Stabbing Westward: Oregon and the Pioneer Gothic
We all knew Old Mrs. Berger kept a loaded shotgun in the living room at all times, just in case. Unspeakably ancient and seldom seen in the light of day, she lurked in the shadowy curtains of her picture window at all hours, up a long gravel driveway at the top of our cul-de-sac, deep in the heart of our neighborhood, Rock Creek VIII.
The shotgun was just in case a neighborhood child dared to step foot onto the last shred of her pioneer family’s land. She was Scots-Germanic. Or . . . Swedo-Prussian—no one could be sure—but all of this land had once been hers, her family’s, back before Portland began to boom, before suburban sprawl had re-written the history of Beaverton. She was our very own version of the oldest living Confederate widow: a frightening, shadowy specter of the past in the midst of our happy ranch style homes.
I didn’t really believe any of it, but as with any good mythology, the believing never matter. Wanting to believe did. I let myself believe it was true—mostly because I was a stifled grade-schooler with a melodramatic imagination, but also because it tapped into something. Something I knew even then to be true about the mythological landscape around me, growing up at the far western edge of suburban Portland.
I haven’t lived in Oregon for about a decade since graduating college, and the further I’ve moved away from it and my childhood, the more I have (admittedly) romanticized my vision of it, maybe even fetishized it. It was only after moving to New York, where everyone is forced to market their identity in opposition to everyone else, that I started to consider my own private Oregon and realize my long-held opinion of it as the place of the dark green gothic.
These days, in the post-Grunge era, if you read about the Pacific Northwest, it’s typically pushing a twenty-first century vibe: it’s the booming industries of high-end bohemia, the Pacific Rim chic of the Pearl District, the online wineries. It’s tech-savvy rock-climbers and start-up microbreweries. It’s the kind of place they love to write about in American Airlines Magazine. It’s the kind of place where, in New York City in your twenties, everyone knows someone who just moved there and loves it.
But in the larger imagination of America, the Pacific Northwest remains the least culturally defined of all its regions. It may be its relatively short national history (and lack of baggage) that allows it to be so future-focused. I once picked up a Portland history book in Powell’s City of Books and found the following inscription: “Nearer to us than Jamestown and Plymouth, is the Heroic Age.” (Harvey Scott) It was written in 1923, and somehow it still feels true. In America’s cultural Cliff’s Notes, the Northwest is neither part of the Gold Rush or the great cowboy mythos of the true Westerns. It can’t claim the dark glamour of the LA detective noir or the golden beach-blanket shenanigans of post-WWII California. What it does possess, I think, hidden behind its hip progressiveness, is a rich vein of what I would call the “Pioneer Gothic.”
Traditional European Gothic is the literature of a decayed and perverse aristocracy, and by definition, the Gothic revels in peeling back a false moral veneer to expose the hideousness underneath. In America, the Puritans of New England fashioned a mythology of fear based on their relationship to the pagan woods that surrounded them. Their forests became a place where goodwives became witches and where noble pastors encountered the Devil in the three-piece suit. The stiff Christian certainty of Pilgrim civilization was the veneer. Behind it hid the suppressed temptations of the untamed pagan woods.
The Southern Gothic, the most well known variant in the United States, takes root in the lost illusions of antebellum gentility. You don’t have to be from the South to understand the faded Blanche Dubois, or the archetypes of the corrupt traveling Bible Salesman, the Gentleman Caller, and the Magic Negro. Moving West, the California Gothic is found in the decadent corruption of Old Hollywood—it’s Norma Desmond in fright make-up, rotting away in her mansion up on Sunset Boulevard. If these are the poisons underneath their regional façades, what is the lie of the Pacific Northwest?
Suburban discontent is too easy and ubiquitous; it’s true of every region of the country, and the luxurious tragedies of upper-middle class idle wealth don’t constitute a true cosmic horror. The Pioneer Gothic must dig further into our collective past to offer something hidden, something uniquely us; so what is our mythology?
