no place like...

After reading Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow and Ivan Doig's This House of Sky, both memoirs of rural life, I am struck by how central the agonies of leaving are to each book, and to others like them. The aching desire to be done with a place, the habits, memories, and compulsions that draw one back. Rural America is many things to contemporary culture--nostalgic heartland, political touchstone, cultural wasteland--but one thing it isn't is heavily populated. Leaving so dominates the narrative of small-town life that it's easy to forget such places were once the stuff of sod-busting, nation-building dreams.

It isn't so much the lack of consumer niceties, like espresso or malls, but that rural life is hard, physically and often socially. The lonely work of making a living off the land, often in harsh or isolated environments, knits communities together in ways that are both boon and burden to their members.

Or perhaps it's just a function of genre, that truth that, with time, we're all haunted by the past, by the things that shaped us before we could comprehend them. Geography only reinforces temporal distance, and so we return, asking memory and place to yield time's answers.

new year's resolutions

Last summer's move--and combining libraries with Kendall--occasioned a wholesale re-evaluation of my book collection. I winced in self-recognition, then, when I read this article in which readers reflect on which books to keep and which to send along. Although Kendall and I did cull our respective collections, we somehow still ended up in Washington with multiple editions of things like Doña Bárbara and Amadís de Gaula. We made every effort to keep only Really Useful Books or Really Good Books, but the biggest stumbling block came when it was time for the books to leave the house. Like dog lovers earnestly finding new families for a litter of puppies, we shepharded our discarded books to local bookstores and listed them for sale on the internet. A few trickle out from time to time, but because the market for medieval Spanish literature and literary criticism in Portuguese isn't strong, many of the boxes of books still lurk forlornly around the house, unwanted, neglected, cursed because they're in the way. But I have faith that they could be useful to someone, somewhere, and so they sit, mocking me every time I push the "add to shopping cart" button on Amazon.

um, señora….?

I like my students, I honestly do. What I do not like, however, is the feeling that comes over me when I am slogging through about 70 student essays. I begin with good intentions, reading each one carefully, thinking about the syntax and paragraph structure and language use, but each essay completed feels like the tiniest drop in the biggest bucket. I'm soon peevish, agitated; my back hurts, I can't find a comfortable position for my feet. I leaf through the remaining essays, counting and re-counting those left to grade. Students' errors begin to feel like a personal affront. Are they confusing the preterit and the imperfect on purpose? Are they not proofreading because they want me to suffer? With each carelessly translated phrase or misuse of ser and estar, I'm less and less certain that I'm teaching them anything at all.

It comes down to too much togetherness, I think. Even more than the usual intimacy of reading, correcting student essays draws the reader into the mind of the writer. As language instructors, we make sense of direct translations of idiomatic phrases and decipher errors common to language learners. Did the student truncate that sentence for stylistic reasons, or was it a grammar error? What to make of the paragraph that breaks off mid-sentence? And why do some students not grasp the concept of audience, failing to edit certain highly personal details? All of this means that students very much inhabit the mind of the grader, and grading essays can seem all-consuming. Despite the fact that student writing involves an exchange of ideas not unlike conversations that would be productive under other circumstances, such as in class or during office hours, grading that writing comes to feel like an imposition when it takes over the non-business hours of evenings and weekends.

Now that my grading is wrapped up for the term, however, I'm very happy to be back to liking my students again. From a respectful distance.

people of the south wind

I wonder, as the wet fall weather settles over Washington, how much of homesickness can be attributed to a physiological response to climate and geography. A friend described how her sense of direction was distorted when she left behind mountains and trees; I, on the other hand, haven’t yet learned to read the shifts of elevation and shade in the Northwest, the microclimates introduced by angle and exposure.

After living so long in one place, my eye is not yet accustomed to the unyielding green of Washington’s forests, nor my ear to the sound of wind approaching over mountains and water. Life on the plains is all about the sky, and the mingling of air and moisture over an open expanse of grass. The smell of the weather comes in on the wind: the heavy damp of a gathering thunderstorm, the dull bite of snow-laden wind. The red-gold of fall prairies dulls, by November, to a grayish-dun, under skies a paler, more opaque blue than the brilliance of September and October. One also marks seasons by the wind, and November is when it begins to hurt.

The joke is that Kansans always talk about the weather, and this is often true. We talk about it because tornadoes, blizzards, and adequate rainfall are nothing to be trifled with, but also because it is easier to talk about the weather than to talk about what weather does to us. Farmers remark on the hundredths of an inch that last night’s rainfall left in rain gauges or mention in passing the abnormally hot summer day, but such comments are voiced mainly as statements of the obvious. There is many a Kansan who follows a strict calendar for the use of heating and air conditioning, the observance of which is so ingrained as to become almost a moral code. Living in Kansas tempers expectations; one does not expect routinely fine weather any more than one would hope to find mountain splendors.

