Elk and Blewett Pass

Hiya,

Just a random pic... Taken in June or July, I think; maybe spring. Taken on our way to Seattle up on Blewett Pass, or perhaps over by Cle Ellum.

I used to drive that way quite a bit, when I worked at Central. I'm kind of glad that I don't anymore. Especially when this time of year comes around. The drive is just over an hour under ideal conditions.

However, during the fall and winter quarters, the roads almost always have ice or snow or both on them. Then there's the falling rocks and the deer. It's beautful country, that's for sure. And I always enjoyed the trip, travelling alongside an icy stream, through shear rock walls, and past a coniferous forest that turns gold as winter approaches. Often in the winter, you drive up into the clouds and back out again. And then, sometimes, when you turn off the pass and look out over Ellensburg, the whole valley is fogged in and the snow on the mountains off in the direction you just came sparkles in the sun. It's sunny and bright until you drive back down into the valley's mist, which freezes to your windshield. Freezing fog. Can you believe it?

Today, it's a pretty clear day up on Blewett, as you can see. No problems. And in the time that I worked at Central, I never had to use my chains. Rarely did things get bad enough that I couldn't take this route (there's another, longer way, with lower elevation).

There's no doubt that it's a beautiful trip. But this time of year, it's a difficult trip. You never know how the weather is going to be.

I remember one Thanksgiving when Jen and I decided to drive to Sea-Tac airport in Seattle to fly back to Illinois. As we rounded the first curve on the pass, there was a car on its side blocking one of the lanes. That was the last time that we drove to Seattle to catch a plane. Now we fly over to Seattle from Wenatchee.

Midwestern Living

This is very first-drafty; sorta creative non-fiction; sorta fiction. I'm not sure where it's going yet. It doesn't really have a direction. This piece started out as a daydream on a day where I didn't have much else to do. So, here you go:

Dust coats the floor of the red barn so heavily that you leave footprints. When you climb the worn ladder rungs into the loft, dirt sticks to your hands. Even the sun beams streaming in from a window up near the roof, two stories above you, are filled with particles that dance slowly and convectionally upward. Old cobwebs, sewn by spiders long dead, trail down from the rafters. And there is loose straw everywhere, shuffling between your feet and the creaky floor boards.


Spend a few hours in this room throwing bales and your spit will turn black. Your arms will be covered in scratches and rashes. You'll be sweating heavily in the July heat that radiates through the tin roof.


But oh how cool a drink of water feels afterwards. How refreshing a simple breeze can be after no more than an hour in the loft.


The bales come fast, slowly climbing the clanky conveyor and falling in through the window near the roof, and the race is on to get one or two stacked against a wall before too many pile up under the conveyor. How remarkable, you think, that in a few days you will be able to reach up and touch the roof of this room, feel the heat pressing through the tin from the sky above, step over the rafters on top of the rising stacks.


This is what work means to you. You with three friends in a barn, stacking endlessly, sweating, talking and joking about girls at school. It doesn't really even matter if you get paid. Hard work and good company are rewards enough. At 17 you don't really care about money, needing just enough, maybe, to buy a few beers to drink while you sit out under the stars on the hood of a rusty Ford and chat with some of those girls you joked about. It's a good life, at 17, staring up at the stars, crushing on girls, getting a little buzzed on a road that's no more than two worn tracks through the middle of a corn field, working hard.


Work changes, though, and with it, so do you. Suddenly work becomes bills--car payments and rent, health insurance--until you can't work hard enough anymore and you're burnt out and stressed out and bitter and angry at what work has done to you. And sometimes you just wish that you could go back to the days of sweating in a barn, days when your ego makes you decline a dust mask offered by a gray-beard farmer, who understands your refusal, having once been 17 tossing bales with his friends in that very same barn years ago.

I'm avoiding writing again by writing

I'm all about blogging again recently, just because I don't want to write other stuff. You know what I mean? I'm writing here because I'd rather be doing this than writing my dissertation.

Right now my disseratation seems a little big. I have all sorts of ideas banging into each other, and I have a plan, like a big junk box that all of those ideas are thrown into. But when I think about starting to sort that box, it seems like I find other stuff to do instead: the dishes, blogging, playing poker. It doesn't really seem to matter what it is, just as long as it's something else.

Recently, it has been blogging, both reading and writing blog posts. I'm thinking about like a blog novel or a blog non-fiction book. I'm pretty sure that will never happen though. It's a nice idea, but if I ever start to write it, I'll just end up writing something else instead.

So I need practice following through, I guess. And confidence. That's always good. I'm pretty sure that I'm at least decent at this writing thing, but you know, those little insecurities always seem to seep in when you're not paying attention. They whisper to you from the back of your mind, " What if people don't like what you write? What if you're doing all of this work for nothing?" What if I am? What then?

Maybe that's why a lot of doctoral students get to their dissertation and freeze up. Maybe they're afraid of that final barrier between safe waters and deep waters, where there be monsters. I guess when it comes to this sort of stuff, I can swim just fine. But I like that I can still see the sandy bottom, even if I'm no longer touching it.

This experience with my dissertation has made me think a lot about how we use rhetoric in our classrooms, the way that we insist that our students write to an audience. But all of these nerves I have over what other people will think is really the only thing keeping me from writing. There has to be a better way to think about the relationship between writer and reader that what rhetoric has to offer. It makes me think of Bakhtin's superaddressee and Frank Farmer's work with that concept. Perhaps, you are my superaddressee. That's right, you, who has stumbled across this post and who may or may not respond.

Can't believe I'm actually posting this.

A little something to share with the world

This is the view from my balcony. You're looking east, toward Spokane and away from the Majestics. It's evening and the sun is setting. You can see that the mountains are already beginning to cast shadows over the valley.

The brown hillside above East Wenatchee proves how little rain we get. For us, this rainbow is a rare site indeed.

I love the way it smears near the edges and the way it contrasts with the hillside and the clouds.

Perhaps, that's why there's so many songs about rainbows.