[The Montana Professor 16.2, Spring 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
O. Alan Weltzien
English
UM-Western
a_weltzien@umwestern.edu
I collect homes, yet I wouldn't call myself mobile, not like all those Americans profiled in surveys who apparently move every few years. My own family--wife Lynn, stepdaughter Melinda, sons Alec and Joel--has stayed in Dillon for many years, and before that I lived in a smaller Virginia town, in the green foothills of the Blue Ridge, for a decade. But every few years I need to travel somewhere new and fashion a temporary nest. Since adolescence I've separated myself from "tourist" stereotypes, preferring to follow my own itineraries, fancying myself an occasional "traveler." Along the way I ingested the notion that travelers occasionally stop in a place, sink slender roots, take their cues from natives and try to go inside, tilt from stranger to intimate. Going inside takes time and effort and an open heart, and sometimes my preconceptions slap my face, leaving me smarting. But at such times I always find myself feeling most alive, most new, particularly since college.
Furthermore, the journeys out into the world paradoxically bring me home. New, temporary dwellings don't efface the oldest ones; rather, they bring their particular odors and orderings of rooms and prospects into sharp relief. Twice within the past decade my family has lived six months or more far from our home in southwest Montana. During those times, interspersed with the onrush of new sensations, images of our valley's sagebrush flats and east bench and browse-bordered river, surrounded by four local mountain ranges, spring before my eyes in precise focus. I smell the sage right after a spring rain or summer thunderstorm, finger the pattern of sun and cloudshade between McCartney Mountain and the Highlands. Physically distant, I discern local features as if for the first time. What my body takes for granted appears new, as though I've just moved there.
I grew up in the state named after our first president in which native place names survive where tribal peoples usually do not. In Washington, as in many other states, we learn correct pronunciations of native names of rivers, towns, and counties even when we can't locate all the reservations or never learn the dismal stories leading from pervasive names to constricted, out-of-the-way reservations. A host of names survive and Washingtonians embrace them, particularly prizing those our ears register as most odd.
A Puget Sound child, I assumed our climate to be the world's; but two trips out-of-state challenged the grip of low cloud cover and dripping conifers. My folks, north Seattle natives, both graduated from the University of Washington, as did my two brothers. Black sheep, I travelled east of the mountains for college and stayed, except for a half year abroad and one quarter as a Husky. Traitor to family tradition and the damp climate, I enacted a middle son cliché, standing out on my own.
"East of the Mountains": a Puget Sound commonplace, one fraught with historical, political, even psychological associations. The phrase continues to inscribe the state, as it refers to its eastern half which, by the late twentieth century had clearly lost the demographic and political contest. The same geographical divide and story has played out in my adopted state of Montana, I later learned. As a kid I knew east of the mountains meant other, and lesser: hot, dusty, "barren" farming country, absent or more distant mountains. It took me three college years in the Walla Walla valley to shed such marine ethnocentrism; it took longer to reverse perspectives, scrutinize the Sound from a distance, judge home from newer ones, escape the lure of endless cloud cover and rich, wet air.
"Walla Walla": euphonious phrase with a comic tinge. Say it fast and keep a smile off your face. Say it slower and its repetition gains dignity from our rising tongue. Happy example of an ancient linguistic habit of doubling. My lips and tongue first shaped it one forgotten day in childhood as my fingers roved about a Washington state map, imagining road trips. James W. Phillips's Washington State Place Names (1971) reminds us that "the name comes from the Nez Perce word walatsa, meaning 'running water,' [the] repetition loosely translating as 'many waters'" or as a diminution meaning "'little rapid river.'" The Nez Perce called the local Indians "Walawalapu, or 'Little River People.'" Turns out that "in several native dialects walla means 'water'" (154). My first home away from home took root in a place meaning the source of all life, and a creek runs through it--the Walla Walla River bends south, across the Oregon line, miles west of the city. Coming from a region teeming with river and tidal flows, I never would describe the small city, founded short years after Seattle, as braided with streams, wet. I didn't realize until later that, east of the mountains as in most of the world, walla is treasured, not assumed.
