Foo Fighters and Rain

The rain has come once again.

Its been cloudy and rainy for the last three days, and I am awaiting winter's onset once again.

This time around, I am prepared. Well. Not really. But I can sure as hell try.

I find myself listening to "Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day. I don't know why. Just feels like the right mood.

That would be the view from the library where I am writing this right now. The camera's auto-enhance makes it look brighter than it actually is.

September has taken forever. It has literally been one of the longest months I have experienced, and I'm just dreading that it gets over with soon.

Right on key autumn hit. It got cold one night, and it hasn't gotten above 75° since. I kind of enjoyed the beginning of the rain. It was like the cold gray blanket had descended back on our moderately sized valley.

"Our"

I've started identifying with this place.

I wonder if this is what comes with the year end of the cycle. Did it take me that long to get here? It's a tough love. Traveling the path has been less like a smoothly paved North Carolina highway, and more like trudging up one of the taller Cascades on an unimproved gravel road in a four cylinder car. The journey takes forever, and it busts up different parts of your car, but you do get there.

So what is next? Do I want to stay here? I know I still have a year left, but it weighs on me. I don't want to pursue connections if I'm not going to stay here. But I want connections. I can't keep still. I don't want to just "go on" here. I want to explore.

See.

Experience.

Return.

I entice you to ponder the definition of "Home". What does it mean for you?

I can't decide on a definition. Does fate dictate that I will need to settle down eventually? Can a living be made place-hopping? I don't want to be that jerk though.

My reservations are large, but my aspirations are larger. So many things to contemplate. And I have so much to consider. One one hand, I don't like being alone, but on the other hand, I love to travel. I want to see places and become acquainted with them. But I want to see everywhere.

Ohio was the starting place. New England was the taste. Warren Wilson was the honeymoon. Ireland and Barcelona were the extravagant spending. Vancouver is... The doldrums? Painful reflections and life lessons?

Whatever it may be, with the turn of the clouds and the cold I come upon another year here. Lets make the best of it.

Windy Ridge

So if you were to ask me which of the three sides of Mount Saint Helens I liked the most... Well I'd say I like all of them the best for different reasons.

The North side it's for the "easy tourist/learn about the mountain itself" experience. The road is the nicest, the drive is the clearest, but the crowds are the biggest. But the facilities are also really educational, with lots to do for families.

The South side is for the adventurers. The ones who want to get out and play around the mountain in nature. The roads here are half the time gravel, but the experiences are twice the fun. You get to descend into an old lava tube cave with nothing but a gas powered lamp, hike in a basalt valley with a one person width swinging suspension bridge as the end reward, or even climb the mountain itself.

Finally, there is the East side. This is the side for awe and inspiration. It is by far the farthest out, but gets you the closest to the mountain. When you pull up to the final overlook, Windy Ridge, you and your car are literally three miles from the start of the crater. Each lava dome is clearly visible, and you can see where the volcano has started to rebuild itself.

On the way up, you get great views of Mount Adams to the east, and Mount Hood to the south. The road is a mix between pavement and rubble, but it makes the journey that much more valuable. The forests are old growth, interrupted by the sudden decimation of the 1980 eruption.

You get to drive into the pumice plain, and your car sails among the sticks of seared trees and the sea of downed timber.

The half barren mountaintops are like two sides of the same coin, the west facing slopes gone to bedrock, the east facing slopes, spared from 1300 degree mudslides.

You can even see and visit the famous Spirit Lake, once home to the Mount Saint Helens Lodge, which is now under 250 feet of earth and rock. The lake itself still has the log mat, still floating about from the 1980 explosion.

I sat and thought (call it meditated?) for a while at the top of Windy Ridge. I sat in the pumice and ash, and took in the marvel of being so close to something of such immeasurable power. And being surrounded by others which are much older, and contain much more than the geological youngster of Mount Saint Helens.

I even saw the colossal Rainier off in the distance, holding the title of grandest of them all. Rising 14,411 feet in the air, it is plainly visible between two mountain peaks.

So here I am. Sitting among giants. I still can't fathom it to this day.

What more can I say? Pixels cannot capture the amount of beauty in this world.

Contradictory Landscapes

So, what about a landscape that isn't supposed to be there? What do you do then?

Let me explain.

I'll wrap up a little of my recent experiences through examination of landscapes:

So there are landscapes that exist which are meant to exist. I've visited a couple of those in the last couple of weeks:

The drive from Aberdeen along the Pacific Coast.

The pacific coast.

