In a Perfect World

In a perfect world, today I would have rented a motel room in Connell, Washington and picked out spots up and down Highway 395 to take photographs. In a really perfect world, I would have had a 360 degree lens and been able to make visible in a permanent way the panorama of colors, cloud formations, mixtures of cloud and sunshine, incoming weather patterns, and slowly encroaching darkness that the Palouse afforded travellers today.

Then I would have rented another room in Boardman, Oregon or in Rufus, Oregon and travelled up and down I-84, between the I-82 interchange and The Dalles and done the same thing.

My favorite color is gray. I love gray's mutedness. Driving today in mostly gray conditions, until darkness fell, meant no strain on the eyes. When sun rays tried to break through the gray, they formed slanted lines that made me think of what I thought God looked like when I was a young boy.

What's more, the slate clouds occasionally opened up close to the horizon and starting at about 2:30 or so, a long sunset emerged. North of Kennewick, the sky was a theater of scratchy rain falling miles away to the east, magenta clouds over pale blue sky over tan hillocks to the west, puffy cumulus clouds both ivory and darkening gray to the south, but picking up the surrounding faint purples and pinks.

If ever a person doubted the existence of multiple realities occuring at the same moment, all a person had to do was stop and observe this almost chaotic Palouse sky and see multiple weather fronts, a variety of colors, and the assertion and recession of the sun all happening simultaneously.

I felt awed.

Later, as I drove along the Columbia River, the tawny mounds on the north side of the Columbia seemed like screens for color slides as they absorbed and reflected the purples, yellows, and reds from the sky. These mounds amaze me each time I drive east or west on I-84 in the way they are never the same color, as if they are never the same mounds. I have seen the color of these mounds range from deep purple to faint green to reddish-brown to light tan and have even seen them seem black, depending on the light and what's going on in the sky.

How would a person determine what color these mounds really are? They don't have a color aside from what the atmosphere and weather and light conditions around them dictate.

I have to say, that once past The Dalles and moving on toward and beyond Hood River, I find the scenery more spectacular (water falls, evergreens, rugged rock formations, the lower regions of the Cascade mountains to the south starting to rise from the Gorge, and, on a clear day, a magnificent view of Mt. Hood), but not as interesting.

Tonight, in fact, I hated being in this rain forest climate. For about fifteen to twenty miles the rain fell in huge black bullets; it was as if the dark sky itself was raining upon the freeway. I was deeply grateful to the semis on the road. I perched myself behind a couple of them which helped keep my speed reasonable and helped me see. I was disappointed when they had to leave the freeway for a weigh station. I had to go solo for a while, but caught up to other cars and never passed them so that I could navigate this downpour more safely.

The hardest part of returning to Eugene is leaving Kellogg.

The second hardest part, in the winter, is driving during such short days.

In a perfect world, the sun moving low in the winter sky and the slate condition of the sky and all its colorful change would last for twelve to fourteen hours a day instead of for about nine hours.

Or, in a really perfect world, I'd have all the time I wanted to get back to Eugene and could spend only the daylight hours driving, with long photo stops, and would relax along the way, blogging in motel rooms, posting pictures, never worrying about when I got back to Eugene or to work.

Just Leave Me Alone

This picture was printed in November of 1957. It's difficult to tell how fully the leaves have or have not turned, so I'm not sure what month the picture was taken. I am not quite four years old. The haze behind me and between the leaves is not for artistic effect. It is Smelter Smoke, the generic name give to all emissions in Kellogg, whether from the Smelter, Zinc Plant, or other plant.

I wonder as I look at myself stopped in time almost fifty years ago, whether I was thinking back then what I tend to think now: just leave me alone. My first memory from this time in my life is getting beat up by Mike, one of the boys I get together with at Thanksgiving time in Lincoln City. I remember thinking while he punched me, "Leave me alone." I often wanted to be alone. I used to go out behind our house where scrubby plum trees grew and I'd find rocks and I'd hold them up to my ear and see if they would speak to me. I couldn't do this with friends. I had to do it alone.

It wasn't long after this picture was printed that I started to read. No one taught me to read. One evening my mother came home from teaching school and I picked up a book and started reading aloud from it. About that time my parents invested in a World Book Encyclopedia set. I took a fascination, before I was in kindegarten, in the states and capitals. I didn't set out to memorize them, but I did. I became a little party game: ask Billy any state and he can tell you the capital. To pore over the U-V volume of the World Book, with its list of all the United States and capitals and to find each of the states on the United States map and develop a sense of geography meant time to myself. I often wanted people to just leave me alone.

I did social things. I played a lot of baseball and basketball and football and hide and seek and rode my bike with the Gunderson brothers and we tried to figure out during the height of the Cold War which houses in Kellogg the Russians would bomb first. I once told my mother that I hoped I would be dead before the Russians attacked Kellogg so I'd miss all the bombing. I think I wanted the Russians to just leave me alone.

But even as I did social things, I liked to read and I liked to go by myself and imagine whole baseball games unfolding as I threw hard crab apples softly in the air and sent them over the Lenhart's fence with my baseball bat. To me, it was a lot more fun to march through the Yankees' and Giants' lineups by myself and make the game happen in my head than it was to play out these pretend games on fields with others. I enjoyed doing it alone.

When I leave Eugene and come back to the Silver Valley I enjoy the trip alone. When I leave the suffocating dampness and claustrophic closeness of the Willamette Valley and start east along the Columbia River with the whole basin widening and widening in tans, deep purples, and barren splendor, I feel liberated. The traffic on the Columbia River is light. The landscape is open, barely inhibited by mountains or trees. I want the stretch from The Dalles to Boardman to the I-82 interchange, north to the Tri-Cities and up and down the golden hills of the Palouse into Ritzville and on to the black pines of Cheney to last forever. I am alone with the grand open spaces of eastern Oregon and Washington stretching my mind and giving my spirit room to roam.

Once I've arrived in Kellogg, I stay with my mother and visit with my sisters and see my great friends and I love the company. But almost every day I do what I did when I was a teen ager: I walk, alone (well, with my dog) up to the high school, along the ever more grassy trail behind the hospital and on toward the narrowing of Jacobs' Gulch and remember how often I would slip out of the house at night to walk up to the high school, just to be alone. Back then I'd try to sort out my failures: basketball, baseball, lost student government elections, failed romances: I'd dwell on how I wasn't measuring up to what I'd hoped I would be.

Now, I try to achieve a state when walking alone in which I'm more like the young boy you see pictured above. I try to empty my mind and take in the trail to the high school, the bear scat on the trail, Jacobs' Creek trickling below, the clean, fresh air, and shade of morning and let it work on me innocently, without the interference of my inward voice babbling. My better self turns to that babbling, gabbing, overthinking part of me and says, "Just leave me alone."