I am in Sandy, Oregon, at the base of Mt. Hood, and my tire is blown out. I’m waiting for the tow truck guy to help me change it, because I am inept and Subaru offers this service for free. It was raining when I pulled over, but now it is snowing, and the sky, while darker, is laced and the thing about snow is it makes me look up. Rain, I just keep my head down. But snow drifts when it falls and stalls air and the moments it carries, and if I watch, I slow a bit, too, breathe for a second or two.
The guy’s a little surly when he arrives. Grumpy. He’s had trouble finding me, I’d left my phone in the car while standing outside, missed his calls. And while I did give exact coordinates to the dispatcher, they apparently didn’t get relayed to him. He won’t look me in the eye and lectures me about how he can’t change a tire if he doesn’t know where I am. Well, he’s got a point there. I apologize, thank him, apologize some more. In about 30 seconds he has my spare on, stands up, wipes his hands on his jeans.
“You don’t have far to go, yeah?”
I tell him I actually have to somehow make it on this spare to Portland.
“You won’t make it.”
“I have to make it.”
“Well, you won’t. Tire’ll blow out on the freeway. You’re too far from home. These things overheat and aren’t designed to go that far.”
I shrug. We just look at each other for a couple seconds. We both know we’re sort of remote and it’s Sunday, the day after Christmas, and tire stores are all shut down.
“I’ll just start driving and see what happens,” I say.
He shakes his head.
Then his face suddenly just softens, he narrows his eyes and does a little half grin.
“Okay, then. Adventure. You know the back roads?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, again. I’ll make you a map. Don’t go over 35 all the way home. You might be able to make it this way.”
He climbs up in his cab and rips out paper from a yellow legal pad. He draws lines, and Xs, and labels roads and turns and roadmarks, like the John Deere tractor shop where I’ll turn right.
“Call if you get lost, I’ll set you straight,” he says from his window as he pulls away.
It’s mid-afternoon and the light is grey and dense and washes evenly over the sky, between trees. I’ve never been on these roads, up and down these hills. Tree farms quilt the landscape, a country market and brick tavern seem to appear every few miles. The occasional school. Farm houses set back from the road stream chimney smoke that mirrors the streaks of darkening impending rain held in the clouds. There is uninterrupted horizon out here, like at the coast when looking out across the ocean to some sort of other side, not meant to be seen, but wondered about, considered.
I haven’t travelled this slowly for so many hours (and it does indeed take hours to get home at this pace) since the Sunday drives I think about for the first time in probably 30 years. My dad would come to the house and pick us up. Even though they weren’t really together, my mom would sit in the front seat, and my sister and I would slide along the leather bench of the station wagon in the back. My mom always wanted to go out of the city, same kinds of rural roads as the ones I travelled today. She’d always ask my dad to drive really slowly so she could look at the horses and fencelines, wonder about the age of the farm houses. In the summer there would be roadside stands, and we’d stop and get corn, peaches. She always talked about someday moving to the country, selling the house in the suburbs, living on a few acres. We could ride horses together, she and I. We could garden, she’d teach me to can. But the somedays folded into the todays and she still has the house I grew up in, though she’s not there much anymore, she’s not anywhere anymore.
I make it home. I pull into my driveway, sit there a moment, watch the picture of this piece of world out my windshield blur as the rain hits and stays. I send my mapmaker friend a message, telling him the tire held, thanking him for his map, which I kept on my lap the whole way. I walk up the steps to my house. It’s warm inside, the kids and dog greet me with a clamor down the stairs.
I collect geography dictionaries and books. I love them. My favorite is from 1848, the title of which reads exactly: Mitchell’s Ancient Geography, designed for Academies, Schools, and Families, A System of Classical and Sacred Geography, Embellished with Engravings of Remarkable Events, Views of Ancient Cities, and Various Interesting Antique Remains, Together with an Ancient Atlas, Containing Maps Illustrating The Work.
Kid you not.
Some guy named Henry Hickok carefully pencilled his name, and the date 1849, on the front page. I wonder who he was, why he had this book, if he ran his finger under the same lines I do.