Often, when the tug of homesickness sets in, I find myself wishing not that I’d never left Kansas, but that I’d left it long ago, before the place had a chance to take hold.

i'm an animal, you're an animal, too

“Did you lose a dog? A little black one, near the entrance to the trail?”
“Um, yes?” We respond uncertainly, eager for information about the dog we have in fact lost, but wary of the accusatory tone that lies just beneath the friendly concern.

“Lose” is not, however, the most appropriate verb. We began the hike with two dogs, but Lupe, being Lupe, ran off shortly after we’d started. We called for her, but when she didn’t show up, we continued hiking, not knowing whether she was ahead of or behind us. We thanked the couple, also dog owners, and walked away sheepishly. It is surely a nearly universal sentiment among pet owners that at such moments it seems that yours is the only animal so poorly socialized, so egregiously disloyal as to flaunt in public behavior that could only stem from inadequate care. Bad dog; bad, bad owner.

By all objective standards, Lupe and Marcos lead privileged lives. They are well-fed, well-loved, and well-traveled. There is no doubt, though, that Lupe would in some ways be better suited to another lifestyle. As the cliché goes, dogs love unconditionally, but when does our loyalty to them become selfish? As we hiked without Lupe, I told myself that if she were running with a pack of dogs and got separated, the consequences would be on her. Dogs discipline each other, keep order within the pack, and life outside the pack therefore keeps its own order, too. But Lupe isn’t wild. She’s a domesticated animal, one with whose care we are charged. By choice.

Dogs thus offer perspective on our uneasy relationship to nature. They live in our homes; increasingly, they frequent restaurants and go on vacation with us. They calm psychological distress and lower stress levels, at least when they’re on good behavior. Dogs remain animals, however, governed by their breed and temperament at least as much as by what we manage to teach them. Dogs blur the boundaries by which we distinguish “nature” from “society,” the biological and instinctual from the artifice of human interaction. Although absolutist ideas about how human society should interact with nature make for pithy bumper stickers—“meat is murder,” “eat beef”—they conceal the thornier issues regarding our place in the natural world. The way we treat domesticated animals can be unimaginably inhumane, but abruptly ending our relationship with them would likewise be unethical. Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, and pigs have struck an evolutionary bargain with us, which, as Michael Pollan argues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has often been to their benefit. Thousands of years of genetic fiddling and co-adaptation with certain species place upon us a responsibility for their care. Yet even as we shirk the implications of this cultural co-dependency—abandoning farm animals to the cruelties of industrial agriculture, or conversely, to an existence in which we are no longer their caretakers—we increasingly humanize our dogs and cats. It is no longer viable, in most circles, to think of humans as masters of the natural world, but the implications of this shift haven’t yet been worked out, even among those who accept evolution, for example, or the need for sustainable agriculture. The arguments of vegans notwithstanding, when it comes down to it, how much more ethical is it to force human behavioral patterns upon a pampered dog than it is to raise and slaughter an animal for food? Maybe we can’t help but think of ourselves as “special animals,” but we’re not so special that we can remove ourselves from an ecosystem without consequences. Although sometimes, dammit, it would be nice if the dog just came when she were called.

it's alive!

I feel that I’ve crossed some sort of line. A few years ago, my best friend bought me a copy of Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions. The book is unabashedly confrontational: the front cover boasts a challenge to “politically correct nutrition and the diet dictocrats.” I was on board with her central message, which is that eating minimally processed foods is healthy, but I found other ideas a bit off-putting, such as her chirpy proclamation that an avoidance of vaccines enhances the benefits of eating lacto-fermented foods. It seemed to be a bit of a totalizing proposition, that things would start out with homemade ketchup and then I’d be compelled to home-school my kids and weave clothes out of hemp fibers I’d grown and processed myself. I’m all for self-reliance, within reason. I enjoy the challenge of preparing complicated dishes from scratch. I’m crafty, I sew, I plant things in dirt. I enjoy the transformation of raw materials into finished product. But realistically, I also enjoy living in a world where the division of labor and mechanization allow me not to spend my days procuring food and garment by stalking prey and tanning hides. I don’t particularly enjoy washing clothes by hand, nor would I last long on a diet of, say, fish I’d caught myself. There are problems with the current system, but I’m not sure a whole-scale, back-to-the-land movement would solve them. After all, things like vaccines and industrial agriculture, despite their unintended consequences, came about as a means of mitigating the risks involved in living.

One thing that Sally Fallon and I do have in common, though, is a love of fermented foods. Bread, cheese, pickles, kefir, miso, tempeh, beer, wine; there’s something almost miraculous about foods that are alive and that use that life in the service of creating more complex flavors and, often, increased nutritional value. (Another thing that proponents of fermented foods seem to share is an evangelical tendency regarding the purported virtues of their favorite foods.) Until recently, my forays into the realm of fermented foods had involved bread and kefir. I have now made sauerkraut, and it was good. About a month ago, we helped Kendall’s parents crush grapes they’d grown themselves and bottle the juice for wine; a few days later, Kendall and I made lacto-fermented pineapple-cilantro chutney for fish tacos. Thus, it would seem, I have leaped willy-nilly into the world of fermented foods.

