Open Spaces

Voices from the Northwest

Penny H. Harrison, Penny H. Harrison

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780295804132
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Saggi letterari

Since its beginnings, Open Spaces has been on the cutting edge of thinking about the Pacific Northwest - an intelligent, provocative, beautifully conceived magazine for thoughtful readers who are searching for new ways to understand the region, themselves, and many of the major issues of our time. The Pacific Northwest is known for its innovative solutions. Whether the challenge is integration with the natural world, the relationship of science and policy, learning to use what we know, or simply enjoying a balanced and fulfilling life, these writers, leaders in their respective disciplines, provide the background necessary to understand the issues and move forward. This lasting collection from the magazine is an invaluable resource for students, educators, and practitioners working in various fields as well as decision makers in government, business, and other sectors looking for real-world answers to ongoing conflicts. Collectively, the writers in this volume apply their expertise and talent to provide an intelligent and informed context through which to see public issues and make sense of the changes that continue to shape the region and our world. Individually, they touch on our deepest sense of human experience and continuity and reflect the spirit of the Northwest. Open Spaces enlightens, challenges, and inspires. Featured writers: Bruce Babbitt R. Peter Benner Linda Besant Emory Bundy Jeff Curtis Bob Davison Sandra Dorr Angus Duncan David James Duncan Tom Grant Stephen J. Harris Roy Hemmingway Thomas F. Hornbein William Kittredge Jane Lubchenco Kathleen Dean Moore Lee C. Neff James Opie Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain Jarold Ramsey Richard Rapport Eric Redman William D. Ruckelshaus Robert Sack Edward W. Sheets Scot Siegel Kim Stafford John Struloeff Ann Ware Charles Wilkinson For more information go to: http://www.open-spaces.com

I

WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST?

Others ... can of course also be responsive to where they find themselves:–artists have to be. That’s the ground for their art, the place where they live.

—William Stafford, My Name Is William Tell

WRITING WEST

John Daniel

ARE there characteristics that distinguish Northwestern writing from the literature of other regions? To answer is to generalize, and to generalize is to overcook the soup, but I would respond with a qualified yes. The roster of Northwest writers is long and varied, but many of us within that variety tend to invite the influence of natural places and processes into our work. Northwestern landscapes, weathers, and wild communities involve themselves in what we write not merely as backdrop or setting but as imaginal matrix, the very stuff of human life and longing. As a consequence, despite the environmental damage in which all of us are implicated, I’d say we are hopeful writers. How could we live among Pacific salmon and old-growth forests and fail to be hopeful? We aren’t much given to irony or alienation. We’re given to the possibility of redemption.

These qualities are of course not strictly Northwestern or even Western, but—at present, at least—I would argue that they are more Western than Eastern, and it is partly because wild nature infuses our work that Western writing is sometimes deprecated in the East as “regional” in a euphemistic sense, meaning local color, work of limited value and influence. Norman Maclean had a world of trouble trying to publish A River Runs through It, because, in the words of one editor, “These stories have trees in them.” Our great nature poet, Theodore Roethke, though a more interesting artist, remains in the shadow of his confessional Eastern contemporary, Robert Lowell. Even a writer of Wallace Stegner’s stature suffered slights both great and small from the literary brokers of New York. Reviewers and critics reflexively called him “the dean of Western writers”; they never announced who held the deanship of Eastern writers.

East-West regionalism, though, is only one dimension of the dispute. Avatars of high culture have long disparaged writers whose work is bound up with any locality. It was this snobbery in T.S. Eliot that dismissed William Carlos Williams as a poet “of some local interest, perhaps.” Eliot thought art must seek the universal by sterilizing itself of the personal, the particular, the immediate. Williams believed that it was only through an intense imagining of the ordinary particulars of his town and countryside, and his life as part of them, that he could approach the universal.

Williams’s poems persist, tenacious as dandelions. So will the work of William Stafford, who endured some of the same condescension from the muckamucks of high art. Stafford was open to anything a natural place or human encounter could teach him, and so his two principal landscapes, the Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest, are persistently evident in his work. His imagination naturalized both and made of them a world in which any reader was welcome. Alertness was all he asked, and maybe it’s a kind of transpersonal alertness that characterizes our literature at its best. We try to attend not to our personal pains and ecstasies alone but also to the greater memberships we belong to, memberships that William Stafford had in mind as he weighed what to do with a dead doe on a mountain roadside, the body warm with an unborn fawn and a danger to human motorists. “Around our group I could hear the wilderness listen,” he wrote. “I thought hard for us all....”

