sisters, together

Nearly three thousand miles separate my sister and me, the distance between the two Washingtons. Three thousand miles, a baby, new jobs, and the general busyness of life meant that we hadn't seen each other in two years.

A few weeks ago, we got to spend a few hours together, an afternoon, wandering around downtown Seattle in the sunny and unseasonably warm weather. All too brief, after too long apart, but lovely nonetheless.

re-set

Left to our own devices a few weekends ago, the dogs and I took a route up the Chuckanuts that is known in our family as the “view hike.” Like many such hikes, it’s on an old utility road that winds through second-growth forest and ends at a recent clear cut. Along the way, it passes a small lookout with views of the Salish Sea, the San Juans, and occasionally even the Olympics--hence the “view” in our nickname for the spot.

Although nothing like summer’s glory hikes, it’s a pleasant little five-mile round-trip that’s close to town and offers hill work. The Chuckanuts are full of little gems such as this, and the return to this bit of loveliness always marks the end of fall and the beginning of winter.

Admittedly, winter is not my favorite season in Washington. The monotony of gray can last well into what should by all rights be spring, making the season seem longer than it actually is. Although we’ve learned by now to combat seasonal affective disorder with full-spectrum happy lamps and mega-doses of outside activity, having a name to stick on the moody doldrums does little to ease the symptoms.

On the flip side, summer in the Pacific Northwest is glorious. Unambiguously, gorgeously glorious. But summer also means a madcap rush to squeeze everything in to one short season--the hiking, the house projects, the lounging in the backyard, the luxury of leaving the house dressed in a single layer, and the feel of sun on one’s face and arms and bare legs. As much as I love it, summer leaves me a bit exhausted, and the swings between seasonal extremes at this latitude always seem a bit immoderate to my Midwestern sensibilities.  

This particular outing, though, was a pause, a chance to anticipate the pleasures of the coming season before we tire of them. And it felt entirely right to be once again tucked in among the grays and muted blues, with the loamy smell of deciduous leaves on the ground mixed with the sharper notes of Douglas-fir needles, and the only sound that of the wind in the trees overhead. 

in the company of others

In recent years, our October tradition has been a trip up to Cougar Divide. The road to the top is not good and the trail itself is unmaintained, but persistence yields magical landscapes and a visual feast, from Baker's glaciated slopes to Table Mountain, the High Divide, and the Canadian peaks. When bathed in late-fall sunlight, the spot is incomparably beautiful.

After a summer hiking season truncated by canine health concerns and professional obligations, it was a pleasure to spend an afternoon among friends in the high country, soaking in the sun on one of the last sunny days we'll see for a good long while.

Although our habit has always been to forge ahead and cover as much ground as possible in a single outing, this fall's hikes have been all about the company. More journey and less destination, as the saying goes.

Photo credit

unintended mindfulness

Most professors are required to give course evaluations, and most course evaluations tend to blur together. Nearly every single time I read over the student comments, though, there are one or two that stand out, sometimes for their rancor or their unabashed enthusiasm but more often for the, ahem, rather bracing lack of self-consciousness on the part of their authors. My most recent favorite* belongs decidedly in that category.

The student wrote, and I quote, "When she was having fun and joking with us, I felt like sitting there wasn't that bad and this was fun." 

My first instinct was to laugh, and laugh I did, mightily. Alone in my office. In the faculty workroom as I printed out worksheets for the first day of the new quarter. And again when I got home and told the story to my husband. Oh, sure, I was a little indignant about the backhanded compliment and, you know, that the student presumed that just sitting there was enough.

But then it hit me that the kid was right, not about my Spanish class in particular, but about life and how sometimes it is enough to see the small moments clearly and measure them accurately.   

*This quarter’s runner-up was the tersely worded “She’s legit.”

in defense of widgets

A few weeks ago, I ran across a comment in the Chronicle of Higher Education forums that compared the standard five-paragraph essay foisted upon students everywhere as the academic equivalent of a widget. That is, this kind of essay serves no other purpose than as a thought exercise that bears little relationship to the kinds of thinking and writing students will need to do in the real world. 

