(This passage, drawn from my manuscript Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, refers to the Sinlahekin Valley, a region of northeastern Washington that's one of my favourite places on Earth.)
The ghosts of the Sinlahekin don't live in town. Wade into a blue-skied draw, far from roads and barbed wire, where wormwood and dry grass ripple in the mind, and there, in the earth's own cleavage, wait. They will come.
By the late 1800s, every indigenous civilisation in the Oregon Country was lost or losing. The Haida were decimated, the Modoc deported, the Palouse ground to dust between soldier and Shoshoni. Smohalla died of grief; his dream, of Homily and Moses. Leschi, great statesman of the Nisqually, the settlers studiously strangled, following due process of law.
In this time Sarsarpkin withdrew his tiny Sinkaietsk band to the upper Sinlahekin. Congress had once reserved the entire American Okanogan to the First Nations, but the whites had never respected this. When gold was discovered, even the pretence of treaty was dropped. In the idiom of the day, the reserve was "opened to the public", leaving Sarsarpkin with an ultimatum: abandon his home and join the nations already herded onto the Colville reserve, or accept what we, in our own idiom, call "privatisation". Sinkaietsk land would be "allotted" – parcelled out – to individuals, who would be empowered to sell it to strangers if they wished. This, the old man knew, would only defer his people's dispossession of, and expulsion from, the Sinlahekin.
Sarsarpkin had fought the occupiers in the canyons, and he had fought them in Congress. He had never won. And so he lived the remainder of his days on a Sinlahekin allotment, still the moral, if not political, leader of his people. He attended Mass, maintained relations with Colville and Canadian nations, and by all accounts practiced neighbourly acceptance of the usurpers. None of which convictions suffered from his equally well-documented addiction to alcohol.
Neither could they overcome it. In November 1887, Sarsarpkin's older son Peter, also drunk, pushed his father over a cliff and killed him. The following spring, younger son Jack bashed in Peter's skull in like circumstances. The other Sinkaietsk families fell to similar pressures, kicking their allotments one by one into foreign hands. The scant survivors straggled into Nespelem, their very name shattered like busted sod.
Sarsarpkin was buried, along with his widow and his children, on a low rise outside Loomis. Years later the town erected a high marble cross on the site, but even that eventually disappeared. This day, a wire enclosure and two headstones were the only clue that a nation slept there beneath the scrub and jumping cactus.
But Sarsarpkin's heart still spoke, in words those who stood beside his grave could hear. In the end, he'd had a single choice: die somewhere else, or die here.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the Sinlahekin Valley courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
The late hour kept me running a brisk 50 mph (the maximum controllable speed on gravel), so that an apparent chunk of slate in the road nearly slipped beneath my radiator before it caught my attention. Grinding to a halt, I stared at the plate-sized rock in the rearview mirror. Sure enough, it sprouted two yellow-striped forearms and a matching head, with acid eyes that glared at me through the pall of dust I'd raised. I snatched my camera and jumped out, thinking to bag a quick photo, then chase my chelonian friend off the road before a less attentive traveller squashed him flat.
But on my advance he sprinted into the undergrowth, with scornful disregard for my species' reluctance to apply that verb to his. I was left to herd him with stomping boots, back into the fading sunlight, to get my portrait. He appreciated none of this - not the running over, not the dirt bath, not the brisk jog, and most particularly not the herding. When the slides came back from the lab, I found a study of one seriously bent Western painted turtle.
Still, I had to admire the guy's pluck. We were a hundred yards from water. Wherever he'd come from, wherever he was going, he'd earned his rest in that place.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of Chrysemys picta bellii courtesy of Gary M. Stolz, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and Wikimedia Commons.)
(This is an excerpt from a manuscript about an epic outbacking trek I took six years before I became a monk. As you can see in the photo at left, some things have changed.)
Shortly after 0700 I coasted down the long hill into Conconully, skirting its round, post-card reservoir. Motoring quietly through drowsing neighbourhoods, bright clapboard glowing like a remembered summer, I was struck, as often on the Gold Side, by a sense of place. Hometown, as few Puget Sound ones are anymore.
A regiment of impact sprinklers had swept the state campground's day use area as clear as a July schoolyard, but that suited me fine; its deserted parking lot was perfect for peeling off my Michelin Man layers.