I’m not sure what any of this says about my political leanings, but I’m not alone in this. People are making jam, building yurts, raising chickens in their backyards; a friend of mine quit her job and is devoting a year to investigating food and farming around the country—on her bicycle! Some point to the recession, others to frustration with the pre-fab, have-it-now nature of contemporary life. There is pleasure in work well done, certainly, but there is also a weird sense of nostalgia, even luxury, now attached to tasks that were once considered drudgery. Maybe the days of industrial civilization are numbered and my pleasures really are as guilty as they sometimes feel. Maybe the economics of green jobs really will pan out, and we can somehow have the best of both worlds. Or perhaps what we should hope for is something on a smaller scale, so that as more people bake their own bread and do their own laundry and grow their own food, we’ll start properly valuing the labor of those who do these things for a living.

fishing report

November has been too full of student essays and visits from friends to do much fishing, but I did finally purchase a pair of waders at Swain's General Store the last time we were in Port Angeles. (As if access to Olympic National Park, the Coho Ferry to Victoria, and in-laws weren't reasons enough to visit Port Angeles, Swain's puts it over the top.) My waders are a very lady-like shade of pale blue, with pink lettering on the chest. Although Swain's does indeed have almost anything you might need for almost any kind of activity in which you might engage (Logging equipment? Check. Polish pottery? Check. Dog toys? Check.), they did not have wading boots in my size. So my waders wait, a little forlornly, at the bottom of my closet. Winter steelhead fishing, perhaps?

red in tooth and claw

Fly fishing is often exalted as a sport that requires a deeper understanding of nature, given that the mimicking of hatches and the reading of water and the like necessitates a fuller engagement of ecosystems in action. Or something of the sort. Whatever else it may be, fishing is a reminder that nature is not always a benevolent aide to human endeavors.

On a recent outing, we were fishing off the southern part of Indian Island. The sky was a clean, wind-swept blue; the Olympics jutted above the trees to the west, and the snow-tipped Cascades rose off to the east. It was easily one of the more beautiful places I’ve ever visited. It was also extremely windy. Kansas-style windy. So windy that it was impossible for me to mend my line, let alone to make decent casts. Once we gave up on fishing, we puttered around Port Townsend, then just made the 5:10 ferry, lucking out as stand-by passengers. As we drove across Whidbey Island, we discussed writing projects and the books we were reading; we talked about dogs and wilderness and factory farming. We got to Deception Pass, the connecting point between Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands, just as the sun was setting over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Ever since our early road-tripping days, back when we were driving Highway 1 up the California coast, we’ve been waiting for the perfect Pacific sunset. Clouds and mountains and trees had always foiled our plans, but this was magnificent. The sky was streaked with orange and purple, the green-blue, white-foamed water dominated the foreground, and trees shaded into distant bluish mountains. As if to gild the lily, we turned and saw a full moon rising over the Cascades in the east. The whole scene had the feel of a minor miracle. People were jumping out of their cars, skipping along the bridge to snap pictures they knew would compete poorly with the experience of being there. Perfect strangers grinned at each other awkwardly, giddy and a little embarrassed at having shared something that felt so special and almost intimate. The afternoon had doted upon us with a series of happy coincidences.

When we got home, though, the same winds that had complicated our fishing had also blown down trees and knocked out power to our neighborhood. Of course I’d waited until Sunday evening to finish my lesson plans, and we were sitting at a road block a half a mile away from our non-electrified house. The serenity of the sunset ebbed completely, and I was tired, cranky, and behind for the week, and there was absolutely nothing I could do.

Deception Pass is but one part of the system of rugged inlets, islands, and coves that characterize the Washington coast; it is so named because the Vancouver Expedition explorers who traversed it thought it a part of the mainland. Whether cartographic or ecological, nature does have lessons for us--object lessons about preparedness, and more abstract lessons about respecting complexity--but conservation is one thing, and empathetic fallacy entirely another. It is good for the human spirit to seek solace in nature and to delight in mountains and seascapes, but sustainability is ultimately a human concern. We talk of saving the earth, when what we really mean is the hope of preserving our ability to survive on the planet. Nature--that is, the forces behind sunsets and photosynthesis and air currents--ultimately doesn’t care whether we survive or not, or in what condition. Although we should certainly care about creatures beyond ourselves, talk about climate change and environmentalism often seems shot through with the same anthropocentrism that got us into this mess. The earth is simply too vast and too interconnected; we can no more save it than we can have dominion over it.

god bless lawrence, ks

Kansas is not the sort of place most people associate with wild excitement, unless of course you're talking about college basketball. There are nevertheless very good things to be had in Kansas, if one but knows where to look. To mark Kendall's graduation and to celebrate our wedding, two events that took place during the same packed weekend last May, we had dinner at Krause Dining. From the outside, it looks like any other house on a typical East Lawrence street, but the interior is divided between a modern addition and the original nineteenth-century structure; diners can peek in on the kitchen as they move through the spaces. Each aspect of the multi-course meal was well planned and very, very good, but the whole affair remained happily low-key. After dinner, we chatted with the owner on the patio as the soft spring night fell around us; it turns out the couple moved to Kansas from San Francisco in part because they wanted to bike their children to school. All in all, a very Lawrence experience: a little funky, rarely flashy, and completely true to a particular vision.

