Memories and Sky

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Humptulips County has become my home, its pleasant pastoral greens beacons for my heart, its soft murmurings music to my spirit, and its gentle beauty balm for my soul. I love it here and would not now live anywhere else. But I was not born here. I grew up in Eastern Washington, an ecosystem and a lifetime away from Humptulips County.

When traveling East through Snoqualmie Pass, Eastern Washington begins in the high foothills of the Cascade Mountains above Ellensburg, its Western boundary marked by the wall of the Cascades against the overarching sky spread before you and its Eastern boundary unseeable due to the curve of the Earth. The sky determines Eastern Washington – its character, its coloring, its people, the land and the quality of the life upon that land. You cannot speak of Eastern Washington without mentioning the sky any more than you could speak of New York City without mentioning the toughness of its inhabitants. You cannot imagine Eastern Washington’s landscape except as lying beneath a sky of every imaginable hue of blue, gray or rose – land and sky existing as perfect analogues. You cannot remember a particular moment spent in Eastern Washington without recalling whether it was informed by rain, wind, lightning or sun pouring from an omnipresent, overweening sky – for the memory of that event would be singularly incomplete without its appropriate backdrop.

While I never feel claustrophobic in Humptulips County, I always feel a keen sense of release when reaching the foothills above Ellensburg. There is one, particular bend in the well-traveled, familiar highway where it always becomes apparent to me that I have arrived in what Ivan Doig termed “This House of Sky.” As I round that bend, my spirit is released into that sky to soar with the hawks, to feel and taste the bite of the wind, and to savor the colors of the landscape below – tan and sere in Summer, crazy quilted and musty in Fall, white, pristine and silent in Winter, and satin-sensuously green during its brief Spring.

The light is always glorious no matter the time of year, since there is so much more sky from which it may originate. In this light I first see the beauty that is the land itself: the ridges vanishing into the haze of a distant horizon; the very shape of the valleys as seen from above; the cornucopic imprint of life upon the land. And, the closer I look the more beauty I can find lurking within the interstices of this massive landscape: tiny flowers growing within volcanic rock; blurred movements of field mice or other small animals; silvery undersides of grey-green leaves twisting in a Summer wind; mysterious cavortings of dust devils over a plowed field; joyous antics of tumbleweeds in motion; babbling creek water passing over time-smoothed stones.

I have less reason now to visit the sky under which I was raised, but it still informs and affects my life, calling to me from memory. My parents lie beneath this sky, snug in their graves and now of the landscape itself. I hear their whispers in the susuration of the wheat and I feel their presence in the narrow canyons of the Blue Mountains. I come here less often now, but come I will as long as there is the ability to do so.

This was the land of my childhood from which I will never be completely estranged. My youngest son has just moved to Eastern Washington. The landscape of his childhood is the obvious, visual glory of Humptulips County. I wish for him that he may learn to love the spirit and magnificence of this sky, for only in its immensity can one fully appreciate one’s position upon this earth and discover the singular sense of wonder and magnificence that is to be found in the struggle of each living thing to survive and endure.