So laying down in the bed of the truck, I shed my December kit by stratum, cool air sweet on my nakedness as the long underwear at last came off. Then I squirmed back into my trousers, grabbed my toilet kit, and scrambled back over the tailgate. While setting bath water from the nearest sprinkler on the stove, I caught my reflection in the canopy.
The trendiest salon in New York City couldn't have given me that hairstyle. It fractalled off in a hundred directions, licks and wisps corkscrewing out like an armoury fire. If I'd had a black turtleneck, I could have passed for the hippest artiste in all of Greenwich Village. But bare-chested in dirty jeans, I just looked like an extra from Deliverance.
I dipped my comb and started in, and was soon dripping like I'd dunked my head to the shoulders, but never really mastered the situation.
Buddhist monks say they shave their heads to free themselves from attachment. Bollocks. They do it to free themselves from their hair.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson.)
Travelling so far so long in isolated country produces a kind of elation. The muttering millions bugger off, leaving you in boundless creation, under a sympathetic God.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Anthony Burden and Wikimedia Commons.)
The instant I start an outbacking trek, I'm looking for postcards.
I define as backward those towns that sell corny postcards, spineless those whose cards depict other places. But the cards I buy fly everywhere, under governance of an elaborate formula.
Lovers get the best ones, followed by Europeans, who suffer a debilitating lack of outback. From there, priority hinges on the closeness of the relationship.
The mailing list is as long as the journey, and I agonize, sometimes for days, over which to send whom. But in the end, I'm mostly just talking to myself.
Slipping cards through slots in post office doors and general store counters soothes the rower, the part of me that always faces aft, and reminds others that I exist, a fact I fear they are likely to forget.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. 1922 postcard of the Osoyoos custom house courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous collector.)
If you'd told me when I was 22 that the day would come when I would cherish my ex-girlfriends, I would have called you mad.
As a young man, I did relationships like a drug. Heroin, to be specific. I loved hard, like diamonds, and lost harder. I wore rejection like a crown of thorns, bled from it like stigmata, dragged it across the earth like the Holy Cross. Cowardice, caprice, indifference, were feminine vagaries I could not forgive.
I was the ex-boyfriend from hell.
I don't know what changed. I didn't hear from my ex-girlfriends for years, and then I did. And I was ecstatic, like a pilgrim who falls to his knees on the far edge of the desert, weeping for the pain, and laughing for the weeping.
No-one was more surprised than I.
So perhaps, sometimes, even I grow up.
Perhaps even heal.
My ex-girlfriends are interesting, caring, engaging women, and a gift to my life. They have great husbands, brilliant children, and there is nothing I wouldn't do for any of them.
There's no word for this unexpected love. It's not possessive, like a lover's, or exclusive, like a brother's, or conditional, like a friend's.
It just is.
And whatever it is, it brings me endless joy.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Peter Dowley and Wikimedia Commons.)
These Okanogan Forest Service roads are punctuated by the weathered husks of farmhouses, their glass and paint long departed, their Norman Rockwell profiles drooping with iron sickness.
But not rot; that wants rain, and the only moisture that ever flowed freely in this country was the blood, sweat, and tears of homesteaders.
When even that ran out, families surrendered.
Standing by those vacant windows, you can feel the handshake, smell the wash, taste the bacon, and in the keening of a wind-blown hinge, touch a sorrow still full as deep as it was four generations ago.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of Douglas County derelict courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(The following is a passage from Rough Around the Edges, a manuscript I began 20 years ago. Though my Zen practice was still about six years in the future, it's interesting to me today to read a fundamentally exact description of what the Buddha called "world weariness" – the mainspring of enlightenment practice – written in my own pre-monastic hand. Like the man said, we come by it honestly.)
The problem, the problem. What is the problem?
You're born. Somewhere, someone sets an egg timer. For a quarter-hour you rave like a rich man in a burning mansion, snatching at a vase, a string of pearls, anything to show you lived there.
The timer dings; you're unborn. The necklace falls to the ground.
We get it about wealth. The prophets have all warned us. But there are other treasures just as fleeting.
I hunger for love, to share life, and not to be alone. Except it won't do. Even if you find love, the timer still goes ding. The necklace falls to the ground.
