Gap in the Grid

by Matt Briggs

AT COSTCO, WHILE WAITING FOR MY TIRES TO BE FIXED, I went for a walk along the Green River. I am at the Tukwila CostCo on a road named after the warehouses. I am in the parking lot of an office park of small businesses in warehouses. A stand of cotton-wood trees surrounds a pond that at first, I take to be an oxbow of the Green River, a slough of wet land. I walk along the Green River flowing from the south. The river runs from the slopes of the Cascades south of Black Diamond from the Cedar River Watershed in the jungle of passes where I-90 passes over the central Cascades. The Green River used to be joined by the Mount Rainier glacier fed White River and then the two rivers empties into the Black River at Lake Washington, but things changed the flow. A massive log jam flipped the White River from the channel going north to the west, where it emptied out into Commencement Bay in Tacoma. The lowering of Lake Washington caused the Green River to shift into the Duwamish River channel. The Green River now changes names in Tukwila to the Duwamish. The entire valley floor of the Kent valley feels the echoes of these changes. This is land given over from the cultivation of vegetables to office parks of little warehouses.