Blue Highways: Roosevelt, Whitcomb and Paterson, Washington

Unfolding the Map

We are riding and clenching our buttocks with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) as we hope to find a gas station somewhere along the Columbia River in Washington before we have to get out and walk.  Have you ever run out of gas, or almost run out of gas?  Feel free to leave a comment if you have.  If you want to see where all this butt-clenching is taking place, go to the map.

Book Quote

"On the highway again: at a cluster of closed buildings called Roosevelt, I noticed my gas was low.  The next town, according to the atlas, was Moonax five miles away.  Ten miles on, McCredie; fifteen, Alderdale; twenty, Whitcomb.  I drove unconcerned.  But Moonax was another Liberty Bond.  Same with McCredie.  Down went the needle.  I could see stations along the interstate a mile south across the bridgeless river.  No Alderdale.  I locked the speedometer needle on forty-five and my arms to the steering wheel.  A traveling salesman once told me that if you tense butt muscles tight enough, you can run on an empty tank for miles.  And that's what it was going to take.  Whitcomb was there, more or less, but the station was closed on Sundays.  Paterson, the last hope.  If it proved a ghost town, I was going to learn more about this deleted landscape on foot.  I drove, tensed top to bottom, waiting for the sickening silent glide.  Of the one hundred seventy-one thousand gas stations in the country, I needed one."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 10

Biofuel crops in Paterson, Washington. Photo at Washington State University's Biofuels Cropping Systems Research and Extension Project's site. Click on photo to go to site.

Roosevelt, Whitcomb and Paterson, Washington

We've all been in LHM's position, haven't we?  We're driving down a stretch of freeway, no exit in sight, and the needle on the gas gauge (or the digital graphic readout) is actually below the empty line.  We are tense, hoping that over the next small rise, or around the next corner, we will see our salvation in the form of a road sign that tells us that in one mile we'll find gas, food and lodging.  Or perhaps, peeking over the trees, a Conoco or Shell or Valero or some other gas station sign.

I used to drive on a lot of out-of-state trips on a job I had.  I would go from Wisconsin to New York, or perhaps down to the DC area, or to Philadelphia.  And I must admit that I was not one who was very risky when it came to gas.  If I noticed the needle down to, oh, lets say an eighth of a tank I would find the next gas station and fill up.  However, when you're driving roads you don't know, the problem is one of making the right choice mixed with a little bit of luck.  At the time I was traveling, in the early 90s, the internet was in its infancy.  Cell phones were huge contraptions with big antennae that only wealthy people or government workers in security agencies used.  Atlases and road maps were all we had to inform us of what was ahead on the road.  If it was on the map, then it should be there.

But if you're LHM, or me at that time, you liked to take drives along the blue highways instead of the interstate.  And that meant taking some risks.  Because, like LHM, you might find that the map was wrong and a listed town was actually not much or worse yet, it folded up some years before leaving behind a collection of morose, empty and rotting buildings.  Because I wasn't much of a risk taker, I would actually fill the tank more often during these times, so I wouldn't find myself out of gas on a lonely stretch of road where I might have to wait.  In winter, this was even more imperative.  The last thing I wanted to do was freeze to death in my car.

But despite my planning, I too had a few sphincter-tightening moments where I wondered if I'd make it.  It usually involved being on a blue highway, and it usually occurred in a very rural, if not forested, area where there were few settlements, and often on a Sunday.  I can remember, butt clenching rhythmically as I drove past small town after small town where either there was no gas station or the station was closed.  I would longingly look at the pump and wonder if I could shake out a few drops from the bend in the hose that would get me perhaps a few feet farther down the road.  I'd then hope for the best and drive for the next town.  If I saw a sign for an interstate, I would head down that way because chances were better that a gas station might be at the junction and, because people traveled interstates on all days, might actually be open, Sundays be damned.  I can remember at least two below-the-empty-line moments where I was sure I would experience, as LHM puts it, "the sickening silent glide."  But it never happened.