It’s a funny book. There’s a chapter called, “Greece, Italy, etc.” (etc.??) and the first line in chapter 20, “Asia, etc.” is, “The term Asia, as now understood, was not used by the inspired writers.” Which made me laugh out loud the first time I read it. And a very large portion of the book is questions, “How many years have elapsed since the Creation? Since the Deluge? Since the building of the Tower of Babel? Where was Sicyon? Sidon?”
In The Nature of Geography, another of my favorite finds, published in 1939, the author writes, “It is the undemonstrated assumption that the landscape–the visible surface–is more fundamental to the total complex of an area than, say, the invisible climate, or the houses are more fundamental than the people who build them.”
Or the map more significant than the way one stranger gets another to home–the visible and invisible kind, through dormant orchards, winding roads, memory, winter sky.
Last week, one of my dearest friends moved to China. With a young son in tow and hopscotching flights, it would be an exhausting journey and a week or so before I’d hear news of her arrival. When I do, she sends a lengthy missive in list form of the happenings and findings in her first few days into a transplanted life (there is no tub, she is heading to the flea market to look for a very large pot to bathe in, the job she was promised is about 10 hours a week more than originally discussed…). But the very first point she writes is the following:
Luoyang is amazing despite the fact that flowerbeds and parks are dug up for new growth, I can’t understand a damn thing anyone’s saying and have a secret fear I never will, the layer of smog hangs in the sky and there is no sun, no stars, no other place to look to.
My friend lived in the Pacific Northwest for years, and grew up in Alaska. She’s seen a lot of sky, felt a lot of grass on the scale of Walt Whitman beneath her feet. And she notices when sky and soil are missing. Now in the world’s most populous country, geography is enveloped by the tangible needs of daily human life–buildings to sleep and work in, pollution-generating cars to transport to and from the coordinates of work and home and errands, product generation for consumption.
We are aware of the precarious state of the planet’s health. Entire polital campaigns are slanted to this angle, environmental policies debated in governments worldwide, industry and considerable funds designated toward creating and marketing “environmentally-friendly” automobiles, light bulbs, detergent. Yet, sometimes we still can’t see the sky in Los Angeles, in Luoyang, sometimes even on murky summer days in Portland. And why do we need to?
I don’t know why others hike or camp, take walks, sit outside on their lunch hour–I can only speak for myself. My son, daughter, and I often take our dog out around dusk. We are held by the light as it changes, and the darkening occurs softly, and without our noticing. And it is often at this time of day that color blooms across the arc of earth, and cobalt will singe with rose before giving in to black. It is a contest to see who can find the first star of the night, and when one of us calls out and points up, we stop walking and make a wish. It is the only time it occurs to me–in my solidly adult life of bill-paying, meal-fixing, laundry-cleaning–to stop and stand exactly where I am, to pause a thought, to wish. And it is because the sky asks.
One evening when my daughter was younger, she wondered what made the sky spill with paint, how the color arrived, and why it changed and disappeared. I use words like “electromagnetic spectrum,” and “atmosphere,” “dust particles,” “gas molecules,” “water droplets….” Violet is the shortest wavelength, red the longest. Colors are continuously radiated and absorbed, deflected, reflected. Seen. Blue scatters across the sky, at the horizon it is a lighter shade because it is farther away. At dusk because there is less light to carry the shorter-wavelength colors like blues and greens to our eyes, the longer-wavelength colors can sustain, reach further like the fingers of an outstretched hand. So we look up and wait, down on earth, for the colors of a particular day to reveal themselves.
British physicist Philip Gibbs wrote, “It may not be a coincidence that our vision is adjusted to see the sky as a pure hue. We have evolved to fit in with our environment; and the ability to separate natural colours most clearly is probably a survival advantage.” The Physics and Relativity FAQ, 1997. Web. 23 October 2010.
