west by east

Bellingham is, geographically speaking, about as far west as you can go and still be in the continental United States. But to get to the West, to the imaginary land of cowboys and Indians, of ranches and coyotes, of boom and bust and arid mountain landscapes, requires going east. Standing at an old fire lookout just east of Mt. Rainier, the difference was clear. To the west were the clouds we’d driven through on our way around Seattle, grumbling all the while about the rainy Northwest send-off. To the east, the skies were open and blue, marked only by the high clouds that bring neither shade nor rain. We were headed east, to Texas to visit my grandma, and to Kansas, to visit friends and to judge barbecue. We had a couple of specific destinations in mind and a vague time frame for getting there; we carried sleeping bags, a tent, food for the road, and a couple of bags full of books.

In Sunnyside, Washington, we met two Mexican cattlemen at a taco truck. Over tortas, they told us the winding story of how they’d come to be in eastern Washington, and then they asked us what we were doing there. We told them, more or less, our general plan, insofar as we ourselves had worked it out: to camp, to drive small highways, to visit friends and family. The more business-like of the two, the man we assumed was the boss, looked at us curiously and asked, as if rhetorically, “But won’t that waste a lot of time?” His companion rejoined, “Don’t you see? That’s what they want, to waste time.”

Of course what he actually said was, in Spanish, “lo que quieren es perder tiempo,” which translates literally as to lose time. Not spending time unwisely, as the English suggests, but misplacing it, losing track of it, using time, perhaps, as something other than as a measure of progress. To give yet another economic metaphor for the passage of hours, it is a luxury, certainly, to spend time this way. Given my druthers, I would, like most people, choose time over money, although the real grace lies in keeping both in perspective. A trip of this sort, though, offers little with which to bluff the passage of time; absent the busyness of workaday life, time must instead be fit to the immediate needs of the day.

As we drove through the landscapes that have served as backdrop to so much American self-invention, time weighed heavy upon me. It was present in the form of geologic time, as traced out by the canyons and gorges through which we crossed, and in the splay of social history that leads refugees from Laos and Somalia to the Texas panhandle, that creates the oil- and gas-fueled boomtowns of modern Wyoming, that finds a market for the corn from acre after acre of irrigated fields in Nebraska. It jarred a bit, as in the odd mix of military bravado and family vacation levity at the Little Bighorn Battlefield monument. It was there in family history, which is time’s way of sinking memory into flesh, as well as in the more personal past, as I measured the present of a town I’d loved against the images of it that I’d carried away so dearly.

I came away a little shaken, honestly, unsure of how best to rejoin time, having once lost it.

hanging on

Wildflowers unfailingly shock me with their abundance, their fragility, their tenacity: the nodding heads of yellow glacier lilies above dried vegetation still matted by recently melted snow; a sloping meadow brilliant with paintbrush; corn lilies with lush, poisonous foliage; mountain heather clinging to the base of the most barren of scree slopes. This profligacy defies altitude and exposure, the winters that arrive early and linger late, the carelessness of hikers. My mind fumbles with the categorizations of habitat, range, color, shape, scientific and common names. Each recognition, whether haltingly retrieved from my guide book or identified by a companion more capable than I, brings a tiny thrill of belonging, the small sense that I am more of this place.

return

Upon beginning William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth, I sank into a tide of memory. It is no longer lonely homesickness that I feel, but rather a love for the place, for the colors visited upon the prairie in the fall, the late-afternoon sun on wheat fields laid bare by harvest, the sky, the wind.

give me a home

There are those times when I lunge wildly for the city, for something beyond the breadth of rural life. Having grown up in the sort of town that movie heroes leave behind, I wonder what it must be to gaze upon iconic places and buildings and to call that city home. Then too there is the cultural life, the galleries and concert spaces and bookstores, the creative and commercial energy welling up and making things happen.

But, inevitably, there rises a swell of longing for the silhouette of a Ponderosa pine limb against a cloudless sky; I am struck dumb by the sight of the Big Dipper suspended low over the distant mountains, transfixed by the greenish play of light through cedars and moss. Mountain heather catches my eye, and the silver arc of clouds backlit by the moon. I crave not always wilderness, exactly, but an abundance of natural life and the depth of experience conveyed by the natural world.