In the pantheon of risk and reward, riding on empty is probably not as high up the chart as, let's say, summitting Everest or surfing a monster Hawaiian wave or hang-gliding or jumping out of an airplane or even heading out to hike in the woods on a day that looks like it might become vaguely threatening.  And today the level of connectivity we have has made it even less risky.  Looking for gas?  You probably have an application on your sleek new Android phone or your handy new IPhone that will tell you where all the open gas stations in a fifty mile radius lie and direct you by synthetic voice along the shortest path to the place.  It'll even tell you the price and may, because you used it, get you a discount in the convenience store on your favorite bag of chips.  Out of gas?  Just call your auto club of choice on your cell, or I just found out, if you are out of cell range you can buy a device that allows you to turn your cell phone into a satellite phone and it will use your GPS to guide your would-be rescuer to you.

But where's the fun in that?  Where's the sense of adventure and thrill, when you drive into a gas station on the last remaining fumes of your previous 87 octane purchase, that you beat the odds once more and lived through something slightly dangerous?  Something that might have made you get out of the car and depend on the kindness of strangers to get you to a gas station where you could purchase a gallon in a plastic jug and then find a ride back to your car so that you could get a few more miles back to the gas station.

I was always a lukewarm watcher of Seinfeld, because I had a love-hate for the characters who seemed to me to be spoiled and whiny even as I thought the plots were clever.  If you'll remember, each show usually had 3-4 story arcs going through them that all tied back together at the end.  In one story line in an episode, the character of Kramer is test driving a car with a dealer representative, and the car is on empty.  (to see the clips from this episode relating to this story arc, click here.)  They choose to see just how far they can go, if they can push the needle farther below empty than anyone ever has.  At one point, the salesman says that the experience has expanded his horizon more than anything and has given him a heightened sense of what's possible.  After all, we are at our best in our work, thinking and problem solving when there's a little risk involved.

Musical Interlude

I can't think about this topic without Jackson Browne coming to mind.  Browne's music was a staple during my junior high, high school and college years.  This is a nice live acoustic version of his song Running on Empty, though in the video the sound appears to be slightly off from his performance.  Still, it's a great song and would have been relatively new when LHM was driving around the U.S.  I bet he probably heard it on the radio in Ghost Dancing while he traveled.

If you want to know more about Roosevelt, Whitcomb and Paterson

Columbia Crest Winery (in Paterson)
The Columbia River: Paterson Ferry
The Columbia River: Roosevelt
The Columbia River: Whitcomb Island and Whitcomb
Wikipedia: Paterson
Wikipedia: Roosevelt

Next up: Umatilla, Oregon

Blue Highways: Maryhill, Washington

Unfolding the Map

We stop for a walk with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) in Maryhill, continuing to ponder on some large questions of life and time.  In this case, why do we bother to try to realize dreams that crumble and blow away over time?  Sounds depressing?  I don't think so.  I think it just is. Navigate over to the map to pinpoint Maryhill.

Book Quote

"Sam Hill had many plans - some shrewd, some cockamamie - and he had money to try them.  His plan for Maryhill, Washington (first called Columbus), was to find a narrow zone where coastal rains met desert sun; that belt, he believed, would be an agricultural Eden....He talked some Belgian Quakers into considering settlement, but when scouts for the group came, they saw and left.  To them, Hill's ideal zone was the fiction of a creative road engineer more adept at theory than practice when it came to agronomy and climatology.  And they were right.  The town lay in the rain shadow of the Cascades.

"Hill continued building the big and costly stone manor, often called, with some accuracy, 'Maryhill Castle.'  At one time he said it was for his wife Mary, but she apparently refused even to visit the place....

"....But Hill died....Hill's dream had passed, and now, but for the museum, monument, and the ruined rock walls, the desert slope was as vacant as ever."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 10

The Maryhill Museum in Maryhill, Washington was built originally as a mansion by Sam Hill. Photo by "Cacophony" at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Maryhill, Washington

What happens to our plans, our dreams, and when we realize them, our creations?  I have been thinking a lot about his as I have been writing these posts in this blog.  LHM's account in this chapter of Blue Highways about Sam Hill and his ideas have brought these thoughts back to me recently.

