Trans/plant/portation

On the Cynthia Nixon episode of Law & Order: SVU, her character remarks, “You’re never more than six feet away from a spider.” I really didn’t care to know that, true statement of fact or not. As bugs go, spiders are not my worst enemy. That mantle goes to the disease-spreading cockroach. Fortunately I haven’t spied any of those since moving away from the nation’s capitol. Out in DC broad flat roaches skitter across the sidewalk in the summer months, sensing oncoming foot traffic. It’s like a creepy, disgusting version of the parting of the Red Sea, except there’s nothing approximating divine intervention going on.

But if Walla Walla is free from mosquitos and cockroaches, both of which love humidity, then it has more than its fair share of spiders, some of them extremely poisonous. We’ve got rattlesnakes out here too, because we’re in dry tumbleweed territory. The snakes, however, don’t hang out in corners of our home—other than a friend’s dog who got bit during a hike on a low ridge, I haven’t heard of any rattlesnake encounters since I moved out here. Read More…

These days I use chronic sleep deprivation as a tool. It’s my excuse when I can’t think of a particular word. It’s my justification for taking an early afternoon nap. It’s my benchmark for whether the latest set of nighttime hours aided or subtracted from my sleep deficit. It’s my metaphor for 2012, in which I measure achievement in between unintended bouts of sleep. At some point I may actually drool into my keyboard and short-circuit my laptop. Anything is possible.

But another effect of not granting rest to my brain is the effect it’s had on my frontal lobe. Perhaps my cerebellum is demanding that it operate at peak efficiency so I can like, breathe and blink and such, but my filter for shutting up has gone all wonky. I’m not lecturing passersby as I run errands, exactly, but my big booming laugh is taking more people by surprise.

Last week I left extra early before work because a significant number of my dendrites told me to get a mocha from the patisserie. Not the roastery, not the drive through espresso place on 9th Avenue, but the patisserie. Without enough alertness to remember that the shop wouldn’t be open at that hour, I maneuvered the car to downtown, then cursed at the Closed sign, which of course didn’t care, it being an inanimate sign and all. Idle at the light on Main Street, then press the accelerator. I figured since I was near the post office now I might as well pick up the mail for the office. About thirty feet past the stop sign I recognized that hey, those red octagons mean something important. What was it again? Read More…

I shouldn’t write about this while I’m still here. It’s creepy enough in these hallways at night, but right now the sun is still up and I can pretend I won’t be a nervous nellie after dark.

We’ve driven out to the Hot Lake Hotel in La Grande, Oregon, former resort and when that didn’t pan out, sanitorium. Now former sanitorium, as that didn’t last, either. Three hundred plus windows in a blocky brick frame, at one point all blown out, the wind and rain assaulting the structure for decades, folks round these parts had given up on the building as part of a bygone era when the train stopped here and let off hundreds of passengers. La Grande, like Walla Walla, was a destination in the pioneering West, until the population centers crystallized along the coast and sucked the life out these inland cities. Portland and Seattle became economic black holes for the likes of places at the edge of smaller mountain ranges, and to this day, there is much grumbling about people here getting the short end of the stick. Read More…

Susanne and I like to think we are seasoned travelers, people who move around continents with ease and without flinching. I know before I get to the security line how many bins I’ll need for my stuff. I know which planes have a great bulkhead row and which will cause me to wrap my legs around me like an experiment in human origami. Southwest trains their employees to present all information as a jolly delight, so I’ve learned to cut through the tone to get to the actual substance. Delta, after its merger with Northwest, has a lot of sullen, underappreciated staff at the till, so I make sure to smile when I talk to them and then I get slightly better service. I’m a gate-checking madman, avoidant of baggage fees, and I most recently am grieving the loss of the tiny bag of pretzels, because it seems even that microscopic luxury of flying has now vanished.

