I want to say more about environmental writing, about what I’ve learned, but I feel it’s been already been covered in discussions and this blog well. I was disconnected, but now I’m not. I’ve come to value passion, again, as much as I do clarity. I took things for granted, but not anymore. I have little else to say now, as this class comes to close, but I would like to share what I’m doing in the next couple of days, as it speaks to my experience.
On Tuesday, my sister and one of my closest friends will be taking a drive to Lake Chelan and the Columbia River. We’ll be waking up early, having breakfast at our spot, and heading through Highway 2, better known as the North Cascades Highway. We’ll pass through an Indian Reservation, the Cascade Mountain passes, and through mineral-turquoise Diablo Lake. We’ll get higher in elevation until we see the mountains get snowcapped, the valleys daunting, with the air becoming light. But soon it will flatten out and we’ll go through Methow Valley, through Winthrop, Washington’s infamous and gaudy “Wild West” town and subtle, dusty Twisp. When we reach the Columbia, we’ll be heading north to the Okanogan Highlands, to see that steppe I’ve been dreaming of seeing all year. What was I thinking? That I could go without this? The primitive roads, the sagebrush, the signs for rodeos and stampedes, and all the forever blackened firs.
I don’t really have time or the money to be meandering. But I tell myself this is research, that now that I know what I’m identifying, it’s valid research. When the sun goes down, we’ll hit my cousin’s campground at the Falls, where Chelan meets the Columbia and have beers, yell and sing, and feel cool water.
The next day, we’ll wake up early with black coffee and pan-fried eggs, and take the rural route out to Spokane, dip down into the rolling clay fields of the Palouse, back west through the Basin and Yakima, our baffling “The Palm Springs of Washington.” We’ll go through vineyards, orchards, hops, through all the little towns along the highways of the Inland Empire that are little else besides a church and a gas station. I don’t know what we’ll do on this day. I just know it will end in Crescent Bar, watching the sunset over our dammed, but mighty Columbia with both Pittsburgh and Seattle feeling equally apart from me.
My time with friends and family will be shortened, and neither of the bunch will understand why this is so important for me, why it’s necessary to see what’s inland. To echo my first entry, they’ll never understand that this place is a crossroad to me, the place where I first became intimate with the land as much as people, the outer limits, the unknown of my home. I’ve lacked the tools, the eyes, the age and wisdom to look at this place and meditate on it. I’ve lacked them up until now.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Final Place Entry: Thursday, July 28th and August 8th. The Ravine Trail and Confronting Solitude.
People here still ask me why I chose Pittsburgh. They probably always will. My answer will always be distance. How well can somebody write about a place that they’ve never seen from the outside? I write about my home now with passion, but that wasn’t always the case. I couldn’t wait to leave it after college. I’ve never forgotten how close I was to never coming back.
Today, I’m at my mother’s house, sitting outside on her deck. The weather is cool, in the low sixties, and a wind is lifting the smell of saltwater through the hemlock and strawberry trees to where I am. Right now, there is where I want to be. I want to be here with my dogs, my coffee, and even the crane flies. But I know the novelty will where off, I will grow restless, and crave Pittsburgh again, even though I was so happy to leave it behind the remainder of the summer. The Northwest is a funny place. It’s a great place to be from and it’s great place to end up. As for all that life between, Pittsburgh has served me far better.
On the Ravine Trail, I think of it as a city, a work in progress, a place reinventing itself. It’s me. I’ve become rather fond of it, even at times become defensive. Pittsburgh is like my sister. I can insult her, but no one else can. Soon, I’ll be leaving it on the Empire Builder.
There is little wildlife to be seen today in Frick Park, all of them certainly aware before I was of the coming storm and rainfall. It’s darker than it should be at this hour.
In this blog, I’ve portrayed this place as a poor substitute for my home, but that’s really no longer correct. Becoming somewhat frayed by living in a city, it’s honestly become a bit of a refuge.
I need distance from my home to write about it, but I need reminders, too. In everywhere else I’ve lived, I’ve neglected that, even avoided parks, and tried to go hard without. In Pittsburgh, I wasn’t doing so well with urban living and needed that hike, with that person in April. I can’t remember a time in all my travels where I just went into the woods and thought about my life. Not until now.
Standing here in the Ravine Trail, I again think about my life and all its comforts and distractions. I’m afraid of nature because of the silence and the deeper thoughts and reflections that usually go in hand with it. Maybe that’s why as much as I miss Washington, I’m always ready to leave it with difficulties such as someone I don’t want contacting me on my birthday, one less dog, a dinner table missing someone, suddenly all coming to the forefront, all now unavoidable.
I hear birds now, the static of cicadas high in the oaks. The clouds are getting darker, but the thunder and lightning has yet to begin. Their air is again stagnant, near tropical, although a cool breeze moves through the woods. I can feel the soft dirt through my shoes. Everything is okay. The trail is empty today. The solution to avoiding your own thoughts is to keep moving. But that’s not a sustainable or happy life, is it? Graduate school has decisively put me in place for two years. This class has had me coming here every other week to confront solitude.
One result: On the Empire Builder, I fall asleep at random intervals. Cat naps. My laptop is closed and my headphones are off. The first time I was on this train, it was an adventure. I didn’t want to miss a single unfamiliar landscape or any town. But now I know the route. I’m left with only my thoughts. I’m okay with that.
Another: I first became intimate with nature in the Inland Northwest, but Frick Park, of all places, appears to be my reacquaintance. The morning we arrive in Spokane, I notice maple trees. I realize that I learned how to identify maples from the Ravine Trail.
Today, I’m at my mother’s house, sitting outside on her deck. The weather is cool, in the low sixties, and a wind is lifting the smell of saltwater through the hemlock and strawberry trees to where I am. Right now, there is where I want to be. I want to be here with my dogs, my coffee, and even the crane flies. But I know the novelty will where off, I will grow restless, and crave Pittsburgh again, even though I was so happy to leave it behind the remainder of the summer. The Northwest is a funny place. It’s a great place to be from and it’s great place to end up. As for all that life between, Pittsburgh has served me far better.
On the Ravine Trail, I think of it as a city, a work in progress, a place reinventing itself. It’s me. I’ve become rather fond of it, even at times become defensive. Pittsburgh is like my sister. I can insult her, but no one else can. Soon, I’ll be leaving it on the Empire Builder.
There is little wildlife to be seen today in Frick Park, all of them certainly aware before I was of the coming storm and rainfall. It’s darker than it should be at this hour.
In this blog, I’ve portrayed this place as a poor substitute for my home, but that’s really no longer correct. Becoming somewhat frayed by living in a city, it’s honestly become a bit of a refuge.
I need distance from my home to write about it, but I need reminders, too. In everywhere else I’ve lived, I’ve neglected that, even avoided parks, and tried to go hard without. In Pittsburgh, I wasn’t doing so well with urban living and needed that hike, with that person in April. I can’t remember a time in all my travels where I just went into the woods and thought about my life. Not until now.
Standing here in the Ravine Trail, I again think about my life and all its comforts and distractions. I’m afraid of nature because of the silence and the deeper thoughts and reflections that usually go in hand with it. Maybe that’s why as much as I miss Washington, I’m always ready to leave it with difficulties such as someone I don’t want contacting me on my birthday, one less dog, a dinner table missing someone, suddenly all coming to the forefront, all now unavoidable.
I hear birds now, the static of cicadas high in the oaks. The clouds are getting darker, but the thunder and lightning has yet to begin. Their air is again stagnant, near tropical, although a cool breeze moves through the woods. I can feel the soft dirt through my shoes. Everything is okay. The trail is empty today. The solution to avoiding your own thoughts is to keep moving. But that’s not a sustainable or happy life, is it? Graduate school has decisively put me in place for two years. This class has had me coming here every other week to confront solitude.
One result: On the Empire Builder, I fall asleep at random intervals. Cat naps. My laptop is closed and my headphones are off. The first time I was on this train, it was an adventure. I didn’t want to miss a single unfamiliar landscape or any town. But now I know the route. I’m left with only my thoughts. I’m okay with that.
Another: I first became intimate with nature in the Inland Northwest, but Frick Park, of all places, appears to be my reacquaintance. The morning we arrive in Spokane, I notice maple trees. I realize that I learned how to identify maples from the Ravine Trail.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Prompt #5: Fire Ecology and the Serotinous Pine.
I love it when life has long arcs. I know, I know. Dramatic unity is best saved for fiction and creative writing, not real life. Janet Burroway devotes a significant section of her seminal Writing Fiction, to cement this difference in the novice writer. Still, I love it when it happens.
The element of nature I found myself most attracted to was always right in front of me, one of those things that sounded, as a kid (maybe even as an adult), too crazy to be real. I was drawn to it for that, never researched it, and just let it be.
Metaphor and symbol. Ugh. I compare handling them to handling live explosives. Simile is fine. They’re funny, light-hearted, and safe to use. Just noting a casual similarity that evokes. Metaphor is a stronger statement. It is. Not like. Is. I never go looking for them. If they’re in my writing, I’m usually using them by accident. I feel as if they’re too obvious, too unwieldy. They seem incompatible with minimalist writing, an enemy of word economy.
But on rare occasions, metaphors do just simply arise. When they do, they’re usually within nature. I remember a story I wrote about a man repressed, drying out near the Columbia River, reflecting on a member of his family who was far more wild and savage. I didn’t know it then, but the Columbia was perfect for it, really. Long, surging, originally mistaken for the ocean, but now dammed in fourteen different locations, now suppressed, suffocated.
The element I found myself drawn to was two particular kinds of pines, the lodgepole and the ponderosa. When I was with my father, watching the Tyee Creek Fire of 1994 level the North Cascades, and I fretted about the loss of trees, he told me not to worry. He said that the fire caused by lightning was a good fire and that the trees needed it. I was in disbelief, of course, watching firs being set ablaze that fire could give life to the forest. The next year, when we returned to the site of the fire, there were certainly charred trees, specifically firs. But next to them were, what I realize now, were lodgepoles, smaller, but radiant green, and ponderosa, gleaming orange, having shed their old bark.
