Dixy Rocks the Northwest
Through the mud of Fox Island in Puget Sound clumps a stubby and sturdy woman wearing a vibrant green baseball cap, a gold and green sweatsuit, and a T shirt emblazoned SAVE OUR FISHING FLEET. Beaming happily, she feeds her Beltsville White turkeys (one of which she will later carve with gusto at her table); points proudly to three eggs freshly laid by her Rhode Island Red hens; strokes her pet sow, which is ready to have piglets and then become part of her larder; hails her goat April, a daily source of milk; and shows all the joy of a Washington dirt farmer in her modest (65 acres) spread. Then she marches through a stand of Douglas fir to the slate-gray pebbled beach that fronts her property, and gazes fondly out at the waters she has known since childhood. Bending, she picks up a beached starfish, studies the specimen for a moment, and tosses it back into the water--"to preserve the natural balance," as she puts it.
That small act of concern symbolizes the problem that confronts Governor Dixy Lee Ray, her state of Washington and indeed the entire Pacific Northwest. The unspoiled region is struggling to preserve a natural balance that is threatened by the works of man, striving to encourage progress yet retain the beauty of the forests, the mountains and the seacoast that make the area so mistily appealing and define its very essence.
"We all have a deep and abiding love of this land," says Ray, speaking for her fellow Northwesterners. "We're all very defensive about it, and we'd like to see things stay the same. Most thinking people realize that economic development is necessary--you have to have a job to live. But we want change to come in a way that preserves the natural flavor, not necessarily every blade of grass or every weed, but the natural flavor. There are those who argue, 'Now that we're here, let's close the door. Put up a fence, keep the rest out--all those other guys.' But we just can't do that."
Change is coming to the coastal states of Washington and Oregon and to neighboring Idaho, and coming fast, but awesome swaths of the Northwest remain untouched. The upland plains and the mountains that march from horizon to horizon still have a feeling of the frontier. Nearly four times the size of New England, the entire region has a population of only 6.8 million--little more than half of that of the other far corner of the country. Americans who live in cities or suburbs can look at large parts of the Northwest and glean a true idea of what the nation was like 50 or 100 years ago--a region where small-town accessibility and friendliness come naturally, where people seem to care more about who they are than what they have.
Even the city dwellers of the Northwest live close to the land, their concerns and dreams shaped by their environment. Other Americans worry about urban blight, street crime, racial trouble, chronic unemployment. But not the Northwest. Its economy, based on the renewable resources of forests and farms, is expanding strongly. Its biggest manufacturer, Boeing, has a $5 billion backlog of orders. Its two major cities--Seattle (pop. 496,000) and Portland (377,000)--are bustling, clean and eminently livable. There are too few blacks for any real racial problems, and the small Indian minority--.8% of the population--is fighting in the courts, not the streets, for such goals as regaining water rights and tribal lands. In the Northwest, the issues that raise tempers and rile voters involve keeping the water clean to help the salmon and steelhead runs, keeping the air so clear that it smells pine-fresh, and keeping the majestic vistas of uncut forests that in so many places stretch to the skyline.
The whole Northwest, and most especially Washington, is entering a crucial phase, one that will decide whether the region can retain the very elements that distinguish it, in substance and flavor, if not literally in every forest and windswept stretch of coastline. Dixy Lee Ray, herself an increasing source of controversy, is right in the middle of the struggle and delighted to be there. With the subtlety of a Seattle stevedore, she is bulldozing ahead on the key issues. Among them:
Nuclear Power. Can the Northwest use the atom to generate electricity without endangering the environment and the people? Yes, says Ray emphatically. Oil. Should supertankers be allowed to carry oil from Alaska through Puget Sound, the Northwest's inland sea? Yes again, argues Ray.
Federal Control. How much should the other Washington, the one on the Potomac, dictate to the Northwest about how it can use its resources? Very little, says Governor Ray, again emphatically.
Neither Ray nor anyone else can solve another problem: population growth. Looking anxiously ahead, Tom McCall, then Governor of Oregon, declared in 1971: "Please come and visit us again and again. But for heaven's sake, don't come and live here." Surprisingly, the migration to the Northwest is still a trickle compared with the tide flowing to the Sunbelt, but more and more Americans, lured by the natural beauty and the way of life it fosters, are arriving. The populations of Washington, Oregon and Idaho have increased 15% during the past ten years (Florida rose 45%) and are expected to grow another 13% by 1985. More people mean a need for more jobs. Washington Congressman Mike McCormack sums up the development-v.-conservation dilemma: "One man's conservation is all too frequently another man's unemployment."
