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.

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.

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.

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.