Trees that only flourish, replicate, and/or reproduce in fire. I mean, that sounds absurd, right? I was obsessed with these trees for years, never knowing their names or how they really functioned until, well, nineteen years later when I had to do research for an environmental piece.
Lodgepole and ponderosa are different, but related. The lodgepole pine is what is called a serotinous tree. The seed release of a serotinous tree is triggered by environmental factors compared to maturity. The American Heritage Science Dictionary gives a slightly different definition: “[A serotinous tree is] late in developing, opening, or blooming. For example, serotinous pine cones may persist unopened on the tree for years and only burst open during a forest fire. Serotinous flowers on trees develop only after the tree has produced leaves.”
Huh. A tree that is late in blooming, only reaching maturity when exposed to an environmental trigger associated with destruction rather than any sort of birth. No, that’s not a slap to the face or a functioning metaphor at all.
The ponderosa is not serotinous the way a lodgepole is. It’s much more adamant than clever. Whereas the Tyee Creek fire consumed the fir, leaving their remains for more than a decade after, the ponderosa stood. Unlike the lodgepole, the ponderosa seeds, their resin containers, don’t need fire to be released. Between 45-60 years old, the cones drop, and the pollen spreads in a golden dust. Fire clears the thicket, the invasives, the squirrels and jays, and the ponderosa, last man standing, blushes orange and is free to reproduce unmolested.
Metaphor for patience and endurance? Nah.
Last thing: My thesis director has noted that of my collection, the one linking theme in every single one of them is fire. Whether it’s a wildfire, explosion, an act of self-immolation, or whiskey spat on embers at a campsite, there is just fire everywhere. I’m still working on it. Fire is still associated with destruction most ways you slice it. But with serotiny? Not so much.
The element of nature I found myself most attracted to was always right in front of me, one of those things that sounded, as a kid (maybe even as an adult), too crazy to be real. I was drawn to it for that, never researched it, and just let it be.
Metaphor and symbol. Ugh. I compare handling them to handling live explosives. Simile is fine. They’re funny, light-hearted, and safe to use. Just noting a casual similarity that evokes. Metaphor is a stronger statement. It is. Not like. Is. I never go looking for them. If they’re in my writing, I’m usually using them by accident. I feel as if they’re too obvious, too unwieldy. They seem incompatible with minimalist writing, an enemy of word economy.
But on rare occasions, metaphors do just simply arise. When they do, they’re usually within nature. I remember a story I wrote about a man repressed, drying out near the Columbia River, reflecting on a member of his family who was far more wild and savage. I didn’t know it then, but the Columbia was perfect for it, really. Long, surging, originally mistaken for the ocean, but now dammed in fourteen different locations, now suppressed, suffocated.
The element I found myself drawn to was two particular kinds of pines, the lodgepole and the ponderosa. When I was with my father, watching the Tyee Creek Fire of 1994 level the North Cascades, and I fretted about the loss of trees, he told me not to worry. He said that the fire caused by lightning was a good fire and that the trees needed it. I was in disbelief, of course, watching firs being set ablaze that fire could give life to the forest. The next year, when we returned to the site of the fire, there were certainly charred trees, specifically firs. But next to them were, what I realize now, were lodgepoles, smaller, but radiant green, and ponderosa, gleaming orange, having shed their old bark.
Trees that only flourish, replicate, and/or reproduce in fire. I mean, that sounds absurd, right? I was obsessed with these trees for years, never knowing their names or how they really functioned until, well, nineteen years later when I had to do research for an environmental piece.
Lodgepole and ponderosa are different, but related. The lodgepole pine is what is called a serotinous tree. The seed release of a serotinous tree is triggered by environmental factors compared to maturity. The American Heritage Science Dictionary gives a slightly different definition: “[A serotinous tree is] late in developing, opening, or blooming. For example, serotinous pine cones may persist unopened on the tree for years and only burst open during a forest fire. Serotinous flowers on trees develop only after the tree has produced leaves.”
Huh. A tree that is late in blooming, only reaching maturity when exposed to an environmental trigger associated with destruction rather than any sort of birth. No, that’s not a slap to the face or a functioning metaphor at all.
The ponderosa is not serotinous the way a lodgepole is. It’s much more adamant than clever. Whereas the Tyee Creek fire consumed the fir, leaving their remains for more than a decade after, the ponderosa stood. Unlike the lodgepole, the ponderosa seeds, their resin containers, don’t need fire to be released. Between 45-60 years old, the cones drop, and the pollen spreads in a golden dust. Fire clears the thicket, the invasives, the squirrels and jays, and the ponderosa, last man standing, blushes orange and is free to reproduce unmolested.
Metaphor for patience and endurance? Nah.
Last thing: My thesis director has noted that of my collection, the one linking theme in every single one of them is fire. Whether it’s a wildfire, explosion, an act of self-immolation, or whiskey spat on embers at a campsite, there is just fire everywhere. I’m still working on it. Fire is still associated with destruction most ways you slice it. But with serotiny? Not so much.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Place #5: July 27th. Nine Mile Run and Reclamation in Nature. 2:48 P.M. Hot, Pleasant.
Nine Mile Run is not what I expected.
Its entrance is just below the Parkway, completely invisible to the unacquainted. Unlike the Ravine Trail, which greets you with cardinals, aromatic flora, and muted traffic, Nine Mile Run, after drawing people in with the sound of its faint, trickling stream, stops them in their tracks with the sour, blunt odor of sewage overflow. Up close, it resembles the L.A. River far more than any of the three that carve Pittsburgh into a triangle, a creek held within, together, by a corridor of boulders and concrete. Discarded plastic bottles outnumber the sycamores and cottonwoods. The sound of the Parkway reverberates throughout the woods.
It’s not what expected. It’s my fault for having expectations. I don’t blame the stream.
After a fair warning about dogshit on the trail, the smell of sewage quickly dissipates and becomes hard to describe. I remember a conversation I had with an ex-girlfriend, not one of my brighter ones, about photosynthesis—exciting pillow talk, I know. She said she loved the image of a plant, happy and fat off of ingesting sunshine, devouring waves (and/or particles) of it much like we do food. For better or worse, I’ve never forgotten that image, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-school. I bring it up because that image reminds of the particular, organic fragrance—the one that followed the sewage—that I only find comes out in late spring and summer, and only when the sun is its peak hours bearing down on green plants. Closer to the water where fish and bullfrogs have been sighted, a smell is more tangible: Slight chamomile.
Not much further up the trail, the water becomes a cloudy turquoise, greatly obscured by a chain-link fence suffocated by small vines. Our guide tells about the old philosophy of streams, its function to be cleanse and take away sediment, all that is gray, all things we no longer have use for. I find this appalling, wondering about the need to suppress a stream of water instead of building around it and taking away any potential function.
I find the mismanagement of water to be the most abominable form of pollution. But I’m calmed when I take in the scenery: Canadian thistle, creek willows, spider webs refracting light, dragonflies dueling and/or mating.
I thought about my expectations for this place, still trying to manage them and the reality of this place. That’s when our guide speaks of Nine Mile Run as a reclamation project.
Often, we talk about conservation, preservation, the meaning of wildness, the ethics of access. But this is the first time I’ve ever really thought reclaiming natural landscapes. It’s a rather triumphant concept, isn’t it? Urban saxifrage, roots splitting sidewalks and roads, ragweeds growing over railroad tracks, ivies and hops covering homes, modern day hydras that only multiply when divided.
Mercy. I think I need a moment when I think about reclamation. Abbey and Foer have gotten to me in regard to expressing unadulterated passions, about letting your emotions show in writing. The environment is always approached with a zero-sum mentality. Worse than a zero-sum game. We have rationalists, devil’s advocates, and mealy-mouthers. Where is our abundance of advocates and proponents? So much of nature writing involves stopping the hemorrhaging, the sprawl on wild lands. The only direction to go is down. But taking it back, now that’s something.
(And thus we have the have the opening statement of how I became an eco-terrorist.)
I’m getting off track now. But I was wrong to look at Nine Mile Run with such disdain. It’s in a state of recovery. The guide, those familiar with the area look more delighted than anything else, recalling just how much worse it used to be.
Oh, expectations.
Its entrance is just below the Parkway, completely invisible to the unacquainted. Unlike the Ravine Trail, which greets you with cardinals, aromatic flora, and muted traffic, Nine Mile Run, after drawing people in with the sound of its faint, trickling stream, stops them in their tracks with the sour, blunt odor of sewage overflow. Up close, it resembles the L.A. River far more than any of the three that carve Pittsburgh into a triangle, a creek held within, together, by a corridor of boulders and concrete. Discarded plastic bottles outnumber the sycamores and cottonwoods. The sound of the Parkway reverberates throughout the woods.
It’s not what expected. It’s my fault for having expectations. I don’t blame the stream.
After a fair warning about dogshit on the trail, the smell of sewage quickly dissipates and becomes hard to describe. I remember a conversation I had with an ex-girlfriend, not one of my brighter ones, about photosynthesis—exciting pillow talk, I know. She said she loved the image of a plant, happy and fat off of ingesting sunshine, devouring waves (and/or particles) of it much like we do food. For better or worse, I’ve never forgotten that image, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-school. I bring it up because that image reminds of the particular, organic fragrance—the one that followed the sewage—that I only find comes out in late spring and summer, and only when the sun is its peak hours bearing down on green plants. Closer to the water where fish and bullfrogs have been sighted, a smell is more tangible: Slight chamomile.
Not much further up the trail, the water becomes a cloudy turquoise, greatly obscured by a chain-link fence suffocated by small vines. Our guide tells about the old philosophy of streams, its function to be cleanse and take away sediment, all that is gray, all things we no longer have use for. I find this appalling, wondering about the need to suppress a stream of water instead of building around it and taking away any potential function.
I find the mismanagement of water to be the most abominable form of pollution. But I’m calmed when I take in the scenery: Canadian thistle, creek willows, spider webs refracting light, dragonflies dueling and/or mating.
I thought about my expectations for this place, still trying to manage them and the reality of this place. That’s when our guide speaks of Nine Mile Run as a reclamation project.