Yesterday my son lay stock still in the bore of an MRI machine. A mirror was positioned in the tunnel so that he could see me sitting at the foot of the flatbed. We both had to be stock-still for an hour. My view consisted of his still-chubby toes (he’d removed his socks prior, trying to eliminate everything that could possibly cause an itch) and above the machine, high on the wall near the ceiling, was a small window, about one and half feet by two. Much more difficult than his previous MRI two years ago, partly because he had a headache going into it, this time midway through they needed to inject him with contrasting fluid. He has historically thin-walled veins that collapse easily, so finding a line in was tricky, took attempts on both arms by two different people, bruised him up, and just plain hurt. He never made a noise, but while they were sticking him with needles he just lay there and the tears quietly rolled down.
I wiped them and squeezed his hand, and after they pushed him back in the bore to complete the rest of the scans, and I sat back at my post in front of his toes, I looked up at that window for the remaining 30 minutes, at the square of sky that wasn’t going anywhere, either. The blue was dense and static, the visual timbre of a resonant note, an oboe perhaps. Several tree branches extended into the frame, the remaining leaves the color of sparks. Clouds interrupted and hung. A breeze pushed around the branches, and while time and our bodies were frozen inside that room, hinged on necessary stillness, the movement outside continued on, the branches conducting the sky. I could watch all this through the small rectangle of glass, and the blue it contained, the bit of tree, the clouds, focus my thoughts away from my son’s tears, away from the new prick marks on the inside of his arm, removed from the clanging, banging sounds of the machine to what was waiting on the other side of the window. I had someplace else to look.
Much of the world is shrouded in the tediousness of smog. And in those places, eyes travel upwards and vision with the capacity to continue on and on, to absorb every shade and hue, is blocked. The call and response betwen physics and geography is unwitnessable.
The Environmental Protection Agency reported air pollution and visibility impact on the skies over our country’s national parks. In eastern parks, average visual range has decreased from 90 miles to 15-25 miles. In the West, visual range has decreased from 140 miles to 35-90 miles.
But, due to continued air pollution, we see less and less of the ground on which we stand, of the sky that dangles the earth. And in turn, there is less context, less information for orienting our complicated, human selves. Those of us here in the West have it better than most, the typical visual range is about 60 – 90 miles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But that’s only half of what it would be without haze. In most of the rest of the U.S., the typical visual range is only 15 – 30 miles, about one-third of the visual range under natural conditions.
A University of Maryland team of researchers recently compiled data of sky visibility measurements taken from 1973 – 2007 at 3,250 meteorological stations around the world. Increased airborne pollution in the atmosphere blocks solar radiation from the earth’s surface, and has caused significant “global dimming.” Science Daily, 2009. Web. 24 October 2010.
And in this continual drought of light we keep trying to verify where we are, even if it means squinting here and there, or re-creating sky in whatever ways we’re able. One of my favorite photographs of my children was taken years ago on a rainy Portland winter day. They’re toddlers, over-sized sheets of paper are clipped to each of their little easels, empty yogurt cups filled with paint are lined up on the table. They each hold brushes, and are standing in their underwear with huge grins pasted across their faces. The paper remains white. Their bodies, however, are covered with every color of dawn, day, and dusk. They’ve painted each other’s backs, too. I remember Sophie saying, “Look, Mama! We’re painting the sky on our tummies!”
The sky is not maneuverable by statistics; and data of diminishing brightness and color informs of tangible implications of visibility impact, but it cannot explore or implicate the emotional tethers created when one’s head is thrown back and for a second or two, we just look. In those moments, a day is contained with clouds, or color, with one thing, perhaps the only thing, that remains steadily and constantly there.
The tide is way out, past the dock. Algae and seaweed cling to the slick wooden sides, to the mud, to the barnacled oysters that curtain the square of land in front of our cabin, to the buoy ropes, now exposed. My sister Annie and I, in canvas tennis shoes to protect our feet, wobble across sharp shells, try avoiding stepping on tiny purple shore crabs that dart under and around anything in their path, carry plastic buckets and walk further out to where the sea waits to return. Over night the water of Hood Canal pulled back farther than it would in two months. We are walking on the bottom of the sea. Orange starfish drape like outstretched fingers over oysters and mussels, some spanning a foot or so in diameter; purple sea cucumbers and pale green anenomes spread across rocks; empty Dungeness shells lay scattered along with blush-red Spot Shrimp casings. Sometimes at low tide, the ground is so densely blanketed with creatures, it is next to impossible to walk.