The place name migrated from a slender river and modest valley to a fort, then a surrounding settlement. Phillips's entry describes a familiar nineteenth-century story, and ironic semantic shift, as the beautiful name settled on an 1855 treaty campsite, then a fort built to subdue and remove local tribes. This migration occurred short years after the infamous Whitman Massacre (1847) at "Waailaptu," "place of rye grass," as every Whitman College student learns. A dozen years later (1859), a seminary was founded that took its name from the martyred Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. It became Whitman College, Washington's oldest institution of higher learning.
In high school I learned something about Whitman's reputation and age, and wanted to try a private, liberal arts college. Near the conclusion of a trip my sixteenth summer, I first set foot on its campus; a few months later, three friends and I, high school seniors, visited a few days. Somewhere inside me I sensed I should move on. It felt too comfortable in white Bellevue, which already commanded a reputation for wealth, one I didn't scrutinize until later.
Because of my folks' Puget Sound cabin, we rarely traveled out of state. Those two out-of-state trips followed the American middle-class formula, later skewered by the National Lampoon's "Vacation" movies. Three summers after the required California trip, we drove well east of the mountains, spending four days and nights in Yellowstone National Park. My folks mistakenly allowed me to plan the trip, so I assumed the role of Reisefuhrer and haven't relinquished it since. I pour over maps and figure out how to cram the days, fulfilling baleful stereotypes about tourists I've tried to disguise and rationalize. I do my homework and usually avoid guided tours, pompously believing I can do as well or better if I'm in control. In Yellowstone I had the family scurrying from breakfast until evening. We "covered" the crown jewel and slept out of fatigue in the rented trailer. In recent years, I grow increasingly embarrassed about my desire to cover, to the point of seriously tiring muscles and bones, a new place though I've not relinquished it: a dangerous illusion. When I recall the paces I've put my own family through when travelling, guilt wraps me. I always argue, when we will ever be here again?
That long ago summer trip set the pattern. I thought I'd cover Walla Walla the way I'd covered Yellowstone, only now I'd try to make a nest on my own far from family. I hadn't even changed states or time zones yet felt in a different state. In those days before e-mail and cell phones and cheap long distance, it was a special day to call home, and the Cascades placed home farther away. I never owned a car and friends didn't make the trip often, particularly once winter set in.
To reach Walla Walla, we quit I-90 at the Columbia River, following the dammed River on Route 243 to the lonely Vernita toll bridge, then cutting across the Hanford desert to the not Tri-Cities, re-crossing the Columbia at Pasco. Once across the Snake River's mouth, approaching Wallula Gap ("many waters" in the Walla Wallan tribal tongue--Phillips, 155), we drove the final stretch up the Walla Walla River Valley, the Blue Mountains drawing closer. This spur of the Rockies, along with the Wallowas rising just beyond in northeast Oregon, gave my hiking boots their first taste of elevations beyond those in the Cascades.
No vineyards spangled the hillsides and no Interstate ran through the fruit-filled Yakima Valley. We whisked across dry spaces, no trees offsetting the dun Horse Heaven Hills, to reach college. I knew about the Atomic Energy Commission but didn't know the locations of any toxic waste dumps within the restricted area. Nor did I realize that, because of the AEC's status, no dams slowed the Columbia River in the "Hanford Reach." This big off-limits tract drawn from "no-good" land, preserved the only free-flowing stretch of my native region's premier river, whose fate is commemorated in Richard White's The Organic Machine.
That last hour, leaving the Tri Cities behind and turning away from the Columbia at Wallula Gap, we drove past the occasional ranch and two little cow towns, Touchet and Lowden, before reaching "the Valley they liked so well they named it twice." No wineries made their appearance until several years after my college graduation. I could never have dreamed that, by the century's end, the Walla Walla Valley would be Washington State's hottest wine region, with dozens of boutique wineries and cellar doors in the neighborhood. By 1999, ten wineries had opened; at present, there are over sixty. Move over, Palouse wheat.
A few years ago an anthology of Southwestern writing was published with the memorable title, Getting Over the Color Green. I didn't until my Walla Walla years. To cross the diagonal line, east and south, I abandoned marine blue and conifer green and discovered brown. Walla Walla mixed green with brown, and those mountains just southeast tint blue, particularly in low afternoon or seasonal lights. In Walla Walla I learned to make a home from a dorm room. Jewett Hall and venerable Lyman Hall just south of it form Whitman's east border and front the large green or commons, Ankeny Field, around which the campus spreads. I disliked Whitman the first couple of months--homesickness, feelings of not fitting in--but then found my feet, making new friends including occasional girls.