I have to frame this question by first asking: What's the point?  What's the point of creating things, especially if they will end up like Sam Hill's vision of Maryhill, Washington?  He had great plans.  Plans that were, as LHM says, "some shrewd, some cockamamie."  He put his plans into effect.  He built a large "castle" for his wife.  He hoped to build a settlement that made use of what he thought might be the perfect meeting place of aridity and humidity for an agricultural wonderland.  Instead, the settlement didn't happen.  The climate was not right for agriculture after all.  His wife didn't want to go anywhere near Maryhill.  All that is left, according to LHM, are a few buildings, a ghost town, and a facsimile of Stonehenge up the hill.  What was the point of that?

What was the point of the great civilizations whose remnants are crumbling under our feet over the millenia?  The Hittites and Babylonians.  The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians.  The Mayans, Aztecs and Inca.  The Cahokia Mound Builders, the Chacoans and the Mesa Verdeans.  The Mongols and the early Chinese empires.  What was the point of their civilizations if now all that is left is what can be saved through archeology?

Percy Bysshe Shelley summed up the hubris of pride and of civilization in a memorable way in what is one of my favorite poems of all time, Ozymandias.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Rosalind and Helen, a modern eclogue, with other poems
1819

I am but a bit player in these things, but I have been realizing that even my small contributions to our current civilization are but tiny blips that will burn briefly and then die.  Living in the present, it is easy for us to believe that things that we produce are timeless - our writings, our art, our music.  Yet only a fraction of the literature and art that has been produced through the millenia of human existence has survived.  How many wondrous works of art might there have been that we have missed?  How many amazing pieces of literature have been lost over time?  What lost symphonies or masterworks of song have had their notes briefly sound and then disappeared?

As I write these lines that will be saved electronically on the internet for you to read, I am conscious of a number of things that could happen.  They could be lost due to a catastrophe with the server.  I could run into dire straights and find that I cannot pay my bill to keep my account on this provider.  As we move forward in time, perhaps the provider might not survive and go out of business, taking my posts with it.  As we move forward through years, decades, centuries, how do we know that the internet will survive beyond a brief flowering?  How will we know that our civilization will survive - civilizations up to now, even those that seemed in the midst of their greatness to be guaranteed to last forever, eventually fall and die away.

So why do I, the Sam Hills, the architects of civilizations dream and create works that will eventually dissolve in the relentless march of universal time and movement?

I can only answer for myself.  I wite these posts because it pleases me.  I also write the occasional poem, make Facebook posts and dream of writing a book someday because it is my one little sound in the vast cacophony of the universe, my one word in the encyclopedia of creation, my one spark of energy to add to the immense energy of the wider cosmos.  Of course, I would love for my creations, for my small part to play in the ongoing history of humanity, to last and have some relevance.  But that is just my bit of hubris.  What I create may be relevant or not, but eventually my creations will disappear and my voice will fade.  Just like Maryhill, the great civilizations, and all our arts, literature and music will eventually follow Ozymandias and crumble forgotten into the infinite and unrelenting cosmological desert.  Other towns, civilizations, arts, literatures and musics will follow and in their turn disappear and be replaced.  And that's just fine, and just as it's meant to be.

Musical Interlude

I had a hard time picking this song.  I looked up music that might have something about Ozymandias, and though Jefferson Starship, the Sisters of Mercy, and Qntal all had songs with that name (and I am really partial to the Jefferson Starship song), I kept coming back to this song by Midnight Oil, even though it really has nothing to do with what I'm writing about.  I even went to songs about time's passage, and looked briefly at another song I like, Steely Dan's Black Friday.  But this kept popping back in my head.  So, if it's supposed to be in this post, it will be in this post.  And I think it can fit, because when all is said and done, isn't life and all our creations like a dream that will one day fade and end?  Enjoy Dreamworld!