We fill our buckets, then sit cross-legged on the dock (that in a few hours will be floating in Puget Sound, a destination for swimming races from the cabin deck), and examine the invertebrates and compare sizes of limpets before returning them to where they were found. Occasionally we’ll sit there so long the tide will move in and with it Shiner Surfperch, silvery glints skirting the dock sides. We have only to lay on our stomachs and lean over the edge, dip our buckets in the water, thick with the palm-sized fish and easily catch at least a couple.
Once, a particularly fat perch swam around in our bucket. I reached in and pulled it out, held it between my two cupped hands, squinted and ran my thumb along its tarnished silver and yellow scales. Suddenly my sister hooted, “Babies!” And sure enough, squirting out from its underside were fully-intact centimeter-sized newborns. I recall something like 15 or 20 of them threading around and around the bucket. Annie and I scraped algae from the dock side with our fingernails and floated bits to feed the tiny fish. We named each of them before tipping the bucket and sending them back into the sea.
This is a memory. It stretches back 30 years. A few months ago, in August and September of 2010, low oxygen levels in Hood Canal resulted in thousands of dead fish and prawns piling up on the shorelines. And this isn’t an anomaly–in 2003 and 2006 staggering numbers of suffocated fish washed up on the rocky Washington beaches (Welch). The smell. The view, the stillness, the expanse of grey on grey.
It’s an election year, and the environment is a point of discussion. The newly-formed Tea Party appears to be a player. Outspoken and visible, they have raised the timbre of the conservative voice. Norman Dennison, founder of the Corydon Tea Party recently stated, “I read my Bible. He made this earth for us to utilize” (Broder A1). To a statement like this, does one respond to conscience? To aesthetic? To logic? The ethos, logos, pathos of any argument comes down to semantics. Or perhaps riddles: if the earth is used up, is there anything left to utilize?
The data is hard. And it is not just reflecting dropping numbers of water-dwelling creatures in the region. Concentrations of PCBs are elevated to “levels of concern” in eggs collected from bald eagle nests, and these environmental contaminants are considered contributing factors in reproductive failures in these Hood Canal birds (Mahaffy).
Each morning my dad would lower the crab pot and a few hours later he’d don rubber gloves and draw up the rope. Usually full of crab, he’d carefully pry apart the pinchers gripping the netting and turn the crab over on its back to check if female or male. The males over 6.25 inches across the shell would be tossed in a bucket, the rest returned to the sea. My dad would throw them over the side of the boat, and I’d watch them slow-motion-sway with the movement of the water, gently sink until they disappeared from view, a soft descent so remarkably different from their scuttle and scurry on the floor of the boat, the clipped snap-snap of their claws, all movements precise and quick, but in these moments they drifted like dandelion seed pods when blown off a palm with a wish. Back on land, my dad would crack the shells and clean the crabs, my mom would prepare her huge stainless steel boiler, and for meals we’d have broiled open-faced crab sandwiches, dripping with mayonnaise and parmesan cheese. My sister and I would collect oysters layering the stony beachfront like October leaves in a park, and then throw them against the concrete foundation slab to break the shells, otherwise pliers, a shucking knife, brute strength, and heavy gloves were needed to protect from the sharp barnacles while prying and pulling apart to harvest the slippery insides for breading and frying.
Wild Pacific oysters on Washington’s coast haven’t reproduced in six seasons. Fossil fuel emissions specifically and global warming generally are linked to ocean chemistry changes responsible for killing the shellfish (Welch). The presence of paralytic shellfish toxins forced the closure of shellfish harvesting in Hood Canal by the Kitsap County health department. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce conducted extensive research on algal blooms and toxicity levels, the findings of which prompted the closure of razor clam and Dungeness crab fisheries (Magnien).