Since her inaugural eleven months ago as one of the nation's two women Governors,* Ray has been attacked for being too eager to encourage development. She has a distinctive background for the battle. Until she first ran for office in last year's Democratic primary, Ray, 63, was not a politician at all. That pleased Washington's voters, who are fond of mavericks. They were enchanted by her no-nonsense manner and her knee socks, in which she often tucks a comb. When she is in the mood, she radiates a charm that makes her seem like a benevolent pixie, a chubby (5 ft. 4 in., 165 Ibs.) Peter Pan.
Unlike most politicians, Ray has an expert's knowledge of both sides of the debate over nuclear power. A marine biologist, she was named to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1972, and was its outspoken chairman in 1973-74. She is a strong advocate of nuclear power and is bitterly opposed on that score by environmentalists, although while at the AEC she moved aggressively to improve safety features for reactors. Ralph Nader once put her down as "Ms. Plutonium." Her view of him: "An ignorant man--he has no credentials, he has no experience in anything."
Without question, Ray knows how Washington, D.C., works--a great advantage for the Governor of a state whose land is 29% owned by the U.S. and that feels both exploited and ignored by the faraway Federal Government. When she left the nation's capital in 1975 and set out for Fox Island, driving her own motor home, she could feel the pull of the Northwest. By the time she crossed the Missouri River, she was singing at the wheel. Says she: "Every mile I put between me and Washington, D.C., I felt happier and happier. I drove all the way to the beach. I just had to see that old Pacific Ocean."
Whatever their views on Ray, Northwesterners can identify with her compulsion to hurry back home and, before doing anything else, drive down to the sea. In 1792, British Explorer George Vancouver discovered Puget Sound and marveled at the "innumerable pleasing landscapes" that he thought needed only "the industry of man to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined." Since then, the region has experienced the industry of man aplenty, and not all of it for the better. But the Northwest remains astonishingly unsullied and apart. There is brilliant color in the green forests--the yellow flash of the willow goldfinch, the state bird, and the white and rosy pink of the rhododendron. A commuter ferry going from Seattle to a suburban island can seem, for a few moments at least, as alone as an Indian cedar dugout canoe might have been centuries before. If the day is clear, a traveler can spy the heights of the Cascades, a range of 13 peaks over 10,000 ft., topped by Mount Rainier (14,408 ft.), that sweeps north toward Canada and south toward Oregon.
The Cascades split the region into two Northwests by affecting weather patterns. Moist winds from the Pacific push up the western mountain slopes, cool and turn to rain. Two-thirds of Washington's population live in the rainy and green environs of Puget Sound, concentrated--although far from crowded--in Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, and Olympia, the capital. Coastal dwellers shake their heads and tell visitors of the dour, damp days, perhaps hoping to dissuade them from moving in. Actually, Seattle gets less rain (average: 38.79 in. per year) than New York City (40.19 in.), but if the water falls gently, it often seems to fall ceaselessly.
East of the Cascades, the climate is so dry that farmers constantly worry about their crops, especially when the previous winter's mountain snow is light, as it was last year. Still, the land is usually bountiful. The region yields about 15% of the nation's wheat and almost half of its potatoes. With the help of irrigation, Washington is the leading producer of apples, hops and sweet cherries.
The farming areas of the Northwest have a rare, raw beauty. As winter approaches, the wheatfields in the highlands of the Saddle Mountains and on the Palouse prairie to the east are plowed and furrowed like circles of whipped cream on a pie. Near Yakima, the winds blustering through the hills set the bare branches of the apple trees clattering. A cantilevered bank of clouds passes over a mountainside, and the green landscape turns black and white, resembling a Japanese tapestry. When snow caps the peaks, the Blue Mountains near Walla Walla are indeed blue--electric blue.
Novelist Bernard Malamud has written that without investment to speak of, a person in the Northwest becomes "rich in the sight of nature, a satisfying wealth." Just as well, because the Northwest is not the ideal place to get rich in the pocketbook. People are generally better off than most Americans--the per capita income is 6% over the national average--but the wise highrollers head for the Sunbelt.
The Northwest was settled late in the 19th century by industrious people who came for the long haul. To populate the lands it was opening up, the Northern Pacific Railroad recruited migrants in Britain and Northern Europe. Scandinavians and Germans also moved west from Wisconsin and Minnesota. North westerners are still overwhelmingly Protestant, and politicians with Scandinavian roots start with a distinct advantage. Two examples: Senators Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, 65, and Warren G. ("Maggie") Magnuson, 72, who have been in the other Washington for 36 and 40 years, and who are regarded by the electorate as ambassadors who deal with that outer world--the Federal Government and the rest of the U.S.--on an equal basis.