One hazard of this orientation is piousness about the natural world, and some of us do fall too frequently into a default tone that Kim Stafford has aptly tagged “the first-person rhapsodic.” A second hazard, to which anyone who writes of his own region is prone, is defensiveness. Many Western writers carry a chip on the shoulder (you may have sensed one in this essay) about the attention or inattention paid us by the greater literary culture. This attitude, sadly, is itself more injurious than any slings or silence from New York. Defensiveness is never fertile. Stegner and Stafford and Roethke and Maclean showed us the answer. The only reply to regional bias, finally, is to write well enough and long enough to overcome it.

And besides, the greater culture is coming to us. More and more western writers are winning at least a modest national audience, some of them through East Coast publishers, others with one or another of the vigorous small and mid-size presses—for-profit, nonprofit, and university—that have established themselves on the West Coast and in the interior West as well. The number of agents headquartered in western cities has probably quadrupled in the last twenty years. And new or resurgent literary and general-readership magazines, some of them regionally based, seem to be blossoming all the time.

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman farmer in the newly born United States, asked two hundred years ago, “Who is the American, this new man?” Wallace Stegner, in his “Wilderness Letter,” offered an answer: “A civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild.” By “wild” he meant both wilderness and the quality of wildness, the presence in our lives of Nature’s original energy. Henry David Thoreau, in one of his most famous utterances, gave a directional definition to that presence: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Thoreau’s Wild West is a state of spirit more than geography, native to all the American land. For some of us it flourishes best in the mountains, rivers, and lonesome reaches of the West, but readers everywhere are hungry for the wild, hungry for imaginings in language of how we belong or could belong to the living land. “There was need of America,” Thoreau wrote, referring to the tame listlessness of European literatures, and just as the cultures of Europe renewed themselves in the American East, the East is now looking west for its own renewal. It may remain the home of our cultural capitals, but more and more the East is turning in our direction to drink from the wild perennial springs of vitality and hope.

OTEY ISLAND

William Kittredge

PINTAILS and mallards and teal, in their quick undulating vee-shaped flights, were everywhere in the twilight, wheeling and calling, setting their wings, settling. I was with Tupper Blake, at the little property he calls March Island Ranch, looking out over the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, and I was happy like a child.

Only a week or so before, Jim Hainline, the head biologist at the Klamath National Wildlife Refuges, had flown the wetlands in the basin, and counted about 3.7 million waterbirds, some 525,000 mallards, slightly over 700,000 green-winged teals, and 772,000 pintail ducks.

Those were big numbers, way up from the annual fall count in recent years. But in 1955 some 7 million birds had been counted. Maybe the seemingly irreversible decline in the numbers of waterfowl using the refuges had stopped. Maybe the efforts of preservationists like Jim Hainline were beginning to pay off. Maybe the flyway was coming back.

The actual birds, some small portion of them, flying in the sky before us, were like confronting a sight of infinity, the earth, our only habitation, thronging with life.

Not long ago I heard a man point out that the lives of most citizens in the partway mechanical world we’ve invented for ourselves in recent centuries can be thought of as semi-denuded. Only in the last one hundred years has it been uncommon for people to witness great wildlife spectacles.

My great grandfather saw millions of passenger pigeons darken the sun over the forests of Kentucky. The last passenger pigeon died in 1912 in the Cincinnati Zoo. My great grandfather also traveled the Great Plains in the 1850s and saw buffalo in thousands moving over the sand hills of Nebraska. The great herds flowed over the grasslands like the wind or waves on the sea. They were ordinary. Now they are gone.

Salmon thronged in rivers like the Klamath. We’re a hunting creature, evolved to revere such sights. The sight of so much life lights up our minds with visions of luck, and possibility, success.

But there’s more to it. Sacred, to me, means that which I will not consent to do without. Those birds in their multitudes, there in the twilight sky over Lower Klamath, are to me sacred. The sight of them convinces me that I participate in a flow of meaningful energies, that I am thus meaningful. It’s a solacing notion, derived from witnessing life. It’s about as religious as I get.

Tupper Ansel Blake is a professional wildlife photographer, and I am a writer. We had parked at the foot of Otey Butte, a volcanic extrusion on his property, just on the California side of State Line Road, and climbed the couple of hundred feet to the top. We were there to begin work on a joint book about watershed problems in the Klamath Basin. It was our job, as I understand the social responsibilities of writers and other artists, to see as accurately as we could, and to pass on what we’d seen to others in ways that might lead them to see as we saw. I was obliged to depict the flying waterbirds in ways which would lead others to not simply understand but to participate in my feelings about them.

