Books vs. Blogs: The Northwest; Lost In The Land Of Amber Fields And Verdant Mountain Majesties
Last summer, my friend and I worked on a biodynamic vegetable farm in the Var region of Provence, and before we lest, we hypothesized about our future co-workers. A mixture of hipster, hippy, and rasta, we decided- combining unfortunate dreadlocks, FEED-100 tee-shirts, and hand-rolled cigarettes into one smugly beatific package. Without a doubt, we decided, they would be from Portland.
We were right, or partly right. All six of our co-workers fit the above description, but only two were from Portland. Still, 2/6 was enough to solidify my impression of Portlanders as earnest and artfully crunchy do-gooders. Seattle, in my mind, represented Portland’s intellectual, bespectacled, black-coffee-and-caterwhauling-indie loving cousin. But the first description is of a microcosm at best, and I have very little idea where the second came from. Who are Northwesterners, and how does their northwestern-ness come out in writing?
The first part is relatively easy- the Northwest was first settled by pioneers who found the midwest’s landscape too intimidating and its lifestyle too hardscrabble. If the logging and farming lifestyle afforded by the Northwest, with its abundant forests and swathes of fertile grasslands, was somewhat akin to that of the Midwest, at least its seasons were milder, and its topography more visually stimulating. In addition to logging and farming, Idaho for a brief time offered its residents a chance to strike it rich from oil and gold, though the subsequent bust left many a boom town crippled or fallow. Today, any chance at real money lies in the recreation business- outdoor activities like skiing, snowmobiling, hiking, fishing, and deep-water rafting are, apart from a few of its cities, the Northwest’s main tourist draw. What all these industries had and have in common is a tie to and dependence on the land, and a sense of it as an impressive beast that must be tamed “through the exploitation of its resources” (Shwantes, Carlos A., The Pacific Northwest: an interpretive history, 7).
In addition to feeling challenged and shocked by the land, the pioneers and later settlers also felt isolated by it. Two chains of mountains, the Cascades in Washington and Oregon
and the Bitterroot Range in Idaho form fairly impassive natural barriers (though the Columbia and Snake rivers provide an escape valve). A sense of remoteness, of what Carlos Shwantes calls “hinterland” culture still predominates the rural areas of the Northwest today, accompanied by is an “awareness that much of the region remains uninhabited or only lightly populated…inhabitants tend to gather like bees into a few urban hives” (Shwantes, 5-6).
And what of the hive-dwellers? According to Shwantes, “natural setting” looms large in their perspectives too, as evinced by Portland’s regulations protecting the city’s “view corridors”– empty spaces which look out on the Willamette River, Mount Hood, and Mount Saint Helens to the east and the West Hills to the west– from future man-made obstructions.
So we have the primacy of the natural, and the sense of remoteness as definers of the Northwest sense of place. What we don’t have is much of a regional identity, dialect, or culture. Perhaps because the natural is so magestically, dramatically, unescapably there, it engulfs all else.
What unified voice there is belongs, in general, to the area’s newcomers- the teachers, artists, musicians, and writers who heeded the two-pronged clarion call of land-as-muse and big-shot university positions that sounded post-WWII. The newcomers brought with them wide-eyes and a sensibility unencumbered by “self-consiousness or regional insecurities”; as the poet? David Wagoner tells Shwantes, the Northwest was a godsend, for “It has for me the central shock of untouched nature. I came from a place where nature was ruined, and here the natural world was still in a pristine state, in some areas” (448).
However, if there was a Northwest sound or voice, Wagoner didn’t hear it, and apart from the characteristics already mentioned, neither did the other works I consulted, Nicholas O’Connell’s On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwestern Literature, and Lisa Gabbert’s “Distanciation and the Recontextualization of Space: Finding One’s way in a Small Western Community.” What the latter did mention, which also perhaps explains the lack of defining regional characteristics, is the area’s transiency- its industries are seasonal, and there is no real divide between the summer and temporary residents and the year-rounders.
In Just a Small Town Girl, Kathleen Parker B writes occasionally of her childhood home in rural Washington, but most of the memories are centered around people, not place, and there is a distinct lack of nostalgia:”I believed the only future for people who stayed in my town was to become one or more of the following: a fisherman, a fisherman’s wife, a drunk and/or a bigot” she writes in “Revisiting the Past: A Cautionary Tale.” Indeed, Parker describes herself as “just a small town girl with a big city heart,” a heart currently sated by the neon schmaltz of Las Vegas.
The narrator of River-Rose seems to prefer nature over neon, but she sees the towering sunflowers, sun-spattered trees, and sunset-streaked lake just as Kathleen Parker sees Vegas’s landscape: awe-inducing and praiseworthy and even soothing (but never seeing it as theirs). This same lack of attachment shows up in My Pretty Little Head; while though its author, Christine, is a photographer and posts numerous landscape photos, there is rarely relevant commentary, and what is there generally pertains to the quality of the photos, not their subjects. Nature photos are common throughout the blogs (with the exception of “city girl” Kathleen Parker), but again, their subjects are always viewed with awe, not attachment.
The one power of the Northwestern bloggers’ childhood places was their ability to generate a sense of isolation– and a need to escape–in their inhabitants. Not all of the bloggers got the hell out of Palouse, but those who remain discuss their restlessness and future (geographically far away) plans at great length. Writes Christine:
I am a wild dreamer. Everything I think about is at least 6 months out. At times this can be very disappointing because that means there is an awful lot of lag time for dreams to be squashed, altered, or easily letdown. However, I have a BIG dream that is consuming all my thoughts lately, as in I can’t sleep at all because I am constantly brainstorming, and I really truly in my heart of hearts think it will work out.
Miss B from California (who grew up in Oregon) echoes Christine, wondering:
Do I really want to work in an office mostly doing administrative things?– or do I want a different career path? One that I started to pursue a few months back. I have to do some thinking.
A characteristic I didn’t come across in the books was how self-oriented and headspacey nearly all of the bloggers were. Nothing overly emotional or dramatic, mind, but thought spews, mostly descriptions of crushes and exes (and their emails!) and husbands and wives, of love lost and hearts broken, as well as of future-related anxieties, smatterings of biblespeak, and the family. Family serves as an anchor (often literally- many of the twenty-somethings live close by or even with their parents).
Other striking commonalities are short, either simple or two-part compound sentences. Adverbs are common; adjectives, apart from pedestrian ones, are not. Voice tends to read as genuine, not artful, and rarely edited. And assertions- sometimes backed-up, sometimes left alone, are everywhere.
What it comes down to for Northwest rhetoric is a sense of nature’s sprawl and power (and not, importantly, of owning or being one with it), a sense of isolation, a tendency to focus inward, pervasive itchy feet, and a reliance on family as root providers.
Books:
Carlos Schwante’s The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History
Nicholas O’Connell’s On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwestern Literature
Lisa Gabbert’s “Distanciation and the Recontextualization of Space: Finding One’s way in a Small Western Community.“
