Blue Highways: Klamath Falls, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

We cross out of California and into another state, our eighteenth if you're keeping track.  I revisit an old theme about state of mind, particularly the state of being alone.  Go to the map to see where we are, and enjoy some alone time reading this post!

Book Quote

"...then crossed into Oregon, where the Cascades to the west blocked a froth of storm clouds; but for the mountains, I would have been in rain again. A town of only fifteen thousand somehow spread across the entire bottom of a long valley; when I saw the reach of Klamath Falls, I kept going."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 1

Downtown Klamath Falls, Oregon. Photo at the Rowing and Sculling website. Click on photo to go to site.

Klamath Falls, Oregon

There is something very poignant when LHM sees the lights of a small city in Oregon and decides to keep going.  In the long, lonely drive across America that he has completed so far, where he has spent time mostly with himself in Ghost Dancing, I can imagine being a little shy of people.  After all, being alone is not a bad thing.  Alone time, especially for certain people (and I count myself one of them) is a way to recharge one's mental and emotional batteries.  For introverts, just being around a lot of people and activity is work.  It takes emotional energy that can be draining.  Those with the extraversion trait seem to get their energy around other people, and find being alone difficult.

I'm not sure what LHM is like in real life.  Perhaps he is an extravert, and therefore given the circumstance of losing his job and losing his romantic partner, he is in a time where he is simply more inclined to be by himself.  Or perhaps he is an introvert, and this is his way of recharging and healing.

As an introvert, I have been thinking about these types of questions.  I am married to an extravert.  My wife enjoys people and putting herself into the thick society and all its events.  For many, many years I thought that my duty as a husband was to go along, even when I didn't feel like it.  As a result, I found myself getting more unhappy and irritable.  We began to fight more at events as she mingled and I, tired and not happy about being there, seethed in the corner.  It became assumed that I would go to every event and happening, and I bought into the assumptions.

I also snatched at any time alone.  Hiking, driving long distances, even my year-long stint as a visiting professor in Lubbock where I lived alone during the week and then commuted back to my wife in Albuquerque on weekends, were like little oases of sanity to me.  I found myself happier after getting some time to be alone, to be with myself.

Being alone isn't all wonderful.  I must say that I have a very love-hate relationship with being alone.  One thing about being alone is that eventually it makes you reflect on your life, and makes you confront your own inner demons.  I have a few of them, some due to family circumstances in my youth I couldn't control, some due to my own choices and mostly from a negative self-image.  As an introvert, this was difficult because it forced me, even though I had fears of being alone, into social situations that in high doses was difficult for me to maintain. In other words, I had to go to events and activities to stay away from self-loathing thoughts, yet doing too many of those was not the answer for me.

Thankfully, I'm getting past this.  A commitment to a new form of therapy, somatic transformation therapy, has helped.  I am also making a commitment to say what I want and need, especially my need to take time for myself.  This includes allowing myself to be alone.  The demons?  They're still around but save for a couple that pop up regularly, their voices are getting more muted and I can ignore them better than before.  In fact, doing these little essays around Blue Highways has been part of that process.

I want to make a distinction between being alone and being lonely.  Being alone is a choice that one can make.  LHM chooses to remove himself from his circle in Missouri to travel alone around the country.  People can choose remove themselves for a while from the society of people.  However, loneliness is not a choice, it is a feeling.  One can be lonely even in the midst a crowd.  I've felt loneliness as well, and it's never a good feeling.  Loneliness is a lack of connection with others, and not necessarily by conscious choice.  While we all feel lonely sometimes, a persistent and chronic feeling of loneliness can lead to self-destructive thoughts and behaviors.  I'm never happy when I'm feeling lonely, whereas it is possible for me to be happy when alone.

