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In the late 19th century, newcomers to the Northwest derided the early settlers as “mossbacks” who were stuck in the past, in the woods. Seattle writer Knute Berger, the curmudgeonly, modern-day Mossback for the online newspaper Crosscut, has written hundreds of columns – his skeptical and often humorous responses to the phenomenal growth of our region and our often outlandish or ill-fated dreams fueled by unlimited hype and hope.

Berger’s new book “Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps, and the Myth of Seattle Nice” (Sasquatch Books, 2009) is a collection of his provocative essays. On February 25, with “Pugetopolis” as the starting point, Berger debated his friend and fellow writer and reporter Timothy Egan, National Book Award Winner for “The Worst Hard Time,” at the Town Hall in Seattle. Although their exchange seemed more a civil discussion than a debate, Egan enthused about some advantages of Seattle’s dawning status as a world-class city based on technology and brainpower, while Berger registered circumspection about seemingly endless growth and development. But both writers agreed, as Berger later wrote, that “our challenge is to find a way of living here that matches the place.”

Acclaimed Seattle novelist Jonathan Raban called “Pugetopolis” “indispensable – a book that contains within its pages the beating heart of this city, its quarrels and conversations with itself, its dream life, its flights of braggadocio.”
In addition to his writing for Crosscut, Berger is editor-at-large of Seattle Magazine, political columnist for Washington Law & Politics, and a regular guest on NPR affiliate KUOW. He also was editor-in-chief of the Seattle Weekly from 2002 to 2006, where he wrote the award-winning Mossback column. He lives in Seattle.

Berger recently sat down at his downtown Seattle office and talked about his hopes and fears for our aspiring world-class city.

Can you talk about your journey as a writer?

I decided in sixth grade that I wanted to be a writer and when I got a chance to take journalism classes or work on a school newspaper, I did that. I helped start the newspaper at Evergreen [State College]. The Evergreen experience was great because it was a bully pulpit and a target-rich environment. Even though I’d worked for [Sen. George] McGovern and been an anti-war activist, I had a chance to try out my more contrarian side. I published a conservative column that practically got me impeached. Then I worked mostly as an editor for years at various local magazines.

Did columnist Emmett Watson’s “Lesser Seattle” inspire Mossback?

I believed in Lesser Seattle. One of the shattering revelations was in the late ’90s, having lunch with Emmett, and finding out that Lesser Seattle for him was just a shtick, which was legitimate. Seattle has always had as part of its civic culture this buffoon-like self-puffery and this “We’re the next New York” [and] there’s a lot of hubris and mindless boosterism. Emmett performed this wonderful function of popping the balloon. But, in fact, the growth of the area has added diversity and vitality, and he saw that as a positive thing at heart.

I tend to be more of a true believer in Lesser Seattle in that I think that the scale and rapidness of the growth, and the fact that it’s corporate-driven as opposed to grassroots-driven, is really problematic.

Mossback was a derisive term that newcomers called long-time settlers.

Pioneers worked the land and carved a niche and they let the land grow on them. They lived in log houses and some even lived in giant cedar stumps. They weren’t interested in building New York. They were interested in being part of the landscape. It struck me that the term mossback is resonant in terms of the tensions we’re still dealing with today, not simply between newcomers and oldtimers [but] with people who see Seattle as a blank slate and think they can make it anything they want versus people who feel they become part of the place.

You mention a kind of local Calvinism in terms of politics.

Seattle is a very Calvinist town in lots of ways. We’re not a very religious place – it’s sort of a secular Calvinism, but it shows up in this ethic where people are politically liberal but conservative in terms of personal behavior. We think of ourselves as very high-minded when it comes to race or social justice, but then with strip clubs or smoking in bars, there’s this conservative, prudish streak. That Calvinism has been contrasted with the frontier libertarianism. One of our biggest early industries besides timber was prostitution and vice districts with a rollicking frontier mentality. That also fed that boomer mentality of build it big, be a world-class city, do things on a grand scale. That cuts against some of the Calvinist civic culture.

How have we addressed poverty and homelessness?

The idea that Seattle has to purge itself of homeless people is misguided. I was appalled at the sweeping out of the camps and where people were finding shelter in greenbelts. Places like Nickelsville seem to both [raise] public awareness and promote the values that mainstream culture wants people to have — independence, entrepreneurship, civil society, compassion — and creating a way people can get back on their feet without being entirely reliant on the social service network. On the whole, it’s been a positive way to deal with a terrible problem.

Matthew Klingle’s book “Emerald City” [is] an environmental history of Seattle that deals with the social, class and race issues involved in how Seattle was shaped. There’s nothing natural about Seattle. We washed away hillsides, we built canals, we ran rivers backwards, we filled swamplands; our industrial area was water that is now landfill. This place has been terra-formed extensively. We cut down virtually all the forest that was here.

Many projects had very strong class elements to them. People who used greenbelts to hunt for food were pushed out so that those greenbelts could be turned into parks for wealthier people. In the early days of groups like the Mountaineers, there was a belief that the outdoors was a wonderful place to promote the Anglo-Saxon race’s health, and they wanted to keep urban, lower-class people from going to Mt. Rainier because it was seen as somehow degrading of this natural environment. The city of today is the result of a lot of prejudice and bias, and conscious and unconscious actions where race and class made a lot of difference.