To end the meal, we were served basil sorbet with candied basil leaves, a dish that prompted many a discussion over the course of the summer. Upon receipt of an ice cream maker as a wedding present, we promptly set out to re-create the dessert. Because I am an advocate of all things made from full-fat dairy products, I couldn't bear the thought of sorbet when ice cream was in the offing; besides, we live in Washington now, where sorbet rarely tastes as good as it does on a hot summer day in Kansas. We adapted a recipe for ice cream, and it is as follows. My candying technique was heavy-handed, so my basil leaves ended up rather sodden; they tasted better than they looked.


Basil Ice Cream with Candied Basil Leaves

For the leaves:
8-10 whole basil leaves
Egg white
Granulated sugar

Lightly beat the egg white, adding a little water if necessary. Lightly coat both sides of each leaf with the egg white, then dip in the sugar. Let air dry for several hours, then use as garnish.

For the ice cream:
1 cup whole milk
2 cups cream
3/4 cup sugar
1 large bunch fresh basil

Heat the milk over medium-low heat with 1 cup of cream and the sugar, just until bubbles form around the edges. Add the basil and let steep for an hour. Strain leaves, then let the mixture chill thoroughly. Add the remaining cup of cream and freeze according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

Variation:
We've also made this ice cream using mint; I was running low on fresh mint leaves, so I substituted about a teaspoon of Morrocan mint tea leaves. It was delicious, with a deeper flavor than the fresh herbs alone.

with both feet in

Still no waders, but wading didn’t make a huge difference. I did, however, take a big step toward becoming a Washingtonian, or at least fishing like one. When we arrived at the Nooksack last Sunday afternoon, I gazed longingly at what was sure to be the sweetest spot on the whole river. It was just beyond a gravel bar, and the water pooled between two log jams, creating a lovely confluence of fast current and deeper, slower water on top of a rocky shelf. If I were a fish, I’d hang out here: plenty of gentle water in which to rest, a line of faster current dropping off food, a deep shelf under which to hide. I’d had my eye on this spot, in large part because it was just out of reach. But on this afternoon, the river level had dropped enough to make the wade only ankle-deep. So I did it. Barefoot, the better to save my feet some time in wet boots.

The highest compliment paid in the fly fishing world is to say that someone thinks like a fish; knowing one's prey is, after all, the hunter's goal. At this point, I think I have more in common with the insects. Brought into sudden and bracing contact with a world full of strange practices and stranger terminology, I’m often lost. That afternoon, though, was the first time that casting felt, well, somehow right. More often than not, I’m apt to tangle my line around my feet or my rod, but when the movement of my arm came into rhythm with the flexing of the rod, fishing became fun. As is repeated over and over to every beginning fly fisher, “casting isn’t fishing!” (Kendall’s personal variation on this theme is, “None of that River-Runs-though-It crap!”) Like most dour, fun-spoiling axioms, this one is true, but I understand why casting is so captivating. For the layperson, it is the most visible difference between spin fishing and fly fishing, the practice that, until one knows better, defines the sport. It is also hard, so when I felt my line at last sail cleanly out of the end of my rod and watched it arc over the water, it was exhilarating. Excited, I overdid it on my next cast and promptly turned the end of my line into a tangled mass of fly, leader, and tippet. Luckily, untangling knots happens to be the one thing in fly fishing at which I am very, very good. Although I have yet to catch anything larger than a salmon smolt, I felt momentarily like a fly fisherwoman. It only lasted for a few casts, but it was enough for now.

five feet out

I start out with the best of intentions. I tie my fly carefully to the end of my line, tugging at it to see that it’s secure. I scan the water for the most promising ripples and check behind me for back-casting obstacles. The last few times out, though, have brought nothing but a line snagged on river rocks, on willows near the bank, and on dead logs in the water. In the past two days, specifically, I lost a nymph to rocks on the Nooksack river near our house and an elk hair caddis on the North Fork of the Nooksack nearer to Mt. Baker. Two days, two flies, with hardly a fish in sight. Although I am loath to believe that money spent improves one's sporting skills, it appears that I need some waders. Better casting skills would help, to be sure, as would a raft, as Kendall is quick to point out. It stands to reason that to catch fish, one must go where the fish are. And where the fish are, it would seem, is always just beyond my reach.