If you want to know more about Maryhill

Maryhill Museum of Art
Maryhill State Park
Sam Hill's Stonehenge
Washington Stonehenge
Wikipedia: Maryhill

Next up: Roosevelt, Whitcomb and Paterson, Washington

Blue Highways: Stonehenge on the Columbia, Washington

Unfolding the Map

I feel like this post might ramble a bit, but I think LHM was really trying to make sense of time and space and put it all together in the context of his trip.  I don't think he expected to run into a replica of Stonehenge in southern Washington, and frankly, I didn't expect that we'd have such a thing either.  I mean, I know that there is Carhenge, made out of cars, and there is a henge made out of old refrigerators. But a full replica?  That's pretty cool.   To see where Stonehenge on the Columbia sits, see the map - be sure to zoom in with satellite mode to actually see it!

Book Quote

"A little before sunset, in the last long stretch of light, I saw on a great rounded hill hundreds of feet above the river a strange huddle of upright rocks.  It looked like Stonehenge.  When I got closer, I saw that it was Stonehenge - in perfect repair....

"....In truth, the circle of menhirs was a ferro-concretehenge, but it was as arresting on its hill as the real Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 9

Stonehenge on the Columbia River, near Maryhill, Washington. Photo by Gregg M. Erickson and in the public domain at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.

Stonehenge on the Columbia, Washington

There is an awful lot of self-reflection on the part of LHM in this chapter when he finds Stonehenge on the Columbia.  It affords us a good time to do some reflection as well.  I'll give a short synopsis of what LHM reflects upon.

When he finds this Stonehenge, quite unexpectedly, LHM is first struck by the convergence of past and present, which happened to him once before at the Navajo petroglyphs of Hickison Summit.  He remarks that this Stonehenge was built by a Sam Hill to commemorate the sacrifice of American doughboys in World War I, and how some graffiti on the monument gave it a kind of historical authenticity even though it was simply a mask of another more authentic monument far away.  He finds a Polaroid of a naked woman posing by some of the stones...her pendulous-breasted pose in the fading light hearkens to something more primal and elemental.

LHM then discourses on time.  He discusses how when we look at the stars that we look into the past, and speculates that when a telescope is built that can look back to the beginning of the universe, astronomers will be looking at the beginning of time and at the matter that now makes up the human race.  The original Stonehenge, he says, was an attempt at a time machine, one that could take the starlight - straight out of the past - and use it to predict future seasons and astronomical phenomena.  He begins to connect all that he sees around him in the universe and concludes that to escape his ego, that narrowness of now, and achieve concord or union with all things he has to reach outward - to embrace the past and the future.

I remember having this sense of things interconnecting in, of all places, New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, in a wing all its own, is the reconstructed Egyptian Temple of Dendur.  This temple was given to the United States by the Egyptian government because it was to be submerged by the waters of the Aswan High Dam and because the United States had assisted in rescuing other sites of archeological significance.  One thing that captured my attention when I saw it was the grafitti on the temple.  One in particular stood out - an inscription by a man in the 1800s who was from Brooklyn.  I can imagine that, in the middle of the African desert, the man who carved his name into the temple in the 1800s thought that it would remain there in perpetuity.  Instead, his name ended back up in New York City three generations later.  I laughed at the irony of it all, a cosmic irony that shows that nothing in our world is permanent and fixed even when we "build it to last forever."  I realize now that the places that I've carved my name, physically and in the virtual world, will also fade over time and that any remembrance of me might also end up being a delicious bit of irony if it survives at all.

I am also struck by how the original structure of Stonehenge, in England, was built as somethat that was functional.  We are still trying to decipher the exact function of Stonehenge, but theories include an astronomical observatory, a religious center, a place of healing and a place of burial.  However, nobody quite knows.  Regardless, it did perform a function, and in its longlasting mystery gained prominence as the last remnant of a millenia-long-dead and unknown culture.  In a way, it serves as a gravestone for that culture it represents, and its mystery is the epitaph.