Growing up in Beaverton, the mythos instilled early in me was primarily about the Pioneer Spirit, embodied in those mighty Jeffersonian twins, Lewis and Clark (guided, as always, by Our Native Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, Sacajawea). There was 54’40” or Fight; there were beaver pelt top hats; there was mighty Columbia, rolling on; there was timber and Timberline. And then there was The Oregon Trail, known to all eager children of the 1980s as the school sanctioned computer game of choice. We were taught proudly (and in none-too-subtle terms) that, historically, the Oregon Trail had irrevocably split in Idaho and it was there, like something out of Pilgrim’s Progress, that the Pioneers had been forced to a make a lasting moral choice: the wicked and the gold-thirsty went south on the California Trail to pan for sin and profit, while the pragmatic and noble stayed the course, bringing them at last to the fertile soil of the Willamette Valley. Here amid rain-kissed Douglas firs, libertarian values and the indispensably Protestant pioneer spirit raised cities out of stumptowns.
But quietly, eerily, something the pioneers knew still remains under the skin of Oregon, like Shanghai tunnels snaking beneath our streets. You can find it in the damp granite architecture of municipal reservoirs, slowly being devoured by moss. Or in the lonely ash-blasted madness of the Mount St. Helens landscape. It’s in the abandoned timber and mining camps, sinking back into the earth. The horror lurking beneath our veneer is not human corruption or ghostly vengeance or depravities of the flesh—it’s the land itself. Because in the Northwest, there’s never a sense that we have successfully conquered nature. The grandness and the immensity of the landscape defies containment. Nature is simply tolerating our presence . . . for now. To be convinced of this takes nothing more than a forty-five minute drive in any direction. Lose sight of that last Starbucks, that last gas station, that last highway marker or overhead powerline, and that icy sliver of apprehension you’ll feel is naked vulnerability. It’s fear.
Like the Puritan colonists, our fear is of the Forest Primeval, but with a significant difference: traditional Gothic is steeped in the Judeo-Christian supernatural: ghosts, haunted houses, Satan, sin and salvation. I believe the Pioneer Gothic is significantly atheistic; it’s Man in the cosmic void. It’s Jack Torrance going mad in the Overlook Hotel. It’s D.B. Cooper leaping out of a plane to vanish into thin air. It’s the Donner Party pushed to the dinner of last resort. This is not Hawthorne’s Devil waiting politely for us in a sunny New England clearing with a witty proposition. This fear lacks Christian underpinnings, urbane sophistication, or forgiveness. It’s not even pagan or Native American in nature, it’s something eldritch, primordial, Lovecraftian, that nature might even be malevolent, but at best indifferent to our intrusion. And, with time, Oregon itself comes to claim whatever has been taken from it. This is the fear of the Pioneers: isolation, madness, the whispers coming from the damp forest edge. This is the true cosmic horror underneath the veneer of our McMenamins and sport utility vehicles.
I always took a certain pride in the irreligious tradition in Oregon, the state with the lowest national church attendance. Not out of spite or animosity towards religion, but because I felt like we didn’t need it. Who needs a sermon when you live inside a cathedral? And being a child prone to seeking out shadowy Bradbury corners, I recognized that a reverence for that cathedral comes with the fearful catacombs underneath. I don’t believe the Northwest is a place defined solely by horror or dread, but I believe those aspects are a valuable and potent influence. It adds dimension and richness of our regional heritage, and a theme that can better place it in a national cultural context.
Old Mrs. Berger, guarding the last of her pioneer land against the amnesia of suburban sprawl, captured my imagination as a child. The Northwest continues to capture my imagination—as a wondrous place of contradictions, perhaps summed up wonderfully and unexpectedly, by a Budget Rent-a-Car review I once found. It read:
“[Oregon] can be as arch as it is earnest, as sophisticated as it is folksy, as obsessive as it is easygoing—and although it may lead with its utopian aspirations, it has plenty of dystopian secrets.” (Kimberly Sevcik)
Ross Maxwell ‘00 lives in Los Angeles.
