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.