On the other hand, the Stonehenge on the Columbia was built specifically as a memorial.  It has no other function.  There is no mystery.  It was never used as an observatory other than those who, like LHM, looked out at the stars and pondered the mystery of time and space from within its concentric circles.  It is not used to predict planting and harvesting seasons, or to foretell eclipses.  We have much better ways for doing those functions now.  Nobody brings themselves or their loved ones to Stonehenge on the Columbia for healing, unless somehow the hope of the founder in establishing the memorial somehow has some healing effects on long-standing and vanishing pain from the First World War.  Sam Hill, who built the monument, was mistakenly told that the original Stonehenge was used as a sacrificial site and he wanted to memorialize the young men of Klickitat County, Washington who were sacrificed to the god of war.

There are many places of past function that have turned into monuments.  Almost every monument we are left with once had function.  Yet, I have to wonder if the functional structures that we have built today, our modern buildings of concrete and steel, will one day become monuments.  Just as the pyramids rise above Egypt, will our Empire State Building and Sears Tower, or their remains, become tourist sites for tourists trying to capture a dead culture.  Just as we read about the Alexandria Lighthouse, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, will people in the future be awed when they learn about the Golden Gate Bridge, a monument to our civilization's current and maybe past greatness?

I've never heard of a monument turning back into something functional in other ways.  That was before I went to the Star Axis in New Mexico.  It is a work of art being built into the side of a mountain.  Aligned with the axis of the earth, it allows one to walk through past alignments of the Earth with the stars, and future alignments also.  Because the Earth wobbles on its axis, the North Star of the time of the Egyptian pyramids was a different star, Thuban, than our North Star today, Polaris, which is different from the North Star of 10,000 years from now, Vega.  I wonder if after our civilization is dead, and if there is a time when humanity enters a period not unlike the Dark Ages when knowledge is not widely disseminated as now but is perhaps kept alive by small groups devoted to learning, if this huge sculpture will become functional and serve a purpose other than as a sculptor's long-envisioned project?

If we look to the past, we can certainly take pride in our accomplishments as a civilization.  We see where we've come from and how we've progressed.  But we can also possibly see our future in the past.  Civilizations die, and are replaced by new civilizations, just as if we gaze into the cosmos, we look into the past and see our future in the stars that have been born and have died before our star and world existed.  We live in the now, and think it will never end, but all that seems permanent will fade.  As LHM says, our present will become our past and our future will become our present, and try as we might to fight it, change renders all impermanent.

Musical Interlude

One of the funniest scenes in the mock-documentary, or rockumentary, called This is Spinal Tap is the scene where the titular band performs their song Stonehenge.  I am putting the full version of the song here, but if you want to see the scene in the movie where the band's grandiose plans to have a giant version of Stonehenge lowered to the stage end up hilariously wrong, look at this YouTube video.

If you want to know more about Stonehenge on the Columbia

Columbia River Images: Stonehenge
Images of Columbia River Stonehenge
Legends of America: An American Stonehenge in Maryhill
Wikipedia: Maryhill Stonehenge

Next up: Maryhill, Washington

Blue Highways: Dallesport (The Dalles), Washington

Unfolding the Map

I'm going to apologize in advance, because I get political in this post.  I don't usually do that, but sometimes a convergence of what I'm reading and society happens.  As you know, this blog not only maps the places in book journeys, but is also a chronicle of what goes through my head as I read the literature.  So, unsolicited, you get my opinion, just as in every post.  Otherwise, The Dalles appears to be a beautiful area, and if you open the map, you can see where it is situated geographically.

Book Quote

"At The Dalles another dam - this one wedged between high walls of basalt.  Before the rapids here disappeared, Indians caught salmon for a couple of thousand years by spearing them in midair as the fish exploded leaps up the falls....

"....Natives found a new source of income in the falls when white traders came with boats to be portaged.  One fur trader complained, as did many early travelers, that the Indians were friendly but 'habitual thieves'; yet he paid fifty braves only a quid of tobacco each to carry his heavy boats a mile upriver."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 9

The Dalles Bridge between Dallesport, Washington and The Dalles, Oregon. Photo by "cacophony" at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Dallesport (The Dalles), Washington

I must admit, this will probably be somewhat of a politically-leaning post, because that is what is on my mind today after reading Leonard Pitts' column in my local paper yesterday and reading LHM's quote, above.