Often, we talk about conservation, preservation, the meaning of wildness, the ethics of access. But this is the first time I’ve ever really thought reclaiming natural landscapes. It’s a rather triumphant concept, isn’t it? Urban saxifrage, roots splitting sidewalks and roads, ragweeds growing over railroad tracks, ivies and hops covering homes, modern day hydras that only multiply when divided.
Mercy. I think I need a moment when I think about reclamation. Abbey and Foer have gotten to me in regard to expressing unadulterated passions, about letting your emotions show in writing. The environment is always approached with a zero-sum mentality. Worse than a zero-sum game. We have rationalists, devil’s advocates, and mealy-mouthers. Where is our abundance of advocates and proponents? So much of nature writing involves stopping the hemorrhaging, the sprawl on wild lands. The only direction to go is down. But taking it back, now that’s something.
(And thus we have the have the opening statement of how I became an eco-terrorist.)
I’m getting off track now. But I was wrong to look at Nine Mile Run with such disdain. It’s in a state of recovery. The guide, those familiar with the area look more delighted than anything else, recalling just how much worse it used to be.
Oh, expectations.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Prompt #4: Istanbul.
Recently at Chatham, a large number of MFA students went to Turkey for their field seminar. I initially was set to go as well, but after a long discussion with our director, I realized that perhaps it wasn’t for me. Going to Turkey wouldn’t have been an adventure so much as it would’ve been me revisiting familiar ground.
I don’t talk much about the time I spent in Istanbul anymore. Enough time has passed and no longer do I have strong feelings about a place that was so important to me. The important part is that, at least, I remember the way I used to feel towards it.
A month after my father passed away in 2008, I did something that I don’t think anyone expected: I took a job in another country. With a large part of my family grieving and reassembling their lives, I fled for Istanbul, Turkey. There is a sense of guilt I feel to this day about it, about leaving, but I remember being on that plane from Seattle to Chicago, Chicago to Istanbul thinking that as selfish as it was, it was something I had do for myself. I had to come to terms with a life, without a father, alone.
Istanbul had me from the start. After Orhan, the school’s assistant picked me up we took the drive from Ataturk International to Kozyatagi on the Anatolian side of the city. The word metropolis doesn’t suit Istanbul. The city alone contains more than twice the people from my state, possibly even three times more with the undocumented lost in the Eurasian sprawl. Combined with oppressive pollution and an early spring heat, I was overwhelmed. But not the overwhelmed that is typically accompanied by anxiety. The kind of overwhelmed that makes you feel powerless, fatalistic, where all you can do is just watch. Jet-lagged, jittery, surrounded by people speaking a different language, I remember drifting in and out as Orhan spoke in broken English. Istanbul, if you were to consider it a European city (which I do not), would be unusual. Paris, Rome, Berlin, Barcelona all reeked of sulfur and dogshit, tagged in graffiti, preventing you from being adrift and lost in their supposed magic. But Istanbul smelled of vetiver grass, chamomile, and deep citrus, the avenue of my apartment lined with palms and neon-violet flowers. I would wake up later that night and take a stroll for baklava and a phonecard before returning to my pastel-colored apartment and grieve alone and far away from everyone I’d ever known—grieving properly. My room had an outside balcony and from it, I could make unfamiliar constellations in the sky, realizing that Istanbul was and remains the only city that could ever happen in.
There are many things I give Istanbul credit for, but this remains the first and most important. Time would pass in Istanbul and I would become one of them, fall in love with one of theirs. But as with all unfamiliar places, all alien and exotic, a routine begins to develop. That crowded midibus and ferryboat that was so fascinating, such an experience, would become an inconvenience. Crossing from Asia into Europe, over time, becomes a commute. When the time came to choose between my adopted home and my real one, I would choose the latter.
I don’t want to say I never look back—I do. Not as much as I used to, mind you, but I do. I try hard to stay in the now, not let nostalgia get the best of me. I know Istanbul is a different place now and all the components and people of my life from that time have moved on. But whenever Washington started to drizzle, or Pittsburgh gets too cold, I think back to sunlight flashing in Gizem’s eyes, all those walks with her by the cay at Kadikoy and pedestrian, cobblestoned Istiklal Caddesi. I think of the Galata Bridge and the fishermen with their cigarettes dangling out of their mouth, the toothless simit salesmen wishing God would bestow his peace upon me. But mostly, I think of that spring, that morning after that first night, and how everything would be okay.
I don’t talk much about the time I spent in Istanbul anymore. Enough time has passed and no longer do I have strong feelings about a place that was so important to me. The important part is that, at least, I remember the way I used to feel towards it.
A month after my father passed away in 2008, I did something that I don’t think anyone expected: I took a job in another country. With a large part of my family grieving and reassembling their lives, I fled for Istanbul, Turkey. There is a sense of guilt I feel to this day about it, about leaving, but I remember being on that plane from Seattle to Chicago, Chicago to Istanbul thinking that as selfish as it was, it was something I had do for myself. I had to come to terms with a life, without a father, alone.
Istanbul had me from the start. After Orhan, the school’s assistant picked me up we took the drive from Ataturk International to Kozyatagi on the Anatolian side of the city. The word metropolis doesn’t suit Istanbul. The city alone contains more than twice the people from my state, possibly even three times more with the undocumented lost in the Eurasian sprawl. Combined with oppressive pollution and an early spring heat, I was overwhelmed. But not the overwhelmed that is typically accompanied by anxiety. The kind of overwhelmed that makes you feel powerless, fatalistic, where all you can do is just watch. Jet-lagged, jittery, surrounded by people speaking a different language, I remember drifting in and out as Orhan spoke in broken English. Istanbul, if you were to consider it a European city (which I do not), would be unusual. Paris, Rome, Berlin, Barcelona all reeked of sulfur and dogshit, tagged in graffiti, preventing you from being adrift and lost in their supposed magic. But Istanbul smelled of vetiver grass, chamomile, and deep citrus, the avenue of my apartment lined with palms and neon-violet flowers. I would wake up later that night and take a stroll for baklava and a phonecard before returning to my pastel-colored apartment and grieve alone and far away from everyone I’d ever known—grieving properly. My room had an outside balcony and from it, I could make unfamiliar constellations in the sky, realizing that Istanbul was and remains the only city that could ever happen in.
There are many things I give Istanbul credit for, but this remains the first and most important. Time would pass in Istanbul and I would become one of them, fall in love with one of theirs. But as with all unfamiliar places, all alien and exotic, a routine begins to develop. That crowded midibus and ferryboat that was so fascinating, such an experience, would become an inconvenience. Crossing from Asia into Europe, over time, becomes a commute. When the time came to choose between my adopted home and my real one, I would choose the latter.
I don’t want to say I never look back—I do. Not as much as I used to, mind you, but I do. I try hard to stay in the now, not let nostalgia get the best of me. I know Istanbul is a different place now and all the components and people of my life from that time have moved on. But whenever Washington started to drizzle, or Pittsburgh gets too cold, I think back to sunlight flashing in Gizem’s eyes, all those walks with her by the cay at Kadikoy and pedestrian, cobblestoned Istiklal Caddesi. I think of the Galata Bridge and the fishermen with their cigarettes dangling out of their mouth, the toothless simit salesmen wishing God would bestow his peace upon me. But mostly, I think of that spring, that morning after that first night, and how everything would be okay.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Place #4: July 12. Return to the Ravine Trail, 9:39 PM. Hot, Dark.
Kat made fun of me the first time I ever saw a firefly. It was about two weeks ago, after a soccer game, and we were sitting down to beers at the Waterfront when I saw this flickering, pale green light in front of me. Combined with the hit to the head from the car accident, the humidity, and running around in it, I thought it was a sign that maybe I should get my head checked. Sure enough, I see the long silhouette of an insect—suddenly relieved—its enlarged abdomen glowing. I didn’t know Pittsburgh could get fireflies. I tell Kat that this is my first time ever seeing a firefly. She gives a half-interested, “Oh, that’s nice,” assuming it was just the first of the season.
In the Northwest, we don’t get fireflies. I don’t know that they’re a signal to the start and halfway point of summer. I never captured them in jars at night with my sister, put them into Mason jars, and had an organic nightlight. I do have memories of flipping june bugs off of my mother’s deck, hearing that horrific, heated hiss and dodging the crane-fly, which resembles a giant mosquito that has an affinity for your face. (Go ahead, look at the Wikipedia page for crane-fly and tell that doesn’t look like summer fun.) You can imagine my surprise at seeing a bioluminescent animal in front of me as I’m about to sit down for a drink. I’m jaded about a lot of things, a world-class skeptic for sure, but there’s something about seeing the firefly that just makes me a little stupid with excitement. I’m certain I’ve seen them before about the city just when it started to get hot, but maybe I’ve just dismissed it as optic phenomena, much like those stars and strings we see at times.
On this particular night, they seem out in abundance and Lucas, as payment for allowing him to stay at my place the past couple of days, takes up Beechwood to the Ravine Trail. We decided not to enter the trail this late, sticking near the trim field of crabgrass and white clover before the walking path dips down, where the lightning bugs drift lazily. My sandals are on, but the ground is still wet from the scattered rains. The sun has gone down and there’s only a faint bit of light left, just enough to see where I’m going. As acquainted as I am with trees, I’m still not much of a fan of the woods at dark, especially with looming, near-electric sounds of cicadas moving their wings.
Lucas, like Kat, is from the Midwest and doesn’t share my enthusiasm. It almost feels like this is the playtime he’s allotted me after supper. I’m afraid of capturing of the insect in my hand, mindful about recent readings about messing with nature, afraid I’ll press too hard in my excitement, but will end up with glowing paste in my hands. I learn quickly that simple, soft contact, the firefly will just attach. I even get one between my hands, but I notice in its anxiety it doesn’t seem to glow. I’ve heard about synchronization, where fireflies over time will start glowing in unison. Not tonight though. Regardless, I prefer the asynchronous illumination. Since the first sighting, I see them in pairs and triads, but here in this flat introduction to the trail, there are at least a baker’s dozen. My feet are wet, I’m chasing bugs, it’s late and I’m playing outside and it’s enthralling. Someone needs to remind me I’m almost 26.