Washingtonians tend to care deeply for education and to be self-reliant, moderate and tolerant in most things. Yet Seattle trails only San Francisco in the U.S. incidence of alcoholism and suicide--a bleak fact sometimes blamed on the long, gray and wet winters.
Visitors commonly marvel at the outgoing friendliness of Northwesterners. "People are simply more civil, more pleasant out here," says William Ruckelshaus, the former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General, a native of Indianapolis who moved to Bellevue when he became a senior vice president of Weyerhaeuser, the timber giant. Perhaps one reason for the affability is that it is so easy to have a good time: just head outdoors. A resident of Spokane can be hunting birds after a short drive, and an hour can put him on the trail of bear, elk or moose.
Washington has half a million sports fishermen, and Seattle, which is 80% surrounded by water, leads the nation in boats per capita. There are more than 200,000 craft of all kinds and shapes in Puget Sound near the city, and on a summer weekend it looks like half of Seattle's population is afloat. Non-sailors are likely to be backpacking, fishing or climbing in the Cascades. The Mountaineers, a club with more than 9,000 members, gives expertly taught courses in such arts as rock climbing and traversing a glacier. To Easterners who are inured to driving for three to eight hours and then finding a rock-strewn trail, the skiing seems unbelievably accessible: half a dozen excellent runs lie within 90 minutes of Seattle. A cab driver's happy report to his customers this season: "Forty-two inches at Crystal. It's going to be a great year!"
In some ways Washington's Governor fits the pattern of the North westerner, but in many ways she does not, right down to the choosing of her name. The second oldest of five daughters of a Tacoma printer, Ray so hated her given first name that she rejected it completely. Her sisters know what it was, but won't say. The family started calling the mischievous child "the little Dickens," which evolved into Dixy. To that she added Lee (she is distantly related to Robert E. Lee) and legally changed her name at 16.
During the Depression, when land was cheap, Dixy's family bought 65 acres on Fox Island, 15 miles from Tacoma. It was there that Dixy began developing her interest in marine biology, studying what she calls "unpleasant, creepy, crawly things." She won a scholarship to California's Mills College and helped pay her way by working as a janitor. Ray, who has never married, earned her doctorate in 1945 from Stanford, and settled down to teach zoology at the University of Washington. She was an instant success --an enthusiast so genuine that students brought friends to hear her lecture. In the mid-'50s she took part in federal ocean-study programs, and later ran the Pacific Science Center, a museum that successfully reached out to the community.
When President Nixon named Ray to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1972, she buckled down with typical zeal to master the new discipline. "If you have to start learning a new field," she jokes, "it sure helps to begin at the top." She got along well with AEC Chairman James Schlesinger, another outspoken maverick, who admired her candor and persuaded Nixon to appoint her his successor. Ray insisted upon being called chairman, not chairperson. She has never been a feminist crusader--"I'm not a joiner type" --although, of course, she had been practicing women's lib all her adult life.
As AEC chairman, Ray showed she was just as tough as Schlesinger suspected. Says one former AEC member: "She has a streak of Golda Meir in her." She created a separate division to set up stiffer safety standards for reactors, although the move affronted some top AEC officials who claimed it was unnecessary. She also made the AEC pay more heed to environmental-impact studies on reactors.
All the while, she lived in a custom 8-ft. by 28-ft., self-propelled motor home with her constant companions--a miniature gray poodle named Jacques and a huge, dignified Scottish deerhound named Ghillie. She moored the $18,000 bus on a dairy farm in Maryland. A Government limousine would pull up every morning, and Ray and her two dogs would be whisked to the AEC offices. At her suggestion, the AEC was reorganized in 1975 into two agencies and Ray then moved on to become Assistant Secretary of State for scientific affairs. When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dodged her frequent requests for meetings, she quit after six frustrating months, declaring that trying to get a decision at State was "like slamming into a wall of marshmallows."
Once back home, Ray plunged into politics: "I decided I'd been telling other people what to do for a long time. I'd better put my money where my mouth was, and that's why I became a candidate. Why did I choose to run for Governor? I didn't have time to start any lower."
But was she a Republican or Democrat? Ray never had decided before, since Washington does not have party registration. She chose the Democrats because, she says, "although I tend to be fiscally conservative, I believe in the philosophy of the Democratic Party."