On Otey Island, in turn-of-the-century homestead days, there had been an artesian well on the little flat at the top, and a small orchard. We stepped over the remains of old rockwork fences, laid up when the butte was an island in a sea of tule marshes, reachable only by boat. Life for the men and women who settled there must have been defined by hard work, and by sweat, and more work. And by dreams.

Northeast of the marshlands preserved by the Waterfowl Refuge are thousands of acres of ordered, irrigated, and drained farmlands. Beyond the agricultural lands are dry hills, which look much as they have for millennia. Beyond them lie a thousand miles of mostly unbroken Great Basin deserts.

Tupper came up from California, and spent time and effort and money in order to turn his property around Otey Butte, second-rate farmland when he bought it, back into swamps, for the waterbirds.

When local farmers saw equipment cutting imitation sloughs through the fields which had once been laboriously drained, Tupper told them to think of him as the first local “Duckaroo.” A lame joke, but the independent spirit that went with it seems to have won them over. Tupper’s neighbors treat him with respect.

Maybe he’s crazy, the thinking sort of went, but he loves the birds, and he’s lucky, and able to indulge his passion. Anybody would love the birds. “It’s like looking out over the ocean,” Tupper said, as we stood at the top of Otey Butte. Thousands of birds were flying.

“More animal hearts,” he said, “than human hearts.” Maybe he’s not so crazy. But, then, he’s not trying to make a living off farmland in the basin.

Tupper Blake and I make our livings as witnesses. Out there on Otey Butte, feeding on the natural glories, we were like tourists. We could, if we were not careful, allow ourselves to honor only our private inclination to regard the birds as sacred. But there are many versions of what’s most useful.

So we’ll try to honor and respect other versions of what’s going on in the Klamath Basin. But we’re only ultimately responsible for presenting our own vision. Other visions will no doubt be presented in other ways. Over time, built stone by stone like a rock fence, we hope, a more complete and socially useful vision will accumulate.

Tupper and I will have tried to do what we can, as artists; we will have honored our responsibility; society in its ways will come to an evolving notion of how to proceed. If we’re true to ourselves we will have attempted being useful in the only way, as citizens trying to be artists, that we can be useful.

RHAPSODY FOR BLACKBERRIES

Sandra Dorr

I MUST make jam. Every time the refrigerator opens, I see the berries, as black as bears, their eyes shining. They have voices: a low crescendo that climbs higher every day. They tell me what it’s like to lie hidden under the green fingers of leaves, listening to cars chuff by. To grow darker and darker in the light. When I grow old I’ll be one of them, a blackberry wizened into a bobbled tooth of sweet, hot sun.

What pulls me to drive off roads whenever I see them? Is it because they’re free? And everywhere, like swallows, in an Oregon summer? The very last berries are dropping off bushes right this minute under the eaves of the Wave Crest Hotel, in the air of salt brine and fog, bushes that grow like big men with bristling hands. I passed their white flowers that rippled like butterflies, and their light perfume in June, when my legs had begun to turn a nut brown and my walk had slowed with the beginning of summer. The road along the old, yellow hotel was filled with blackberry bushes, gathering force. The tide was the lowest of the year, and people were walking out the beach to the volcanic rocks that stand in the waves like far-off castles. It seemed that I could walk forever, breathing in the bushes and the soft, ocean air; I would not get tired, and the waves would keep returning. This is how the berries grow, and grow.

On Sauvie Island, it’s said, an almost unthinkable mass of blackberry bushes once flourished on a knoll fifty feet above sea level, one of the highest points of the island. A group of explorers poked through it one morning and discovered a wall. The historical society dug out a nine-room house, built in the 1850s and preserved in blackberries.

In July I found blackberries springing out from the cliffs on the Wind River, in the forests of Mount Hood, in shallow gullies along highways, even in supermarket parking lots. They fell apart in our fingers, and we ate them in the car until our chins dripped. Warm, and sweeter than sugar. Then we scrubbed the purple juice from the seats, and I promised everyone the best jam this side of the Rockies.

So I line up the lids, the honey, leftover pectin, and the pots of boiling water—oh, lord, they’re hot! The blackberry voices trill and crescendo. My husband hollers up from the basement, “Sandy?” and I stop to see his project.

He turns fine-grained cherry, alder, and oak over in his hands, considering them the way I consider the berries. The saw has screamed; there’s been a thwacking of paint, and now a lean set of shelves—perfect for jars of jam—stand, under the basement stairs. “Gosh.” I mutter, “they’re great. You did it so fast.”

I want to be a woman of purpose, to mash the bowl of berries and to fill the solid glass jars with the wildness and the sweetness, months of eating ...