What's the problem? I'm afraid to die alone. But I live alone. I work alone, and most of the time, I love alone.
The seconds tick. The words echo in my mind. A thought occurs:
Perhaps the most valuable thing in that house is the fire.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the mechanics of egg-timing courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and generous photographer.)
Pullman is improbable. Even from a distance, the town looks, not out of place, but out of epoch. In theory it's a typical prairie town: terraced into four loamy knolls, shaded by spreading maple, pine, and spruce, all of it drifted together by steel rails. In its leafy streets and neat switching yards you could believe you're trapped in an HO layout, especially if you throw in a train. Which you often do, in a city named for the man who invented the sleeping car.
But even from the horizon – say, the top of Kamiak Butte, eleven miles north – there's something incongruous about Pullman.
Only on approach does it land: it's the brick. Lots of it. Pullman's ruddy walls rise like the defences of a medieval town, which it also resembles, once you've put your finger on it. But those ancient cities were not walled in factory-made terra cotta, and so Pullman has a futurism, like a robotic eye in a human face, that contradicts and complements the train set and the Templars.
Those red ramparts, rising amidst what Greensiders sneer a cow town, are the source of cognitive dissonance. Because Pullman is nowhere. It's near nothing of consequence in three states, of which it lies outside all but one. Had matters so rested, Pullman would today be what its constituent bits still are: a Gold Side hometown in dusty decent coveralls.
But in 1890 the red came. That year, the federal government extended its network of land-grant agricultural colleges to Washington, and with atypical boldness, the State Legislature sited the new institution, not merely in eastern Washington, but in southeastern Washington. That is to say, in Plutonian space.
And as Pluto was not a real planet, so Pullman was not really a city. Incorporated just four years earlier, its 200 farmers and railroad workers were quickly inundated by a veritable lahar of staff and students. And so the first product of the Agricultural College, Experiment Station, and School of Science of the State of Washington, was that most Washingtonian of things: a mill town. Except that this mill splits from its raw resource, not shakes, but scholars.
In our motherland of apple carts, that was just the first the new college upset. For all the novelty of its location, today's Washington State University serves a region more cultural than physical. Olympia may be capital of the map, and Seattle the money, but Pullman is the capital of nowhere. All of it (the nowhere), from Sumas to Sekiu to Skamokawa to Scotia, and every backwater between. Country kids statewide aspire to WSU, not just for agronomy, veterinary, and teaching programmes, but also its world-class faculties in media, literature, and archaeology.
And behind the carrot, the stick. Growing up in rural Thurston County I engaged daily with WSU's army of barnyard Green Berets. Their Cooperative Extension ran my 4H programme. They ran FFA. They ran the tansy-ragwort eradication campaign, the artificial insemination service, the whole head, heart, hands, and health consultancy. They answered questions about recycling plastic, feeding babies, canning corn. With an irony I did not remark at the time, they sponsored the marine science summer camp I loved.
From WSU's guerrilla intellectuals I learned as much about war, Watergate, and women as rabbits and razor clams. They wore gumboots and flannel, got our jokes and fears, and saw no incongruity between our podunk ZIP codes and their university degrees.
The Extension Service is the reason a King County town can lie 30 minutes and a million miles from the University of Washington. To those of us in the woods and prairies and mountains, the difference was never about football.
I'd never been to Pullman before that day, but even from afar I knew those brick battlements for the college. As they encadre that city's neighbourhoods and thoroughfares, so too do they gird every small town in Washington.
The bone and sinew of the Academy.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Joe Mabel and Wikimedia Commons.)
I always massage a broken heart with danger. Once, in college, I memorialised a girlfriend's abrupt adieu by riding my bike a hundred miles up the side of Mt. Rainier and back in a single day.
It helped. I don't know why.
Not long after I fell in love again, and not long after that, got bounced again. Days later found me high on a sheer rock face, alone, with little experience or equipment.
I almost didn't survive that one.
The memory of that September morning remains vivid, these many years gone. The scent of sun-baked basalt and cool alpine air, the grey stone driving into my gut like a terrestrial fist, and once again I'm crimped over a ledge, cheek pressed against the Olympics. Below, the toes of my hiking boots are wedged against a shallow nub in an otherwise featureless surface, while above I'm literally clinging by my fingerprint ridges to the shelf's base. Hanging between worlds, I am simultaneously of one piece with the mountain, and apart from it.