The trick of this duality has yet to be unraveled. I can only say that immersing myself in the details of nature feels something like love.

lou the blacksmith

As a kid, I rarely slept on the long car trips that ferried us between one set of grandparents and the other. Much of that time was spent either reading or staring out the window, daydreaming, but the rest was spent talking to my dad. As my mother and sister slept, I’d pester him with questions about why things were the way they were, about combines and cows and what exactly barley looked like. I especially loved it when he talked about his childhood and the friends, relatives, and ruffians who populated the small Nebraska town he grew up in.

The world of his childhood seemed to exist at a distant remove, even from the small Kansas town in which I was growing up. In that world, people used things like cream separators, and they did things like make bridles and trade horses. His own grandfather, my father often pointed out, was a veteran horse trader who frequently used Sunday’s reprieve from labor to lay the groundwork for a trade, but who was loath to close an actual deal on the day of rest.

One of my favorite stories involved an encounter between the Lakota chief Sitting Bull and the proud father of the first white child born at Fort Randall, South Dakota. A local blacksmith, already in his eighties at the time my father first heard the story, recalled his own father having boasted of showing him around as a newborn baby to everyone at the fort. Sitting Bull was being held prisoner there, and at the sight of the baby in his happy father’s arms, the story goes, the famous warrior reached through the prison bars and chucked the infant under the chin. As for the veracity of the blacksmith’s story, my dad only shrugs and notes that it’s chronologically plausible, given the ages of those involved.

With the most recent telling, my dad digressed into a technical explanation of forges, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wagon trains. The pace of generational change is dizzying: Sitting Bull, the leader of a nomadic people faced with devastating social change; Lou, among the last blacksmiths to ply the trade that made westward expansion possible; and my own father, a civil engineer charged with building and maintaining the modern highways that have facilitated mobility. There are various ways to make this story coherent, I suppose, and each has appealed to me at different points in my life. As a child, I thrilled to the spark of adventure, the history-comes-to-life nature of it all. At other times, the story has seemed a cautionary one about the restless tide of technological and cultural change, each generation outpacing the last. This time, though, what resonated most with me was the gracious tenor of memory: the sweetness of hearing a favorite childhood tale retold, my father’s own gentle longing for a time and a place before him, and the lives that emerge through shared stories.

where the wild things are

The water pools at my ankles, icy cold and glacier fed. It’s still early in the day, but the summer sun is high, the view expansive: Mt. Baker is just visible beyond the ridge we’re scaling, the boulder field below gives way to forest at the tree line. My husband stands with one of the dogs, waiting on the opposite bank. I take another step deeper into the current, and my sandal slips against the wet rock. Panic washes over me, radiating out from the pit of my stomach and tingling down my arms and legs. I freeze, unable to move forward or to turn back.

On the surface, the nature of my fear is easy to understand: the rushing water, the jutting rocks, a single misstep, and incapacitation could easily ensue. Not solely a fear of physical danger, my streamside anxiety has more to do with faulty interpretation. Habitat shapes human society, but culture just as surely creates nature and the systems for relating to one’s environment. I am no less a weakling in Kansas, no more capable of coping physically with a sudden blizzard or hailstorm, but I have absorbed the life experiences and social interactions that render the plains comprehensible. In this mountain stream, by way of contrast, I am patently out of my element.

Kansas, like the Great Plains in general, is best known as a place of transit, typified by generic remarks about “fly-over country.” Much of the area is too arid for traditional agriculture, and the indigenous inhabitants lived off the region’s iconic herds of bison. As European settlement advanced westward, the plains saw traffic along the California, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails, and new travelers seeking fortune beyond the western mountains; only later did people come to try their hand at agriculture. The plains, however, are not a place given to permanence. Tornadoes, prairie fires, hailstorms, swarms of locusts, and the incessant wind impressed upon these settlers that their existence was fleeting, their material presence upon the plains transitory. Today, many a former homestead site is marked only by a lonely stand of trees, a vain attempt at endurance, that remains long after the house has fallen to ruin.

If physical structures on the plains are fleeting, social ones are enduring, developed over generations as a buffer against the real dangers and the sense of isolation induced by the vast expanse of treeless prairie. There are stories of solitary homesteaders going mad listening to the wind in their dugouts, and of wayward children becoming lost in blizzards and freezing to death just outside the door. Inhabitants of the Great Plains tend toward the taciturn and the practical, and they gather to themselves the folds of family and community that make life there possible.

