By Camille Bishop
Winter 2020 Kaplan Award Winner
Outside of Elma, Washington, there are two grey cylinders that tower above the trees. They can be seen on clear days from the road, two distinctive concrete mountains, green all around.
When you drive that highway, traveling between Olympia and Aberdeen, there isn’t much to catch your eye. The occasional small town blurs by, an intermittent overpass blocks the sun for a moment, a car or two passes. The drive is a sea of green and concrete, and after awhile things outside the car cease to exist, the occasional shadow no longer enough to catch your eye, the trip becoming more about music or conversation. There is no reason for you to be looking up outside of Elma, Washington. Unless of course, you are us.
My best friend and I spent the better part of three years exploring. These early morning drives were an unspoken tradition, following two spoken rules: no maps and no hotels. We did this so often neither of us can remember every trip we took, only photos and messages and faint memories existing to piece it all together. We intend to go somewhere new every time, to see as much of Washington and Oregon as weekends between work and high school would allow us. We drove up and down the coast, stopping in small diners and ordering almost only coffee – proof of how hard it can be to order when one of you is allergic to almost everything (her, and the list includes soy, dairy, gluten, corn, coconut, and more) and one of you is a lifelong vegetarian (me). We didn’t need the food anyway, we always packed snacks.
It wasn’t really about seeing the Pacific Northwest, I know that now. It was about feeling like we were doing something, trying to cure the stir-crazy feeling we both had sitting through classes and serving coffee and being at home. Living in such a beautiful place was the reason we told ourselves, something that gave us an excuse and some beautiful photos.
A month before my 16th birthday, we woke up at 4 am. The day before, while we volunteered cleaning headstones, we talked about taking what ended up being the first of these trips. The rules weren’t set yet – we planned to go to Seattle, spend the day there. As we talked about it more, the plans devolved. We had both seen Seattle before, we wanted to see something new.
The coast, however beautiful, was not new, just new places in a familiar setting, one we had grown up going to for holidays, family vacations, birthdays. So we decided on nothing. By the time our alarms went off the next morning, we still had no plans.
We made coffee in her family’s Keurig and drove North, avoiding the freeway until absolutely necessary, then stopped for coffee in Longview. By the time we left Starbucks in Centralia, I had the idea that we head towards Aberdeen. I knew it was a shitty little town from what I had heard from my dad, but I also knew I had never been and it was towards the beach and it was, at the very least, shitty and new. The new was the important part.
To get to Aberdeen from I-5 you can take two different highways. Highway 8, or Highway 12. Highway 12 meanders up from Centralia, connecting to Highway 8 right before Elma. By the time we hit Elma, it was a little after 7 and the three coffees were doing their job. That is probably why I was paying so much attention to our surroundings driving through a place where most people couldn’t care less. It was her job to drive and mine to look. This never mattered more than it mattered this day.
Before you enter Satsop, some context: In the 1970’s, Washington state made a massive push towards nuclear power. The Washington Public Power Supply System (unaffectionately called WHOOPS) planned five nuclear reactors at two different sites, the largest nuclear plant construction project in United States history, and one of the biggest ever planned in the world.
Today, only one reactor stands, Unit 2 at Hanford. Across the state, the remains of the billion dollar failure are still visible. The two cooling towards stand close to 500 feet, twin giants that cost millions of dollars and never saw a day of use. We didn’t know any of this before the first time, but I think it’s important that you do.
After noticing the towers, we took the next exit and broke our not-yet-established rule against maps and used Google to guide us up the twisty roads before hitting gravel that finally turned into the clearing where Satsop is. I wish I was talented enough to help you understand what that moment felt like but words fail me. When I was writing this, I texted her and asked if she had any photos of the inside. She said she didn’t feel like she needed photos because even photos can’t really describe the feeling it gives you. It’s an entirely unique feeling to be there, to travel from in the trees to the massive open field with one small administrative building and two huge cylinders, seeming taller than anything you have ever seen.
That morning there was nobody there besides us. No cars, people. Just us, Satsop, and the fog. The towers have fences around them with no trespassing signs in red, but no cameras or signs about felonies, which is probably why we thought it was fine to shimmy between the cracks of the fence and go inside, not considering the possibility of nuclear remains. There were, of course, none, and we sat and talked and danced inside the tower for over an hour.
Satsop was our piece of the world. On many of our adventures, we would head there, either a first stop or a last, to visit our place. We talked about it, and still do, like an old friend. It was just ours. We never saw anybody else there, we never brought anyone else there, and besides telling a few close friends and family, we never told anybody we went there. It felt like something only we knew about, even though we knew that two 500-foot concrete towers were far from a secret.
On our last trip there, at the end of a beach trip where we slept in the car and drove late into the night, everything was already different. We were fighting, the first time we had fought on one of our trips, and taking the road to Satsop didn’t give us the same feeling it had before. About halfway up, we noticed several massive parking lots where there used to be forest, hundreds of VW’s baking in the sun. We learned later they were recalled cars, waiting for their next step. We passed two or three of these lots before making the turn into the clearing, finding another. The entire road, the administrative buildings parking lot, the spot where we had always parked. We must have sat there for fifteen, twenty minutes before silently turning around and driving away.
If you look on Instagram at Satsop Abandoned Nuclear Power, you won’t see the Satsop I know. You will see parking lots full of cars, Instagram models and amateur photographers posing inside the towers, the fence we climbed through now removed. Musicians and scientists use them for the acoustics, movie studios shoot scenes there. They are all experiencing it too, just differently.