The Strata Beneath Our Feet

Out here, the layers of history are thin as tissue paper. Even old money isn't all that old. In the 1920s, after the launch of regular ferry service across the lake from Seattle, wealthy businessmen built mansions along the east shore, earning it a borrowed nickname, the Gold Coast. My family's house was perched across the bay from one of the first of those mansions. A graceful brick Tudor swathed in ivy, the Thurston place sat at the top of a sloping lawn that ran down to the water and all the way around the point, so much lawn that it purportedly took 16 hours just to mow. For a young girl who had not yet been to Europe or even the East Coast, it was what old money looked like.I visited the house once with my Camp Fire Girls group, invited by the widow, Mrs. Thurston, to swim in her pool. The kidney-shaped pool was surrounded by a flagstone patio and topiary that was, I want to say, clipped into animal shapes. But maybe not. Animal topiaries or not, the glamorous surroundings had overawed me. I tried to swim decorously, a sleek side-crawl that wouldn't ruffle the surface. No cannonballs or horseplay here. When Mrs. Thurston's housekeeper served us lemonade in plastic tumblers on a silver tray, we thanked her politely, shyly. We were not invited inside the house, but later I saw the interior when it was used as a location for a couple of movies and TV shows. In one starring Bill Bixby, there was a secret door in the library bookcase, and it occurs to me only now that this probably wasn't an actual feature of the house. It had seemed like the kind of place that would have secret passageways.Many years later, the widow died and the house was sold to developers who wanted to subdivide the property and build four more houses around the point. Neighbors protested fiercely, and the city of Medina refused to permit it. However, the developers had the last say, as they almost always do. They turned off the heat and electricity to the house, opened the doors and windows to let the rain in, and now were waiting for the elements to wreck the place, so they could have it condemned and tear it down, demolition by neglect.This was the same summer that I returned home from acting school in New York to an empty house and a family that was also falling apart. After discovering my father's affair, my mother had decamped to live on the boat. My father, who was supposed to stay in the house during her absence, had instead taken off with his bubbly girlfriend. I wasn't entirely alone: Greg, a friend from college, was staying in my sister's old room for the summer while he took an intensive Chinese language course at the UW. His own family had come apart in similar fashion to mine—his father had married their housekeeper—and he'd been more or less left to his own devices after that. The two of us knocked around the big house, feeling oddly orphaned though we were in our twenties and had four living parents between us.One evening after he got back from classes, Greg and I decided to take a little dinghy, the only boat left at the house that summer, and row across the bay to Groat Point. We would picnic on the lawn of the old Thurston mansion. We rowed towards the landmark I had used in the past to set my sails, a willow tree that draped over the water at the exact tip. When at last we got there—it's slow work to row a dinghy—we ignored the No Trespassing sign and tied our little boat to the dock.Summer evenings in Seattle stretch out long; in July, it stays light until ten, but the Thurston house was already in shadow, set back against a tall stand of Douglas fir. In the gloaming, it looked just as it always had, those years I'd rounded the point, coming and going. Closer up, though, the grass was shaggy and dotted with dandelions. As we climbed the slope past the tennis court and drew closer, we saw panes in the leaded glass windows broken out like teeth. The pool had been drained down to a slimy green puddle. Other trespassers had been here before us; beer bottles and cigarette butts were scattered here and there. A sheet of plywood displayed another warning, spray painted in red. We peered into the dim interior through a bay window the size of a movie screen and then went inside, stepping over broken glass and into the dark. It smelled of rotting cardboard. Water had warped the sweeping grand staircase, buckling the railing, the steps, and the floor below into seasickening waves. We couldn't see much, but I didn't want to see any more.I walked back down the slope, swiping at tears, tears that might suggest a closer association with the Thurston's house than an afternoon swim many years before. Yes, it was genuinely painful to see the calculated destruction of this graceful house, but I was aware even then that this was merely a pretext. I was actually crying for the loss of my own house, the end of my family, for my gilded life that was breaking apart that summer. And, yet, another part of my divided brain was watching this scene. I'd spent the previous year learning how to cry on command, to project angry or shattered while at the same time hitting my marks and saying my lines. I'd become adept to the point where I felt like I was acting all the time.I had also read The Great Gatsby for the first time that summer. In my imagination, the Thurston house could have been Gatsby's. And look, there on the far side of the bay was our dock with its own green light. What could be more romantic than that?I was captivated by Fitzgerald's portrait of Gatsby, and Daisy, Tom and Jordan, by their elegance and romance and what Fitzgerald called “their vast carelessness.” I missed the implicit criticism in that line because I wanted to be careless. I wanted to be from old money and to have their casual sangfroid. I wanted to be Daisy in her airy white linen dresses. I wanted men to be desperately in love with me and go to exorbitant lengths to impress me, and I wanted not to care. I could see myself playing those scenes.I missed the racism embodied by Tom Buchanan, who tells Gatsby, “It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things.”I missed that the novel was intended as a condemnation of the rich.Instead, I sobbed at Gatsby's death, and I admired the elegiac closing lines. I memorized them