These regional differences strike me as I reflect upon that moment of panic, stranded midway across a mountain stream. Nurtured in a social environment composed of people who made a living off an arid, often inhospitable land, I grew up believing in the American myth that nature can be conquered. In Kansas, this conviction takes shape not so much as reliance upon technology but upon collective faith: in fences, in neighbors, in the future, in belief itself. Tractors and irrigation equipment domesticate the landscape and render it usable, but it is shared customs that provide solace against a bitter winter or a drought-stricken summer. Stripped of my frame of reference for comprehending nature, wilderness seems that much wilder, Washington that much riskier.

In the end, however, I made it across the stream, aided by two kindly fellow hikers who rigged a rope line to help me cross. Neither Midwesterners not Westerners, they were from New Jersey.

fools and englishmen

We have recently experienced what the NPR meteorologist described as a "classic heat wave," and it would seem that I am no longer the heat-tolerant--nay, heat-seeking--creature that I once was. A few days ago, Kendall and I set out with the dogs, thinking that forests and mountains would offer kinder temperatures than our house.

Excited by the prospect of the green stillness of an old-growth forest and a new perspective on the Twin Sisters mountains, we set off to explore the Elbow Lake trail. At the trailhead, however, we found a river impassable due to high water. The same was true at the Ridley Creek trailhead, just up Forest Road 38. July is the true beginning of summer in Washington and is therefore prime hiking season, but we're still on the cusp of it: the warm weather has yet to melt the snow on the upper trails even as the run-off it generates can complicate the hikes at lower elevations. Grumbling about the many long months without a proper hike, Kendall set off in dogged pursuit of views of the surrounding mountains, all confirmed by the Garmin, the compass, and the topographic map.

As I staggered up an old logging road in the late afternoon heat, however, I began to question the logic of our course. Unlike Kendall, I am not motivated by views alone, nor do I feel a compulsion to finish every trail I begin. Even under the best of hiking conditions, I am much more apt to lag behind, looking at unusual rocks or grasses or soil patterns, or to obsess over what might be a possible change in the weather. His persistance has led me to many more spectacular vantage points than I would have pursued on my own, for which I am genuinely grateful. On this particular afternoon, though, I was just hot. And tired of looking at trees.

Unfortunately, our best views that day came on the drive in; we chalked the experience up to a fact-finding mission and headed home. Nature breeds patience, no matter the season.

reconnaissance

Shortly after we arrived in Bellingham last summer, Kendall and I spotted a sign for beach access along Chuckanut Drive. We parked in the designated lot, and after much scrambling down rocky inclines and thrashing about in the undergrowth, we arrived not at anything resembling a beach, but at a rocky outcrop better suited, as Kendall noted, for plunging to one’s death.

Given that this beach is a landmark important enough to warrant its own parking lot, we figured that, as usual, there was some local trick we’d missed. Yesterday, lured by the summer sun, we again set out in search of the phantom beach. We left the parking lot by way of a different trail, but ended up at the selfsame spot, albeit with fewer mosquitoes this time around. After a sigh of frustration, we sat in silence, taking in the San Juan Islands, dark against the opaque silvery blue of the bay’s sun-lightened waters. It was glorious, but not the beach we’d been expecting. So we set off again, following a hiker’s instructions to continue along the railroad tracks, looking for “a slightly bigger trail, probably with more people on it.” And we did, in fact, happen upon Clayton Beach, a sandy sliver carved out between the forested coastal cliffs and the sea. At low tide, the pocked coastline and barnacle-covered rocks were exposed, and crabs and miniature jellyfish moved through the sun-warmed shallows. The beach was neither more nor less beautiful than the previous spot, and finding it gave the sense of a minor triumph and vague restlessness, the sort that often follows the fulfillment of a long-anticipated desire.

We returned to the car, making mental note of the trail’s contours for a future return. Out of such experiences accumulates, perhaps, a sense of place.

home again, home again

My parents just wrapped up a week-long visit to Bellingham and its environs. We drove the North Cascades Highway, hiked in the Chuckanuts, biked Lopez Island, ate oysters and salmon, visited Re-Bar and Butchart Gardens in Victoria, and otherwise indulged in the local summer pleasures.