In the Northwest, we don’t get fireflies. I don’t know that they’re a signal to the start and halfway point of summer. I never captured them in jars at night with my sister, put them into Mason jars, and had an organic nightlight. I do have memories of flipping june bugs off of my mother’s deck, hearing that horrific, heated hiss and dodging the crane-fly, which resembles a giant mosquito that has an affinity for your face. (Go ahead, look at the Wikipedia page for crane-fly and tell that doesn’t look like summer fun.) You can imagine my surprise at seeing a bioluminescent animal in front of me as I’m about to sit down for a drink. I’m jaded about a lot of things, a world-class skeptic for sure, but there’s something about seeing the firefly that just makes me a little stupid with excitement. I’m certain I’ve seen them before about the city just when it started to get hot, but maybe I’ve just dismissed it as optic phenomena, much like those stars and strings we see at times.
On this particular night, they seem out in abundance and Lucas, as payment for allowing him to stay at my place the past couple of days, takes up Beechwood to the Ravine Trail. We decided not to enter the trail this late, sticking near the trim field of crabgrass and white clover before the walking path dips down, where the lightning bugs drift lazily. My sandals are on, but the ground is still wet from the scattered rains. The sun has gone down and there’s only a faint bit of light left, just enough to see where I’m going. As acquainted as I am with trees, I’m still not much of a fan of the woods at dark, especially with looming, near-electric sounds of cicadas moving their wings.
Lucas, like Kat, is from the Midwest and doesn’t share my enthusiasm. It almost feels like this is the playtime he’s allotted me after supper. I’m afraid of capturing of the insect in my hand, mindful about recent readings about messing with nature, afraid I’ll press too hard in my excitement, but will end up with glowing paste in my hands. I learn quickly that simple, soft contact, the firefly will just attach. I even get one between my hands, but I notice in its anxiety it doesn’t seem to glow. I’ve heard about synchronization, where fireflies over time will start glowing in unison. Not tonight though. Regardless, I prefer the asynchronous illumination. Since the first sighting, I see them in pairs and triads, but here in this flat introduction to the trail, there are at least a baker’s dozen. My feet are wet, I’m chasing bugs, it’s late and I’m playing outside and it’s enthralling. Someone needs to remind me I’m almost 26.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Prompt #3: Clydesdale-Quarterhorse Mix.
Not long after my father passed away, my mother, suddenly not taking for granted how short life is, started doing a lot more of what made her happy. By the end of 2009, she went ahead and purchased a rescued horse named Cici and started making a weekly habit of going down to the stables in Black Diamond.
My mother is a funny lady sometimes. She was born in the Garlic Gulch area, the Little Italy of Seattle that sadly, doesn’t exist anymore. Before she was too old, she moved to the southwest part of the county to Burien, an area that wouldn’t come it’s own city until 1993. Her entire life has been spent in and around the city. Her memories consist of working downtown, summers spent watching airshows by Lake Washington, fish and chips on Alki, and going to the Pike Place Market for her grocery shopping. She is a city slicker through and through. Yet, if you talked to her now, you wouldn’t see that so much. She listens to the country station, vacations in the Inland Empire instead of near the rainforest or the Pacific, fantasizes about cowboys, and spends her time lately at the base of Mt. Rainier where she keeps her horses.
I went ahead and told her one day that her past doesn’t seem to match her present very well. She then told me I was too young to remember, but around where we grew up betwixt Burien and Renton, was a thoroughbred horsetrack called Longacres that was demolished in 1992. Apparently it was quite a sight, the glacier-tilled ground conducive to racing, six-digit purses, and an appearance of Seattle Slew himself running for cancer research. After my mother finished telling the story of how she had sneaked into a VIP lounge and was hit on by James Caan, I went to do some research about the lost track. The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, an extremely useful tool for my thesis, had quite a bit of information about Longacres. Remembering the nostalgic glint in my mother’s eyes, nothing I read was more unforgettable than this line:
Many had generational associations extending back to Longacres’ earliest days, and for these the loss of the track was a personal threat to both lifestyle and livelihood.
Unlike my mother, I was not nearly as attached or even all that interested in horses and often declined her invitations to join her at the stables in Black Diamond. I’m not sure exactly when I started going along with her on our weekends off. One thing I love about my home is how despite the fact that Seattle stretches nearly thirty plus miles from north to south, all it takes is twenty minutes, by ferry or highway to be resoundingly out of the city. It wasn’t long before we were in flooded organic farms alongside the Green River, with highland cows gawking at us as much as we did them.
As you probably weren’t expecting, I never had a close attachment to my mother’s horse, Cici. She was temperamental, unfriendly, and forced my mother into surgery after she bucked her off. Realizing that she was not a horse for a novice like my mother, she was sold off and sadly died of colic shortly after being picked up by her owner. But there’s an adage that hung in the barnhouse of the stables: Once you a buy horse, you don’t stop with just one. My mother purchased another, an American thoroughbred colt named Dude, who was simply too young and too massive to ride.
Despite not having any attachment to a horse yet, I found myself curious about them. My mother’s friend and horsetrainer, the Gayle to her Oprah, Marie devoted her whole life to tending and breaking horses. She wasn’t alone at the stables. Every horse owner, stable hand, there was an odd mythology behind them I simply wasn’t getting. This was at a time when I thought horses, simply, were just very dumb animals. (Granted, they still can be sometimes.) But when so many people are strongly attached to an animal, well, you have to admit you may be wrong about something.
This is when I began reading about the history of horses. The thing that captured my attention was how, in this world, there only true one wild horse. That would be the critically endangered Prezwalski’s horse. It wasn’t long before I became curious about the differences between a wild and domestic/feral horses and looked into behaviors. They’re really quite a curious prey animal in that although they’ll flee, they’ll also stand their ground. I would learn from Marie that it’s important too, as a human, to stand one’s ground against them as in their structure, we can be see as a subordinate and prone to be nicked and charged. Instead of being mad at Cici, I became more sympathetic towards her when I realized that horses have impressive memories and realized, much like my beloved Belgian shepherd at home, she was likely abused. I learned about the differences and roles in mares, colts, and foals. Although it’s still in progress, I learned and am still learning above the variance of breeds and what exactly being a cold or warmblood entails. At this point in my reading, well, I found myself actually enjoying going to the stables with my mother.
Still, my interest in horses was relatively at arm’s length and it wasn’t until my mother brought home a Clydesdale-Quarterhorse mix named Dunny that I began to have an attachment. Dunny, due to his breeding and growing up in an environment filled with noise, was not easily spooked. He was and is calm and gentle, if but a bit clumsy. I was a little bit nervous when my mother called him over and told me to keep my hand flat while I fed him. He took it, stood there, and let me get closer and scratch him behind the ear. So it began every weekend when I would take him from his pen, get the scrub brush, and go to town on his mud-matted hair and mane. Occasionally, he’d try to jerk away from the metallic circle brush and step on my boots, but I’d never get upset. At times, with Marie’s encouragement, I’d have to be firm and lead him by his rein with authority, uncomfortable as that makes me at times with animals. This would all end up a bonding experience with Dunny and it was hard, much harder than I thought when I drove off to Pittsburgh for school.
Even though my interest in horses still learns towards curiosity instead of affection, I had certainly come a long way from someone who shot his mother down each time he was invited out to Black Diamond.
My mother is a funny lady sometimes. She was born in the Garlic Gulch area, the Little Italy of Seattle that sadly, doesn’t exist anymore. Before she was too old, she moved to the southwest part of the county to Burien, an area that wouldn’t come it’s own city until 1993. Her entire life has been spent in and around the city. Her memories consist of working downtown, summers spent watching airshows by Lake Washington, fish and chips on Alki, and going to the Pike Place Market for her grocery shopping. She is a city slicker through and through. Yet, if you talked to her now, you wouldn’t see that so much. She listens to the country station, vacations in the Inland Empire instead of near the rainforest or the Pacific, fantasizes about cowboys, and spends her time lately at the base of Mt. Rainier where she keeps her horses.
I went ahead and told her one day that her past doesn’t seem to match her present very well. She then told me I was too young to remember, but around where we grew up betwixt Burien and Renton, was a thoroughbred horsetrack called Longacres that was demolished in 1992. Apparently it was quite a sight, the glacier-tilled ground conducive to racing, six-digit purses, and an appearance of Seattle Slew himself running for cancer research. After my mother finished telling the story of how she had sneaked into a VIP lounge and was hit on by James Caan, I went to do some research about the lost track. The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, an extremely useful tool for my thesis, had quite a bit of information about Longacres. Remembering the nostalgic glint in my mother’s eyes, nothing I read was more unforgettable than this line:
Many had generational associations extending back to Longacres’ earliest days, and for these the loss of the track was a personal threat to both lifestyle and livelihood.
Unlike my mother, I was not nearly as attached or even all that interested in horses and often declined her invitations to join her at the stables in Black Diamond. I’m not sure exactly when I started going along with her on our weekends off. One thing I love about my home is how despite the fact that Seattle stretches nearly thirty plus miles from north to south, all it takes is twenty minutes, by ferry or highway to be resoundingly out of the city. It wasn’t long before we were in flooded organic farms alongside the Green River, with highland cows gawking at us as much as we did them.
As you probably weren’t expecting, I never had a close attachment to my mother’s horse, Cici. She was temperamental, unfriendly, and forced my mother into surgery after she bucked her off. Realizing that she was not a horse for a novice like my mother, she was sold off and sadly died of colic shortly after being picked up by her owner. But there’s an adage that hung in the barnhouse of the stables: Once you a buy horse, you don’t stop with just one. My mother purchased another, an American thoroughbred colt named Dude, who was simply too young and too massive to ride.
Despite not having any attachment to a horse yet, I found myself curious about them. My mother’s friend and horsetrainer, the Gayle to her Oprah, Marie devoted her whole life to tending and breaking horses. She wasn’t alone at the stables. Every horse owner, stable hand, there was an odd mythology behind them I simply wasn’t getting. This was at a time when I thought horses, simply, were just very dumb animals. (Granted, they still can be sometimes.) But when so many people are strongly attached to an animal, well, you have to admit you may be wrong about something.