Like some who spend time in a new place, I let my feet lead me through neighborhoods radiating outward from my small room. I preferred the residential areas east and south and west, and like anyone who stays awhile in Walla Walla, discovered a wealth of gorgeous old homes displaying intricate nineteenth-century or turn-of-the-century details on their facades or porches. I hadn't realized that houses could look like this. On these streets I realized Bellevue was new, showed little history: even its mansions didn't glow with age as do these spacious homes. I often imagined what it would be like to live in one of those houses, growing up with high ceilings and tall window sashes and a big porch. My understanding of state history stretched.
Occasionally I borrowed someone's bike and rode west to the Whitman Mission ("Wailaptu") or south, across the Oregon border. Or I'd hike east out of town with a friend, following Mill Creek, or hike out of the bottom beyond Kooskooskie onto plateaus of the Blues. I camped in the Wallowas and climbed The Matterhorn, a high broad ridge. I fell in love with a place, as happens with most Whitties, and like some, I would have loved to stay. Walla Walla, my counter-example to Puget Sound, helped me move out of suburbia. I felt adopted by the area and could summon its topography with my eyes closed.
My comfort in that Valley also fueled my restlessness, as I spent six-and-a-half months of my junior year in Great Britain. I was nineteen when I flew on a chartered Britannia Airways jet from SeaTac Airport, and had never been farther east than the greater Yellowstone plateau. Whitman had grown too predictable and I had come to feel too much at home there. I was hungry to taste some of the world, collect new scenes, and that wanderjahr extended a pattern set on that long ago family trip to Yellowstone. To validate my college home I needed to distance myself from it, range much farther away--temporarily. For myself, the new was premised upon a return to the familiar: away led back home. I would return to Walla Walla for my senior year.
I walked London obsessively, a contemporary Baedeker in hand, and after classes Thursday midday, I usually bought a "single" train ticket to some area I wanted to explore, backpack in place. The next three days I walked and hitchhiked, and after six months, I'd seen a lot of England, Wales, and Scotland. Driven by my obsession with detail, I perversely insist on learning a new place as intimately as my body can tolerate. I missed as few castles or cathedrals or writers' homes or mountains or university or coast towns as possible. I crave thoroughly immersing myself in foreign landscapes, though immersion is, at best, a useful fiction. From London I radiated outward just as, long ago, we toured Yellowstone from our Madison Junction campsite.
Crossing the Atlantic opened the door to my crossing the continent and moving five times, over the next fifteen years, in two Virginia locales: a small, university city and a rural town just below the Blue Ridge. I reached Puget Sound only for a few weeks most summers and Walla Walla, never. The instability of graduate school got replaced by the closely knit college community within which my first wife and I made a home. In Virginia, I never knew if I lived back East or in the South. We explored many of its corners and beyond, north and south and west. I gained a new cynosure through which to study the USA and gazed upon the Northwest through a telescope. A new region which geographers lump as "the middle Atlantic states" fed a new life--one I quit and left behind in 1991, a single father of a five-year old moving to my third region, Big Sky country. I found another reference point, another USA.
In southwest Montana my new family has learned a new visual scale and standard of air and water quality. We know winter is the longest season and elevations of two vertical miles or more are commonplace. We know gradations of brown, generous or slight snowpack, year-round sunshine, wind-driven clouds that drop rain only in May or June. In Montana's largest county, we've become experts in rural life.
I strongly recommend that students leave Montana to know it and themselves best. We also range afar to come home. My small cluster of dorm rooms or apartments or houses spread before me like a fan of poker cards. What do I retain except sets of images blurred around the edges? Does my periodic desire for new scenes efface distant former apartments and friends, most of which I'll never see again? As I've reached middle age as an academic in a state university system, I've increasingly realized, like a splash of cold water across my head, that over the past score of years, I've felt most acutely alive when abroad. During those three periods, professional and personal selves have meshed more tightly than during my life in Virginia or Montana. Maybe it's because I must become a student again, the learning curve steepens, and I'm learning far more than I'm teaching, as I admit to my foreign students. In Poland and Bulgaria I stumbled on, applying newly acquired, shaky foreign languages on the streets just as we wove in and out of cities and through the countryside in shabby cars I bought or leased. It takes stupidity or naive courage to drive into big foreign cities with only a map to counter one's ignorance. It takes stamina to walk all day in cities, visiting museums or galleries or checking out neighborhoods. I wear us out, but I won't change.