And so, the past few trips I’ve fished a little (more casting practice, after all) and observed a lot. I’ve seen the seemingly infinite variations of green on display in Washington, from the ever-present lime-colored moss to the green-black of the interior forest, and the glacial-turquoise hue that stays with the Nooksack until it melds with the greenish-brown color of rivers that pass through farmland. I’ve watched several caddis hatches, and seen the struggling wings of insects produce on the water’s surface exactly the sorts of movements that fly fishers try to imitate. I’ve marveled at the beauty of a proper cast, and I remain convinced that, to paraphrase Julia Child, casting requires both technique and the courage of one’s convictions. I also watched as that same perfect cast was frustrated by a leery fish. I’ve been mesmerized by the current patterns produced by the interaction of surface and depth, and have meditated on Norman Maclean’s descriptions of river geometry. I’ve also been amazed by the apparent ability of Washingtonians to wet-wade in very cold water late in September; Kansans, despite their general disdain for excessive air conditioning and their predilection for watching tornadoes from their porches, evidently do not share this trait.

I do the things I know how to do. I practice, I ask questions, I practice some more. Almost inevitably, though, I stumble up against some aspect of the fly fishing world that outstrips my modest skills. And so, there, where certainty and precision elude me, I sit and watch.

the trip without a camera

We just returned from a five-day camping and fishing tour of central Washington, with nary a picture to show for it. Although I often bemoan the interference of technology in enjoying the moment rather than documenting it via Facebook, text message, or cell phone, I frequently fall sway to the impulse. (I do my grumbling quietly, of course, lest I be thought a fuddy-duddy.)

But on this trip, neither of us grabbed the camera. In this spirit of more mindful observation, then, here is a list of highlights from the trip that are resistant to capture through photography.

• On the hike to Merritt Lake, off of SR 2, the wet smell of fall wafting up from the cool forest floor and meeting the piney, sun-warmed upper air currents.

• While fishing the Cle Elum and Yakima rivers, the glossy, sensuous green-black swirls of river water as evening fell.

• The thrill of turning around on a trail (Iron Bear Creek, off of US 97 north of Cle Elum) and seeing, completely unexpectedly, Mt. Rainier in the distance.

• As we left the dense forests of western Washington, seeing the sky clear and blue above me and visible to an expansive horizon far in the distance.

• The realization that many of Washington’s famed fruit crops grow not in the verdant orchards I’d imagined as a child, but in irrigated semi-desert landscapes. As we followed US 97 north toward SR 20, forested mountains gave way to rugged rock formations laid bare of vegetation by the increasing aridity. Yet dotting an expanse of land dominated by variations on white, ochre, and beige were localized splashes of intensely green lawns, orchards, and vineyards, along with the brilliant blue of the Columbia, which makes such agriculture possible.

• The heart-pounding moment when, as we were searching for a campground and I was lost grouchy thought because we would again be setting up camp in the dark, a rustling in the grass by the side of the road proved to be a young black bear that darted in front of the truck, then stopped to inspect us before disappearing into the forest. Many a trailhead sign with instructions about how to handle potential bear encounters had prompted lots of worrying, but I didn’t anticipate the adrenaline and the sense of danger averted that came with actually seeing a bear. We saw either the same bear or a similar one the next morning on our way to hike, and both times I was a little awed and very glad that humans and dogs were all in the truck.

• Falling in love with the area around Winthrop, which combines mountains and forests with a sense of open perspective that I associate with places like Montana. The mountains of western Washington are also big, rugged country—and driving west on SR 20 is nothing short of awe-inspiring—but the reduced rainfall east of the Cascades thins out the trees and lets the sky compete with geography and vegetation.

• Feeling, for the first time this summer, that Washington is becoming home.

the accidental angler

“Set!” yells the guide, and then patiently explains again why the fish escaped and what I must do if I am to catch a fish. Intellectually, I understand that my rod needs to come up as I simultaneously put tension on the line to set the hook into the fish’s lip. Sensing precisely when and with how much force still eludes me; the guide points out that it is a feeling, and feelings are difficult to teach. As with so much in fly fishing, I fall short of putting theory into practice. I have yet to catch a fish.

Surprisingly little of my rural childhood has prepared me for fly fishing. I have vague memories of overhearing men discussing bait and lures, of falling into the lake while watching my dad fish, of watching with horrified fascination as he cleaned the fish that would be our dinner. Until recently, I thought of fishing, when I thought of it at all, pretty much as I think of golf, which is to say mostly as an easy way to spoil a perfectly good day outside. But I married into fly fishing, and fly fishing is, to its practitioners, nothing less than a way of life. It is also a measure of character, and so I gamely cast my fly in the direction I think the guide is pointing. I ask questions about fish habits and habitat, about what my rod and line should be doing, about different kinds of flies. It is a beautiful sport, but one so filled with strange vocabulary and arcane practices that I struggle to understand the basics. My father-in-law enthusiastically answers my questions with technical detail and scientific reasoning. My husband replies that the aim of fly fishing is always the imitation not only of the food itself, but its approach to the fish.