In the article, Pitts outlines just how absurd Alabama's new law against undocumented immigrants might be.  I hesitate to call them illegal because the violation of being undocumented is a civil violation, not a criminal one.  What has happened since Alabama passed its law?  According to Pitts, the state stands to lose $40 million in lost revenue because farms cannot find enough "legal" workers to harvest the fruits and vegetables.  People of Hispanic descent, at whom the law appears to be aimed, have left the state in droves whether documented or not.  Farmers complain that citizens and documented residents that they have hired quit after a few hours because they can't take the backbreaking work.  I read that citizens aren't taking these jobs even as farmers have been doubling wages trying to attract workers.

Of course, slamming immigrants and blaming them for the nation's problems has been an American tradition for a long time.  Many of the same people calling for border fences and increased armed forces on the border and other anti-immigration policies had ancestors who were shunned and derided as Wops, Chinks, Polacks, Micks, Krauts, and all the other groups that immigrated to the United States in the 1800s.  Those people were pushed into crowded slums lined with tenements.  Disease was rampant, jobs scarce.  Gangs and thuggery were rife.  Signs on businesses often said "(Your favorite ethnic group here) Need Not Apply."  One of our current presidential candidates, who has called for an electrified border fence that might kill illegal immigrants, most likely had ancestors that were forcibly brought to this country and enslaved, and then after gaining citizenship were shunned and segregated for the next 100 years.  Others might have had ancestors that escaped the concentration camps.

The difference now is that much of the immigration problem is not due directly to U.S. policies on immigration, but is part of wider and deeper economic and social forces put in place by the globalization of the world economy.  The equation is simple - laborers will move to where jobs are more plentiful and lucrative.  Unfortunately, while the borders for goods and services are being relaxed and dismantled, the borders that restrict the flow of labor are being intensified.  The United States borders Mexico, which is not necessarily a poor country because there is a lot of money there, but it is a country with a huge income gap between the small number of the richest and the huge number of the poorest.  There are many, many people in poverty.  So, they go where the jobs are.  Even if the jobs are crappy they pay more than working a farm or tending store in Mexico City.  Undocumented workers hope immediately that they can make enough to send back home and keep their families fed.  Maybe, they hope that one day they can become documented and move their families to the US, but that hope is becoming more remote.  In the mean time, they work and send the money home not knowing if they will be caught and deported.  Many today call that criminality, but that kind of devotion to trying to get ahead and taking care of family would be, under other circumstances, called "family values" and "initiative," by the same people.

LHM's quote reminds us that it is very easy to demonize people based on characteristics.  In LHM's quote, the white trappers were the invaders into Indian lands.  The Natives, seeing an opportunity for gain (which is in the good old capitalist tradition), were derided as cheats and thieves, and then cheated themselves by the trappers that so labeled them.  If anyone had the right to be angry, upset and fearful of this wave of different looking people coming across borders and taking valuable resources away from the longtime rightful owners, it was Native peoples.  As the quote illustrates, they had lived in a land of plenty and were industrious in how they used the land for its resources without overtaxing it.  They reached a balance with Nature and what they needed.  Who were the unwanted strangers then?  Lewis and Clark and the legions of European descendents that followed them.

I contrast that with today.  I tend to believe that the arguments over immigration are straw men, an attempt to demonize a group to mask other problems and mistakes.  Undocumented immigrants did not shove us into recession or push our visible unemployment rate over 9 percent.  Undocumented immigrants didn't invest in overvalued stocks, nor did they push real estate to overinflated prices until the bubble burst.  Undocumented immigrants didn't push our deficit into the trillions or contribute to a massive trade deficit or transfer our national debt over to the Chinese.  Undocumented immigrants didn't bankrupt our pension funds and underfund our schools.  Undocumented immigrants didn't steal jobs, they seem to have filled jobs at which US citizens turn up their nose.  And when they are gone, the economies of agricultural states will suffer and so will a lot of other people.

