Category: Archie Binns (Page 2 of 2)

Someone with some good information on Archie Binns came by and edited the wikipedia page last week. Which is sort of great, because I’m going to start the Laurels Are Cut Down this week.

My general impression of this book, after completing the first four chapter a year or so ago was that it would have been better had Binns staid within the realm of a book about his own youth and life. Instead, what could have been a nice deep map of western Washington gets blurred into a history/travelogue of the entire state.

After Binns leaves the wet side of the state and begins meandering up the Columbia River, his experiences leave off and what he has read in books and learned from other people picks up. From that point on, The Roaring Land reads a lot less like what Murrary Morgan would do with his histories of Washington starting tens years later than cheap boosterism.

That said, the best line in the book comes from the worst chapter, the final “Living Map of Washington,” which repeats the airplane level history Binns eventually dives into. Speaking about people who would generalize about Washington:

To them the whole state is forested with giant evergreens, rain falls year round, and radicalism flourishes in the wet shade of the forest.

Add something about coffee or grunge rock, and that would still apply.

My favorite chapter is the second, Steamboat Era. It gives a view of my particular corner of Washington (the deep South Sound) from a vantage point we don’t get very often. We follow a young Archie and his family as they travel from their stump farm near Shelton as they get on a ferry in Hammersly Inlet and travel by saltwater (switching boats once) all the way to Tacoma.

I may have sounded harsh, but the other great chapter in the book is Center of Gravity, which covers what was the center of gravity in Puget Sound country in Binns’ time, the Kent Valley. Binns looks at the valley in much the same way we do, in a “wow, hasn’t that changed.” While we’ve seen a transformation from farms to cement parking lots, Boeing industrial areas and the Tuckwila mall area, Binns’ generation (and his dad’s generation) saw the transformation from old growth forest to farms.

For him, the farms were the pinnacle of advancement, the malls of Tuckwila not even imagined.

He also made an interesting note about the character of the people of the Kent Valley (which served as a way for him to explain the character of all Puget Sounders). Since farms (and timber operations) were in that time small, everyone owned a piece of something. Or, at least worked a piece of something. Since there were no big owners, everyone depended on each other for business and socially. When someone was down on their luck, it was easier for Puget Sounders to pick up their neighbors than it would have been for dry siders, who mostly owned or work for large operations.

The next book will be The Laurels Are Cut Down, a review of which can be found here.

One of my favorite writers is Archie Binns. Hardly any of his books are still in print, and there is a serious dearth of any writing about him out there. Until just now, there wasn’t even a wikipedia entry about him, despite him being a notable writer back in the 1930s and 40s. If you do know anything about Binns, edit this entry.

So, what I’m going to do is start a new series here where I reread some Archie Binns books and seek out ones I haven’t and write a 1,000 word or so review. I’m rereading the Roaring Land now (which I had read most of), and I’m going to pick up The Laurels are Cut Down (which I hadn’t read yet) in a few days.

Here are some Archie Binns links too.

Why am I doing this? It has some to do with Raban, but it also has to do with writing about what I like and also being a little mad that there wasn’t a wikipedia entry, and when you look up his name you get a list of books of his for sale, but nothing about him.

Archie Binns wikipedia
Review: The Roaring Land
Digital Archie Binns: Steamboat Era from “Roaring Land”