A panorama from a lookout at Gray's Harbor

Alder's Flat in Mt. Hood National Forest. (Auto-Awesome Photo, just giving full disclaimer)

More of Alder's Flat

Entrance to Willamete National Forest

Sunset in Salem

And of course, the catalyst, in the Steigerwald National Wildlife Refuge

So what makes these "correct" landscapes? is it because of their pretty scenery? Their forested hills around them? How about their inclusion of nature?

Well all of those help a landscape, but none of them really make or break a landscape in the grand scheme of things. It is really the fact that the areas of the landscapes in the pictures "fit". They run together with what is around them, with most things flowing well into and out of the scene.

This weekend, I discovered Yakima. A lonely valley in the middle of the high desert, turned Garden of Eden by the modern power of irrigation.

Its strange. You are driving through the high desert in central Washington. You've seen it all before, the endless plains of scrub brush and tender dry grass, resisting the massive wind the best in can. Just waiting under a Red Flag warning to eradicate all before its hellish fire.

So far, so good.

The plains turn into mountains, the mountains into barren hills. Then, as soon as you round a corner:

BAM!

Fields of green, yellow, and brown stretch out throughout the valley below. It is a valley, full of the richest vegetables, fruits, and buildings you can imagine. The valley stretches out beyond what the mind can imagine. Off in the distance are faint, hazy hills, yellow and brown as the previous ones you were just driving through. But halfway up the sides, a dark green is visible. Those are fruit trees and they stretch up just as far as the water can go.

The valley is built on this source. Water. It needs it. It feeds off of it. It produces with it. Without it, it would be just another desert valley, with a river running through it.

But why? That is my ever present question. Why is it that this valley, and this river, gave rise to one of Washington's greatest food producing regions? Why is it that this place was settled on as that place? I don't really know. How much water does it use? This land, I don't think it was meant to be food production, I think it was meant to be a subtle little pocket of high desert river life. So what have we made/gained/lost with this development?

Its weird. I've never been in a place that isn't meant to belong there. All of my landscapes have flowed, fit together, and transitioned into different settings quite well. This place comes upon you as the perfectly created wonderland of local food. But was it supposed to be that way?

Homesickness

I really need to stop longing for a culture I am content with. I need to embrace the low points of the journey, and enjoy the luscious crops of the fertile valleys.

I thought that my life was built upon adventure, and seeking out the more to see. The irresistible drive to continue onward until I've circled around full. I guess that isn't the way it is supposed to be.

I do not want to fall into the conservative mindset of "conserve what you have, it always works", and if it hasn't been conserved, go back to it. That must be the stubborn Midwestern kicking back in.

I miss my home.

I do have a home. My base of operations is Thurston, Ohio. While my family may not live there anymore, it is the town I identify with the most. I grew up there. I learned there. I experienced the first threshes of life there. Identified my loves, explored my passions, and got the hell out, only to discover it again once I had left, and once they had left.

I do have a home. My lyrical muse lies in the fields adorning the mountains of the Swannanoa Valley. The sweltering humid heat of the morning fog makes me pine to live those experiences again. Marching through the forest every morning to greet the academic rigor of the day, only to end the week in a celebration of Mario Kart and Magic the Gathering.

My method of travel is the Catalyst. She travels with me between all points known and unknown. She is my temporary home, gracious enough to host me on the long journeys through the desert, over the tallest mountains on the continent, and between those two points where I am solidly anchored.

Out here though, there is no home. There is only a drift of the shells of a community. It's too big to have a cohesive whole, but too small to have specific individual parts. There is no definition here, it's just like an impressionist painting that has been rained on.

All the natural area cannot fix this place. No amount of rare summer storms, humid warm nights, nor fields of far off crops can bring me back enough to want to stay. The noise is too precise, the hum of the highway too close, and the entrapment of the houses too focused.

The only thing that comforts me tonight is the far off sound of the port, with its clattering rails slowly moving towards cargo ships, and the soft chirps of few lone crickets somewhere in the neighborhood. But even that is sometimes lost in the chatter of cars and wavering voices and settlements around me.

It's been a while since I've walked the streets at night. I do miss the semi-quiet embrace of the dark. It's almost like a velvet blanket, wrapping me close. But oh how it makes me feel even more lost.

The rows of houses seem so comforting, but it reaches the uncanny valley quite quickly. It rolls down the mountainside, ever destined to that floor where embrace becomes envelopment.

