Heart of the Monster: Journey to SEJ 2010, Part 3
[stextbox id="custom" color="000000" bcolor="000000" bgcolor="ffffff" image="null"]As I prepare for a new journey, I'm thinking about past travels, so here is the third installment of my tales from last fall's trip to the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. See Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Talk about slow journalism.[/stextbox] [shashin type="photo" id="422" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="right"]Imagining my own murder came easily. Shadows sapped what last fall warmth might have lingered from the forests around the confluence of the Lochsa, Clearwater and Selway rivers. Choosing a river-rafting resort for its off-season rate, I was the only guest on this, the day of the year's first frost. I envisioned my role as the victim in a backwoods-set horror film. Having battled a cold all day, a fever crept through my brain in sharp contrast to the plummeting mercury outside. My thoughts ran wild.
In truth, they had all day, just as this text, as all text seems to escape my control.
Before succumbing, I ate across the highway at Ryan's Wilderness Inn. I sat at the counter and watched a courtroom reality show through the static on a small T.V. What could have been my last meal was a French dip with over-salted, but tasty, au jus. It was served on a place mat depicting a map of the solar system (I think one of my best friends growing up had the same set). The mid-October day unraveled as I ate. Listening to crackle of the snowy TV screen and the waitress chit-chatting with the cook, I marveled at the vastness of the universe from this roadside eatery, just a speck in Idaho's forests.
I'd left Oregon that morning before swinging across a remote corner of Washington. Along the way, I inched ever closer to my professional line in the sand. I wouldn't arrive in Missoula, though, without facing the Heart of The Monster.
As I've previously recounted, my day began with deer at dawn in a campground on the shore of Wallowa Lake. After a breakfast in Joseph of polish sausage and eggs drove North through Enterprise (disappointed not to have realized the night before that the Terminal Gravity brewery was there). I left Enterprise along Oregon Route 3, following the road up a slowly-rising plateau until I traveled above the western rim of Joseph Canyon. I entered Washington where the Lewiston Highway becomes state route 129, then decends into -- and rises again out of – the Grande Ronde River Valley on a tangle of twists and turns protected only by guardrails resembling white picket fences.
"Discovering" the land
[shashin type="photo" id="394" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="left"]Long before I descended again – this time approaching the Snake River at Asotin, just south of the twin cities of Clarkston and Lewiston – I learned these lands were not by any means as wild, as remote or as isolated as my first impression led me to believe. After Joseph, as “empty” as the land seemed, I started to learn something else that perhaps many of us don't realize when we approach the “wild.” This land is -- and has long been -- home to many generations of people, even if perhaps the relationships those people had with these surroundings were so different, so much more subtly integrated than our current society's.
That realization started to emerge about ten miles south of the Washington border, when I “discovered” Joseph Canyon. Having never seen the Grand Canyon and having reluctantly skipped Hell's Canyon, I was easily impressed by Joseph. Beyond the natural beauty and beyond the fascination I felt for its geology, though, another thought circulated: what was this vast and dramatic and beautiful place like when there wasn't a road above it, when tourists weren't stopping at overlooks to peer down into the valleys that used to be the winter home of an entire nation?
Such questions rattle through my head wherever I travel. Here in my own nation, on a landscape so many of us so readily dub "ours," they take on different meaning. It's easy for Americans to still perceive spaces like these that contrast so sharply with our cities and towns and farms as “wild” or “untamed” or “unspoiled” lands untouched by civilization. What came before is often unacknowledged, if not out of sight.
In college, I was a history major whose focus – if inadvertently so – was on the articulation and formation of national identities. Even so, I must admit to having little knowledge about the nations and communities that exist and existed within the land we describe as the United States of America. This is true even though I grew up in the heart of the Chumash world and no matter how many times in elementary school we were assigned to read The Island of the Blue Dolphins. Nevertheless, the Channel Islands I gazed at my whole life were the same ones so important to the Chumash. I've strolled countless times past the Albinger Archeological Museum and, of course, Mission San Buenaventura, both reminders of one sort or another of what came before, what we've wrought upon one another, and what's been buried by the passing decades. In many ways, though, the Chumash -- and even the Spanish who subdued them -- were abstract concepts in late Twentieth Century Southern California. The only time they really began to seem less so was after college, when I paid attention to longer and broader historic narratives, or when I worked on stories like this one I did for the about the impact of contemporary development projects on ancient Chumash sites.
Vague Knowledge
Of course, I've always known the vague superficial history of American exploitation, subjugation, extermination and marginalization of native communities, but I'd learned few details about specific histories and incidents. More straightforwardly put: I know little about Native Americans and their history aside from the cursory overview given in traditional California public school educations, and whatever knowledge I've occasionally picked up through other pursuits since.