Backing down is not an option; toeholds are few, and I can't see to find them. I can't climb for the same reason. So I cling, and ponder. Indian summer makes my palms sweat, and that makes them slip, in tiny jerks that send electric jolts through my body. Yet I'm strangely detached, as if it's all happening to someone else.
I suck in a lungful of air, and my expanding chest deducts another quarter-inch from my account.
The fall, fifty feet to jagged rocks, will surely kill me. I could channel my strength into a desperate upward surge, but my boots might slip and their weight drag me to my death. On the other hand, if I deliberate much longer, the problem will solve itself.
Calmly, I choose to panic.
Knotting the muscles in my legs, I shove off hard, back arched, arms thrust forward like a competition swimmer. My face makes a sickening thud against the outcrop, but my fingertips find a crevice in the blind rock. I jam my knuckles in, head throbbing, lips numb and swelling, and hang. My boots kick briefly in the void, then find a ripple of their own. Chin clenched against the ledge, I cling again, and gasp, and wait for the nausea to pass. A rivulet of blood trickles from my nose, down the rock, and into my tee shirt. But I'm well-belayed, suspended by my own skeleton. A leaden heel flung over the rim, and I throw my arse into the job and flop onto the deck like a halibut.
For a long time I just lie in the hot grit, trembling, an arm tossed over my eyes, and wheeze. At length, choking on the blood now flowing backward, I rise to half lotus, clamp a bandana over my nose, and pant through my mouth. Golden morning whispers the dry bunchgrass that tufts the cracks. A Steller's jay screams in the treetops below, neon blue among the needles. And far below that a forested valley stretches, pristine and wild, to the edge of the world.
At last the bleeding stops, and sometime later, the singing in my spine. I fill my mouth with cold water and lie back down.
That day I decided I'd got what I came for. Since then, my heartache remedies trend to solitary journeys through remote places.
Dangerous, yes. But not stupid.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of a guy doing it right courtesy of Jakub Botwicz and Wikimedia Commons.)
By the time I reached Alan's apartment -- six hours of rainy interstate blockaded by accidents -- I was exhausted, disgusted, and keen to leave freeways behind for a very long time. My glasses were embedded in the bridge of my nose, the bows biting into my ears.
But how good to find Al at the end! He smiled broadly as he opened the door, and I was heartened to see that the break-up hadn't taken the glint from his porcelain-blue eyes. He laughed his "H-e-e-ey, man!", clamped my hand, and suddenly we were college kids again, as if Al could make it so simply by combing his thick blond hair the same way.
There was nothing for it but to return to the scene of the crime, and so we drove across town to Fairhaven and our favourite restaurant. As I savoured a mushroom burger and frosty porter, Al regaled me with tales of his tour in the Air Force, his current job fixing helicopters, and a bar fight he'd recently witnessed, his large hands evoking the knife-whirling Canadians as he mugged and gesticulated, eyes wide with an enthusiasm that fell away from the rest of us with our hair.
We picked up frozen yogurt on the way home and spooned it out across Al's breakfast counter -- I in the living room, he in the kitchen. Missing furniture and blank spaces on the wall told a story that lost none of its poignancy for remaining unspoken. When at last Lake Whatcom blacked out of the sliding glass door, he said that Michelle had been with abusive men before they met, that she treated him like a child, and at last came to consider him the enemy. I understood, and said nothing. That Al's relationship had failed at the same time as mine only deepened the anguish: another stay parted on a sea grown surly. But there was exhilaration in facing the storm together, damming it up in silence, and so defeating it.
I slept fitfully on the sofa that night, and woke to muffled morning-jock banter from Al's clock radio. We gulped tea as he readied for work, the anticipated stress of our respective days twanging between us in monosyllables. At the door we hesitated, I in the hall, he on the mat, reluctant to desert the other in the presence of danger. But there were aircraft to repair, roads to run. We clasped hands again, muttered "See ya, man," and the door swung shut.