Thanks to a couple of Fulbright Fellowships, we lived several seasons in Poland and Bulgaria just after each was shaking off its Communist shackles. We got to know Gdansk and Sofia, respectively, very well, and after every trip in country, we returned to our apartment as though returning to our own turf. We knew bus and train lines and times, and knew where to buy fresh produce and warm bread and local beer or wine. I've dragged young sons all over eastern or southeastern Europe. After our time in Bulgaria, when my stepdaughter was a high school freshman, I developed the rationale that I wanted each child to live at least briefly in another country while in high school. I thought I could pull it off via academic exchanges. This rationale clothed my addiction for temporary new nests in a less selfish light. I described my desire to envious friends: "It will broaden their outlooks a lot." I think of it as my greatest gift before they fly away to college, and applaud my sincerity and disinterest.
Conveniently, it's also true. As a high school freshman, the last thing my stepdaughter wanted to do was move to a small southeast European country she'd barely heard of. After her six months, Melinda didn't want to come home, which meant leaving her Japanese-Bulgarian boyfriend. Melinda wrote about Bulgaria in her college applications and I assumed she was the only one describing that country. After her freshman year at Pacific University, she told us a story of a professor asking the class if anyone had been to Greece. Only Melinda raised her hand, and she confessed that she hadn't paid that much attention to all those ruins and monuments. Alec, our older son, flew farther away for college, putting down roots in Middlebury, Vermont. Much more a home body, I could not have launched so far away as either. But I like to think Alec's half year Down Under prepared him to live, temporarily, in northern New England.
So in my peregrinations, I have journeyed from Walla Walla to Wagga Wagga, and to reach the latter, we travelled further from home than ever before. In mid-January, 2003, we found ourselves in the Bradley terminal at LAX, awaiting the Qantas nonstop flight to Sydney, diagonally crossing the globe's largest ocean without refueling: a surreal trip that shrinks the globe and propels you into tomorrow.
I had been accepted as a "visiting scholar" through The University of Montana's International Programs Office, and would spend six months at Charles Sturt University, whose largest campus spills off a ridge a few kilometers north of Wagga Wagga, New South Wales./1/ All three campuses spread west of Australia's Great Dividing Range. So again I found myself driving inland, away from salt water and across mountains, but now our leased, '94 Hyundai pointed southwest. Walla Walla is roughly five hours southeast of Seattle; Wagga Wagga, five hours southwest of Sydney, a much larger city also defined by water. To reach Wagga you drive four hours on the Hume Highway, the country's most famous highway (not all four-lane), connecting Sydney and Melbourne, and then branch west on the Sturt Highway, which runs west all the way to Adelaide. Australia names its major highways, and Hume and Sturt rank among the most famous, early-19th century white explorers. Of course no highways are named after aborigines, though aboriginal place names dot the landscape, as in the Northwest.
"Wagga Wagga," we eventually learn at the Museum of the Riverina (a name describing the local geographical region and soils), means "place of many crows" in a local aboriginal language, though other etymological theories stake some claim, including the notion of "winding" or "staggering," as in drunk. The Murrumbidgee River (love that native name, too) rises in Australia's Snowy Alps--a stretcher by European or Rocky Mountain standards--and flows briefly south then north-northwest before settling west, and loops in a series of oxbows (like "billabongs") past Wagga--locals often use the singular appellation as a shorthand. The first time I heard the city's name, I had to chuckle. Somehow it seemed fitting that I was phonetically looping back towards my college town as I closed my first half century, aiming towards a past home just as we reached a brand new one. But then, going away always entails going home, just as the growing collection of "digs" diffuses the geography of home.