Do I pretend to know what to do about undocumented immigration?  A lot of smarter minds committed to finding answers have worked on it.  All I know is what I see and perceive.  To me, the furor over undocumented immigrants just doesn't add up.  We have so many problems to solve, it seems a waste of time to worry about people slipping across the border in an attempt to help their families survive.  I'd rather that U.S. citizens worry about how to fix our political problems, how to get people back to work in jobs they want, how to fix the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and most of all make this land a land of opportunity for everyone to be able to reach extraordinary achievement and good fortune.  I think we should all remember that in life, we all came into this world with nothing, and eventually we will migrate from it without being able to take anything with us.  In that, we're all just immigrants passing through creation and over time, we'll all be undocumented.

Musical Interlude

A song about immigration should have a variety of participants.  The Puerto Rico-based group Calle 13 has a song called Pal Norte (translated as "Heading North), which mixes Andean and traditional beats into the driving reggaeton style.  The song is a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of those who immigrate.

If you want to know more about Dallesport or The Dalles

A2ZGorgeInfo.com: Dallesport
Celilo Falls and The Dalles Dam
Center for Columbia River History: The Dalles Dam
Columbia River Images: The Dalles Bridge
The Dalles Chronicle (newspaper)
El.com: The Dalles
Historic The Dalles
Wikipedia: Celilo Falls
Wikipedia: The Dalles
Wikipedia: The Dalles Dam
Wilipedia: Dallesport

Next up: Stonehenge on the Columbia, Washington

Blue Highways: Klickitat, Washington

Unfolding the Map

We join William Least Heat-Moon for a barbecue with the three hang-gliders in Klickitat, Washington.  Hang-gliding is described as an addiction to risk, to put it all on the line, but to not push the envelope too far.  Sound familiarly like keeping things in balance?  I explore a little from my own experience why it seems that people from small towns might take more risks.  To locate Klickitat, fly to the map!

Book Quote

"Alba Bartholomew lived in Klickitat, a company town of seven hundred in the narrow vale of the Klickitat River.  His little frame house was like the others on the street except for the windsock blowing on the roof.  He worked at the St. Regis sawmill, where he ran a stacker.  It wasn't the most interesting of jobs.  The mill got much of its timber from the Yakima Reservation twelve miles north.  St. Regis was the reason for Klickitat, and when the Yakima's big ponderosa were gone, people feared the company would pull out and Klickitat would go the way of Liberty Bond.

"'....I think the real answer to why we fly is because it's addictive.  It's a buzz to put everything on the line.  Whenever we go up, we're subconsciously asking the most important question in the world - asking it real loud - 'Is this the day I die?'"

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 8

Klickitat, Washington welcome sign. Photo by a Klickitat resident and in the public domain on Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.

Klickitat, Washington

I'm making a little bit of a correlation in this post.  As I learned in my statistics classes, correlation is not causation.  However, one can make a few intriguing suggestions about how things may work through examining correlations.

My correlation, which I am highlighting with my pairing of the two quotes above, might or might not be apparent.  This chapter of Blue Highways is all about three guys who hang-glide.  LHM sees them, meets them, and is invited to the home of one in Klickitat to talk more about hang-gliding. I find it very interesting that LHM describes the town of Klickitat as small and with nothing much besides a dependency on a lumber mill which, if his words are any indication, may close down in some unknown but not too far off future.  (Note: the lumber mill has been closed since 1994)

Just a few paragraphs down the page, one of the hang-gliding guys talks about flying as an addiction, and the thrill of risking oneself to the point of questioning whether the risk will be the last action one ever takes.

It all makes me wonder whether there is truly a correlation between two things exemplified in these paragraphs.  Might living in a small, out of the way, dependent town, lead one to be more open to risk?

