a review of:
The Hanford Ranch: Land of Contrasts
By Suzan Zwinger
Photographs by Skip Smith
Phoenix: University of Arizona, 2004

The fifth in the University of Arizona’s Desert Places series, The Hanford Reach: A Land of Contrasts begins with the irony that the Hanford Reach isn't classified as a desert at all, despite its triple-digit summer heat and less than six-inch annual rainfall. Rather, we're told, it's “dry shrub-steppe.” As Whidbey author Susan Zwinger says, the combination of heat, permanent drought, and drying winds make a good start for a desert. “Throw in mean-looking grandfather rattlesnakes, scrawny prickly pear, desert varnish and canyon wrens, dehydration, windstorms and bare lithosols - I call this a desert.” Zwinger’s words are ably illustrated by Whidbey photographer Skip Smith’s photographs.

This particular desert is split by the Columbia River, of course, and takes the “Reach” portion of its name from the fact that it occupies the free-flowing part of the river which lies between McNary dam and Priest River dam. A reach in this context is, my dictionary tells me, “the stretch of water visible between bends in a river or channel.”

Zwinger points out that the Reach is an entire “landscape of irony.” While it has been protected since 2000 as the Hanford Reach National Monument and includes the Columbia River’s “last free-flowing, nontidal stretch,” the Reach has remained a rich ecosystem only because in 1943 the Federal government “seized 625 square miles of the Columbia River Basis for the Hanford engineer works under the War Powers Act.” Why so much? As Zwinger points out, to provide buffers not only between the Hanford project and the outside world, but to provide wide buffers between parts of the project itself in case of accident. Since much of that inner buffer was left empty (it wouldn't be much of a safety buffer if filled with offices and other buildings, after all), much of the Hanford Monument is unchanged from what it would have been sixty years ago. It is, in fact, “the largest original tract of shrub-steppe in North America.”

This little (84 pages) book covers a surprising amount. We begin as the last ice age ended with Lake Missoula covering all of Eastern Montana. When the prehistoric ice dam to the west broke, about 12,000 years ago, Eastern Washington was flooded almost instantly. At that time, “archaeological evidence suggests that Native Americans were already here,’ and Zwinger wonders what those early families felt as the ice dam’s breaking ‘sent a wall of water half a mile high pounding through central Washington... at fifty miles per hour.” The force, she points out would have been “thirty-three times the force of the greatest earthquake.”

Nonetheless, what Zwinger and Smith are most interested in comes not from the revelations of archaeology or musings about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation’s role in the Cold War. Rather, their greatest delight comes from experiencing this miraculously-saved natural landscape.

Always half scientist, Zwinger begins her focus on the landscape by exploring her favorite lava flow in the Reach, “a mounded lava flow called the Roza.” As we've come to expect of her work, Zwinger finds beauty in “all the varied lava characters... Some are a jaunt on Mars, others a stroll through exquisite rock gardens...” The Roza is “a stunning rock garden in spring, covered with pointillistic mounds of flowers... blotched in saturated golds, purples, whites, and pinks March through June.”

Later she will move on to “the Wahluke, strange and lush, full of surprise... on top of the White Bluffs... 730 feet above the river.” From here, she can look down upon the river, which seems to her as “beautifully composed” as if it were a Hudson River School Painting. From her vantage point, she has “grand hundred-mile views.”

The land is richer in wildlife than one might expect - waterfowl and shorebirds, meadowlarks, sage sparrows, loggerhead shrikes, geese, a Swainson’s hawk, ravens. And plants of all sorts flourish: “The native grasses grow tall and swirl in the breeze like silky human hair. Throughout are scattered the deep yellows of Cusick’s sunflowers. The salsify, a showy ray flower with nine long green bracts protruding from the backs of thirteen gold petals, comes up to my thighs... Here, grasses are so thick it is hard to walk through them. There is no place bare of vegetation to put my foot...” Following a deer trail, she comes upon a coyote den large enough for a wolf.

Zwinger doesn't always travel these lands alone; one section tells of a kayaking trip hosted by the Whidbey Institute, during which the kayakers hear from a scientist involved in the Hanford cleanup. In another, a North Cascades Institute group visits with a spokesman for the Wanapum tribe, whose homeland was flooded by dams and some of whose sacred grounds are now occupied by one of Hanford’s major reactors. Sadly, the displacement of natives and whites alike wasn't the worst: in 1949, “an experiment called the Green Run... released almost eight thousand curies of Iodine-131 into the air in just two days.” The resulting radiation was ‘detected at considerable distance around the globe” and has since been linked to “elevated cancer rates in the beautiful ranchland of the Palouse Hills.” Asked what he would do in the case of an equivalent release of radiation today, a state health official replied that he would “immediately evacuate all of eastern Washington, parts of Idaho, and northern Oregon.”

The story of Hanford as Susan Zwinger and Skip Smith present it is indeed full of irony. On the one hand, a lovely and rare, often untouched landscape has been preserved for future people to enjoy. Yet our society’s willingness to experiment with forces we did not yet understand has left a massive clean-up task for our children to undertake. Yet another consideration: when Hanford began this country was in a race with Hitler to construct the first atomic bomb. When that race ended, we found ourselves in another, called the Cold War. Through all these experiments and changes, the land itself remains, and now we can see what at least one part of our state might have looked like before intensive grazing, farming, and development changed the landscape. Who can say which of these things will count for most in five hundred years?

The Hanford Reach: A Land of Contrasts is available at Bay Books in Freeland and The Moonraker in Langley. Susan Zwinger will be speaking at the Whidbey Island Writers Conference March 4 - 6.

A reformed fiddlefoot, Wayne Ude grew up in Montana, earned an MFA from UMass-Amherst, directed social services programs in Montana and Massachusetts, taught in and directed creative writing programs on the MA level for 17 years, and has published four books of fiction. Since 1993 he has lived, written, and taught on Whidbey Island.