What kind of nest would the four of us fashion there? I had arranged for us to lease the apartment of a CSU nuclear medicine professor, a Chinese-Australian on leave in Massachusetts. It formed the middle of six or eight units in a modest, one-floor building resembling an older motel, just two blocks north of the city's main east-west street (the Sturt Highway); young men, sometime CSU students, rented on both sides. Two bedrooms, small kitchen, one window air conditioner, and one portable electric heater. Our first six weeks in Wagga (and elsewhere), the temperature ranged between 90 and 105 degrees (Fahrenheit), and one windy day it spiked to 109. We'd unintentionally moved to Phoenix, and I don't like Phoenix.
The Riverina region, and most of interior New South Wales, had been suffering extended drought, too, and smaller cattle and sheep "stations" faced the same dire problems as producers in Montana. We visited two big reservoirs, on the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers, respectively, and found enormous holes of baked, red soil, the pools at 10% capacity. I thought I was back at the Clark Canyon reservoir, twenty miles south of home, well under one-third full the past few summers. A few days before our arrival in their summer of 2002-03, bushfires had burned hundreds of structures in Canberra and the ACT (Australian Capitol Territory), and we tasted smoke that January: the occasional pall took us back to August, 2000, in our Valley, when the nation's largest (fused) forest fire burned only a couple of hours' west. So the exotically new reveals flashes of the familiar. Though the eucalypt forest and bird life differs dramatically, we discovered pieces of the same story plotted by the extended absence of walla. Beyond those pieces, however, and despite coastal rain forests, we came to terms with Australia's "outback": 70% of the continent is classified as desert.
Wagga prides itself on being the largest interior city, approximately 58,000--roughly twice the size of Walla Walla--in Australia's most populous state. A few other cities are giving it a run for its money, but Wagga holds tenaciously to this unquestioned assumption that size equals success. Some state residents joke that "NSW" stands for Newcastle, Sydney, and Wollongong, the three coastal cities that together contain about 90% of New South Wales's population. The demographic imbalance west of the mountains exaggerates that east of the mountains in Washington--or Montana.
We all grew quickly fond of Wagga, whose main business street runs north-south fifteen minutes' walk east of our flat. On Baylis Street one finds a couple of the ubiquitous, tasteful Aussie hotels with elaborate ironwork festooning the balcony and a pub and decent restaurant below. The white, nineteenth-century facade of the City Council chambers graces one corner, crosswalks also run diagonally across intersections for calibrated movement, and public sculpture adorns almost every block. The Wollundry Lagoon stretches like a snake immediately west, with public gardens and the ubiquitous War Memorial fronting it--the residential streets abutting the lagoon display the usual range of Aussie verandas and gardens. I learn that Wagga was settled, after the usual native displacement, about the same time time as Walla Walla, and that the city has grown south of the River across the 20th century. The "Wiradjuri [walking] Tract," a 30-kilometer trail, girdles the city. It follows the south bank of the Murrumbidgee for several kilometers, and this section became my favorite running route despite the near presence of city sewage lagoons ("the shitties"). By the time the Australian winter rolled around, I was still wearing jogging shorts, and had run the entire tract in sections--up and down hills and across paddocks (pastures). My feet pounded the city's perimeter.
As rural Americans, Wagga struck us as a city treat, and we frequented the City Library, Sturt Mall, Civic Theatre, cinema complex, and Art Glass Gallery. At the Saturday city market, in front of the Theatre, Lynn and I sampled and bought pistachios, filberts, olives and olive oil, local wines and citrus fruits as well as aged cheddars and produce. We admired flowers we still couldn't identify. The Riverina proves a rich agricultural district. The South Wagga Grocery lay about 200 meters north of our flat, as do the rooms of Riverina Community College, where I eventually taught a "short course" with a colleague. On Saturday mornings I jogged past young cricket teams practicing or in play on one of the city's large ovals or "parades." In the Daily Advertiser my eyes fell on the ads for the city's licensed brothel, located on a residential street not far from us. As with the Brodwino neighborhood in Sopot (next to Gdansk), Poland, and the Druhzba Dve precinct of southeast Sofia, Bulgaria, I adopted a locale, my body learning the particular pattern of streets and buildings, my senses growing familiar with just this place. In the process I became an inhabitant though I remained a conspicuous outsider.
