In Search

I love the drive from Portland to Montana and back. The topography changes every 100 miles or so. The gorge. The endless plains and farms. The forest. The mountains. The valley in the hills.


I took too many of these photos while driving.


It is good thinking space though. The way the land stretches before you as if there are no more limits. I wonder at the ease of my vehicle and think back to the days when crossing 600 miles would have taken more than a month rather than a portion of my day. The last two times I have driven to Montana, I have been outrunning the rain. The first time, the lightning and thunder came in a few hours after I did. This last time, the rain took a few extra days on the trip. But it was the same rain. I am sure of it.

When I drive to Montana, I often leave the windows up. That is, until I reach the state line and cross from Idaho to Montana. When the window rolls down, there is an intense blast of pine and cedar. You are in the mountain pass. It is full of spruce and ponderosa. As you descend to the valley and meet the river, cottonwood trees greet you on the wind. I smell them always before I see them. Nothing smells more like home than river and cottonwood. Add the whistle of a train and the rush of water, and I am either profoundly homesick or already home.

Montana feels like home in a way that Portland never will. To start, all of Montana is home, even the places that I have never been to. Yet, Portland is an island inside of Oregon. Moreover, the topography of Montana calls out in the secret language of familiarity. In Portland, there are only places where I have lived and worked and spent my free time. Storefronts, book stores, parks, hiking trails, even grocery stores, but never the ground or sky by themselves. As I leave the Interstate for lesser roads headed to my house, I greet meadows and marshes that have always been empty, cliffs that have lost only a little weight, and lakes and rivers that tell me how much snowfall there was last winter by their wax and wane.

On this trip, I also smell the familiar smell of fire smoke. It reminds me of the summer that so much of the state burned that my uncle came from Arizona with his team of firefighters to help quench the blaze. The weekend that he came to visit our house, he looked so tired. He had aged 20 years in the course of a few weeks. He had hardly slept. It was the first time that I was aware that my uncles were mortal. I was so surprised to see him a few years later and see that he had reclaimed much of the youth that had left him while fighting those fires. That was the summer that the sun turned red from the thick layer of fire smoke--red all day long.

Where I stopped to take these pictures has no name. Only a mile marker on a highway between two small towns. It exists in what you call deafening silence. An orchestra of crickets pulses with such intensity as to cover the sound of approaching cars until they are upon you.

This post is far from finished but I am releasing it. I have fallen behind and it may take many more weeks before I have organized all of the thoughts that are attached to these photos. So, here you go. An abrupt end to my road tripping. One of several sagas in my chosen unemployment.

P.S. This is where my sister first learned to walk.

Just a preview. And a warning.
Warning: musings about home and community ahead. Not guaranteed to make sense or to have tact. Product may contain unprocessed honesty and raw confusion.

Montana.

 I wish I could say that I took these photos. I did not; my boyfriend took them on my camera. But I like sharing.

From home to home.

There seems to be a large number of half finished posts in my blog drafts. That seems about right. None of my thoughts seem to end before I am aware of a dozen more standing at the door waiting for my attention. Anyway, I have just returned from Montana, which is one of my favorite places to write about. John Steinbeck wrote “I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it." I used to think that quote was silly. But the more I untangle myself from my growing up, the more I love Montana.



There is no better place than summer in Montana. Of this much I am convinced though I admit to a heavy bias. There are so many stars and rivers. The clouds are always changing, growing, and traveling across this theater sky. The mountains rumble with the gentle roar produced by snow melting and racing down to the valley. And it is in the valley that I grew up and learned all of the things which have made me who I am.

Have I mentioned that I love Montana's sky? Because I do. I do not know if I would want to fly so badly if I had grown up somewhere else. In Portland, flying is a nice idea, but the sky is gray and unplayful. But in Montana, it is always changing. When I go there, I spend half of my time just watching it and it teases me. It tells me that I am still tied down by gravity and have so much left to learn and explore.

And then there is the rumbling of the waters. They used to put me to sleep at night. Everything has its rhythm and I am convinced that the blood that flows through my veins keeps pace with the rivers of Montana. I rafted them with my parents soon after I could walk and I have never been the same. My heartbeat answers to glacier water and my breath to the sound of wind in tall pines, cedars, and my most beloved cottonwoods. The wind too told me I should not trust the ground.

These pictures are of Avalanche Gorge and Avalanche Lake. There are pictures from both sides of the lake including some of the glacier snow for a reference point. ...And one more for good measure.

Yep. This is Montana and I am in love with it even though I no longer belong to it. Even if I never return, it will remain home. My first home. And that is so much more than a first love. Though, if you asked me the difference between those two, I am not sure I could tell you. Perhaps, home is the place where you learn to love and be loved. That is why it is so difficult to leave if the love is good and kind. 