I worry, however, about our ability to get away and be alone.  I think that one can become too engaged.  We may be social animals, but we also need time to ourselves, just like we need to sleep and dream.  Being by ourselves allows us to reflect upon our lives and what's important, and make the adjustments in our attitudes that we need to navigate a life that often throws us surprises.  In a world with a growing population, where more people are moving to cities and people are becoming more and more engaged socially via computers and communication, can we ever truly be alone again?  I walk around with my smart phone, which is always connected to the internet, and I am always within beck and call of someone.  It's becoming harder and harder to disconnect, and harder to find places where one can be truly alone for any length of time.  As more people seek ways to get away, national and state parks and campgrounds are becoming utilized by growing numbers of people.  Even going for a long drive to get away is getting more difficult, as our roads become more and more crowded.  Places that 20 to 30 years ago hardly had any cars now suffer traffic jams.

It's only going to get worse with population growth and as people crowd together in cities by choice or by necessity.  Hopefully, it won't result in a dysfunctional and dystopian society (though some may argue that we are at that point already).  I would like to think that as we become more crowded together, people might actually begin to appreciate their time in solitude.  I hope that such appreciation becomes a means of valuing society, not turning away from it.  Personally, when I flee the lights, I want my flight to be temporary, so that I can come back to society putting a greater value on myself and on others.

Musical Interlude

This song, from the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods, is ultimately about being alone, loneliness, and the companions we sometimes don't realize we have.  The song often brings a tear to my eye when I hear it, and this is an especially poignant version sung by the incomparable Bernadette Peters.

If you want to know more about Klamath Falls

City of Klamath Falls
Discover Klamath
Klamath Falls Herald and News (newspaper)
Oregon.com: Klamath Falls
Wikipedia: Klamath Falls
Zimbio.com: Klamath Falls (blog)

Next up:  Fort Klamath, Oregon

Blue Highways: Frenchman, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapI once saw a "Demotivators" poster that had a picture of an isolated tree on an icy landscape.  The caption read "Just when you think you are not alone, you are alone.  So very alone."  In the middle of the vast desolation of the Nevada desert, one can be forgiven for feeling that way if they have to stop.  It just depends on our relationship with solitude and loneliness.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) stops in Frenchman, Nevada and we consider what being alone in such a place might mean.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to virtually share this space with us.

Book Quote

"Frenchman, Nevada, population four, sat on the edge of a U.S. Navy bombing range.  A if that weren't enough, it was also on a fault zone that still wobbled the seismographic instruments around.

"Frenchman appeared on my map as a town, and, in the desert, it probably was a town, consisting as it did of a cafe-bar-filling station, four-unit motel, trailer, and water tower all huddled on an expanse of dry lakebed mudflats cracked into a crazed jigsaw puzzle of alkali hardpan.  In a state abounding with uninhabitable places, Frenchman excelled.  Without vegetation, suffering from unrelenting wind and extremes of temperature, no source of food or supplies closer than thirty-six miles, no medical care other than Band-Aids and Mercurochrome, frequently rattled by bombs and earthquakes, Frenchman somehow survived on a single source of income: highway travelers."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 9

The desert and bombing range near Frenchman, Nevada. Photo by Devon Blunden on Panoramio. Click on photo to go to site.Frenchman, Nevada

I can't imagine living in the middle of the Nevada desert, in a town the population of four.  I'm a small-town boy, from a town of around 5,000 when I was growing up there, and over my lifetime I've had to come to grips with living in cities.  Even now, there are things that I will never get accustomed to living in populated areas.  Like ground light blocking out the stars.  When I grew up, the stars were prominent and brilliant when there was no cloud cover.  I should have paid more attention when I was a kid, but I didn't know that one day, I would live in a places where, because of ground light, the number of visible stars would be severely reduced.

I'll also never become quite accustomed to the ever-present sounds of human activity in a city.  At night, things get more quiet but never silent.  There is always traffic on the main arterial street a couple of blocks away.  There is always the distant hum of the freeway.  In the early morning, the airport wakes up and military and civilian plane, helicopter and jet engines rev up.  Of course, during the day, the activity ratchets up to a background hum that is constantly present.