Then, a year ago, when I moved from L.A. to Portland, I found myself fascinated by the history of the Modoc depicted at Lava Beds National Monument, a history I hadn't known, even though it occurred in my home state of California (albeit a corner of the state quite distant from where I was raised). It's likely I wouldn't have learned of it had I not been drawn to the monument purely by its geologic appeal.
It may seem naïve to carry a sense of wonder in my discovery of these topics when so much of this history is so problematic. So be it. I can't do anything to change that history, but I can welcome my broadened perspective upon it. I've been fascinated by what I have been able to learn, and by how my knowledge of tribal history has slowly grown as I've settled in the Northwest. Such lessons allow me to much more vividly understand the extent to which urbanization and settlement has extensively shifted our world.
Checking Eden off the List
[shashin type="photo" id="420" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="right"]My realization there above Joseph Canyon about the many thousands of people that must have crossed this landscape, a landscape I perceived as so untouched and so isolated, only served to make me feel more alone, especially as illness descended further upon me. My loneliness increased as the hours and miles stretched, and as I approached the Heart of the Monster, the site that represents the source of all creation to the Nez Perce.
Just ponder that for a second. The source of all creation. Many, many people trace all of humanity to this spot just south of U.S. Highway 12, a nation's sacred source tucked away in Eastern Idaho and now managed by the park service of another nation. The last remnant of a monster that, months later, would be dwarfed by enormous shipments of equipment meant to squeeze from the ground more of the substance that our nation now prizes so reverently.
I stopped. I looked. I listened to a recording of the tale of the coyote who tricked a monster in order to save all the other living things the monster had devoured. I learned how all the people and animals sprung forth from the defeated monster to populate the land.
Then the recording ended. I watched a mom take her daughter on a stroll, and I saw a car load of retirees stretch their legs in the nearby parking lot, and I took photos, and I enjoyed the sun on the skin of my aching body, and I returned to my own car.
I checked Eden off the list without saying a word.
On this trip, I traveled with the precise goal of connecting with others, joining potential colleagues, establishing professional connections and honing my reportorial skills. The closer I came to Missoula and the more I discovered along the way, though, the further I felt from anywhere. “Isolated” with my thoughts as the landscape unfolded beneath my feet, the more my mind wandered into these sorts of reflections and recollections.
Meanderings of thought
[shashin type="photo" id="421" size="medium" columns="max" order="user" position="left"]I admit that the story – and this entire series, delayed as it may be – has meandered from its path. Nevertheless, I'm also wrestling with how to respond honestly to my experiences, with what happened in my brain on the journey and whether it's self-indulgent to serve this soup of thought (it's a little too stagnant to call it a stream) to you, instead of a straightforward report of the who and the what I saw where and when. Which approach provides the real, honest reporting?
You'll notice in reading these recollections that I am extensively self-referential and that my thoughts are increasingly digressive. This isn't an accident, exactly. On this trip, especially at this point, passing through these locations, I barely encountered anyone else. There were few sources to develop. The encounters I did have were simply inappropriate to develop into deep connections, if at all. To do so may have been to force a story that wasn't there. This might be a reality of a solo road trip. You're so encased in your car and then, over time, in your head. As you're recollecting it hours or days or months later, doesn't it follow that your words will be uniquely shaped?
I'm confident in my abilities and experience as a writer, but I'm trying to do much more reporting, more actual reporting, and I'd like to have done so on this trip. It's pretty easy to write and to meander without a guaranteed paycheck. What I need to figure out is how to report without one, because I need to keep my journalistic skills as fresh as my writing, even when I'm not sustaining myself. Then I must figure out how to turn that writing, that reporting, that observation and reflection and analysis and curation into something that does sustain me.
I've long since encountered that professional line in the sand. Each day that passes, I wonder a bit more whether I ever really crossed it. Have I even properly acknowledged it? Did I skirt it? Did I place it further down the road?
Now, as my resume lingers on potential employers' desks or in their inboxes, as reporting piles high like scaffolding around as-yet-unfinished stories, as pitches bounce about the ether, and as I prepare for another, shorter journey (this time with a clear reporting objective in mind), do I need to address what I've learned about myself and my career on the other side of that line? Do I need to stop asking myself questions, and start asking them of others (my suspicion is a loud, resounding "yes")?
Do I understand whether I've encountered the monster, whether at 30 years old, after college and grad school and years as a reporter and editor and everything else I've built up, I've found the monster's heart, whether I've found a way inside, to confront it and to spring forth again from within?