This is when I began reading about the history of horses. The thing that captured my attention was how, in this world, there only true one wild horse. That would be the critically endangered Prezwalski’s horse. It wasn’t long before I became curious about the differences between a wild and domestic/feral horses and looked into behaviors. They’re really quite a curious prey animal in that although they’ll flee, they’ll also stand their ground. I would learn from Marie that it’s important too, as a human, to stand one’s ground against them as in their structure, we can be see as a subordinate and prone to be nicked and charged. Instead of being mad at Cici, I became more sympathetic towards her when I realized that horses have impressive memories and realized, much like my beloved Belgian shepherd at home, she was likely abused. I learned about the differences and roles in mares, colts, and foals. Although it’s still in progress, I learned and am still learning above the variance of breeds and what exactly being a cold or warmblood entails. At this point in my reading, well, I found myself actually enjoying going to the stables with my mother.
Still, my interest in horses was relatively at arm’s length and it wasn’t until my mother brought home a Clydesdale-Quarterhorse mix named Dunny that I began to have an attachment. Dunny, due to his breeding and growing up in an environment filled with noise, was not easily spooked. He was and is calm and gentle, if but a bit clumsy. I was a little bit nervous when my mother called him over and told me to keep my hand flat while I fed him. He took it, stood there, and let me get closer and scratch him behind the ear. So it began every weekend when I would take him from his pen, get the scrub brush, and go to town on his mud-matted hair and mane. Occasionally, he’d try to jerk away from the metallic circle brush and step on my boots, but I’d never get upset. At times, with Marie’s encouragement, I’d have to be firm and lead him by his rein with authority, uncomfortable as that makes me at times with animals. This would all end up a bonding experience with Dunny and it was hard, much harder than I thought when I drove off to Pittsburgh for school.
Even though my interest in horses still learns towards curiosity instead of affection, I had certainly come a long way from someone who shot his mother down each time he was invited out to Black Diamond.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Place #3: The Ravine Trail Suddenly Becomes Inaccessible. 1:32 PM. Hazy.
I couldn't make it to Frick Park this week. I wanted to. Really, I needed to. I have a good reason why I didn’t.
Last week, I was in a car accident. It happened so fast that by the time I realized what had happened it was already over. Two older ladies, out late at night, made an illegal turn and had I not turned a little to my right, it would’ve been a head-on collision. I had my bell rung and my car was totaled beyond repair. Luckily, the medic checked me and found no sign of a concussion.
I was on my way to Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn to visit friends, a while outside of Pittsburgh, until a classmate was kind enough to get me and bring me back. Determined to leave Western Pennsylvania, I bought a next day Greyhound ticket and went ahead with my plans to leave the city. I’ve had a hard month and honestly, a car accident didn’t come as a surprise when only a week prior, my neighbor was cleaning his gun and had it fire through my kitchen wall when I was asleep. I felt like I just needed a break from the city, this city.
A few entries back, I touched on something about urban solitude. There’s something comforting, or rather was, to me about being in a giant city. Not unlike being in the woods, one is anonymous, overwhelmed with what they’re seeing, and despite everything teeming with life, one can feel really alone. I used to think that when this program was finished I’d head to a big city with a vibrant art scene such as Portland, San Francisco, or Brooklyn. I used to think it would be conducive to writing. I used to think that.
After I take the L Train over to Williamsburg, the temperature is already at 86 degrees. Concrete absorbs the heat, sustains it long after the sun goes down. There’s a haze over the East River. The streets are littered with Mexican beer bottles, cans of Four Loko, receipts, and broken glass. It’s garbage day. Open containers dot Berry/Nassau Avenue, giving the neighborhoods a stench not unlike the outside of a factory farm. This isn’t my first time in Williamsburg or Brooklyn, but this is the impression I find sticking with me.
I make it to Taylor’s apartment and she has some news for me: She’s moving to Vermont in one month. Taylor and I are both from Seattle and have kept in touch over such a long time. She’s been in New York since 2002 and has largely become an East Coaster. New York is now in her blood, but Washington was there first. You know where she’s from simply by her arborlust. Not too long ago, I would’ve been shocked that she would leave her cheap residence near the creative hub of the United States. Now taking off to Vermont almost makes sense.
Brooklyn is fun, but it doesn’t do the job that Frick Park has done for me the past couple of visits. Greenpoint is a Polish neighborhood and for a moment, I forget where I am when I don’t speak the language and have to point at items for my breakfast and dinner. The rats on the subway never cease to unnerve me. Bikers seem intent on running me over (everybody does lately, especially when I have the right of way). And it’s hot. Concrete hot. In our last night, thankfully, we spend it in McCurren Park, sitting on a baseball bench. There’s a hum of halogen, stadium lights, bottles and paper shards in the grass. This is as close to Frick Park as I’m going to get. Taylor and I start talking about Kanye West and I think of this line in Refuge that I’ve highlighted and underlined twice:
“Many men have forgotten what they are connected to,” my friend added. “Subjugation of women and nature may be a loss of intimacy within themselves.”
It started in my language first, the day I started saying I was from Washington instead of Seattle. I am connected to wood and water, the mountains and the steppe. Saltwater is in my veins, I long for coastlines, and my desire to be in them is overwhelming on the bus back to Pittsburgh. Washington is what I’m connected to, not the city. Can anyone really be connected to a city? The Seattle of my grandfather’s youth is gone, my mother’s too, and I’m rapidly losing the grip on my incarnation. But it’s not about the city, is it? When people ask about what where I’m from is like, the first thing I’ll mention is the view of Puget Sound from my mother’s home. Is it any wonder why in weeks prior, when I smelled the aromatic grass in Frick Park the first thing I compared it to was an orchard?
While I long for home, it is not easy to have that need filled. Frick Park has become an increasingly suitable alternative as I realize my connection is with the land, not a city. With my car about to be turned into a cube, my alternative is now inaccessible. Just outside of walking distance, I’ve arranged a ride to Ravine Trail in upcoming weeks. Until then, I’m left more anxious than I’d like to be.
Last week, I was in a car accident. It happened so fast that by the time I realized what had happened it was already over. Two older ladies, out late at night, made an illegal turn and had I not turned a little to my right, it would’ve been a head-on collision. I had my bell rung and my car was totaled beyond repair. Luckily, the medic checked me and found no sign of a concussion.
I was on my way to Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn to visit friends, a while outside of Pittsburgh, until a classmate was kind enough to get me and bring me back. Determined to leave Western Pennsylvania, I bought a next day Greyhound ticket and went ahead with my plans to leave the city. I’ve had a hard month and honestly, a car accident didn’t come as a surprise when only a week prior, my neighbor was cleaning his gun and had it fire through my kitchen wall when I was asleep. I felt like I just needed a break from the city, this city.
A few entries back, I touched on something about urban solitude. There’s something comforting, or rather was, to me about being in a giant city. Not unlike being in the woods, one is anonymous, overwhelmed with what they’re seeing, and despite everything teeming with life, one can feel really alone. I used to think that when this program was finished I’d head to a big city with a vibrant art scene such as Portland, San Francisco, or Brooklyn. I used to think it would be conducive to writing. I used to think that.
After I take the L Train over to Williamsburg, the temperature is already at 86 degrees. Concrete absorbs the heat, sustains it long after the sun goes down. There’s a haze over the East River. The streets are littered with Mexican beer bottles, cans of Four Loko, receipts, and broken glass. It’s garbage day. Open containers dot Berry/Nassau Avenue, giving the neighborhoods a stench not unlike the outside of a factory farm. This isn’t my first time in Williamsburg or Brooklyn, but this is the impression I find sticking with me.
I make it to Taylor’s apartment and she has some news for me: She’s moving to Vermont in one month. Taylor and I are both from Seattle and have kept in touch over such a long time. She’s been in New York since 2002 and has largely become an East Coaster. New York is now in her blood, but Washington was there first. You know where she’s from simply by her arborlust. Not too long ago, I would’ve been shocked that she would leave her cheap residence near the creative hub of the United States. Now taking off to Vermont almost makes sense.
Brooklyn is fun, but it doesn’t do the job that Frick Park has done for me the past couple of visits. Greenpoint is a Polish neighborhood and for a moment, I forget where I am when I don’t speak the language and have to point at items for my breakfast and dinner. The rats on the subway never cease to unnerve me. Bikers seem intent on running me over (everybody does lately, especially when I have the right of way). And it’s hot. Concrete hot. In our last night, thankfully, we spend it in McCurren Park, sitting on a baseball bench. There’s a hum of halogen, stadium lights, bottles and paper shards in the grass. This is as close to Frick Park as I’m going to get. Taylor and I start talking about Kanye West and I think of this line in Refuge that I’ve highlighted and underlined twice:
“Many men have forgotten what they are connected to,” my friend added. “Subjugation of women and nature may be a loss of intimacy within themselves.”
It started in my language first, the day I started saying I was from Washington instead of Seattle. I am connected to wood and water, the mountains and the steppe. Saltwater is in my veins, I long for coastlines, and my desire to be in them is overwhelming on the bus back to Pittsburgh. Washington is what I’m connected to, not the city. Can anyone really be connected to a city? The Seattle of my grandfather’s youth is gone, my mother’s too, and I’m rapidly losing the grip on my incarnation. But it’s not about the city, is it? When people ask about what where I’m from is like, the first thing I’ll mention is the view of Puget Sound from my mother’s home. Is it any wonder why in weeks prior, when I smelled the aromatic grass in Frick Park the first thing I compared it to was an orchard?
While I long for home, it is not easy to have that need filled. Frick Park has become an increasingly suitable alternative as I realize my connection is with the land, not a city. With my car about to be turned into a cube, my alternative is now inaccessible. Just outside of walking distance, I’ve arranged a ride to Ravine Trail in upcoming weeks. Until then, I’m left more anxious than I’d like to be.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Prompt #2: A Lake Demands Respect, Taking a Page from Annie Dillard.
