I grew up in a small town. It’s about 30 miles north of Seattle. It used to be a logging town, but it got overrun by antique stores, local bakeries and bicycle shops. It’s somewhere you can go that's less than an hour from the city, but far enough away from the nearest skyscraper that you can pretend you’re in the country. There’s even a farm in between the city and Snohomish. They have a corn maze in October.
If you live in Snohomish, you have two high schools you can go too. Glacier Peak or Snohomish High. Glacier Peak is newer than Snohomish and, generally speaking, better. Graduation rate is higher, so are test scores and college proficiency rankings. The Glacier Peak Grizzlies even have a friendly rivalry going with the Snohomish Panthers. Glacier Peak was founded in 2008. It represents the new era of the town. Snohomish the suburb, Snohomish the tourist trap. Snohomish High represents the old guard. Back when it was poor, back when it was a logging town.
Snohomish High School was founded in 1894, and everyone in the town knew it. It was there before the McDonalds’ and the Subways’ went up. Before the trendy coffee house replaced the western themed pub. If you lived in Snohomish before the big restoration started, you were loyal to Snohomish High School. And the school, like the town, was big on tradition. We love our parades in Snohomish. You love the carnivals and our pumpkin patches and our Saturday nights at the Pilchuck Drive-In, greasiest burger north of Seattle. But above all else, you love the football. The stadium was packed every night of the season. You could hear the crowds from my house less than a block away. The residential streets, practically empty during the day, would fill up to the point where my dad, grumbling and cursing, would have to park his car in the alley behind our house. The local ROTC would be present at every game to light off the ceremonial cannon. Did I mention they had a cannon? A cannon they’d fire at the start of the game and whenever the Panthers scored a touchdown. Oh yeah. People were into it. Brett Karch, a student at SHS, was in the Snohomish ROTC and on October 6th, 2006 it was his job to fire the cannon. October 6th was the homecoming game.
The countdown started.
He pulled the trigger.
Boom.
The shrapnel from the ensuing explosion almost cost Karch his leg. He'd be in the hospital for three weeks and undergo three surgeries. He'd have trouble walking for months after the incident. His future was practically ruined.
Odds are high that you are familiar with the concept of victim blaming. Generally, it's using the victim of an incident as a scapegoat for larger responsibility if the truth of the incident is too unpleasant. It's saying “none of this would have happened if you hadn't (blank).” Public reaction to survivors of sexual assault often falls under this category. “This wouldn't have happened if you'd been wearing different clothes” or “This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't been by yourself” or my personal favorite “This wouldn't have happened if you'd just said no.” Just say no. Because obviously the perpetrator would stop if he realized the woman he was raping didn't actually like being raped.
Brett Karch’s experience with victim blaming took the form of emails and letters addressed to him while he was in the hospital. Some of them were threats, some of them were cold and uncaring, some of them were disguised as get well soon cards. All of them said the same thing. “The tradition of firing a cannon is too important to lose just because you lost your leg.” I wonder how that made him feel, laying there in his hospital bed, recovering from the third surgery, knowing that the town he was going into the military for preferred an outdated piece of tradition to his life.
Two years later, Glacier Peak opens up. If Snohomish High appeals to the traditionalists in the town, Glacier Peak is for the newcomers, the middle-classers with two kids and an Escalade and disposable income who started moving to Snohomish around the same time. The median income rose from roughly $46,000 to almost $60,000 in between 2000 and 2014. The times were changing.
The school paid a $660,000 settlement with Karch in 2009. The cannon hasn't been used since. Life went on. In the years following the explosion, Snohomish started feeling less and less like a town and more like a suburb, one of the seemingly identical hundreds that splattered the countryside just north of Seattle. If the cannon explosion, caused by faulty design, represented anything...it was how violently people rooted in tradition will hold to it when they feel it threatened. It shows that sometimes we'd rather blame someone for getting their leg blown off than ask yourself if maybe, just maybe, you really need to fire a cannon before every football game.