A bit overdue:

Montana and I are complicated lovers. 
We should probably move on. 
But I cannot. 
There is something about waking up in the embrace of mountains...
of hearing nothing but the very distant car 
interrupting the slow inhale of hills 
and the long exhale of sky. 
It takes my breath away 
but gives me its own breath. 
And so I breathe easy 
as I take in winding dirt roads. 
I breathe easy 
as on cold mornings 
when you can see your breath leave in puffs 
like lost clouds trying to find their way home. 
I breathe easy 
and I know this will always be, 
in some ineffable way, 
home.

in an effort to distract myself, i bring you: the past.

She stands there like sad poetry gracing pastel pages,
ill-fitted but never wrong.

If you look at her side-ways,
her smile could be a frown.

Doorway open.
Sun streaking perfect, amber light.
Imperfect flies buzz at screened-in windows
as if to make you aware,
there are still worlds out there;
and they know nothing of her sad laughing eyes
and her big, sarcastic lips.

She is less sure than you
that there are differences
between your world and hers.

Some would say
to let the poetry be.
What is ethereal cannot
be understood.

Some would say.

Some always
always
have to say

something.

But as the sun wraps layers of warmth
around your shoulders,
as that perfect amber light
contrasts those imperfect flies,
as you contemplate the poetic differences
of tragedies and comedies
etched across skin,
there is prose that beckons understanding.

There is poetry in human living.

She has it all in her own subtle way.
Those who would say to let her be
have never met her, right?

When you begin to hope to understand,
her world comes crashing in.
Violent, living poetry
without a shade of gray,
her polarized planet stopped spinning
a long time ago.

She stands there
and when you are done reading her,
you smile.

There is poetry in human living.
And it is best when you understand
but understand without division.

There is nothing beautiful about
dismembered worlds yanked from orbit,
dissected lives taken out of context.

And those who always have to say
are only half right.
They read only their own poetry.

 08.03.09 3:24pm

One of my favorite places to just be at: Avalanche Gorge.

summer sky blue

Home smells like ponderosa

baked into tall grasses

with all the warmth

of a summer oven.

And it looks like wildflowers

--flax and lupine,

paintbrush and snap dragons--

scattered everywhere

with strangely majestic thistles in between.

Did you know

that thistles smell

milky and sweet and musty

all at the same time?

And home has so many sounds:

The rumbling of dirt roads

and dashing of deer and grasshoppers.

Crickets and wind and old things

that are too tired, or too loved, to wear out.

I cannot forget this giant theater sky

with its many, many moods

playing and yelling

and whispering so many secrets.

And it does not matter

how long I am away.
I will always have sap

folded into my skin,

baked into my hands.

I may have many more homes

but I will never really wash

this dust from my hair

or this sky from my eyes.

Home

This is what I saw after a very long night on the bus from Montana to Portland, Oregon. It should have been a train ride, but the train was frozen someplace out east. I suppose the bus was not as bad as I imagined it would be. Besides, the road rides the Columbia closer than the train tracks at some points, and that makes it well near worth it.

It was beautiful to look out and realize it was getting to be light outside and to know that I was almost home. The ten or more hours I had already endured worked to create a sleepy peace. It was then that I realized how relative a term 'home' had become for me. I had left home, to go home...and I found no contradiction. Home with all of the family and friends and people that I knew and loved. Home with all of the accepted idiosyncrasies that have been built into me, that I take elsewhere and that often show that I am from somewhere else. Home.

There are layers and layers to that word. The longer I live and the more I move about, the more homes I acquire. It does not matter if all of the memories are pleasant. Home is where you speak the language, where you respond naturally to those microscopic aspects of culture. There was a time when Montana was home and I lived there. It was good to go back. When I am there, it is home. Yet, I am going to school in Oregon and it is becoming home. I am learning new quirks and meeting new friends and, indeed, new family. In a few years, I will move from here and make a new home.

I wonder how many homes I will have in my lifetime. That is a terrifying thought to me because all of my homes occupy a piece of me; and they will never know each other. I am being parceled out, and I cannot protect all that I love. Therefore, I cannot protect myself. The act of leaving may be wrapped in a romantic mystery, but there is something about coming that makes you vulnerable. You have to prepare for both, I think or it is harder to adjust, to fall in love with the place you go to for its own sake. It is more dangerous that way, because you can be hurt more; but in my drowsy state, as I looked out the window and thought of the hundreds of miles I had traveled in a single night, I decided that it is better. Anytime, you get the opportunity to love something that may or may not love you back, do it. If all that stands in your way is fear, do not let that stop you.