Therein lies the difference between my husband and his father, but it occurs to me as I stand in the river skittering my fly across the water to mimic a struggling insect, that such an artfully meticulous sport also approaches something akin to theater. Fish need to be convinced, drawn out with a realistic imitation of life, from tying flies to casting to managing the line in the water. As my husband likes to observe, fly fishing is a world where the fake beats out the real. If a grasshopper were tied to a hook, it would plop unconvincingly into the water and give away the illusion. Instead, to fly fish is to animate an imitator with skill, timing, and luck. What actor doesn’t hope to achieve the same? Fish, it turns out, seem to want what so many of us want, which is to believe in skillful imitation, in art, and occasionally, in things we know to be too good to be true.

of habits and improvisation

On a recent trip to Victoria, BC, Kendall and I went three times to Rebar, taking in breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Like pilgrims on a journey, we arrived eagerly, if somewhat shyly. The pattern of the day settled around our meals at the restaurant, much in the same way that the weekly rhythm of our relationship grew around food. We didn’t date so much as find ways of eating together. At first, we reserved for each other weekend evenings and special dishes designed to impress without seeming overwrought. Kendall's specialty--and the very first meal he made me--is salmon with lavender-orange salt, pasta with pesto sauce, and steamed asparagus; I made him flan and bread pudding with brioche and bourbon butter sauce. He made vegetarian borscht; I made walnut bread. One Thanksgiving, we baked a pumpkin pie together; the next year we made wasabi sweet potatoes with pork tenderloin in a balsamic vinegar and caper sauce. There were Saturday football cookouts at Beau and Ashley's, which inspired theme dinners later that winter. Asian night, for example, with peanut noodles and spring rolls and lime-pepita cookies, or Americana night, with gourmet mac-and-cheese and pulled pork and potato-buttermilk dinner rolls. (Luckily, more energy went into cooking and eating than into naming.) Food has featured prominently in our travels, and we've eaten at markets in Mexico and road-side barbecue trucks in Texas. We cheered Beau and Ashley in the barbecue competition at Dodge City Days and devoured their practice samplings. We followed the recommendations of parents (Rio Mar in New Orleans; Blue Sky Burgers in Amarillo), and searched out new favorites (El Reynaldo’s in Goodland, KS). If food initially provided an excuse to spend time together, changes in our relationship showed up in our culinary habits. We went from cooking for each other to cooking together. Dress and manners got more casual as the recipes got harder, and we found reasons to buy things like star anise and lemongrass and powdered shrimp and tamarind paste. Weekend dinners grew into multi-step affairs that necessarily included friends and leftovers, thereby weaving us more tightly into the textures of daily life together. We evolved a repertoire of recipes, got to know each other through the habits and nuances of food. What we’d eaten and would like to eat, the politics of food, how you can learn most of what you need to know about a person by the way he or she eats. Through the long bitterness of last winter, cooking and eating together was both catharsis and comfort, and our wedding this spring featured Gruber’s appetizers, Beau’s prime rib, wine from Kendall’s parents, and Stacy’s vegan chocolate cupcakes.

Because we’ve spent several years eating our way through their recipes, going to Rebar for the first time felt a bit like a first date with an old friend. It was silly and extravagant and a little obsessive, and completely in line with the habits that make us who we are. We promised ourselves that next time we'd check out Victoria's other food offerings, and we probably will. Sometimes, though, it's best not to mess with a good thing; after all, the salmon with pesto is still in heavy rotation.

secrets

When my birthday gift certificate to Amazon covered the price of a long-anticipated cookbook with a few dollars left over, I bought a used copy of Thomas McNamee's authorized biography of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. Although the story seemed better for the characters in it than for the telling of it, I read it compulsively. It even fueled a cooking binge, complete with olive oil bread, boiled kale, tempeh tacos, and projections for shortcakes dressed with locally-foraged berries. Not all in the same meal, of course. Last night, however, I dreamed in vivid detail that I kept trying to order, unsuccessfully, a chicken sandwich from McDonald's.

habitat

Leaving Lawrence was hard, although harder in the imagining than in the doing. When the time came, after the packing and the re-packing and the farewell dinners and errands and tears, I got in the car and headed west. That morning, I did many of the things that were fundamental to my daily routine in Lawrence: I went to Checkers, I walked on Mass Street, I got money out of my local bank. For an occasion that seemed so monumental in my mind, though, these one-last-time events seemed almost as ordinary as they had the week before, somehow strangely lacking in significance.

I dearly love Lawrence, and it was hard to leave, but not necessarily in the ways I’d thought. I miss individual friends, of course, but also the established texture of social life, the patterns, the hangouts, the friend to call for coffee on a Wednesday afternoon and the one for a Saturday morning run. Along with social space, I miss the familiar routines of place, the personal landmarks and learned shortcuts, all the accumulated knowledge of twelve years of inhabiting a place. The way the social and the spatial overlap.

Lawrence is home, but living there felt like unfinished business. Leaving was necessary, but limbo still feels a little daunting.

westward, ho!

