Sibling Assignment #95: Longing for Richard Hugo

Silver Valley Girl originally assigned a piece asking us to remember Expo '74, but it fizzled out. She replaced that assignment with this one:

Write about a journey, trip, place you would like to visit this summer, and why.

You can read about InlandEmpireGirl's yearning to visit the Olympic rainforest, here and Silver Valley Girl's dream of riding in a boat on the Coeur d'Alene River from the Cataldo Mission to Harrison, here.

As I was writing about the connection I see between Edward Hooper's "Nighthawks" and Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg", here, my memories of the summer of 1992 flooded me.

It was the summer of our twenty year high school reunion. My ex-wife was in Palau. I had decided in April that I wouldn't finish my dissertation. It was my first summer in six years without the thesis weighing on me.

I decided to come to Kellogg for the twenty year reunion via Burns, Oregon, Salmon City, Idaho, Butte and Bozeman and Missoula, Montana and see parts of Oregon, Idaho, and Montana I'd never visited before.

I decided to visit as many of the small Montana towns as I could that provided settings for Richard Hugo poems. For example, I went to Philipsburg and walked

. . . the streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did. . .

Somehow, walking the streets of Philipsburg and Butte and going to Hot Springs and hiking up to Walkerville, Hugo's collected poems in hand, deepened my experience with the poems. I saw the world of Montana through Hugo's eyes and entered into his imagination and felt an even deeper affinity with his world view.

I'd like to go back on Richard Hugo tour. I'd like to take more time and drive to Drummond, visit Belgrade, return to Wisdom, see if I can find Silver Star, take the poems again, read them aloud, and drink in the landscapes and towns and feel those wondrous places inside myself where my soul and Richard Hugo's merge.