In cities, people also contribute to the lack of quiet.  During the day, there are people everywhere moving and doing.  Noise accompanies their activities, whether it's building or refurbishing houses, firing up the old truck to work on the engine, driving by, talking to a neighbor, talking on a cell phone, talking to a dog, talking talking talking...  At night, though the hubbub dies down some, there is still noise.  The low murmur punctuated by laughter at a neighbor's party.  A dog that barks at a cat which then causes the other dogs of the neighborhood to rise up in a canine racket.  Late at night, gunshots that ring out in rapid succession a couple of miles away.

In other words, the city concentrates the human drama in one metropolitan setting.  Sub-dramas take place neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, each chronicling happiness, joy, ecstasy, fear, pain, sorrow, tragedy.  In other word, the human condition on a grand scale.

Now, imagine that you are in a community of four people out in the middle of nowhere.  Of course, you will be able to see stars because there is no ground light to interfere with your enjoyment of the celestial tapestry.  The sounds of human activity will be limited to the people who are there.  In that case, it's only four people, so the sounds will be less common, and on that day or evening you want to get away, you can just walk a while and you'll be surrounded with silence that is perhaps broken only by yourself, or the breeze or perhaps a small animal.

And that's the other side of the coin.  For all of those things, you give up human community.  You give up knowing what other people think about this or that, or how they spent their day, or what they want or desire out of life.  Myself, while I like to be alone, I would think that such an existence would not only entail being alone but also leave one lonely.  Being alone is something everyone wants once in a while.  It is the physical reality of being by oneself.  Loneliness is much more of an emotional state.  It is feeling disconnected from others, even if one is near or among people.  The two states are linked.  If one is alone, one can always find others if one wants.  If one is alone for too long, however, it can lead to loneliness.

Think about it for just a minute.  Think about being under the vast sky, in the midst of the vast earth.  You feel like the only person for miles.  For a while, that might be desired.  You are not surrounded by the busy-ness of everyday human life.  But after some time, you might want to find a person, someone to talk with.  The sky and the wind and meager plants and the occasional animals are fine companions, but they cannot offer advice or opinion or just friendly voice.  People are social.  We need other people, even if it is for short bursts of time.

I don't know how the people of Frenchman, Nevada battle loneliness, unless they snatch what they need from the occasional passing cars on Highway 50.  It still seems like a pretty lonely existence to me.  Or maybe, the sounds of military aircraft utilizing the bombing range remind them that they are still a part of a human community, even if they are just a remote outpost on the edge of the human existence.  When I passed through that area in 2010, the immensity of the landscape and the realization that I was just a blot on something much bigger and larger than me was humbling.  I was, at the time, in a lonely place in my heart, even with my wife by my side.  Spending too much time in the Nevada desert would probably not have helped me, and may have exacerbated my loneliness.  I breathed a little easier when we hit larger towns and other signs of human habitation.

Perhaps I should idolize the people of Frenchman that LHM describes and interviews in Blue Highways, and others who live like them.  Much of my latest work to better myself has been to learn how to live without the clutter and the detritus that separates me from those parts of my psyche that make me uncomfortable, that are scary, and that are hard to face. If the people of Frenchman have learned to live alone, and still be comfortable in their solitude and not succumb to loneliness, perhaps they can be a model for me.  Perhaps they are like the ascetic desert monks, or those hermits of all cultures who separate themselves from people yet hold keys of wisdom for all.  Perhaps they can point me toward a place where I can be engaged with the world around me without running from the person within me.

Musical Interlude

I am not a person who knows a lot about John Lennon's music, partly because I came into my musical own during the late 70s and hadn't had the exposure to The Beatles because I had to figure out my own musical tastes.  Now that I'm older and can go back to what I've missed, I have become more appreciative of the music of Lennon.  Isolation fits the mood of this post, especially its counterpoint of being alone in a world that is "a little town."

If you want to know more about Frenchman

There's really nothing about Frenchman.  I've seen a website that says that Frenchman is not a town anymore, but has been designated a site.

Here's a kitchsy thing that was, until December of 2010, near Frenchman that I missed and dearly wished I'd seen, the Tree of Shoes.  But now, it's gone too.

The Tree of Shoes

Next up:  Sand Mountain, Nevada