What surprised me about their visit, though, was how their presence made Washington feel more like home; something about showing my parents around made me feel less like a long-term visitor here. "Lawrence" is no longer the first place name that comes to mind when someone asks where I live, and I hesitate a little less upon hearing that question.

a taxonomy of signs

There are those happy constellations of events out of which one can infer deeper meaning, particularly if given to a literary bent. By these I mean those circumstances under which the sighting of place names or allusions to books, people, or cultural trends confirm the secret plans, the wisps of desire, the half-formed hopes to which we have yet to give voice. We see in them what we want to see, seeking confirmation outside ourselves.

And then there are those coincidences that come upon us suddenly, speaking in softer tones and so different in scope and imagination from the life we'd imagined for ourselves that those other signs cheapen in comparison. From these latter, I can only surmise that the universe intends that I do something related to China. Or perhaps Toronto.

shadows in green and gray

After slogging through essays and exams and more essays, the academic year ended with the usual, oddly anti-climactic euphoria. To celebrate-and punctuate-this annual change of pace, summer's official arrival, we trekked up to Mt. Baker. It was a return to winter, the rains clinging stubbornly to the foothills and the snow still firmly in command at higher elevations. With warmer temperatures in the forecast, the word on the street was that things would be changing quickly.

But for the moment, though, things were as they had been. The fog hid the views of the river below, and the salal and cedars crowded the trail. Spring appeared only in traces, the bright orange columbine growing alongside a small cascade fed by the nascent spring melt, and lupine, smaller and less exuberant than that in town, rising in delicate purple spikes among the undergrowth. As we climbed higher, the brush ceded to old-growth forest, massive Douglas firs and hemlocks along steep slopes. At the snow line, the trees gave way to an expansive bowl. The clouds sucked in, so that all was grayish white above and below, with only smudges of exposed rock at the rim and the darker, crumpled snow marking our path.

And then, improbably, the clouds parted, revealing patches of genuine blue. The sky lightened in that way that it does here, in which the clouds lessen and the sun casts shadows without revealing itself. We watched the cloud bank moving back along the trail we had ascended, and then, shivering in the cold wind moving down off the snow, turned to follow it.

between extremes

Summers in Washington are, for me, easy to love. The days are long, the berries are plentiful, and the temperatures rise to a pleasant 85 degrees. Sometimes. Summer in Kansas often feels like an endurance test: the ticks, the 100-degree heat, the summer storms of May and June and the searing hot winds of late August. The summer off-sets the endurance test that is a Kansas winter, creating something akin to a balance of extremes. For years, I buffered myself against the cold winds of winter and the summer heat waves by imagining life in a land less mercurial, more temperate in its weather patterns.

Having settled in western Washington, however, the lack of climatic intensity feels odd. Winter was as expected, wet and dark, with the rare bright day counted as an unexpected gift. Spring, though, oh, spring; you caught me unaware. In Kansas, spring is an exuberant, if uneven, extraction from winter's icy grip. Things change. They melt, they give birth, they burst forth. What was once barren, brown, and frozen now heaves with life (often, with insect life), marking a hectic transition from winter to summer. In Washington, spring creeps. It is subtle, the days slowly lengthening, the brighter leaves of deciduous trees filling in the gaps among the evergreens, the shading in of pale new growth at the tips of the Douglas firs and hemlocks. I, the impatient Kansan, frequently missed the cues, my body still attuned to weather patterns over a thousand miles to the east.

let's move to the country

OK, so I’m not ready to go live in a yurt. The attraction is obvious, though, and the desire to chuck it all and return to nature, in various guises, has been a constant companion to the development of industrial society. Perhaps it is the age in which we live, or the stage at which I currently find myself, but a shift toward simplicity seems palpable, no matter how ill defined or short-lived it may be. A malfunctioning system invites questioning, of course, and plenty of people these days have no choice but to operate outside the conventional parameters of success. Part of me really wants to believe, earnestly and wholeheartedly, that the system can still work, despite the recession, despite ecological degradation, despite the acrimony that stalls dialogue. And part of me wants to go bake bread and raise chickens on a farm somewhere.

For me, what provokes envy is the sense of clarity that seems to guide this kind of decision-making. The thought that one could be so deliberate in assessing needs as to pare down both belongings and activities to the most essential is a seductive one. It is also, at least in my imagining, a tad absolutist; it isn’t place alone that effects transformation, after all. As Henry Miller points out in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, even paradise is unlivable when a person hasn’t figured out how to live with herself.