While I would agree that the five-paragraph essay rarely leads to inspired writing--let alone reading--I think the comment misses a larger point about the nature of how students learn. So much of what we do in the classroom involves a measure of artificiality simply because, well, we’re in a classroom and we’re dealing with people who are not yet experts in the subject they’re studying. I’m a strong proponent of experiential learning and I try to help students make connections between the topics we talk about in class and life beyond the classroom. But I also use all kinds of classroom activities not because they mimic how students will use Spanish out in the world, but because they are helpful to students in gaining the skills and knowledge they will need out in the world. Just like medical students who start out with CPR dummies and cadavers, it’s OK to let beginning language students talk about a fictional trip to Spain before we ask them to undertake a complicated interpreting task. I’m fine with giving them activities that help them practice a specific vocabulary set or work on their verb conjugations, as long as they’re also learning how to convey relevant information despite limited language skills or to organize their thoughts in a meaningful way.

Which brings me back to the dreaded five-paragraph essay. Depending upon the kind of class I’m teaching, I’ve had students do all kinds of writing, from movie reviews to autobiographical essays. But I’ve also found the five-paragraph essay to be helpful in teaching students how to organize their thoughts around a central topic and then to marshall evidence that supports their interpretation of that topic. The ability to advance an idea and give valid reasons for supporting it is a really valuable skill, and it’s one that in very practical terms can help students convince employers to hire them or persuade future coworkers to join them in a project. And it’s a skill that carries over from writing into other realms, including the ability to evaluate the arguments of others, rather than accepting a proposition at face value.


I don’t doubt that there are other, and perhaps better, ways of teaching these skills, but I’m willing to cop to a certain amount of artificiality in the classroom because our job as teachers is to provide scaffolding that lets students try and fail and do better the next time. We give them tasks they can learn from until they’ve acquired enough skills and knowledge to do it on their own.

Now I just need to remember all this when the next round of essays is due and I'm cursing the idiot who assigned so much freaking writing.

las muditas

This description of one professor’s efforts to help shy students find a voice in her classroom resonated with me because I was also one of those quiet students. I remember all too well that queasy feeling in my stomach, the flush that came over my face when I knew I was going to have to talk in class. Although I learned to manage it with time, it stuck with me even through grad school, so much so that a more outgoing classmate dubbed my friend and me “las muditas”* for our reticence in class. The nickname infuriated me, in large part because it reminded me of how frustrated I was with my own shyness. Eventually, I set myself a quota for speaking in class and just forced myself to do it.

In this article, the author describes setting students up for success in class discussions by letting them test out their comments via email before class, then calling on them at an appropriate moment during the discussion. This is such a brilliant strategy because it goes right to the heart of the fear and lets students manage that anxiety in small steps and on their own terms, with the teacher’s support. In my own classes, my goal is to create a classroom dynamic in which anyone who wants to can voice an opinion in some capacity during the class session. To that end, other strategies I’ve tried include giving students brief, in-class writing exercises--that I usually count on a completion basis toward a participation grade--so that no matter who I call on, most of them will have at least something to say and they will have gotten to process it in writing before having to say it aloud. I also do a lot of small-group activities before leading into a large-group discussion, so that students have a chance to bounce ideas off of one another and try them out without the pressure of speaking in front of the entire class. It’s a tricky balance, though, especially when weighed against the very real need to move through the course material. 

Creating a classroom that invites participation is important pedagogically, because hearing from a variety of perspectives enriches learning for all students even as articulating one’s own ideas verbally reinforces individual student learning. But it’s also important politically, especially when students don’t speak up because they feel their age, their gender, or their socioeconomic background are at odds with perceived--or actual--norms in the university community. I want students to tackle tough questions and respect different experiences and opinions and find ways to resolve conflicts because these are life skills that I want them to take with them. And I emphasize mutual respect in the classroom because, ultimately, that’s the kind of society I want to live in.

*the little mute ones

sunset in the Blue Mountains

That moment at dusk when haze blankets the horizon and obscures the boundary between earth and sky. And then, as the lights from distant houses come on, the contours of the land are again briefly revealed, before the stars make their slow appearance. 

Photo credit. 

tinkering

I really like this video of Adam Savage talking about the importance of maker culture to the broader educational landscape. In particular, he argues for trying things and failing--and that making things helps kids do well in math, science, and other subjects. Taking things apart and putting them together again in different ways also encourages thinking in terms of systems and how they interact, rather than becoming too entrenched in a particular way of seeing things. 


