Knute Berger - Lessons From Goose Prairie

Lessons From Goose Prairie

By Knute Berger

We all need rest and renewal, especially during tough times with bruising politics. One of the main benefits of church isn’t the practice of any particular belief, but the weekly ritual of getting away from the problems of daily life and thinking about something bigger than yourself.

Dragging politics into church has made that more difficult. Whether you’re in a liberal urban congregation or a conservative evangelical one, it’s tough to duck the ideological battles of the outside world. Back in the 1960s, my mother tried attending the Unitarian church in Bellevue for a while. She liked it because, instead of gazing up at stained-glass images of saints and martyrs, the congregation looked through a picture window onto a grove of evergreens. Firs and cedars touched her soul.

We left that church, though, when the minister began to talk about the Vietnam War every Sunday. It wasn’t that my mother was pro-war, but she thought that politics had no place inside a sacred space. Church was for something more important than an editorial.

Many of us in the Northwest are “unchurched.” We boast the largest percentage of population in America who say “none of the above” when asked our religion. For many of us who fall into nontraditional spiritual categories, the region offers a kind of sanctuary outside of church: woods and wilderness.

It’s a very real salve when wars and politics and economic crises loom. It acts as a counterbalance against election outcomes that often leave us enraged, full of sour grapes or filing lawsuits. The salve of nature pops things back into perspective, reminds us that we humans aren’t the be-all and end-all. Seattle is often extolled as an “outdoor” city that attracts adventurous spirits. Sure, there are hikers, mountain bikers, hunters and climbers. But the area attracts more than the physically active: Nature draws our restless souls, too. And reaching out is easy, as if we lived only a couple of blocks from Notre Dame cathedral or Stonehenge.

On Sept. 10, 2001, I was staying at the lodge at Paradise on Mount Rainier. I returned home late that day and woke up the next morning, with the rest of the world, to the horror of 9/11. The following weekend, my partner and I went back to hike through the flowered meadows that give Paradise its name. It made the weeks to come more bearable, in part because Mount Rainier is beauty made from catastrophe.

Last fall, during an especially trying stretch of the presidential campaign, I realized that, instead of hunching over a MacBook to scan the latest polls, I could greet the dawn at Tipsoo Lake and watch Rainier turn pink and purple in a mirrored pool as the sun rose over the Cascades. You’ve seen the clichéd photograph, but there’s a reason such things become iconic: They’re truly spectacular.

That lake is not far from the sanctuary of one of Washington’s most famous, and influential, sons. The Yakima-bred William O. Douglas served nearly 37 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed in 1939 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He came to Washington as one of those bright young lawyers that FDR found to run the New Deal. Douglas was a great civil libertarian and conservationist who loved hiking the Cascades. The William O. Douglas Wilderness area is Tipsoo’s neighbor. It encompasses many of the alpine areas Douglas loved and fought to save.

The justice’s real sanctuary, however, was just east of the Cascade crest, a high valley ringed by mountains where he built his home away from the other Washington and where he spent the long months when court was not in session. I first heard of it in 1970, when, as a teenager, I wrote Douglas a fan letter. To my surprise, I received a thank-you note in a Supreme Court envelope with the odd postmark “Goose Prairie.”

Douglas died in 1980. The house he built in Goose Prairie is still there, very much as it is described in his memoirs. So, too, is his beloved prairie: full of elk and bird life and wildflowers and herbs, with great fishing nearby and tall firs, pines and spruce climbing the surrounding mountain flanks. There are lots of small cabins there now, but no longer a post office; a diner is open only on summer holiday weekends. A Boy Scout camp intrudes, but the valley is still a remarkable oasis.

Douglas used to test his guests there. He once made Justice William Rehnquist and his wife climb a nearby mountain before he’d serve them a cocktail. Lawyers seeking his signature might have to chase him up pack trails. The rules of Goose Prairie inverted the rules of Washington, D.C. The powerful on the bench or in Congress were nothing compared to the mountains.

Douglas fought hard to save Goose Prairie from the worst ravages of change. He lamented a new road that made it accessible to people like me. He hated the noise from military jets that fly over. And he objected to the sound of snowmobiles in winter. He worried what the modern age would do to places like this. In his mid-1970s memoir, Go East, Young Man, he wrote: “Noise pollutes the Cascades even in winter. Snowmobiles are everywhere. They are a menace to game; elk, chased by snowmobiles, cannot survive. These are devilish machines which invade and destroy privacy and repose. They make a constant whine; it is as though a chain saw were operating for hours on end right outside one’s study window, destroying the quiet and solitude. Drastic steps need to be taken if taut nerves are to have the quiet needed for their repair.”

Even for outdoorsman Douglas, the value in Goose Prairie was as a place for healing, not posturing. There he could recuperate and renew himself from the wear and tear caused by the combat inside the Beltway.

As a political columnist, it might seem odd for me to insist, especially after a historic presidential election, that there are more important things than politics. But with campaigns now lasting years, and with divisions deep and scorched-earth tactics the norm, and with so much at stake, it is necessary, as Douglas suggested, to take time out to quiet “taut nerves,” to give them a rest from the “devilish machines”—like cable news—that increase the noise level of daily life. Goose Prairies are key to our sanity and our salvation, at least in this life.

Washington LAW & POLITICS