After we unload the cars, say hello to the older relatives, and settle into our rooms, the first thing I do in Lake Chelan is jump right into the water. It’s usually quite a shock as the heat in the Inland Northwest during the summer easily can reach the triple digits and the water of the lake is melted glacier. It’s best to run into it and put your head under the surface, to not ease in. My cousins and I will toss around a football, wrestle, or have a splash fight. But the novelty wears off soon enough and they’re out after about an hour. I stay a little bit longer. When I was younger, I would stay in the water from noon until sunset—if that’s not intimacy with a landscape, I don’t know what is. Occasionally, I swim out to the anchored dock or try to balance myself on the breaker rocks. But mostly, I just stay in one place immensely content to just be in water. I like being near any kind of water. I notice when I’m not. I was born next to it. Saltwater runs in my veins and my long-term plans all involve being near to it.
This isn’t limited to just Lake Chelan. I do the same thing whenever I’m in Ocean Shores or Cannon Beach. I remember when my family went to Cabo San Lucas, I was content just to be in the ocean, rolling with the waves with a beer in hand. I’ll even do this in pools, but the smell of chlorine will usually take away from that feeling of serenity. I’ve never thought much about why I do that, I just know that I enjoy the sensation. Now, after some time in this course, it makes a little bit of sense.
Until our readings and discussions in this course, I’ve never really collected my thoughts on nature or honestly, even thought about it at all. There are lots of new concepts I’m still absorbing, but I think most important to this entry is my relationship, how I fit in with nature. As you can tell from my previous entries, taking my environment for granted and not giving ample time or space to be away from an urban environment are some of my problems. But in retrospect, it’s pretty clear that I learned my place in nature, my respect for it, by water.
Despite my profound and lovely memories, Lake Chelan was also the first time I realized how very small I was. Chelan is a Salish Indian word for “deep water” and it really lives up to its name. Chelan, with a maximum depth of 1,486 feet makes it the third deepest freshwater lake in the United States, twenty-ninth in the world. A couple miles up the lake, the water turns into deep, cobalt blue not unlike an ocean. To this day, when we take my cousin’s boat out, I’m still afraid to open my eyes when I’m under the deeper water and unable to take the quietness that comes with being submerged and looking downward into, for a lack of better phrasing, that blue darkness.
We often talk and read about man and the subjugation of nature. I’ve seen trees cut down, animals being hunted, but our control over water, maybe because of a lifetime of going to this deep lake, isn’t exactly what I’d call dominion. Even as my concern grows for my once secret lake, you can see that further past where the deep water begins, the mountains become taller and steep. It’s as if the woods are taking back the lake from the desert in a fury. The wind tunnels so hard in the sudden valley that it can bring about whitecaps on a narrow lake.
The first time I almost drowned was in Lake Chelan. When I was about eighteen, my cousins and I were playing near Chelan Falls, where the lake flows out into the tributary of the Columbia. Most of the area is calm, quiet, with children splashing around and the state is smart enough to mark and but buoys around the dangerous outflow. Eighteen-year-old boys aren’t so smart. It’s an unsettling feeling to be carried away without your consent, suddenly swimming against a current. I was lucky enough to be close to a rocky edge with dry gripping where I could slowly climb sideways back to the calmer section.
Lake Chelan is where I learned to accept things as being natural, without inherent cruelty. Lake Chelan can be a place where I can peacefully drift for hours. Lake Chelan can also terrify and kill me. But it’s really about how I view and interact with the water, above all else, that creates the outcome—I get exactly what I put into it. It’s strange how I can understand a lake as a natural thing, but still don’t realize other people are other people, human beings.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Place #2: Frick Park, June 18th. 2:40 P.M. Hazy.
Since its release, I’ve been obsessed with Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. There are lots of reasons why and chiefly, I think it’s because it’s a sonic self-immolation of an egotistical male—something I can appreciate. After four, five weeks of being in environmental writing, however, I started to listen to the album a little bit differently.
A large majority of the songs, I noticed have a point of origin in a large city (Chicago, impoverished urban areas) and multiple themes of excess (Lamborghinis, diamond-encrusted pieces). Further than that though, I notice a lot of the songs to actually be about ego, power, popular culture, reminiscent of what Sanders was talking about with postmodern art’s lack of concern with our environment. However, as the album progresses, it appears to move away from each of those themes it and go into that raw self-laceration, the failure to connect in or due to the modern world, and winds down to the penultimate track, appropriately titled “Lost in the Woods” which I listen to on my way to Frick Park.
“Lost in the Woods,” as expected, is a song that begins with being fearful from flight of the modern world, but turns into a song about liberation and the beauty of reverting to a primal simplicity. It seems like a tired theme at this point, especially after our readings, but the coda blends into the final song “Who Will Survive in the America?” a song that relies heavily on poet Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment No.1,” a near mournful vignette about the condition of men in an urbanized world.
I keep thinking what I said last week about solitude, how while I’m alone and even prefer to be in cities, I’m rarely ever unaccompanied in nature. It isn’t hard to see with that, I live a life filled with distractions and I’m starting to wonder what kind of impact that’s having on my writing and myself.
During this visit to Frick Park, I decide to go into a different part of it: The Ravine Trail near the preserved part of the park. As I was about to get out of my car and let “Who Will Survive in America?” finish, I thought of my friend Jenny at home. She has a remarkably stressful job with some of the most advanced technology on earth (Multicare Televisual Medicine…Don’t ask me to elaborate, I honestly couldn’t tell you). However, nearly every weekend, she seems to be out in the Olympic Rainforest or Mount Rainier. Unlike most people in a position of healthcare power, though, she’s really quite serene most of the time and I wonder how much of that comes from the balance of the extremes she maintains.
The problem I encountered in Frick during my first visit is quickly neutralized on the Ravine Trail: Probably no more than one-fifth of a mile do I hear no traffic whatsoever. My natural instinct is to want to go deeper, but I keep thinking about Wendell Berry and being more of a observer of one place instead of trying to cover as much terrain as possible. Maybe just see what happens instead of looking for it. I leave my headphones in the car.
I take my time down to the ravine noticing just as much below me on the trail as I do above me in the canopy. My eyes always seem to be up when I’m walking in the woods, but for the first time I see the feverfew, patches of grass, and the myriad of white clovers. The trees are thick, lightly shaded with mold. As my eyes move up, I’m lucky to see wild raspberries, mostly immature, but some a bright spring pink. Logs are split open and clovers that have yet to bloom are growing in the rift, but the dirt is auburn colored and bright.
The creeks are dried up at this point, leaving just moist dirt, a substance I can’t even call mud. I hear that baying of a dog that doesn’t sound very domesticated. For a minute, I feel like I’m really out somewhere. Of course, then comes the helicopter above. So close, Vincent.
The paths split off and I get a good look at the ravine. It’s deep. In the expanse there are three long oaks that stand out above the rest. Whereas the others are covered in slight mold, these are blanketed in ivy. I hear a gentleman and his guitar, but it is quickly muted by the wind and sun splitting open the haze a little. I find myself enjoying this, forgetting this is something I actually need to do. The wind is calm, doesn’t stop for a time, and I think of Muir and how he’d likely refer to this as music. I’m in a good mood today, though, and I think about what he was feeling instead of giving my typical, cynical laugh.
During my back and forth on this stretch of the trail, I come across an amber colored butterfly, in the shade, its wings dotted in black. It had long white legs and didn’t flinch when a basset hound flew by me at top speed, its owners behind in hot pursuit. The butterfly turns its wings about, showing an underside that is not unlike a shattered piece of the bark it’s resting on. After a time, it seems to notice me, and takes off hurriedly upward.
I think I’m afraid of being without distraction, completely aware of where my mind could go when it’s not occupied with something. I can’t even fall asleep unless music or television is on. That says a lot right there, doesn’t it?
My mind should be occupied with something today, but all I can think about is how this part of Frick Park smells different. Something is aromatic, sweet, a smell that could only be compared to an apple orchard after a misting or dew. I begin to notice maple, their leaves cantilevered, and grass long and golden like straw. I’ve only been here for forty-five minutes, already making my way back up to my car as there’s placed to go. But in this lone mile of the Ravine Trail, I saw more in forty-five minutes than the three hours spent the last time. I want to go further, I can’t help it. There’s a part of this reserve that’s protected, where bikes have to be walked, deeper in. I’ll save that for next time. This feels like more than enough today.
A large majority of the songs, I noticed have a point of origin in a large city (Chicago, impoverished urban areas) and multiple themes of excess (Lamborghinis, diamond-encrusted pieces). Further than that though, I notice a lot of the songs to actually be about ego, power, popular culture, reminiscent of what Sanders was talking about with postmodern art’s lack of concern with our environment. However, as the album progresses, it appears to move away from each of those themes it and go into that raw self-laceration, the failure to connect in or due to the modern world, and winds down to the penultimate track, appropriately titled “Lost in the Woods” which I listen to on my way to Frick Park.
“Lost in the Woods,” as expected, is a song that begins with being fearful from flight of the modern world, but turns into a song about liberation and the beauty of reverting to a primal simplicity. It seems like a tired theme at this point, especially after our readings, but the coda blends into the final song “Who Will Survive in the America?” a song that relies heavily on poet Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment No.1,” a near mournful vignette about the condition of men in an urbanized world.
I keep thinking what I said last week about solitude, how while I’m alone and even prefer to be in cities, I’m rarely ever unaccompanied in nature. It isn’t hard to see with that, I live a life filled with distractions and I’m starting to wonder what kind of impact that’s having on my writing and myself.
During this visit to Frick Park, I decide to go into a different part of it: The Ravine Trail near the preserved part of the park. As I was about to get out of my car and let “Who Will Survive in America?” finish, I thought of my friend Jenny at home. She has a remarkably stressful job with some of the most advanced technology on earth (Multicare Televisual Medicine…Don’t ask me to elaborate, I honestly couldn’t tell you). However, nearly every weekend, she seems to be out in the Olympic Rainforest or Mount Rainier. Unlike most people in a position of healthcare power, though, she’s really quite serene most of the time and I wonder how much of that comes from the balance of the extremes she maintains.
The problem I encountered in Frick during my first visit is quickly neutralized on the Ravine Trail: Probably no more than one-fifth of a mile do I hear no traffic whatsoever. My natural instinct is to want to go deeper, but I keep thinking about Wendell Berry and being more of a observer of one place instead of trying to cover as much terrain as possible. Maybe just see what happens instead of looking for it. I leave my headphones in the car.
