Haunted Ground

by Guest Columnist Donna Barr

ASK ANYONE–the students and off-duty sailors and shipyard workers that hang out at the local coffee bars. Even the guy at the once-a-month Gay Bingo, that is held along with a spaghetti supper in the basement of the Episcopalian Church, the guy that just moved up from San Francisco.

They’ll all tell you Bremerton is the most surreal town they’ve ever known.

Bremerton isn’t really a consolidated town; it’s made up of different populations, the students at Olympic College, the floating drug-dealers barking like seals downtown, the poor down west and the not-so-poor up east.

In Bremerton “West” is actually south of the bridges, “East” actually north. Callow used to be a village on its own, like Manette, before they were both assimilated by Bremerton. Now one is a street, the other a neighborhood.

There aren’t any ethnic neighborhoods in this town; everybody is all mixed in together. At a block-watch party, you’re likely to be served chicken adobo, Cajun barbeque chicken, and chicken-and-rice soup. If there’s been a sale on chicken down at the Callow Safeway, there will probably be lemon chicken and chicken-foot soup.

On Callow is the world’s smallest native-people’s reservation. It takes up about of a city block, standing out among the surrounding houses by tall second-growth Douglas firs. It’s been reserved because it’s a graveyard.

The graves are marked by low stones, that lie between the trailers of the mobile-home park. The locals have always lived with their dead. There were a lot of locals here at one time, and they left a lot of dead, but this is all that’s left of their graves. The rest have been gouged up and paved over. You’re better off if you’re psychicly deaf; at night this town walks like Edinburgh.

On the Bremerton map, a very faint cross was used to mark the reservation; you’ll have to look hard to see it. Now it’s marked by a very faint bow-and-arrow. Some kind of politics went on, but I don’t know what.

The city graveyard on the south side has graves in it from the 1800s. Some of the people in it fought in the Civil War–there’s a little walled plot for them. The graveyard dog is a big black dumb Labrador named Brutus. If you call him The Graveyard Dog, you have to make sure you mean the LIVE one–otherwise, people get spooked.

When we came home from a funeral, we found the big fool locked up in our back yard, looking all confused and stupid. He wore a tag, so we called his owner, who came to get him, and had a hard time driving away with a big happy cloud of Brutus jumping all over the front seat with him.

If you walk in the city graveyard in the southeast corner in full daylight, you may catch a glimpse of a tall heavy man wearing a black suit and a white waistcoat out of the corner of your eye. If you turn and look at him, he’s not there. The old guys in town say that if you go down to the shipyard late at night and watch the mothballed ships, the old dead air-craft carriers and destroyers, you’ll see the crews lined up, faintly, in the moonlight.

The politics in Bremerton are pretty surreal, too. Water’s cheap, sewer’s expensive–Bremerton is paying for Gorst’s rebuilt sewer system.

The downtown is gutted, because everybody who’s holding the old, asbestos-laden houses won’t sell until they get full market prices, so no projects to improve the waterfront or the downtown can go forward. The businesses went to Silverdale, where the malls were built in the middle of an important salmon watershed–and get flooded out every time there’s a heavy rain.

Ha ha ha.

The boys catch bullheads in the bay and make “meat-puppets” out of them, partially gutting them with pocket-knives or nail-scissors, so they don’t die too quickly, then sticking their fingers through the torn bellies and making them “talk.” Or they catch the fish on lines, then whip them to death on the surface, laughing their heads off.

TOMORROW: Some more of this.

ELSEWHERE:

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