My Roots

Mom and I went for a drive today. At first we were just going to go fifteen minutes away to a neighboring little town where I wanted to turn in an application for substitute teaching and then come right back. However, it was so pleasant out that we decided to go further through a rural area that she wanted to see, then loop around through Pendleton for lunch before heading home. The mountain range was a hazy blue that nearly matched the sky and the harvested fields on the foothills around us were a clipped gold interspersed with brown, fallow fields that were a rich hue from the recent rain.

Too often I take this country for granted. People either love it or hate it and for almost the same reasons. It is as colorless and dead-looking in the winter as it is vibrant and alive in the spring. One nearby mountain range or another can make the weather change quickly and the road conditions a bit of an adventure to navigate whether from frozen fog, blowing topsoil, or snow. Streams and rivers cut into the soil and basalt rockbeds, swelling in the spring and almost petering out by summer’s end; luring fishermen, swimmers, and rafters.

Towns are much farther than a stone’s throw apart and many are only held together by narrow, twisting roads that are vulnerable to the upheaval of the land and small county budgets. It is a rough country, carved by glaciers and rivers into occasional plateaus and valleys lined by rim-rocked hills. Although humans try to tame it with precariously plowed hilltop fields, much is still covered with boulders, sagebrush, wild grasses, and scrub pine.

It is a big country, where one can truly be alone to the point of isolation and come to fully realize his or her insignificance compared to the immensity of Earth. Many find it lonely to the point of desolation. I, however, love standing alone on these rough hilltops, feeling the timelessness of their existence, the simultaneous strength and vulnerability of the rock beneath and beside me and feeling a kinship with the creatures that struggle to do more than just survive amongst them.

Is it age, wisdom, or my new glasses that gives me such a sentimental viewpoint today? Perhaps, knock on wood, if we’d had car trouble during our morning excursion, my environmental opinion wouldn’t be quite so rosy and thoughtful! Such is life in the far, far, West.

Vive bene.