I showered and dressed, but the sadness didn't break till the Ram's engine roared to life.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
From birth, a great wall screens the Greensider from an uncomfortable reality. We live with our backs to it, like riverboat gamblers, indifferent to the white sawtooth peaks that scrape the clouds from the sky. Everything we love – the grey air, the cold jungle, the wet asphalt – the Cascades steal for us from the rest of the state. We are like mandarins in a sea of suffering, boreals milk-fed on austral pillage. Beyond the ridge: rattlesnakes, black widows, right-wingers. The knowledge terrifies us.
Thus the passes, fabled portals hanging somewhere above our ceiling of vision, disturb our dreams. All winter long the radio intones their names: White Pass, Stevens Pass, Blewitt, Snoqualmie. When the alpine snow seals them up, we are caged in our cloying lotus land. It's a frightening thought.
I had to get over those mountains, to find refuge in reality; a real world cure for my real world pain. Now at last I was climbing east, and out. How better to shake Green Side grief than to lose it on the North Cascades Highway, whose high twin passes disappear each autumn, and stay gone, till the mountains give them back.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the Walla Walla country courtesy of Jeffrey G. Katz and Wikimedia Commons.)
I started the engine and continued the climb to Banker Pass. In the far distance the rugged peaks rounded, and a suspicion of sage on the east wind heralded the gates of the Okanogan.
As I swung around a blind bend the scene suddenly turned to Dante: an entire mountainside razed black and smouldering, heat waves dancing over its charred crust. I cranked the window against its acrid fumes and proceeded with caution. Yellow cards staked along the verge assured me this was a fire-management burn, under the theoretical control of a man behind a desk in a town twenty miles away. The Forest Service was getting a jump on wildfire season, burning the scrub and slash from this clearcut slope while the still-forested ones were fresh enough to discourage disaster.
As the road caterpillared around the next ridge, Hell vanished behind me and I was cutting diagonally across vertical green pastures, one after another, bands of deer and cattle, and the occasional integrated society of both, browsing amid the wildflowers. The grandeur and freedom so mesmerised me that I forgot my resolve to stay alert and deferred to the hood ornament again. By the time I came to my senses it was too late: I'd sleepwalked onto another summit feeder, trapped on a sharp, thin track jutting cloudward at something like the Ram's maximum grade. To the left, nothing but empty space; the mountain cut away so steeply from my outboard tires that it disappeared beneath them.
But with no hope of turning around, and nothing lying between me and the Swan Dive of Retribution, I had no choice but to push this steep and squirrelly road to its bitter end. I flattened the accelerator and the truck leapt gamely forward while I clung to the steering wheel and struggled to maintain maximum thrust on a sinuous ribbon of dirt. At that moment, momentum was survival; stop for any reason, and I wouldn't have the traction on that pitched surface to continue forward. And the thought of having to back all the way down that winding scaffold froze me in terror.
So heart in mouth, eyes riveted on the empty stratosphere, I Buck-Rogered that screaming Dodge into the cosmos. The g's pressed my spine into the bench while I fervently prayed I didn't cross another Forest Service truck bent on validating Einstein on the way down.
Time dwindles to a drip at such moments; for an instant, truth stands in bold relief. Hanging somewhere between an unremembered beginning and an unknowable end, possessed of a theoretical but functionally inoperative ability to stop, I could only rocket, as if a Saturn V were strapped to my backside, up and out. Welcome to existence.
At last the road crested, with nothing visible beyond but open sky. The Ram shot into it like a truck in a TV commercial, seeming to lift off the earth, and then lit soft as a cat on a freshly-graded plateau. I trod the brake and we sprayed to a stop. As the dust blew past the cab, I discovered the wherefore of this goat path to the stars: two huge, battleship-grey communication towers, their microwave drums implacably fixing the horizon, utterly indifferent to the panting insect at their feet. Red masthead lights winked in the linty clouds, warning jetliners not to ding their paint jobs on the bristling antennae.
I rested my forehead on the steering wheel and drew a long, shaky breath. The trouble you get into with your mind in neutral. According to the atlas, I had arrived at Sweetgrass Butte, official edge of the twentieth century, and at 1860 meters, the highest point in the region.
I lifted my hat, passed a hand through my hair. The truck purred underneath, as unperturbed as if we'd stopped at a traffic light. Apart from sky and cloud, and icy gusts bouncing the truck on its shocks like a basketball, we were alone; if not for those antennae, we might have touched down on some distant planet.