and copied them into my clothbound journal.At the time I didn't understand consciously why those lines spoke to me so deeply. I had inherited the belief—held by my father, himself a nouveau riche Gatsby-like character, and by the city of my birth—that history could be buried, and that everything worth having lay in the future. However, only by dint of great energy and determination could one catch that future. I felt a constant pressure to run faster and farther, and at some level, I knew that I might not make it.Had I been asked that summer about the history of the Eastside, I would have said there wasn't any, that it had come into being at relatively the same time as I had, midway through the century. Of course, in the vague, distant past there would have been Native Americans, but other than the skull dug up in the driveway when our house was built, there was no evidence left of them. So then: Native Americans, a long blank period, then suburbs. Yes, this was youthful self-involvement worthy of Daisy Buchanan, but it also reflected the wider cultural disinterest in looking back. Best not to look closely because, as Fitzgerald suggested, just under the pretty, manicured turf are strata of greed and racism.Little more than a hundred years before our picnic, nearly all of the Eastside, what would later become the cities of Medina and Bellevue, was still old growth forest. Most of it was too dense to inhabit, but a branch of the Duwamish tribe, called the People of the Large Lake, lived and fished salmon part of the year in longhouses near the mouths of streams that emptied into the lake. The land under our feet on Groat Point is believed to have been their burial ground. After the first white settlers arrived in Seattle, the numbers of the Duwamish were decimated by smallpox, and they were swindled out of their land in bad treaties.In their wake came loggers, the first of them arriving in the late 1870s. In another archeological blink of the eye, they transformed the forests on the Eastside into vast, ugly fields of stumps. Landowners then hired Japanese, newly unemployed from the logging camps, to clear those stumps. It was dangerous, backbreaking work, digging or blasting out stumps that were deep-rooted and five feet in diameter, but in exchange the Japanese laborers were given permission to farm the newly cleared tracts. In 1904, a man named Sakutaro Takami planted the first strawberry farm, and other Japanese farmers followed. Why strawberries? They required almost no overhead, just a horse and a plow and kids to pick the fruit, but it was more hardscrabble work than most whites were interested in. After digging out the stumps, it took a couple of years for the plants to establish, and then after about five years, a pathogen from the fruit contaminated the soil past producing, and the tenant farmers moved on to the next stump-pocked plot, leaving behind acres of newly valuable land. In this manner, Japanese strawberry farmers literally cleared the way for the prosperous city to come.By the twenties, Bellevue had become renowned for its strawberries. The little town dreamed up an annual Strawberry Festival, and every year increasingly larger crowds came by ferry from around the region to consume acres of strawberry shortcake. Festivities included a parade, skits, and musical entertainments. In 1934, a local resident effused that the festival held “all of the glamour and sparkle of a trip to a foreign land, so completely is our town changed while it endures.” The following year, the fair attracted more than 15,000 visitors, seven times the local population. Though more than 95 percent of the strawberries were grown by Japanese, the fair's organizers were all white, as were the Strawberry Queen and her court of Yum Yum Girls.A 1928 school photo from Medina Elementary, where I would attend sixth grade a little more than 40 years later, shows that nearly half the second-grade class was Asian; the 1926 valedictorian of the high school was Japanese. By the time I came around, though, our class photos displayed uninterrupted rows of white faces. There were no Japanese children in my class at Medina Elementary. One of our high school homecoming princesses, Mary, was Japanese American, and looking back at our yearbook I see a handful of other Asian Americans, but I have no idea if any had a family connection to the strawberry fields. Those fields were long gone, there was no festival, nor had I ever heard of such a thing.Unbeknownst to me, though, the mansion on Groat Point where Greg and I had our melancholy picnic was a physical remnant of that disappeared history. It turns out that the Thurstons were not the original owners of the house. It had been built in the twenties for Miller Freeman, a publisher of trade newspapers with names like Pacific Fisherman and The Pacific Coast Dairyman. He purchased the point for his house and then began buying up other parcels of land from whomever would sell to him.Miller Freeman didn't lease any of that land to be farmed by Japanese. He believed that Japanese immigrants had been sent to the Pacific Coast by the Emperor as spies and saboteurs in advance of an intended invasion. This belief in a so-called “Yellow Peril” was hardly a delusion specific to Freeman, but as the owner of newspapers, he was in a position to disseminate his views. In 1904, he stirred up anti-Japanese sentiment with editorials in two of his papers, Japanese as a to the of white salmon and he the of to from in in and followed. In he actually Seattle to a to against Japanese invasion. After I he to against the Japanese, in his that they and were and from In he the of and began for an land in the He five years later, a that of land by “all for and it to lease land to them as The was at the only other immigrants who could not become were and most of them had been from Seattle years Freeman the Japanese of this invited here. came into this of own numbers after our supposed that Japanese had been came knew were not have an in our for are to the the of Japanese in the but in the end it they could no lease Japanese farmers the by buying land in the names of their By there were in had a for as a and Japanese farmers the only though relatively is and water and to Bellevue with Seattle on the and farmers