Savage's take on tinkering also reminded me of this article on the virtues of being a generalist rather than a specialist, given that a diversity of skills and experiences will help employees adapt better over time. Now, let's get those liberal arts majors to a wood shop or laboratory.  

personal branding

Equal parts satire and survival skills, this post from a few years ago captures the essence of academia-as-performance art by laying out strategies for those all-important introductions that grad students fumble their way through on the first day of every new course.

My favorite bit of advice: "Never sacrifice originality and erudition for clarity."

for love or money

Reading, during graduate school, was about mastering a canon, attaining fluency in literary history and tradition, becoming conversant in the language of theory and criticism. It was often about proving oneself as a scholar and also, sometimes, about marking territory. Rarely did I read something without an eye as to what sort of use it could be put, whether as the foundation of an article, supplementary evidence for another project, or another milestone in the ongoing process of acquiring cultural capital.

Much of this is well and good and a perfectly normal part of the process by which academia replicates itself: of the many things I regret about grad school, the ability to have an intelligent conversation about most major periods of Spanish and Spanish American literature is not one of them.

Now that I’ve opted out of that world, though, my reading habits operate in an entirely different economy. If reading for graduate school was a primarily utilitarian activity, reading--particularly reading fiction--is for me now a more private, less commercial undertaking. Oh, sure, I still read to stay current in my field and to fill in gaps in my personal catalogue of Books That Must Be Read. And it’s hard to turn off the close reading habits acquired through such an intense engagement with literary study; I’m forever tracking narrative voices in my head and paying attention to plot structure and literary conventions and language as I move through a novel.

But I’ve regained that inimitable pleasure of sinking into another’s world through fiction, and I can once again do it merely because I love it. This is why, in part, I think the role of literary scholar never quite fit: I wanted literature to feed my soul, when the structure of academia insisted that I use it to make a living.

And although we do well to give commerce its due, it is good, also, to carve out a bit of space for the things we do first for love.

un recordatorio, tal vez un recuerdo

A former student, now a friend, asked me recently whether speaking Spanish feels too much like work when I’m out of the classroom and off the clock. Yes, it often does, a fact that saddens me. 

Despite that, Enrique Morente’s version of Federico García Lorca’s “La Aurora de Nueva York” breaks my heart and then heals it in all the right ways, reminding me of why I loved Spanish so much in the first place.

la peor de todas

A su retrato
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Éste que ves, engaño colorido,
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;

éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,

es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento dedicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado:

es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco, y bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.

Always, in previous encounters with this poem, I admired Sor Juana's criticism of the role of women in art, principally their reduction to the state of muse.

Here, her sonnet echoes Luis de Góngora's plea to celebrate youthful beauty before it yields inexorably to the skull beneath the skin. Rather than write about the ephemeral nature of female beauty, however, Sor Juana addresses the artist who would preserve that elusive glory by way of paint on canvas. This "vain artifice" fools the senses temporarily, yet results only in an untrustworthy imitation of life itself. Unlike the final tercet of Góngora's sonnet, in which it is female beauty that becomes "tierra, [...] humo, [...] polvo, [...] sombra, [...] nada," in Sor Juana's poem, it is the representation itself that is but a cadaver, a shadow, nothing.

Part of the appeal of Sor Juana as a historical figure is the literary quality of her life: a woman so talented and intelligent, so beyond all expectations for her gender in that time and place, forced to submit to patriarchy and renounce all intellectual activity. It galls, even now.

In the context of her life, neither art nor science could save her, and maybe the unflinching observation of reality offered a cruel sort of solace. And yet, upon re-reading the poem, I want to believe that art does indeed offer a brief respite from the horrors of time. For a poet of Sor Juana's talent to describe art as nothing is disingenuous, to say the least. Perhaps, then, it is the nature of representation that we should take issue with. Religious orthodoxy is one sort of representation, as is an artistic tradition that relegates women to passive observers. At its best, though, art can do so much more than that.

looking north

A view from Sumas Mountain, the pronunciation of which marks how long you've been in Whatcom County. This isn't the iconic image of the lush, dense forests of the Pacific Northwest, but it is in many ways a more honest representation of recent human history here. Lowland farms in the distance, clear cuts in the foreground. Abandoned mines tucked away in stands of old-growth Douglas Fir on slopes too steep to log; shotgun shells, beer cans, and the detritus of target practice. Expansive views of the Canadian peaks, of the San Juans, of Mt. Baker, of the patchwork of logging and regrowth rolling over the distant hills.