To escape the heat on hot Aussie afternoons, the boys and I would don our swimming suits and drive past St. Michael's, a big Anglica church, to the City Beach, located on an inside bend of the River. Dozens of Wagga Waggans of all ages crowded the Beach. After planting towels, we'd step over soft sand into the gentle current. The boys rode or batted green and purple styrofoam "noodles" we'd bought for Joel. After our first couple of visits, we joined kids walking barefoot along the Wiradjuri Track about 100 meters upriver, then launched into the current from rock platforms. Alec and Joel splashed along the gentle current; I floated on my back, mid-river, studying the trunks and canopies of the river red gums (eucalypts) a century or two old, the perches and raucous flights of sulphur-crested cockatoos. I lay suspended on the Murrumbidgee as though lifted by salt water, floating lazily back to the City Beach.
Wagga became our base, and in that reliable Hyundai or nearly new, rented University cars, we ranged over New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, parts of Queensland, South Australia. We even drove to the "Red Centre" and back, enacting the old pattern, home away from home, which for a period acted as gravitational center. It's a paradox of travel, often noted in travel literature, that we go away to go home: to assess and understand and even appreciate as we do not normally, while there. We go out to return, and in the process "out there" and "back here" change shape and draw towards one another, some of their distinctions melting. That's not to diminish the foreignness of the foreign, but to redefine the familiar through its swift expansion and transformation. If abroad means acutely alive, it's because of that radical realignment of what is native. One can become native, I would argue, to many places, but it takes extensive study, suspension of past expectations (particularly American ones), a willingness to be embarrassed and rebuffed, a tolerance for the unexpected and unpredictable, a hunger for new foods and languages and histories and music.
A home boy, I learned only from college years the inestimable value of leaving home periodically, living temporarily beyond the U.S. to stretch and challenge what it means to be American. Sometimes our luxurious standard of living grows painfully uncomfortable elsewhere, even when we try to suspend our expectations about amenities that typify middle-class life at home and blend in, knowing our clothes and tongues quickly betray us. I drove a Polski Fiat in Poland and a Lada in Bulgaria: our family stood out enough, particulary given our broken, rudimentary Polski or Bulgarski. In Bulgaria, the Soviet-style housing complex we lived in--equivalent to a shabby urban housing project in the States--prompted weekend forays. Though the apartment proved adequate, the immediate area, a gray, industrial wasteland, kept us flying from our nest. My wife never opposed travel plans. In Australia, it embarrassed us to field questions about American foreign policy in light of the Iraq War or defend our relatively low gasoline prices, given Aussie prices.
It's a matter of pushing beyond one's comfort zone, abandoning familiar surroundings, taking risks in foreign cities and countryside. I recall few experiences so nerve-wracking as getting slightly lost when driving into the center of Athens and Istanbul. In both cases, I found good samaritans at BP petrol stations, who spoke a "leetle English" and pointed me in the right direction. In both cities, after finding a cheap hotel or pension, we parked the car until our eventual departure. I didn't get lost driving in Sydney; in Melbourne we got stuck in the "CBD" (Central Business District) during a giant anti-Iraq War demonstration, and I watched as the Hyundai overheated, my stomach knotting. Our days in these cities quickly compensated for our fearful entries.
Now Melinda briefly returns to Costa Rica, and Alec will try Deutschland for his junior year. Maybe my strategy, a rationale for appeasing my own appetite, has worked. Maybe they understand what it means to be more than a tourist, when one tries to settle in, speak the language, learn the culture and, in the process, question one's own. Maybe they will become citizens at home outside the U.S. too. That is what I wish for my students, though I find few passionately interested in time abroad.
Walla Walla did lead to Wagga Wagga. And beyond Wagga, we found it again. I'd spotted Walla Walla, NSW, on the map, and on one of our first drives south to Albury and Victoria State beyond, we detoured southwest from Culcairn a few kilometers, and reached Walla Walla, a farming community of less than 1000, noted for a handsome, nineteenth-century church. I'm betting walla meant the same thing to the local aboriginess as it did in what became southeast Washington. When I saw the signs and we drove the main street, I knew I'd returned, across thousands of miles and thirty years, to a place name and home deep inside me--my first adventure away from home. Now Wagga Wagga has joined ranks with Walla Walla on my heart's map. The names--those happy doublings--beckon, and in them as well as other temporary places I have lived, I revise my notion of "away" as I fold them into my expanded, diffuse geography of home.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 16.2, Spring 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]