I reseated my hat, shifted mind and motor back into drive, and etched a tight doughnut in the gravel. By standing on the brake, I was able to shinny the truck back down that rope to the mainline. This time I could see the cliff dropping directly from the right front wheel, down and down, to a knife-edged Road Runner gully miles below. Where, the crease being forested, I wouldn't raise so much as a dust ring, should that tire wander a few inches west.
When at last I reached the bottom, I found that the intersection well-signed. I had no excuse for the detour, except possibly lack of sleep.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of WikiMedia and a generous photographer.)
I'm currently writing three books, any one of which is likely to show up on this blog from time to time. For the benefit of readers who encounter them, these books are:
100 Days on the Mountain. There's an ancient Zen tradition, called A Hundred Days on the Mountain, of retreating to a mountain and meditating for a hundred days. Almost no-one does this anymore; the only teacher I know from the last many centuries who did was Seung Sahn, who sat his hundred days on a Korean mountain in 1948. Taking my inspiration from his story, I set out to do it myself on the other side of the North Pacific. 100 Days on the Mountain is my account of that experience.
Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands. In which I set out to trace the borders of Washington as nearly as possible in an old rear wheel drive pickup. The journey takes me into deep solitude 'way out in the middle of nowhere, where the land itself is the story, and the people I meet only characters in it. As was I. And my truck.
Growing Up Home. I've reached the age when men become grandfathers, but am not allowed to be one myself because I never had kids. (Apparently that's a prerequisite. Who knew?) Therefore, I am forced to publish in book form my stories of wisdom gained much against my will. The essays make short reading (Selling Point #1), are Certified Wise by an authentic old man (Selling Point #2), and you can put them down anytime you want and go back to your own youthful misadventures (Selling Point #3). Or your nostalgia for same.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the New York Zoological Society.)
"Where to now?"
I leaned on the truck's hood and stared at the back of the ram's head, but my chromed companion remained cast in silence.
A magpie burst out of the waving grass half a hundred yards away, caught a blast of air, and banked screeching over the rise.
We'd been down this road before. Three times, in fact. I smoothed the road atlas open, holding it down against the gusts, and frowned. Everything irritated me; the filth on the fender, the reek of hot engine, the sun's glare on the page beyond the shadow of my hat, and the persistent smell of rain.
And the wind. Especially the wind.
We wanted south; all the roads ran east and west, switching back through vales of hilled prairie. Even those tracks the map promised would eventually plumb out, bowed to peer pressure and veered east.
The first time I'd come to the golf course, away out in the wheat, I'd trundled slowly 
past, rubbernecking like a kid at a carnival. Then the dorms. Three times I retraced my route, tried another, and three times ended up back on campus.
Where the hell was this? Either I'd gone all the way around the world, and come back to Pullman, or this was Moscow. But the map didn't go to Moscow, so either theory was plausible.
I knew from my college days that the University of Idaho was just a projectile puke from WSU. And as neither is often mistaken for a Mormon school, to say no more, the highway between was reputed to host more drunken tragedy than any other seven miles in either state. So solemnly and reverently was this fact repeated in the residence halls of Bellingham that I've never insulted it with research.
I sighed west, over the giant surf of the land. Now I was navigating by lore and legend, like the Polynesians of old, checking my work by the smell of the sky and the taste of the sea. And in this I was at a decided disadvantage, for unlike those ancient Pacific voyagers, who plied their watery heritage with sublime confidence, my own ancestors had left me blind and deaf.
And so it is that to this day I judge I've been to Moscow, because that's where it was and that's where it had to be. But who knows? Maybe there's some anomalous college out there, some phase-shifting Hogwarts of the prairie, into which I thrice blundered, and lacking any real sense, called the University of Idaho. Like Columbus, perhaps I'd stumbled on something much grander than my mercantile imagination could grasp, out there off the charts, and will go to my grave as big a fool.
The wind whistled through the ram's helix, ruffled my shirt, batted my hat. I tugged the brim down and thumped the hood through the atlas.
"Anywhere you want," it replied.
I jumped, and the wind shuffled the pages back to one.
"That's where to," said the bighorn.
"Anywhere you want."
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Dodge Ram hood ornament by Christopher Ziemnowicz; magpie in flight by Ken Billington of Focusing On Wildlife; Palouse hills by Bala Sivakumar.)