Now wait a minute, you might say.  Small towns are often a bastion of conservative values.  People in small towns may live there because there is less risk.  There is often less crime, for instance, and the closeness of small communities often shield its members from other types of risk.  I wouldn't disagree.  After all, I lived in a small town that was remarkably free of issues that plagued more populated areas.

But I wouldn't necessarily agree either.  In my small town, there was little crime, but there also were people who we considered "characters" who might have been locked up in other places.  We didn't have gangs, but we did have families with reputations as fighters who'd just as soon hit you as look at you.

I've argued before, however, that as peaceful, friendly, folksy and pastoral small towns can seem and feel, they often have a dark and sometimes violent undercurrent that is less apparent than it might be in cities.  Small towns can be dark, dysfunctional places, where alcoholism, drugs, and abuse of the emotional, physical and sexual varieties are revealed if someone cares to pull back the curtains hiding them.  I wouldn't trade my small town childhood for anything, because it taught me about the best and the worst that humanity offered.

In isolated small communities, is it any wonder that someone might find risk and danger compelling?  One interesting fact that may support my argument is that small towns and rural areas are overrepresented in the US military.  In 2005, the Heritage Foundation examined U.S. Census data and found that rural areas are overrepresented in the military as compared to urban areas.  While there are most likely many factors that contribute to this statistic, including that rural areas tend to be poorer with less opportunities for employment of young people than urban areas and that there is a higher percentage of conservative-minded people who may view military service in a patriotic sense, I also think that a desire to undertake risk as a way to break free of convention might serve as an additional motivating factor.  The desires that drive young people in cities to gather at Occupy protests currently around the country, to assert themselves in a cause that they can rally around and believe in with like minded people in a structured way, may also come from the same psychological place that encourages young people in rural areas to join the military and do service.  Both choices offer a set of risks and rewards.

When I lived in a rural area, there always seemed to be a number of young people who were always willing to risk.  You probably find the same thing in cities but in small towns it stands out a lot more.  These were kids who were on the forefront of experimenting with drugs, alcohol and sex.  Of course, a lot of us did those things, but small town kids always seemed to take it one step farther.  Some of them paid dearly for their risk-taking.  Alcohol maimed and took the lives of more than one young man and woman when it was mixed with driving.  Somehow, rural areas the loss of someone young is extremely tragic because it is so noticeable, so out in the open, and the grief of parents is on display and not lost or buried in a newspaper column in the back page - it is most likely going to be on the front page of the local paper.

Despite the tragedies, we teens in small towns still too risks.  Why?  Because there was little to do in a small town on the Northern California coast, just as there was little to do after hours in a midwestern plains town, or a town in the South, or a small mountain town.  We took risks because we were young, we wanted to impress the girls/boys, and we wanted to feel like we were in control of our own destinies.  We wanted to feel like we were making our own decisions, even if they were bad decisions.

Today, as an adult of 47, I understand better the idea of risk and reward.  I could, if I wanted to, take hang-gliding lessons which would be a somewhat dangerous but understandable way of taking a risk.  I could do a parachute jump.  I could get a motorcycle to ride the open road or devote my time to mountain climbing or spelunking.  All of these are dangerous but they are considered hobbies that involve an adult's choice.  In those activities, I might still catch a little of the thrill I got by stepping outside the boundaries imposed on me as a teenager.  After all, when all is said and done, humans don't really belong in the sky any more than they belong on a speeding piece of open machinery on an asphalt road or rapelling down into the bowels of the earth.  We do it to push the envelope, to test our limits.  No matter what, we are always like children in that very few of us can ever leave anything just as it is and be content.

Musical Interlude

What's the opposite of taking risks?  Why, it's never doing anything.  As is usual, we find in LHM's travels and quotes that life is a balance, this time between risk and safety.  It's neither good to be a total risk taker.  But, as the Barenaked Ladies point out in their song Never Do Anything, neither is it healthy to never risk nor accomplish anything.

If you want to know more about Klickitat

Klickitat Horizons Community Blog
Klickitat Mineral Springs
Wikipedia: Klickitat

Next up: Dallesport, Washington