When people told me that everything would change once the baby arrived, they failed to bring up air  travel. Not a single person in the 8,374 instances of “Your life is going to change, you know,” that I heard before Emile’s birth finished the sentiment with “especially when you try to get on a plane.” I recognized that life would shift, but I didn’t think about flying. Read More…

It rose out of nowhere, otherwise known as 3.7 miles below ground in a section of Virginia far from DC, but as of this writing, today’s geologic event is being called the “DC earthquake.” In the middle of the working day, government employees, among the last people in the country with jobs, evacuated their buildings in case one of them had a crack after the 5.9-level quake shook the eastern seaboard for something around 10 seconds.

J. McKinley covered the devastation on his blog, and other people began using their only means of communication—social networks—to make sure everyone was okay. Read More…

We headed to Eugene, Oregon, on our trip that at one point included a visit to Crater Lake—a visit we canceled because the lake is still under many feet of snow—and when our friends suggested we go to the Oregon Country Fair, we agreed. I was enthusiastic, having gone to the Montgomery County Fair and New York State Fair at least a dozen times combined. I’m a fan of seeing which child’s chinchilla took the blue ribbon, who won for best blueberry pie, and honestly, is there anything more exhilarating than going for a ride on a rickety Ferris Wheel?

The Oregon Country Fair is none of these things. Read More…

We raced out of town on a weekend getaway for all of the obvious reasons, not the least of which it’s gotten very hot in Walla Walla. Even worse, it’s uncharacteristically humid, so 95 and 98 degree days feel powerfully worse than they should. At least in drier heat one can take actual solace in the shade. Now the shades just mock the old-timers into second guessing their memories. We began on our usual route west along the gorge of the Columbia River, and past the creepy tree farm on I-84, stopping briefly in The Dalles for our regular visit to Burgerville. Then at last we were on the winding, scenic highway to Mount Hood. And there it is that we encountered a species of human very new to me: the skier. Read More…

Once upon a time, Walla Walla had political importance. It was the site of incorporation for Washington State, a real pioneering town with horse-driven wagons and farmers, a small jail—still in service—and a few men who counted as the moneymakers and power brokers, like Dr. Baker, Stephen Boyer, and Judge William Langford, who oversaw the transition from territory to county. While industrial pressure led to the flooding of the actual Walla Walla Fort, now trapped at the bottom of the Columbia River in Wallula, much of the original western outpost feel remains today.

Maybe that’s not too terribly challenging, as many of these old buildings are only 100 years old, give or a take a few years. But memory often fades faster than brick, and still the townspeople hold on dearly to Walla Walla’s roots as a farming town and hub of land title deals. Read More…

This whole life creation thing makes for an unpredictable voyage, and not just because Susanne and I have been coming at it from an alternative place—I get that not every baby started out with their parents combing through medical histories and sperm count data. And I hereby note, for what it’s worth, that I may hear some unusual rantings when our child is 14 or so about how they entered into this world, in the midst of their teenage angst. I’m okay with that. We’re still going to sit through the six-week course at St. Mary’s Hospital, with the pillows brought in from home clutched to our chests as we watch painfully accurate portrayals of live births on a wide screen in the training room. Vernix is a necessary substance, I’m sure, but it does not do wonders for anyone’s look. Read More…

I admit it: I was a touch fearful about talking to the doctor on Monday. I’ve got a short list of items about which most physicians get lectury, after all. But for the reasons I expressed in my last post, I needed to have a local doctor, so I was willing to lay it out there. Susanne declared it was a “test” of his cultural competency. I liked that as an approach enough.

For some reason, the appointments at this family practice (it’s the same practice as the one for Susanne’s baby doctor) are significantly late to start. I know we all complain about start times at our doctors’ offices, but I can’t for the life of me understand why they set up 11:30AM appointments when all of the nursing staff, en masse, goes to lunch for 90 minutes, especially as they’re 45 minutes behind schedule by the time noon rolls around. Read More…