Final Prompt Entry: Epilogue/Reevaluating Necessities.

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.