Unlike the Chuckanuts or the trails of the Baker wilderness areas, Sumas isn't on the radar of most hikers here. It is a lonelier and perhaps wilder place, lacking the signed trails and clear land-use ethos of those areas taken out of intensive production and given over to recreational uses. For better or for worse, this is a working landscape, one that shows the price our living extracts from the land.

chick lit

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2010)

Oh, how I wanted to like this book. Love it, even. I first ran across Egan’s name in the context of the dust-up over her comments about the genre known as “chick lit” after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. As Deena Drewis pointed out in her article, Egan’s comments about the “banal and derivative” nature of a lot of so-called chick lit were honest, if a bit ungracious. Drewis ends her analysis by suggesting that Egan’s advice to emerging female writers to “shoot high and don’t cower” is exactly the sort of thing needed to reverse substantial gender inequities in the publishing world.

Much to my disappointment, I hated the novel itself. The characters were leaden, the plot conventional, the narrative techniques stale. I get that the intended effect of the multiple narrative voices and loosely interconnected characters is a comment on the simultaneously alienated and eerily interconnected nature of life in the postmodern, socially mediated era, but come on. This trick’s been done and to much better effect, in my opinion. There were moments when I found myself rooting for the characters--and for the story that was in there somewhere--but mostly I felt like I was reading someone’s rough draft for what could someday be a compelling novel.

I’m OK with not grasping the magic of this particular novel. I realize that it’s hard for a woman to speak critically--especially about other women--without sounding like a bitch. And that to create art you need seriousness of intent. But it’s bothersome when taking yourself too seriously gets in the way of creating meaningful art.

tree love

A few years ago, in the early days of our adventures on the road, Kendall and I drove the California coast from Pismo Beach up Highway One to the Bay Area. The drive with its coastal views was spectacular, as expected, but I’d been promised redwoods.

When they finally came into view, it was love at first sight. I’d seen trees before, obviously, but nothing like these trees. From a distance, their lines are nearly vertical, drawing the eye always up and up and up, their boles slender only because each tree’s height so greatly exceeds its horizontal reach. The trees appear graceful, elegant, composed, as balanced in structural composition as in palette. Up close, their bark is furrowed, mottled with moisture and often with indications of fire; their trunks bear the remarkable iterations of their long lives. Since moving to Washington State, I’ve continued my arboreal love affair: the graceful boughs and gnarled trunks of the western redcedar; the notched cones and sprawling branches of the Douglas-fir; the drooping, delicate tops of the hemlock, so at odds with its sturdy, straight trunk; the tenacious Sitka spruce; the pleasant march of subalpine fir across a mountain slope. These are the familiar companions that hint at altitude, microclimate, and forest age, but redwoods have remained my first love and my biggest obsession.

And so this past spring break, we loaded up the Civic with the dogs and a cooler and sufficient reading material for a 10-day trip and headed south. We followed Highway 101 across the Olympic Peninsula and down the Oregon coast until we reached Prairie Creek State Park, Redwood National Park, and—still farther south—Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Before we left, a friend had described these redwood forests as beyond exaggeration. And they were everything I’d previously loved about redwoods as trees, but compounded by the scale of the forest: bigger, taller, statelier. Moisture from the morning’s rain gave lie to the blue sky faintly visible through the canopy; drops fell 300 hundred feet to the forest floor, waylaid briefly on their journey from sky to earth. Sunlight entered the forest with similar reticence, as if with deference to the world that these trees create unto themselves. We spoke in hushed tones or not at all, and even the dogs seemed moved by the scale of the trees and the space of the forest.

It is perhaps this quality of the coastal redwood forests that inspires both devotion and destruction. Vulnerable though they are to human actions, these forests exist in a temporal scale beyond our ken. Like the cathedrals to which they are so often compared, redwood forests remind us that we are small and impermanent, a state that seems to invite dogma and ambition at least as often as it does reflection.

Just as we were leaving, the sun broke through a gap in the canopy and backlit the falling raindrops; the world seemed suspended, however briefly, in a golden present. Then, as if on cue, a cloud blocked the sun and we loaded into the car and drove on. The beauty of this particular moment is, for me, precisely that although we were beside the point, we got to share in the experience of it.

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.