(The following is an excerpt from "Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands." Copyright RK Henderson.)
Humans are a novelty in the borderlands. At most you see a dormant pickup, careened on the shoulder, awaiting an anonymous driver off on who knows what mission. And even that's uncommon. Which is why I was startled, corkscrewing down a high-centre track in the Umatilla National Forest, pushing for yet another called the Kendall-Skyline Trail, to see a man, statue-still and silent, standing by the side of the road. No truck in sight; he'd just come to stand.
Shooting past I also saw the proverbial ten foot pole, its slim, flexible shaft propped against a fir behind him. This was either one of those dreams, or a story.
Skidding to a halt, I jumped down, camera in hand, my Man Friday watching with the liquid eyes of a deer prepared to dart back into the forest at the first alarm. I grinned and waved, and his round, olive face relaxed into a shy, almost childlike smile.
A small, compact fellow, scarcely five feet tall, with worn jeans bloused into black gum boots, and a thick woollen cap pulled down hard over his straight black hair. His pole, I now saw, was actually a long hook, and that, together with the bleating chorus from the woods and a whiff of wet wool on the wind, explained everything. His flock remained unseen, but three deadpan border collies skulked out of the undergrowth, halted at regulation distance, and scanned me up and down. They continued staring, rigid and mute as cast iron, for a good half-minute, then wheeled as one and disappeared back into the bracken.
"Mind if I take a picture?" I asked, hefting my camera.
The shepherd nodded once, and I squeezed off a shot.
"Thanks." I snapped the lens cap back on. "How long you been up here?"
Again the timid smile, and an apologetic shrug. Once, many years ago, I met a Basque shepherd in these mountains. My French had bailed me out that day. Now I instinctively reached for it again, but the man's dark skin and almond eyes caught the parlez-vous in my throat.
"¿Habla español?" I ventured.
His face split into a wide grin.
His name was Vincente, and he was from Peru. His awkwardness was not entirely dispelled by my lousy Spanish, and I learned that he'd been tending these sheep, with nought for company but three unilingual dogs, for several weeks. His features I now recognised from countless Inkan friezes; if a single Castilian corpuscle fouled those veins, it was damn quiet. I didn't press for specifics, but he'd apparently followed the same trail that led Scottish shepherds to New Zealand, Welsh ones to Patagonia, and Basques to Chile and the far American West.
I felt gifted for the accident, and privileged to have met him. Solitude is a skill, practiced professionally by very few in this age of robot lighthouses and flying fire watchers. If the wheels of commerce have ground most of us solitaries to dross, it was a comfort to know that there was still a place in these mountains for Vincente.
(Border collie photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(The following is an excerpt from "Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands." Copyright RK Henderson.)
Because the choice is ours.
Many years ago, when I was a student, I entered a supermarket. A lady stood out front with a coffee can, collecting for charity. She was a cheery sort, a plump, maternal woman with a rosy Anglican face.
Ahead of me strode a man in a green coach's jacket. "Would you like to give to the Church relief fund?" she asked.
His voice had all the silk of a snow shovel on wet asphalt.
"I was poor all my life, nobody helped me!"
Taken aback, the churchwoman bobbed, and he stalked past, shoulders hunched, fists jammed in his slash pockets.
I never saw the man's face, but his greying comb-over and spare tire are stamped on my mind.
I should have pulled out my grocery money, a single twenty, and handed it to her right there. I should have said, "Here's ten for me," and dropped it in her can, "and ten for him." But I didn't. In the moment, all I could think to do was raise an eyebrow, as who should say, "No good deed unpunished, eh?", and keep walking.
But the guy bothered me. He was rude. He was ungrateful. He was angry. It was years before I solved his riddle.
You decide what it does to you.
You don't decide what happens. When you're born, where you're born, who you're born, how you're born. Land slides, fields flood, markets crash, families fail, houses burn, dogs bite, lovers leave, people die. Dashboards dash and draught boards draught.
You take a number and you watch the wheel. Same as us all.
But you decide what it does to you. Whether it makes you hard or soft. Hot or cold. Mean or mindful.
Poverty doesn't do that. Pain doesn't do that. Heartbreak doesn't do that.
You do that.
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