Her campaign, she admits, was "amateurish, naive and trial by error." Starting far back, she bustled around the state in a Volvo station wagon, stressing the need for economic development and nuclear power, and backing the construction of a Trident submarine base--opposed by the environmentalists--on Puget Sound. She had plenty of energy, an air of bluff honesty that appealed to independents, and a new face. Startling the experts, she defeated Seattle's popular but overconfident Mayor Wes Uhlman, 42, in the primary and then beat Republican John Spellman, 50, the top official in Seattle's King County.
On Inauguration Day last January, 42 Ray relatives showed up, and the Governor's Georgian mansion was as lively and cozy as the two-bedroom house where she and her four sisters had been brought up. There was a football game on the front lawn and jars of plums and applesauce from Fox Island in the kitchen. Ray plopped down into the high-backed chair in her office, twirling a plastic glass filled with champagne. "Well, we made it," she announced. "How sweet it is."
For a while, anyway. Since election day, Ray's popularity has dropped sharply. NIX ON DIXY bumper stickers are starting to appear, and critics are complaining about "Raydiation." Her decline in esteem is due in part to the fact that Ray has turned out to be something of an autocrat, who insists on loyalty at every level. One of her first acts was to replace the staff at the Governor's mansion, including some servants who had been there for years. Her aides, says one fellow Democrat, "aren't just yes people. They're yes-yes-yes people. She intimidates all of them." Her audiences are no longer composed of students, but she treats them like students. At the Western Governors conference in Anchorage this fall, she would clasp her hands and begin to lecture, almost as if she expected other Governors to start taking notes.
Ray feuds with local political writers, charging unfair treatment. At times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which supported Spellman during the election, does seem to delight in baiting her. Publishers have also felt her wrath; she refused to meet again with some after they failed to stand when she entered the room--"not for me, but for the office."
When she is thwarted, Ray's mouth clenches as stubbornly as John Bull's, the engaging twinkle vanishes from her amber eyes, and she lasers her opponent with a lethal stare. Says one of the state's top Democrats: "She's unwilling to forgive and forget, and that's one of the cardinal rules of politics."
Ray is unpopular with the farmers, who miss Dan Evans, the more approachable Governor who served for twelve years before Ray. Her most dedicated enemies, though, are the more extreme environmentalists, whom she derides as radicals who "hate people." Ray's explanation: "The only way they like the earth is when it has no people on it ... because people, of necessity, change the environment [and] use its resources." But many others in the state, including farmers, fishermen and some businessmen, worry about her views on growth--that she wants to go too far too fast.
The hottest current issue is how to handle Alaska's North Slope oil. Washington's four major refineries are located on the eastern shore of Puget Sound at Cherry Point, 100 miles north of Seattle and 75 miles inland from the sea. The refineries are now supplied by tankers limited in size by state law to 125,000 tons. The oil companies and Ray want the figure raised to 250,000 tons, arguing that the bigger loads would allow savings leading to lower prices for consumers. Surplus oil would be passed on to the Midwest by pipeline.
Though the huge tankers would have to thread their way through narrow straits to reach Cherry Point, the Governor maintains that fears of an accident and oil spill are exaggerated. Says she: "There's nothing that tugs on the heartstrings like a few mallards with oil on their wings." Ray points out that some 13 million migratory birds are shot by hunters every year and notes that the number that die from oil spills is minute by comparison. Furthermore, the Governor claims that oil dumped into cold waters, like those of the sound, would cause almost no lasting damage.
Her view that the environmentalists tend to exaggerate the dangers is basically supported by George MacGinitie, the longtime (1932-57) director of Cal Tech's marine laboratories, who lives on the sound. But her statements flabbergast a number of her former colleagues at the University of Washington. A group of 79 scientists and graduate students have declared that a spill "would have serious consequences in Puget Sound." Robert Harman, professor of geology and geography, charges: "Her statements are either misguided, misinformed, naive or whatever. The bays and estuaries of Puget Sound have a tendency to keep oil trapped permanently. Every marine biologist we know agrees that we should not allow high oil-tanker traffic in those waters."
A coalition of environmentalists and state officials backs an alternate plan that would take the supertankers to Port Angeles, which is on the strait leading into Puget Sound in easily navigable waters. The oil would then be carried by pipeline around the southern shore of the sound --some going on up to Cherry Point and the rest flowing to the Midwest. Ideally, the environmentalists would also like to stop all tanker traffic on Puget Sound. Senator Magnuson does not go that far, but he has succeeded in getting a measure passed in Congress and signed by President Carter that in effect prevents supertankers from going to Cherry Point. For the time being, at least, Ray has no plans to try to thwart Magnuson's ploy, but the issue of just how oil will be transported through Washington State is far from settled.