their to town were on or a an by the of had a idea to the two a The was but Freeman his behind the idea and the to build the in the When it opened in his land up in way or the the Japanese strawberry would have given way to the of However, the was up and by the of the following on the after the the came to Tom Bellevue home and took for along with two other of Japanese up and down the Coast that first The next a school in Medina refused to five Japanese the an against Japanese. The school up the children in his and returned them home after then to the of the school Miller Freeman believed his about a Japanese of the Coast had been he took into his own a of Bellevue all of them white, and five Japanese to to the the of their want to with the with in an he the Japanese at the He went on to that to they their Japanese language and that in the only in When it was out that some of the knew only Japanese, Freeman that wasn't a language to was held at house on Groat but little was later, on New Freeman called a and when two of the Japanese didn't He this as of the and that their the Japanese under This to have been the the that every resident of Japanese or would be from the Coast and at such time as this was Japanese were given a and the used to clear stumps were but they were to to farm their or be for that Japanese farmers in Medina had planted their in for Japanese were out of Bellevue, over of them This included of Bellevue They were on for a to next the in the Bellevue the a that the Strawberry was were of for the the to and for the a about the was that the who the strawberries were on to the of the end of the in only returned to The had to sell off their and at Those who had land had to come back but when those who still property it was to their or who had tried to the property of their Japanese had become of In the most of those who returned the against them too the Japanese of Miller Freeman was a around town that asked For Neighbors They held a on by When a of was asked for all in of all Japanese from this about their The and later held a that in Bellevue believed in fair It was also at this that many of those in the were businessmen who to by of the Japanese and their was Miller Japanese farmers to the Bellevue he an white the of that was a The year Miller Freeman had given a of newly to his for this The had still been at so were but the had the to make an for them on the that a movie in the would be a for the on the home with the behind Miller Freeman and his could at with the of the Freeman, and the to the family's his watching a clear a strawberry farm to build the family's Bellevue the first in the Pacific opened in with and the movie years, it had in to this the of the Freeman called the Bellevue a of the and over movie and glass of and by and is and and there is no physical evidence here of a not the Bellevue I knew in the and much less the of the Japanese strawberry Bellevue the side of the and by local to it to light have been by the Freeman family an though, the have changed from when I lived there. The of in a by more than mother a from the at the of Bellevue When we the half the we the with the wealthy young in a man in a couple in in of us, to one another in the a is In the children of on the and through the water not the white of my mother we against the back into the distant my father tells us kids to I the of the a no painted no or just a painted red. It to and The green of the up, my father and and then the is even and I were to let go I would be out and the but who at the top of a love this by the of on my thin and the of ever leaving the ground. I let my my and watch the like and around me. When the back down, like a left in the I off the and like a at my and the of the my mansion on Groat Point was down late in and by four or five even larger to along the and by that of the The where the willow tree the point, was purchased by one of the first who built for himself a a years The look like a at so much as a every of it and and all The willow tree is family home is also After my my mother moved to a from her old life by a My father married the bubbly and they moved back into the house, but took a After years of set to the house one and died in the The house was and another was built in its place for one of the of the Seattle The property changed a more times my mother look out her and if and the have their see down to the where the once For the past two years, though, been every by an the of down the For two years, a project to and the but The up the to the just as it always like a secret we down the the relatively a in that under a high and down to the lake. There used to be a at the of this but The of more The picnic the little that the the the even the all of it is A past as a The been planted with and the size of and an and is with The is to a of the as it might have been before the and strawberry farmers It will probably look after everything grown and in, but now it like a the look out at the the swim how far it had seemed from the shore, how the had felt in the when out of the lake. The is to the east and then a in its The two and half acres that was once the of the is now to be merely a back to the a with and one is an the next up is a for and and so all the way up the to It more like an of a than an actual I to what was here before. but I up a to the along the and out a where be out on the water feet The is on the water and off the of the white tied up at the People the bay in the the point is with glass houses that to the grade like the houses on the Coast. And on the other side of the are the houses that have Miller Tudor my the where our last house The house that it is in the that to our time there is the original boat dock with its green light. It is and to a The is Great Gatsby with the in the on the lawn of Gatsby's house. He out across the water and a in all the houses began to and he is back to the time when first set on the still with the that would later to make way for Gatsby's mansion. He their at the of this on this I my and look past my own past the first white past the strawberry and the In my imagination, I stretch the until they are once Douglas and until everything is and green and of I the water the the but it to what we left behind and how we got here.