Seattle also has a long history of ejecting people who don’t fit its image of itself. We expelled the Chinese, we interned the Japanese, we forcibly removed most of the Native Americans who lived here. Seattle citizens burned the Indian longhouses in West Seattle. The squatters were removed from the tidelands. We happen to be situated in a beautiful natural setting, but the human story of how we live here, where we live, and how that’s been shaped is a complicated one.

You obviously value the history behind the recent developments in Seattle.

What I try to do in my writing is tie history to contemporary politics and culture, and try to explain things.

A few years ago, at the time of the white supremacists in Idaho, a woman said to me, “I don’t get it. This area seems so nice.” But before the Civil War there was talk of the Pacific Northwest seceding to become an all-white republic. If you look at the immigration patterns, [we had] white southerners flooding into the gold fields of Idaho, Washington and Oregon. We had a huge Ku Klux Klan resurgence in the 1920s in Oregon and Washington. One of the largest Klan rallies ever held was in Issaquah in the 1920s. So if you look at the history, it’s not surprising that there’s white supremacists here. The Pacific Northwest was the last part of the continental U.S. to be settled, so it got in the projections of people who were looking to do something “other.”

That may give us our outcast and edgy reputation.

We were a center of old new-age and utopian idealism of various kinds. Some was socialist, some was anarchist, some was progressive and more ecumenical. That’s a strong strand in our DNA – with the railroad barons on the one side that looked at this place as a blank slate and these utopian progressives who looked at it as a blank slate, and they were just trying to build different types of utopias.

Isn’t Pugetopolis – a megalopolis winding around the Sound – a reality now?

It is pretty much a reality. We’re still conflicted about it. It’s a weird thing: nature provided this Eden, so [we] chopped it down and that wasn’t necessarily seen as a conflict. Instead, it was seen as this great thing, and now we’ll utilize it to the fullest extent.

We have this notion that you can have big factories and this global-corporate homeport for commerce, and you can do that in a way that maintains a pristine environment, and we know that’s not true. We know that our living here is destroying Puget Sound, that the snow pack is melting from global warming, and what isn’t melting is contaminated by heavy chemicals from factories. We know that mountain fish have mercury in them. We’re living this contradiction. So Pugetopolis is a reality, but a very conflicted one.

Your critics charge that you want to go back to a Seattle that doesn’t exist anymore, and we can’t do that because we’re condemned to grow.

I get caricatured as being nothing but anti-growth and only nostalgic for the past, which is not true. Seattle has improved in many ways. Seattle is a more diverse, more vibrant city. A lot is better about Seattle now than in the ’60s or ’70s. If you’re African American, Seattle is probably much better city today from the standpoint of diversity and being able to live wherever you want, as opposed to being redlined or restricted by housing covenants.

Good things have happened, but there have been negative consequences: increasing class divisions, the middle class families being pushed out of the city. I’d like to see more thought given to shaping the city and not simply accepting the free market of endless growth. Edward Abbey said, “limitless growth is the political philosophy of a cancer cell.” We can do better. We can look for levels of growth that are much more sustainable and allow us, as we grow and evolve, to integrate the new with the old.

You’ve debunked the myth of “Seattle nice.” My wife is from New Jersey, and she thinks that people here don’t get her jokes.

Seattle is an irony challenged city. People really seem fascinated by [my] chapter on the myth of “Seattle Nice.” We have this public hat-tipping to the idea that Seattle is a nice town, but it really isn’t a nice town. It’s a passive-aggressive town, a repressed town. It’s a town that is friendly on the surface but not intimate.

Warm on the outside, cold on the inside.

Exactly. And people respond to this. Natives of Seattle are 25 to 30 percent. Most people living in Seattle came from somewhere else, and almost all of them complain about how difficult it’s been to make friends or socialize.

I’ve been collecting theories about this. There’s the Scando-Asian theory that this is in our DNA. There’s a theory that everyone who moves here is a misfit so they were socially challenged to begin with. There’s a theory that we’re all caught in a homestead mentality — I can take care of myself and don’t need anyone else.

Somebody [at the Town Hall debate] last night said the culture of the town has been set by Boeing engineers who are not necessarily known for their social skills, but like to work in the shop and solve problems. Another theory is that there’s a show-me-ism in that someone is not worth knowing unless you’ve known them a long time.

It never occurred to me that people had a difficult time adjusting to Seattle until some time in the ’80s, when most of my friends were from out of town, and they asked, “How come people never invite us over for a drink?” Or “We’ll invite people to a party, and they won’t even respond.” I’m not sure I understand the reason for this lack of sociability, but my list is up to about 10 different theories.

Do you have any other projects in the works?

I’d like to do a sequel to this book. I intend to keep plodding away, and Seattle is a target-rich environment. It’s my hometown and I love it and I always seem to have a lot to say. 

Robin Lindley is a Seattle writer, visual artist and attorney.

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