Highlights from the Lawrence-to-Bellingham trek, or, why we’re glad we shipped our stuff and didn’t drive a rental truck

The Nebraska Sandhills
Although a lot of my experience on I-80 through Nebraska consists of fairly stock images of mid-western farmland, the route from North Platte to Valentine is entirely different. Once the road turns north, it enters a vast, sparsely populated region characterized by narrow, steep hills that are actually sand dunes held in place by grass. Ranching, rather than farming, dominates the area, and the views are expansive. I’d traveled through the region several times as a kid, but failed to appreciate its beauty; I was put off by the very openess, nearly unsettling in its magnitude, that now attracts me. Driving through in late afternoon and early evening, the sun caught on the grass, and the sky—that commanding Great Plains sky—glowed with a tangle of light and cloud. A fitting transition from mid-western to western, this is one of my favorite drives anywhere.

Valentine is a center for outdoors activities, including hunting, fishing, canoeing, and rafting along the Niobrara River. We stayed in the Dunes Motel, which is pet-friendly. The town also has a great western-wear store.

Devil’s Tower National Monument
After seeing the South Dakota Black Hills on the tail end of winter the previous May, the summer season seemed a little too overpopulated. The drive from Belle Fourche, SD, to Devil’s Tower was beautiful and far less crowded. I’d only experienced the plains and high desert of southern and eastern Wyoming, and so I’d imagined the monument rising out of the flat grasslands. Instead, it stands at the western edge of the rugged, forested hills that continue into South Dakota. The place is still used by Native Americans for ceremonial purposes, and their ribbons and bundles hung from trees were a slightly incongruous mixture with the carloads of tourists vying for camera angles. The paths around the based are pretty kid-friendly, which is a good thing, but the monument itself is, like most national parks, not dog-friendly. There was a moment when, with the wind rustling the pines, the energy of the place was palpable. It was quickly broken by a loud family with a mom in an anti-abortion t-shirt, but it was there and it made the trip.

Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming
Our quest for campsites took us near the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area west of the town of Buffalo. It was a clear weekend in July, and many campsites were already full. We followed the friendly brown sign promising an established campsite on Forest Service land, but ended up basically in a cow pasture alongside the dirt road leading in. What lucky cows, though, because the road dipped through a broad valley before rising again to forests; snow-capped peaks were visible in the distance, tinged pink with sunset. We unhooked the bikes and took a spin. Kendall discovered that his cruiser is better suited to the streets of Lawrence than to rutted mountain roads, but that he can in fact ride with two dogs in tow. It was the coldest night of the trip by far, and the combination of clear, cool air and mountain elevation made for one of the more brilliant displays of stars I’ve ever seen. The Milky Way was luminous, and the Big Dipper sat nearly atop the mountains. Our morning hike took us through pine forests and past lakes, although the trail seemed merely a jumping off point for longer treks into the wilderness.

Welcome Creek Wilderness Area, Montana
We’d been here fishing the previous July, so when we struck out at all of the easy-to-reach campsites along the highway, we hit the back roads and returned to the Rock Creek area. The drive in from Phillipsburg was beautiful, as the road ran along high, rounded hills in agricultural country, with mountains farther in the background. Our hike that morning was steep, starting in a stand of trees and then climbing through a grassy area on the side of a mountain. It was light when we started out, but we hiked a good distance before the sun came up over the eastern mountains and began to burn off the dew. We should not, however, have driven the thirty miles of dirt road to get back to the 90, particularly not in a Honda Civic loaded down with two computers, a television, cleaning supplies, wineglasses, a stereo, and a baritone sax.

readers

A lot of my reading seems to be cyclical lately, or at least thematic in ways that don’t relate directly to a dissertation. Noticing this trend made me think about how certain books find us, and how much our personal context affects why we like what we like. Inspired by this blog post, I’ve read two novels by Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird (1976) and The Angle of Repose (1971). I read Spectator Bird first and, although The Angle of Repose is perhaps the more complex novel in terms of plot structure and historical, this is the novel that resonated most with me. (Although I did run across an interesting twist on Stegner’s description of the Doppler effect in this article.)

It was due in part to the moment at which I was reading it, one of those happy coincidences in which exactly the right book falls into your hands at exactly the right time. I was on a plane bound for a job interview and had just finished When the Ground Turns in its Sleep (2007) by Sylvia Sellers-García. Although Sellers-García’s novel has many things to recommend it, among them supple language and the fact that its author is a PhD candidate in history (ah, the lure of extra-academic creativity), it failed to excite me. So when I began Stegner’s The Spectator Bird, it was without much expectation and mostly to pass the time. Instead, it was engrossing, if slightly uncomfortable, to read about the protagonist’s efforts to come to terms with his life as it is, not as he wishes it were. I read throughout the flight and stayed up late the next two nights to finish the novel.

