Electric City
(Pop. 922)
Directions: Take I-90 east to exit 151, Hwy 283. Take a slight right onto Hwy 283, which turns into Hwy 28. Turn left onto Hwy 17. Turn right onto Hwy 2. Go straight on Hwy 155 into Electric City.
We’re standing in the parking lot of the Ace Hardware Store in Ephrata, trying—my two road-trip companions and I, and the tattooed 19-year-old stoner who’s gamely offered to help us—to replace a broken windshield-wiper blade. The new blade isn’t cooperating. The gum-wrapper-sized instructions, which consist of blue-ink cave-art drawings and bad Japanese translations, aren’t helping.
For the past 170 miles, the rain has been coming down—bouncing off the road like bullets, slapping the windows so hard they look like they might break. A massive electrical storm is crackling on the horizon. Always a nervous passenger (once, on a trip to California, I threatened to hitchhike home if my then-boyfriend didn’t pull over during a blinding, hail-filled downpour), I’m clutching a book on dam hydrology between my sweaty palms and wondering how long it’s been since our driver has changed her car’s tires.
We left Seattle looking forward to two days of swimming and sun in tiny Electric City, Washington, a 922-person hamlet with one motel, one four-lane road, one coffee shop, and a dozen RV parks and campgrounds, located just off the Columbia River in Central Washington.
At the moment, however, it looks like the closest we’ll get to enjoying the water is an occasional glimpse of the turgid manmade lakes that border our route: Soap Lake, Alkali Lake, Blue Lake, Banks Lake. But just as we’re shaking out our umbrellas and hoping our dubious repair job takes, the rain subsides.
Guiding us through the wilds of far I-90 is Sarah, a former Eastern Washington resident who fills us in on the finer points of dams and irrigation. Prior to the New Deal–era construction of the Grand Coulee Dam—a massive concrete scar that stretches nearly a mile across the Columbia River—this part of the state was all high desert. Today, it’s covered by nearly a million acres of peas, onions, potatoes, alfalfa, corn, wheat and hay.
The dam’s construction, completed in 1941, had its cost: More than 5,000 people were forced to leave their homes, relocating to company towns like Electric City; 70,000 acres of habitat were destroyed; and, as Sarah points out ominously, “Dozens died.” Some of them, she says, fell into the concrete itself. “Their bodies are still in there somewhere.” (The following day, a chirping teenage tour guide will inform us that these rumored rotting bodies “would form bubbles in the dam,” causing the whole thing to collapse and destroy everything downriver. Well, that’s a relief.)
Electric City proper encompasses a few square blocks; our motel, the oddly named Sky Deck Motel (odd because it lacks anything resembling a deck) is spartan and tiny, hidden from the road by two incongruous megamansions. In our $80 room, one of 16 on the premises, a pair of disturbing wooden geese hangs limply over the bed, and a miniature TV anchors an otherwise empty entertainment center. But no matter: The Sky Deck boasts a gorgeous view of Banks Lake, an expansive, grassy beach, and unbeatable proximity to the town’s two bars and single, tiny grocery store. Sore from hours of sitting (and, in my case, craning from the back seat to see what perils loom on the horizon), we check in, wander to the store (which features, miraculously, a walk-in beer cooler) and return to commandeer the lawn. Twelve beers and three impressive sunburns later, it’s time for dinner.
After mulling over the limited options in the motel’s well-worn dining guide (which features Electric City’s three restaurants, all visible from the driveway of our motel) we choose the Electric City Tavern, both for its proximity (three doors down from the Sky Deck) and for its eponymous name. The ECT, as the locals call it (as in, “Hey, ladies, we saw you at the ECT last night”), is a loud, bright, smoky dive, with a small dining counter, two well-trafficked pool tables, and a jukebox that blares Bon Jovi, Tom Petty, and the Black Crowes. The fries are fine, the beer is cold, and the “broasted chicken”—a specialty that apparently involves deep-frying under pressure—is fantastic.
Personally, I would be happy to retire to my beach chair to watch the sun set over the lake, or brave the small flyspecked hot tub. But it’s almost time for the laser light show on the Grand Coulee Dam, and missing it, we all agree, is not an option.
Pulling into the parking lot at the visitors’ center two miles down the highway in Grand Coulee, the first thing we notice is the scale of the structure itself: 5,223 feet across, 550 feet high, the dam is an awe-inspiring manifestation of human triumph over nature. After a brief scramble down a precipitous, switch-backing sidewalk, we plop down on some rocks within a few hundred yards of the dam’s base and wait for dusk. Several hundred yards upriver, the spillways at the top of the dam begin, alarmingly, to open, releasing giant jets of white spray that form a backdrop for the show. Suddenly, a green, laser-scrawled volcano appears, 300 feet high, on the face of the dam, and a basso profundo voice booms from the tinny speakers: “Out of chaos, I was born. Throughout time, I have raged. I am power. I am strength. I AM THE RIVER COLUMBIA!”
The show—part propaganda, part history lesson, and part sheer stoner fantasia—is free, fascinating, and indescribably weird. Aided by hundreds of laser images that range from patriotic (FDR, an eagle) to bizarre (a wave that morphs into a giant, muscled arm), our throaty narrator follows the river through its history: from colonization (“Robert Gray was the first white man to enter my waters. But in the end it was he who was conquered”) to the dam’s construction (“The benefits were soon to be seen by the entire country. Electricity! HYDRO-electricity!”) to the present day (“Mankind has bridled my terrible capacity for destruction”). Even Bethany, the most skeptical member of our trio, was sorry when our laser-enabled trip through hydrological history was over.
****
Road trips? I can do without ’em. My car, a battered 1991 Honda Accord, hasn’t reached highway speeds in years; moving from parking spot to parking spot in my central Seattle neighborhood is about the most action it ever gets. For transportation, I walk and ride my bike, which pretty much confines me to city limits, a restriction with which I am, for the record, absolutely comfortable.
But there’s something to be said for dislocation, the feeling of being uprooted, however temporarily, from the noise and convenience of city life. Two hours’ drive in nearly any direction brings you into entirely foreign territory—the kind of places where flags flutter from every doorway, yellow ribbons decorate every pickup, and Republican Party registration is practically a rite of passage. Which is why we chose Electric City to launch this series of road-trip tales: Its residents, almost alone in its county, voted for Kerry, not Bush, in 2004. Places like Electric City challenge our assumptions about small-town America, and force us to revisit our assumption that they aren’t like us. Over the next few weeks, Stranger writers will visit four such towns—tiny blue dots floating in Washington’s sea of electoral red.
****
The next day, after a hasty dip in the pool and an even hastier breakfast at the frostily air-conditioned Lakeside Grille (when the Sky Deck says 11:00 a.m. checkout, they mean it), we revisit the dam, which is, in the daylight, even more astonishing. According to signs at the visitors’ center, the Grand Coulee Dam is the third-largest hydropower producer in the world, and contains 12 million cubic yards of concrete, enough “to build a sidewalk four feet wide twice around the equator.” After a brisk half-hour tour through the belly of the structure (a process that involves, to the dismay of my height-phobic companions, a torturously slow ride down a steep incline in a giant, glass-bottomed elevator), we pay a brief visit to the world’s most depressing Indian museum (ragged taxidermied elk; handwritten labels; a papier-mâché diorama; need I say more?), wave goodbye to our manmade lake, and hit the road.