Electricity is another key issue for Ray and the state --ironically so, since Washington once had far more power than it could use and still has the cheapest household rates in the country (about one-quarter the cost in New York State). In the '30s the Federal Government began damming the lordly 1,210-mile Columbia River; the Grand Coulee, the Bonneville and 24 other dams in the system are the heart of a Northwest network that generates 43% of all the hydroelectric power in the nation, yet even that is not enough. Demand in the region is expected to double in 20 years. Problem: building more dams on the Columbia has been stopped for environmental reasons.
The former AEC chairman believes the atom is the answer. Ray argues that strict safety standards are being incorporated into the state's six nuclear reactors now planned or under construction --including two at Hanford, site of the nation's first center to produce plutonium. Says she: "We are going to have atomic power as fossil fuels dwindle, so we may as well get used to it."
The nuclear power issue is especially sensitive in the Northwest because it involves water--and water, once so bountiful in the region, has become a scarce resource, although heavy rains in western Washington last week forced the evacuation of thousands. Water is competed for by fishing interests, farmers and the builders of power plants. The water that cools the nuclear reactors comes from nearby rivers and is later returned to them warm. Environmentalists claim that the warm water can disrupt the ecology of a stream. They are stubbornly fighting a plan to build two large nuclear plants on the shores of the Skagit River, campaigning to have a 59-mile stretch of it protected from any kind of development under the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The plants, Ray argues, are necessary and will cause no harm.
She and many other Western Governors are frustrated because so much of their territory is owned by an absentee landlord: the Federal Government. The 29% of Washington that belongs to the U.S. is comparatively small: the Government owns 47% of Wyoming, 52% of Oregon, 64% of Idaho--indeed about 57% of all the land west of the Rockies. Bureaucrats decide how minerals and coal will be mined on federal land, how timber and grazing rights will be apportioned, how electricity will be generated and sold, which areas will be set aside for public recreation. Says Ray: "I often feel that the long arm of the Federal Government reaches out this way, but the distance is too great for our voice to penetrate back there."
She complains that the U.S. is applying "salami tactics" to Washington, reclassifying, slice by slice, rivers and forests in a way she feels harms the state. A prime example: converting national forests that are now designated for multiple use, including logging, into tightly protected wilderness areas. Exercising its right of eminent domain, the Government is buying up private lands and including them in the restricted parcels. Says Ray: "I am against usurping private land. This is not federal encroachment. It's outright interference."
The fight over the shape of the future is even fiercer on the local level than in the state capitals of the Northwest. The battle flares on individual bumper stickers: SIERRA CLUB, KISS MY AXE, V. DON'T CALIFORNICATE IDAHO. On fashionable Mercer Island, just across from Seattle, residents have stalled the construction of two bridges for ten years to hold down growth, although the present spans are dangerous and jam with traffic during rush hours. In Lewiston, Idaho, the Potlatch lumber company is fighting the Sierra Club and others for permission to cut unsightly swaths through stands of white and ponderosa pine to meet the national building demands. Says Jim Hilbert, a local Teamster official: "Sure, we ought to grow. Create more jobs. City fathers run this place, and they don't want growth. But you can't stop it." William H. Cowles III, publisher of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, says hopefully: "We can learn from others, and maybe we will be wise enough to tell the difference between growth and controlled growth."
Dismal examples of how not to grow are easy enough to find. The magnificent setting of Anchorage, Alaska, for example, has already been tainted by a sprawl of thousands of mobile homes. Much of southern California's coastline is a jagged scar of freeways and factories that bar the way to the sea. Washington, at least, has caught a glimpse of the future and is not at all sure that it works. So has neighboring Oregon, which has decided to throttle back on growth and has developed a master plan requiring its 276 local governments to work out their own schemes, which must conform with state guidelines.
Washington has no such restrictive blueprint. Ray doubts that anybody could draw one up that made sense. "Where could you find such a group of wise people?" she asks. One quick answer is right in Seattle, where a group of talented people helped transform the economy of the Puget Sound area.
Faced with the task of guiding the future of one of the most scenic states, Ray finds the job "fascinating, exasperating, dismaying, frustrating, challenging --all those things." Blithely disregarding her fall in favor, she has already announced that she will run for another term when her first one is up in 1981. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer wryly thanked her for not announcing for the presidency. Small chance of that--Dixy Lee Ray relishes too much delivering thunderbolts from the Olympia of her own Washington. qed
* The other: Connecticut's Ella Grasso.
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