Sellers-García’s and Stegner’s novels share thematic and structural elements, most importantly the search for individual identity as set against family history. The characters travel to the purported geo-cultural source of identity, Guatemala in the case of the former and Denmark in the latter, and re-read diaries to make sense of the past. For the protagonist in When the Ground Turns, this means re-visiting his late father’s diaries while searching for his parents’ former home in a small Guatemalan town made tight-lipped by the atrocities of recent civil strife. The town’s secrets draw him deeper into regional rivalries and personal feuds, until he inevitably finds the family he seeks. This scene—in which the protagonist is threatened with physical violence until he literally cries ‘uncle,’ thus revealing his familial relationship with his attacker—topples the plot structure. As befits the post-everything academic novelist, the reunion is ‘problematic,’ fraught with the tensions of otherness and assimilation in a globalized world, but this scene triggers a denouement in which the protagonist decides to stay indefinitely in the remote town. He’s got no job and no family left in the States, true enough, but really? Perhaps in another context it would be believable, but here it smacked of sentimentality. If going ‘home’ is that easy, then why all the fuss about the search for identity?

In The Spectator Bird, an aging literary agent and his wife read journals written during a long-ago trip to Denmark. The protagonist reads reluctantly, unwilling at first to re-visit a period colored by the loss of their only child. He is the son of a Danish immigrant mother, and the trip forces him to confront the overlapping of personal, cultural, and national identities. From the Midwestern couple they meet on the Atlantic crossing, returning to an imagined ‘Old Country,’ to their encounter with a Danish novelist famous for writing about Africa, identity is layered in this novel by both time and place. Social class is an important dimension of his experience of Denmark, given that the protagonist is of a markedly different status than either his immigrant mother or the landed elite with whom he stays while abroad, a difference alluded to but not explored by Sellers-García’s novel. In The Spectator Bird, the protagonist too falls sway to the exoticism of the almost-familiar, including a friendship that verges on romantic with their beautiful Danish host, but remains apart, cognizant of the different cultural forces that have shaped him, as well as of the social structures that would have separated him from his hosts, given other circumstances. It is this restraint that makes the novel work. The protagonist is grouchy, unwilling to confront old age with the cheery goodwill urged by his contemporaries. Likewise, this quality prevents him from over-indulging in reunions with an imagined homeland. He is stodgy, motivated by an almost anachronistic sense of duty and disenchanted with the social changes of his time and place, yet his character is painfully aware of his own failings and of his limits.

Both novels are about readers, and about how texts can draw one in and elicit unexpected responses. The blog post on Stegner cropped up according to its author’s logic, following a schedule far removed from mine. Yet I found it on the heels of a year in which I’d spent a great deal of time traveling through many of the places in Stegner’s fiction, and at a time in which I not only had freedom to read what I wanted, but during which I needed to read about the kinds of things talked about in the novel. It was a random encounter, of the sort that feels anything but. Because I read both novels at a time in which I was seriously evaluating my place in academia, their content underscored other doubts. Really awful things happen to people, and how do we make sense of them? How does one write anything at all about a place such as Guatemala, a country with a horrific recent history of violence, without delving into sentimentality or paternalism? Is my discomfort with Sellers-García’s novel in part a reminder of the uncomfortable dynamic between indigenous groups and anthropologists that I experienced as a student in Guatemala? Am I harder on her because I also study Latin America?

Weighty questions indeed, but this process has also induced a measure of humility about my own reading process. As an instructor, how often have I groaned about the reading habits of my students, about their lack of motivation to complete assignments, about the ways in which being nineteen interferes with their college education? In the end, though, I’m not sure I’m much better. Oh, I can force myself to think critically about something I dislike or to finish canonical novels out of willpower, but unmotivated reading is still unmotivated reading. Part of being an adult is doing unpleasant things, of course, and a large part of what one learns in college is task completion, so I’m not letting my students off the hook. But instead of imagining myself as a Literary Critic or as The Instructor, thinking about my personal reading context brings me back to being a reader. We’ve all had times when headaches or personal hang-ups affect how we understand a book, or conversely, when everything aligns and the right series of books falls directly into your lap. Although I know that books don’t literally seek us out, I like to think that great reading benefits, not unlike love, from luck and personality and timing.

por la cerveza

Stacy put the team together and mapped the course. Erin gave us a name and a slogan. I designed the t-shirts. Team Portacervezas ran through snow, rain, and the Kansas wind to complete a 44-mile relay race from the Boulevard Brewing Company in Kansas City to the Free State Brewery in Lawrence.

university reform

Because I've recently been on the academic job market, this article caught my eye. It lays out many of the problems facing contemporary higher education, as well as suggested changes. It seems obvious that higher education is changing--more classes taught by adjuncts and TAs, reduced endowments, changed funding from states--and so it would seem logical to aim for innovation rather than reaction.

tenuousness, at best

This blog is an experiment. I'm feeling confined by the usual course of things, and blogging is one of the projects I'm forcing myself to try. The point is to find new ways to connect the things that interest me--food, literature, movies, education, oddities, extra-academia, travel--and to find new outlets for conversation. We'll see how it goes once I finally get up the courage to publicize the fact that I'm working on a blog.

Here is a link to another recent project: Adventures on the Lonely Highway, produced using software from Blurb. They provide bookmaking software--including the option to 'slurp' blogs and turn them into books--and then print the results on demand, with options for hardcover or soft.