I take my time down to the ravine noticing just as much below me on the trail as I do above me in the canopy. My eyes always seem to be up when I’m walking in the woods, but for the first time I see the feverfew, patches of grass, and the myriad of white clovers. The trees are thick, lightly shaded with mold. As my eyes move up, I’m lucky to see wild raspberries, mostly immature, but some a bright spring pink. Logs are split open and clovers that have yet to bloom are growing in the rift, but the dirt is auburn colored and bright.
The creeks are dried up at this point, leaving just moist dirt, a substance I can’t even call mud. I hear that baying of a dog that doesn’t sound very domesticated. For a minute, I feel like I’m really out somewhere. Of course, then comes the helicopter above. So close, Vincent.
The paths split off and I get a good look at the ravine. It’s deep. In the expanse there are three long oaks that stand out above the rest. Whereas the others are covered in slight mold, these are blanketed in ivy. I hear a gentleman and his guitar, but it is quickly muted by the wind and sun splitting open the haze a little. I find myself enjoying this, forgetting this is something I actually need to do. The wind is calm, doesn’t stop for a time, and I think of Muir and how he’d likely refer to this as music. I’m in a good mood today, though, and I think about what he was feeling instead of giving my typical, cynical laugh.
During my back and forth on this stretch of the trail, I come across an amber colored butterfly, in the shade, its wings dotted in black. It had long white legs and didn’t flinch when a basset hound flew by me at top speed, its owners behind in hot pursuit. The butterfly turns its wings about, showing an underside that is not unlike a shattered piece of the bark it’s resting on. After a time, it seems to notice me, and takes off hurriedly upward.
I think I’m afraid of being without distraction, completely aware of where my mind could go when it’s not occupied with something. I can’t even fall asleep unless music or television is on. That says a lot right there, doesn’t it?
My mind should be occupied with something today, but all I can think about is how this part of Frick Park smells different. Something is aromatic, sweet, a smell that could only be compared to an apple orchard after a misting or dew. I begin to notice maple, their leaves cantilevered, and grass long and golden like straw. I’ve only been here for forty-five minutes, already making my way back up to my car as there’s placed to go. But in this lone mile of the Ravine Trail, I saw more in forty-five minutes than the three hours spent the last time. I want to go further, I can’t help it. There’s a part of this reserve that’s protected, where bikes have to be walked, deeper in. I’ll save that for next time. This feels like more than enough today.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Place #1: Frick Park, June 11th, 3:59 P.M. Hazy, Then Bright.
(Sorry readers, there was a bit of a mix-up on my end, but luckily Melanie has been great about it and let me flip entries for this week. The Inland Northwest entry is actually my blog prompt while this will serve as my place entry.)
This is the second time I've been here, but really, it will be the first.
I'm indifferent to Frick Park. It's simply there. I have no close attachment. There are probably two reasons for that.
One: I'm think I'm an elitist when it comes to landscape. I almost turn up my nose at nature in Pennsylvania. When I saw the woods across the state, I remembered that this was where our nation got its coal. I saw billboards when I first drove across this state promoting it still in it dubious form of clean coal. I remember living in South Korea where coal processing went unchecked and when it's hazy or cloudy like it was today at Frick, I think of the particles in the air. When I think of Pennsylvania, I think of Centralia. I think of anthracite. I see the rolling low woods and envision them empty--more than empty, hollowed out. The greenest places here have this invisible film to it.
That's my bias and I'm ashamed of it. I was going to stay at the intersection where families appear with their retrievers and frisbees, but I decided on a more inclined path like I did when I first came here. Those preconceived notions I have of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania seem more idiotic as I realize this place, save for the cardinals, abundance of rabbits, and dealing with my first summer of humidity, could just as easily be the state park across the street from my mother's home. When I breathe in that organic smell that can only be found in woods--proper name of the scent failing me--it takes me back to when I was younger and spent summers getting cut up by blackberry bramble and nettles with my sister or on warmer days like this, California with my mother's best friend and her son as we walked in circles drawn to the faintest trickle of water like I see snaked along this pathway.
Groups of mountain bikers pass me, families, couples--I almost feel strange about being alone out here. Almost. But I enjoy it this second time, alone, instead of having to keep pace with someone else. Now that I think of it, I've rarely ever been in the woods alone. I don't know solitude that isn't urban. That's a harsh truth. I don't know solitude that isn't urban.
The incline is getting steeper and I'm sweating buckets, tanks really. I wish I had brought a water bottle. The trees here are more spaced out and thin. It's comforting unlike the more impenetrable fir of my home. The person I first came here with calls my apartment a bunker. She's right, too. I only hear birds in the morning and sunlight penetrates my apartment, never really bathing it. The haze is starting to dissipate with the sunbreak. Something about this place smells different in the light.
I've often heard that mosquitoes that are often drawn towards the sweat of beer drinkers. If you could see my right forearm, you'd find that hypothesis correct. But I don't mind it. It certainly beats having a crane fly go straight for the space between your eyes. Mosquitoes are the only insects I'll notice today. I want to say I observed butterflies, but they could've just as easily been leaves. They're still quite green. No stinkbugs in this park. Am I that lucky, or do they not fare so well when outside of my [expletive]-ing apartment?
The trees tighten up, start to enclose as I get towards the top of the hill. It's not enough to block the sun. I can't wait to be at the top of this. I break off the path I originally took and take the route to the top. I've begun to realize that even when I'm home, the ten months I've spent living in Pittsburgh have all been urban save for anything I hadn't seen via car between Cleveland, Washington D.C., or Brooklyn. This is the second time in ten months I've been in any sort of natural space save for my mother's stables next to the mountains. Even then, Seattle feels overhead.
Two times in ten months. Downright shameful. More harsh realities. The top is coming up soon. I try to imagine what I'll be treated with. Cityscape, the long arch of the park's canopy, the source of the creek. Maybe a nice cooling wind. No, I'm treated to large concrete blocks, odd black radial tubes, and what appears to be a labradoodle gnawing at a tennis ball. The dog park is actually a pleasant sight (save for the chainlink fence), that's not what I'm complaining about. Walking around the top though, the most recognizable sight is what appears to be a gridlocked freeway. That person I first came here with said something that I blocked out during this humid little hike.
Two: The reason why I don't have a close attachment to this park is that I'm never away from what I'm trying to get away. I hadn't noticed it now even though I noticed it then when my companion first pointed it out. I was actually taking an effort to actually soak in the environment. But I suppose I could hear the sounds of car horns, large semi-freighters, and fast traffic all along. There's no really getting lost. When I got to the top and saw the freeway, it was all I could hear. For a moment, I was out of the city, but then my mind, as usual, got in the way.
The path back down, the ground felt a bit more damp and somewhat more steep. A few years ago, I tore a ligament on something far less steep. More cardinals. Did you know I'd never seen a cardinal until I came East? I came across a very large, but felled tree. The wood looked older, more white. I went off trail to get a closer look, unable to help but think of how much it looked like driftwood. After a few cursory glances, I noticed that the closer to the edge I got, there was a bit what seemed like a vale, a terrific summer vantage point.
Shouldn't I have seen this before? Well, yes. But I suppose my eyes were on companion most of the time. This is my second time here, but really, its my first. It's hard to believe how on one side of this mound there was a freeway, but the other a semblance of rolling hill.
More rabbits on the way down. I don't see rabbits much at home either, easy feeding for feral dogs and coyotes. I think about what another friend said to me when I was trying to grab the attention of her pet rabbit with a steady tapping of my fingers. She told me that it wouldn't grab his attention, that as a prey animal, they were inclined to flee from a curious sound that would say, intice a dog. As a boy, my mother wouldn't let me venture into Dash Point or Saltwater State, much less the Olympic Rainforest. Wolves, bears, Roosevelt elk, are all fairly real risks. In the first green space I see in Pittsburgh, this state, is filled with rabbits.
My bias, really is a matter of overblown, unrealistic expectations. Looking at the history of Frick Park, the story (or myth) of its creation, was Henry Frick's daughter requesting a place where the children of Pittsburgh could enjoy nature. While I'm certainly no child, I suppose that is exactly what I'm doing. It's hard to leave this city with classes and my jobs, hard to find time to go out into the Wilds. I can't judge this park. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to. When I take off my clothes in my apartment, for the first time, they actually smell like the trees and grass, strong enough to overpower the usual scent of bacon and Old Spice in my room.
I looked at a map of the park. It turns out I only got towards the center of the bottom half, completely oblivious to the Nine Mile Run. Completely oblivious that it even had another section potentially away from concrete.
I'm seeing what I want to see in this state. I see coal and Centralia because when I was home, I called Pittsburgh my home, accidentally, three times.
This is the second time I've been here, but really, it will be the first.
I'm indifferent to Frick Park. It's simply there. I have no close attachment. There are probably two reasons for that.
One: I'm think I'm an elitist when it comes to landscape. I almost turn up my nose at nature in Pennsylvania. When I saw the woods across the state, I remembered that this was where our nation got its coal. I saw billboards when I first drove across this state promoting it still in it dubious form of clean coal. I remember living in South Korea where coal processing went unchecked and when it's hazy or cloudy like it was today at Frick, I think of the particles in the air. When I think of Pennsylvania, I think of Centralia. I think of anthracite. I see the rolling low woods and envision them empty--more than empty, hollowed out. The greenest places here have this invisible film to it.
That's my bias and I'm ashamed of it. I was going to stay at the intersection where families appear with their retrievers and frisbees, but I decided on a more inclined path like I did when I first came here. Those preconceived notions I have of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania seem more idiotic as I realize this place, save for the cardinals, abundance of rabbits, and dealing with my first summer of humidity, could just as easily be the state park across the street from my mother's home. When I breathe in that organic smell that can only be found in woods--proper name of the scent failing me--it takes me back to when I was younger and spent summers getting cut up by blackberry bramble and nettles with my sister or on warmer days like this, California with my mother's best friend and her son as we walked in circles drawn to the faintest trickle of water like I see snaked along this pathway.
Groups of mountain bikers pass me, families, couples--I almost feel strange about being alone out here. Almost. But I enjoy it this second time, alone, instead of having to keep pace with someone else. Now that I think of it, I've rarely ever been in the woods alone. I don't know solitude that isn't urban. That's a harsh truth. I don't know solitude that isn't urban.