Yet I sigh. One cannot let these kind of things get too close to the soul. I like to think of this place as a cartographic maze; a labyrinth which spirals into its self, but cannot seem to find a way out. The identity of the suburban town does not retreat after completing its journey to its core. It simply keeps looping in circles unable to make its final, defining connection.

And so I am stuck here, listless, wandering and observing. I know there is more for the eye to see, but it is difficult trying to live in the happy medium. A friend told me quite quaintly: "It's a strange town. There is no access to life as in the urban area, nor is there the solitude of a rural area. It truly is a 'sub'-urban area, with a happy medium for many, but an off-kilter balance that cannot swing in either direction for us."

The Map of Trees and Fields Through the Houses

Today I wandered.

I found the blurry boundary between county and city. The spot where the suburbs are slowly creeping outward, through the remaining fields, slowly popping up, and colonizing with its shaped topiaries and curved lanes. Planned everything. Sidewalks. Roads. Lots. Playgrounds. The monotonous houses only broken by a reversed room or a bend in the road.

Yet, I felt more at home here then I have within the city. It reminded me of Pickerington. A new growth on the land, not quite realizing how to fit in, but not unwelcomed either.

Spread. Radials. Loops and Twists. I guess that is what living in a suburb is like? I never have, but I've seen them enough to guess.

Beside the houses were fields of clover and alfalfa. Nearby was a dairy barn, with an active sign warning against cows crossing the road. The sun shone, and for a second I glimpsed the hills of Southern Ohio. I went into an autopilot for my car, instinctively rolling with the well known curves, only to be interrupted by another development, which I wound around.

Eventually I hit the end of the road at a private gate to what amounted to a super mansion in the valley below. That is the thing here, the roads always end. There is no wrapping around to take a left at another T in the road. No curves winding down the old canal route. The only roads that don't end are the Interstates. But those are no fun to drive on.

See, in Ohio, you can take one road, and it will keep going until it T's into another road. You can then take that road forever, until it T's with another road. And if you drive around enough, you will loop (albeit it takes about an hour or so in the country).

Here in Washington, the roads just.

There are no convenient roads to take you through the pastures here. There are no "T" signs, only Dead Ends. One road goes on, and on, and on, but no loop to get back. No easy to see grid with county and township roads going on forever. Its a "come back the way you went in" situation, seeing everything twice.

I take large loops whenever I can. I get out whenever I can. But I've been out everywhere my little car can go. I've covered all of the roads that actually continue, and don't just. end. The only loops you can make are in the city blocks cluttered with houses and buildings.

The murky lines marauding around county and city are one of the few reminders. The sliver of agriculture still shining in the narrowing valley of the Columbia is the closest I can get to home.

Settling In.

These past two weeks have felt like a whirlwind which would never end. I've traveled more places, and seen more things, than I ever had expected. I was able to be a kid again, and enjoy the wonders of the natural world with my family; responsibility free.

My grammar let loose, and my silliness resurfaced, and it felt like a true "vacation" for me. I taught and showed, and participated with no previous judgment or anticipation or preparation.

It felt like we were on our summer vacation again, in the tradition of the days when I was a kid.

I don't know exactly what to call my feelings right now. It isn't "normalcy" because this wasn't "normal" but it was content. Enjoyment? Comfort? Familiarity?

Whatever it was, it was so... Unconscious. I was living without realizing it. With no worry or fear. I never realized how quickly two weeks could go by.

Me showing off my feminine side.

Seaside Beach

Mt. St. Helens from an overlook.

St. Helens from the Johnston Ridge Observatory

A nifty Auto-Awesome photo added by Google. I think it looks pretty cool for a kayak shot.

I choose the "Indecisive- Wavering" on the menu, and this is what I got. Classy Vancouver. Classy.

I now am back to the grown-up life, working the 8-5 job, making the money, to pay the rent, to live in the house, to go back to work, to try to make the world a better place. Its a weird thing, being a "grown-up". So many people tell me they haven't grown up, but I think many people's lives fall outside my basic definition of being "grown-up". Being an adult, to me at least, means having to do things all by myself. I wash the dishes, do the laundry, clean the room, buy food, keep up with my well being, all by myself. I never seem to do all that unconsciously. I am always struggling to do those everyday things.

When my family visited, I didn't have to worry about the everyday laborious tasks. They were taken care of for me (thankfully! My mother could have easily had me do laundry, cook dinner, and clean, but she didn't.) I didn't have to worry about the essentials, therefore I could focus on the auxiliaries. The having fun, the running around, the enjoying time with my family. It really brought me back...