If looking straight out from the deck of the cabin my parents rented each summer the still-snow-capped Olympic Mountains would hold back the sky and reach like arms around the peninsula. This was my “hill,” so to speak. The mountain outline was visible at night, it cocooned the bay from the wide world on the other side, it loomed, was ever-present and so much bigger than I, then and now. Its forested hillsides resonated green across the water, the crags cut into the blue. On early mornings dawn fog buffed the edges but didn’t soften the fact that day, night, rain, gloom, sun, mist, parents fighting throughout every vacation, the inevitable divorce–those mountains distinguished themselves as some sort of evidence that on this earth, some pieces of one’s landscape stay intact, hold their ground, are inexplicably, simply, beautifully there.
“No one will miss a hill or two,” said Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican Senate and Tea Party candidate (Rand). Hood Canal is a memory. It’s mine, it holds no relevance whatsoever to anyone reading this, politicians or otherswise. This was a piece of geography, a sliver of this planet that held my eyes and folded itself into my mind to carry forward, to a time of now when my landscape is often obscured by the walls of my home or office or hospital as I raise children, earn money, deal with my son’s medical issues. My parents were married, my sister and I got along, my hair wasn’t gray. There were fish in the Sound, oysters on the beach, crab in the traps, birds overhead. So why should anyone care?
At high tide the Sound would come all the way up to the foundation and from the overhanging deck we’d jump. Buoyed by the salt, we’d tread water and watch for seals to bob their heads up, disappear, and re-appear in another corner of the bay.
Annie and I would dare eachother to pet the sea cucumbers.
I’d put tiny one-inch shore crabs on her belly when she was sunbathing.
History is an accumulation of memories. The details vary for every single one of us, but we’re still composites of what we remember, of what we’ve seen and experienced.
Generations since mine, on summer vacations up at Puget Sound don’t see what I saw. The mountains are still there, and I imagine on summer dusks they still glow off the sky and reflect on the water like they always did. But the rest is diminished, the pictures in the memory banks of people I’ll never meet are less punctuated with details, with color, with tastes, and textures.
What am I persuading? To care. About minutae baby perch squirting into some wide-eyed kid’s hands; about lavender sky over mountains; about oysters; about family; about limpet shell trading on a small, square wooden dock in the middle of some inland water mass in western Washington. About memory, because we are all responsible for each other’s memories. Whether specifics are shared or not, we all play a hand in allowing for experience by use or disuse of this world we inhabit. Our eyes see particular hills, and then we tell each other or ourselves the stories of those particular hills, over and over. This call and response keeps us tethered–to ourselves, to our history to the ground we walk across– and is survival by story.
And the less of this earth that remains, the fewer the stories. And the fewer the stories, the less reason to listen. And the less reason to listen, the less reason to care–about the land, about each other, about ourselves. No one will miss a hill or two? Yes, actually they will. Because someone sat on that hill, any hill, anywhere, had a picnic on that hill, or someone, anyone, looked out their window every morning at that hill and that picture of grass and trees kept them at their desks all day earning money feeding an economy that funds this country, or some ant crawls in line with an uncountable number of other ants up and down that hill, doing what needs to be done to keep the food chain linked together. It all matters.
Hood Canal was a 3-hour car-ride from our home and I’d often fall asleep leaning against the backseat window on the way up. Annie would nudge my shoulder when we turned into the dirt road that led to the cabin in the cove. Before even opening my eyes I’d know we were close by the musty thickening of air from salt rising off the water, off the warming oyster shells on the beach mingling with the breezes blown down from the Olympic National Forest. Evolution implies forward momentum, but the death that fills these waters I used to swim in is not vibrant–it is brooding and lonely. Time passing implies change of some sort, it’s essential, and I would not expect Puget Sound to remain intact over the 30 years since my last visit. Preservation of imagery and impression is the function of memory. But when the sea echoes, that is indicative of a primal hollowness that reverberates with loss–of marine biology, yes, but also of the elements of story, ours as well as the earth’s.
Utilized and used up are not the same. And if politics has diverged to such vacancy of foresight, the vulgarity of such thinking repudiates consolation.