The incline is getting steeper and I'm sweating buckets, tanks really. I wish I had brought a water bottle. The trees here are more spaced out and thin. It's comforting unlike the more impenetrable fir of my home. The person I first came here with calls my apartment a bunker. She's right, too. I only hear birds in the morning and sunlight penetrates my apartment, never really bathing it. The haze is starting to dissipate with the sunbreak. Something about this place smells different in the light.
I've often heard that mosquitoes that are often drawn towards the sweat of beer drinkers. If you could see my right forearm, you'd find that hypothesis correct. But I don't mind it. It certainly beats having a crane fly go straight for the space between your eyes. Mosquitoes are the only insects I'll notice today. I want to say I observed butterflies, but they could've just as easily been leaves. They're still quite green. No stinkbugs in this park. Am I that lucky, or do they not fare so well when outside of my [expletive]-ing apartment?
The trees tighten up, start to enclose as I get towards the top of the hill. It's not enough to block the sun. I can't wait to be at the top of this. I break off the path I originally took and take the route to the top. I've begun to realize that even when I'm home, the ten months I've spent living in Pittsburgh have all been urban save for anything I hadn't seen via car between Cleveland, Washington D.C., or Brooklyn. This is the second time in ten months I've been in any sort of natural space save for my mother's stables next to the mountains. Even then, Seattle feels overhead.
Two times in ten months. Downright shameful. More harsh realities. The top is coming up soon. I try to imagine what I'll be treated with. Cityscape, the long arch of the park's canopy, the source of the creek. Maybe a nice cooling wind. No, I'm treated to large concrete blocks, odd black radial tubes, and what appears to be a labradoodle gnawing at a tennis ball. The dog park is actually a pleasant sight (save for the chainlink fence), that's not what I'm complaining about. Walking around the top though, the most recognizable sight is what appears to be a gridlocked freeway. That person I first came here with said something that I blocked out during this humid little hike.
Two: The reason why I don't have a close attachment to this park is that I'm never away from what I'm trying to get away. I hadn't noticed it now even though I noticed it then when my companion first pointed it out. I was actually taking an effort to actually soak in the environment. But I suppose I could hear the sounds of car horns, large semi-freighters, and fast traffic all along. There's no really getting lost. When I got to the top and saw the freeway, it was all I could hear. For a moment, I was out of the city, but then my mind, as usual, got in the way.
The path back down, the ground felt a bit more damp and somewhat more steep. A few years ago, I tore a ligament on something far less steep. More cardinals. Did you know I'd never seen a cardinal until I came East? I came across a very large, but felled tree. The wood looked older, more white. I went off trail to get a closer look, unable to help but think of how much it looked like driftwood. After a few cursory glances, I noticed that the closer to the edge I got, there was a bit what seemed like a vale, a terrific summer vantage point.
Shouldn't I have seen this before? Well, yes. But I suppose my eyes were on companion most of the time. This is my second time here, but really, its my first. It's hard to believe how on one side of this mound there was a freeway, but the other a semblance of rolling hill.
More rabbits on the way down. I don't see rabbits much at home either, easy feeding for feral dogs and coyotes. I think about what another friend said to me when I was trying to grab the attention of her pet rabbit with a steady tapping of my fingers. She told me that it wouldn't grab his attention, that as a prey animal, they were inclined to flee from a curious sound that would say, intice a dog. As a boy, my mother wouldn't let me venture into Dash Point or Saltwater State, much less the Olympic Rainforest. Wolves, bears, Roosevelt elk, are all fairly real risks. In the first green space I see in Pittsburgh, this state, is filled with rabbits.
My bias, really is a matter of overblown, unrealistic expectations. Looking at the history of Frick Park, the story (or myth) of its creation, was Henry Frick's daughter requesting a place where the children of Pittsburgh could enjoy nature. While I'm certainly no child, I suppose that is exactly what I'm doing. It's hard to leave this city with classes and my jobs, hard to find time to go out into the Wilds. I can't judge this park. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to. When I take off my clothes in my apartment, for the first time, they actually smell like the trees and grass, strong enough to overpower the usual scent of bacon and Old Spice in my room.
I looked at a map of the park. It turns out I only got towards the center of the bottom half, completely oblivious to the Nine Mile Run. Completely oblivious that it even had another section potentially away from concrete.
I'm seeing what I want to see in this state. I see coal and Centralia because when I was home, I called Pittsburgh my home, accidentally, three times.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Prompt #1: The Inland Northwest.
I've been thinking about Central Washington a lot lately. Ever since I was born, every year, in the last week of July, we've made our way out to Lake Chelan in the Northern Cascades for our summer vacation. I've missed Thanksgivings, Christmases, and the like due to travels and other pursuits. But I've never missed going to Lake Chelan. I've turned down jobs before for not being able to promise that last week in July off. Although the landscape has significantly changed over the years and members of our family, integral to enjoyment of the area, have passed on, we still religiously go even if it seems we're doing more remembering than creating memories.
This place has been on my mind lately as now, finally, almost at the age of 26, I'm breaking my quarter century streak of visiting the area. It breaks my heart, actually, but it's become quite hard to have my life revolve around a single week.
I was utterly convinced that maybe at this point, it was a powerful nostalgia for things past. While my friends were off in Turkey and England and finding myself in no particular rush to get home, I decided to take the Capitol Limited and Empire Builder trains back home to Washington. The last day of the trip, I awoke just outside of the Inland Empire in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and continued into Spokane to watch the sunrise. It wasn't long before I was in the Columbia Basin, over its river, and hundreds of feet in the air above the North Cascades on a brilliantly sunny day. While I won't deny feeling nostalgic, I mostly felt something fresh--something that I'm still not able to qualify just yet.
I don't think people truly realize how diverse Washington's geography really is. To the West, there is indeed a true rainforest (our beloved wet jungle) with Puget Sound (our giant fjord--one of only two in the United States) and the Seattle Metropolis area that doesn't rain (but make no mistake, we have over 200 days of gray skies) as much as you think it does. Eastern Washington, in contrast, resembles more of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains with fertile golden hills and the mountains in the far backdrop. Most importantly, Eastern Washington's largest city, Spokane, is considered to be the center of Washington's Inland Empire.
However, with the Cascades and the rainshadow it creates, Central Washington resembles, as Armenians who moved into the area have stated, Asia Minor. From the Okanogan Highlands and Methow Valley down to Yakima and the Columbia Basin, this part of my home is a mountain steppe, the high semi-arid desert. When I was young and we'd take the three hour drive to Chelan, it would end up feeling so much longer than that with all the changing scenery. When we'd arrive and my uncle would take me to the top of the valley where one could overlook Lake Chelan on one side and the Cascades declining on the other, it was hard to believe the United States or one person could go any further. It's even harder to believe that it still serves as a place of bewilderment.
Only after some distance, an extended period away from home, I realize how important the Inland Northwest is to me. It's a giant crossroads and it doesn't begin and end with family retreats. From the city, to Yakima, and onto Walla Walla--that's where I saw the hometown of my first love. I took my younger cousins up through Okanogan to the British Columbian border for their first adventure outside of the city. I cut through the Basin and the Palouse to see my brother during his first semester at med school. Most recently, I saw the Methow Valley and North Cascades Highway--what was then unexplored territory in a familar place--with said brother two weeks before I drove to Pennsylvania.
This blog will not just serve, as I originally thought, as a memorial to the profound memories created in Central Washington. It will also serve to look deeper into a place and area I once thought I was very familar with and how it surprisingly, continues to still be a host of relevant memories.
This place has been on my mind lately as now, finally, almost at the age of 26, I'm breaking my quarter century streak of visiting the area. It breaks my heart, actually, but it's become quite hard to have my life revolve around a single week.
I was utterly convinced that maybe at this point, it was a powerful nostalgia for things past. While my friends were off in Turkey and England and finding myself in no particular rush to get home, I decided to take the Capitol Limited and Empire Builder trains back home to Washington. The last day of the trip, I awoke just outside of the Inland Empire in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and continued into Spokane to watch the sunrise. It wasn't long before I was in the Columbia Basin, over its river, and hundreds of feet in the air above the North Cascades on a brilliantly sunny day. While I won't deny feeling nostalgic, I mostly felt something fresh--something that I'm still not able to qualify just yet.
I don't think people truly realize how diverse Washington's geography really is. To the West, there is indeed a true rainforest (our beloved wet jungle) with Puget Sound (our giant fjord--one of only two in the United States) and the Seattle Metropolis area that doesn't rain (but make no mistake, we have over 200 days of gray skies) as much as you think it does. Eastern Washington, in contrast, resembles more of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains with fertile golden hills and the mountains in the far backdrop. Most importantly, Eastern Washington's largest city, Spokane, is considered to be the center of Washington's Inland Empire.
However, with the Cascades and the rainshadow it creates, Central Washington resembles, as Armenians who moved into the area have stated, Asia Minor. From the Okanogan Highlands and Methow Valley down to Yakima and the Columbia Basin, this part of my home is a mountain steppe, the high semi-arid desert. When I was young and we'd take the three hour drive to Chelan, it would end up feeling so much longer than that with all the changing scenery. When we'd arrive and my uncle would take me to the top of the valley where one could overlook Lake Chelan on one side and the Cascades declining on the other, it was hard to believe the United States or one person could go any further. It's even harder to believe that it still serves as a place of bewilderment.
Only after some distance, an extended period away from home, I realize how important the Inland Northwest is to me. It's a giant crossroads and it doesn't begin and end with family retreats. From the city, to Yakima, and onto Walla Walla--that's where I saw the hometown of my first love. I took my younger cousins up through Okanogan to the British Columbian border for their first adventure outside of the city. I cut through the Basin and the Palouse to see my brother during his first semester at med school. Most recently, I saw the Methow Valley and North Cascades Highway--what was then unexplored territory in a familar place--with said brother two weeks before I drove to Pennsylvania.
This blog will not just serve, as I originally thought, as a memorial to the profound memories created in Central Washington. It will also serve to look deeper into a place and area I once thought I was very familar with and how it surprisingly, continues to still be a host of relevant memories.
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