efforts. They questioned the need to provide massive infrastructure for Asian goods moving through Canadian ports to reach American markets. They talked about investing in the ports and short-line railroads of Washington state as a way of moving goods to market.

Just like with the aqueduct remark, it seems WSA didn’t do a very good job of market research on their target audience. Nobody was buying what they were trying to sell.

The citizens attending the forum, about 150 of them at the standing room only event, raised the same points the panel members had, and then some. They spoke of the harm that would be done to the environment and their communities. They pointed out the lack of demonstrable need for or alternatives to the plan. They questioned the huge financial liability if private investors defaulted. They asked why we would want to make a long-term investment in a short-term technology based on the inaccurate assumption that we will continue to have cheap and plentiful supplies of oil. As one attendee said, “That is so 20th Century.”

The firms of Wilbur Smith and Huckell Weinman, subcontracted to report on environmental and community concerns, should be getting the idea that this project is a non-starter by now, but don’t count on it. They both make their livings from bringing subdivisions, shopping malls and office parks to a community near you, and may see in this “multi modal transportation corridor” a highway to lucrative contracts for years to come, and this study could easily fall prey to that bias.

This 800 pound gorilla of a proposal could also be part of a “good cop/bad cop” scheme, a way to introduce a scaled down proposal in the name of “reasonable compromise.” Time will tell, with the next advisory board forum scheduled for October and a final report tentatively due in January 2005. In the meantime, write your state legislators and tell them what you think of this proposal, and maybe fire off a letter to the man who gave life to the idea, Rep. Doug Erickson (R-Trucking Industry) and remind him that we kind of like our sleepy little pueblos on the Nooksack. §