Mail Fraud
Moderate-time readers will recall a certain visit that was paid to my abode this winter by a random church member who wanted to ask me all kinds of questions about my belief in God and the upcoming doomsday. I knew there was a chance I’d get another knock on my door, but I didn’t think about my mailbox and honestly, the incident I’m about to reference may have nothing whatsoever to do with my previous conversation. There are more than enough folks around here concerned for my soul to go around. Not that my soul in particular is of any interest; I’m quite sure that there are people in Walla Walla who are gravely worried about humanity in general. This is not to say that I couldn’t interest them in my specific soul, but I won’t go there. I wouldn’t want to frighten anyone with my misdeeds. Read More…
Last year, 
It’s springtime in the Wallas, and the lawn care has resumed in earnest. If winter is a time of hibernation, a lack of produce in the local grocery stores, and complaints about utility bills, then springtime, not summer, is its opposite. People can’t wait to burst outside, and daffodils thrust themselves through the crust of the ground. Echos of children bounce off of the houses up and down the street, so it sounds, from our living room, like there are hundreds of kids playing hide-and-seek in the afternoon sun. 
It won’t come as a shock to anyone who knows me that I am a fan of public libraries, or at least, it shouldn’t. I nurtured a morbid fascination with maritime disasters at the Princeton public library when I went to grade school in the town, and although the East Windsor, NJ library paled in comparison by almost any measure, but most notably with regard to architecture, selection of books, and proximity to PJ’s Pancake House (I’ll always love you, PJ’s!), I still spent a lot of time there after school. I’d bike over and fret once I’d selected a couple of tomes that I’d left my bag at home, so it was a careful pedal back home, balancing the books on the handlebars. Any library beat my primary school’s library, really, which was limited to a tiny room on the top floor of the school, the books crammed in so tightly that one considered doing hand exercises in one’s spare time so as to improve one’s finger strength for wrestling them off the shelves. 
Walla Walla, as far as electoral politics go, is conservative. In the last Presidential election, the county went 58 percent for McCain. Culturally, it’s also a right-leaning place, as I’ve written about in this blog before—the handing out of scripture at the Christmas parade, the strong Seventh Day Adventist presence, the many evangelical people who go door-to-door selling their church’s services—it can feel intimidating to a bleeding heart liberal, especially when the conservative presence is coupled with angry sentiment. It’s a bad economy that doesn’t feel any better to people even as the latest unemployment numbers show a one percent improvement. I understand this anger; I’m frustrated too.
Few places in Walla Walla acquire large numbers of people. I should clarify that. Few places in Walla Walla acquire large numbers of people on a frequent basis. There’s the annual rodeo each Labor Day Weekend, and fans drive in from all around for that, but that’s certainly not what I would call frequent. The weekly sale on Tuesdays at the Bi-Mart, on the other hand, are frequent, but not packed with crowds. I know, I’ve been there, okay? Of course some of the churches have the biggest parking lots in the city, so I presume that they draw in a lot of bodies, or perhaps they overestimate their appeal. Having not gone to Sunday services since moving here, I couldn’t say which is closer to reality. 
I think we’ve established that in the big scheme of things, Walla Walla is a pretty small town. It’s bigger than Ember, Wyoming, yes, but I’m sure 99.9 percent of the United States has more than 50 people in its city limits. Overall, the few tens of thousands of folks who call Wallyworld home understand that it’s a bit isolated, a bit small, and a bit lacking in big city sophistication.
Riddle: what do you get when you combine an overtired klutz, an avid reader of 40 years, and a person’s observation that a particular bookshelf looks more than a mite unsteady on its feet?
In all of the traveling I’ve done since moving to the Pacific Northwest—a journey through Glacier National Park, driving through the Rockies and Bighorn National Forest more than once, exploring Yellowstone, walking through the unbelievably tall mountains in Alaska—I have not seen a single moose. I’ve even driven up next to a lumbering bison, which by the way, didn’t smell all that good, but which was still amazing. I’ve stood 50 yards away from a brown bear lolling around on the soft carpet of moss. Black bears make my list of eyewitnessed nature, too, as I’ve taken in a newly independent cub feasting on fresh salmon in a glacier-fed river as close to the Arctic Circle as I’ve ever come. Yes, I really want to explore the Yukon now. 
Long-time readers of this blog will recall that our last abode in Walla Walla did not reach the pinnacle of success as family shelters go. It did make my Top Two in House Disasters, displaced from the top spot only by the 1-bedroom apartment in Syracuse, New York, in which a 6-by-8-foot section of plaster ceiling came crashing down after a few weeks of increasingly bowing out from a rotten joist. That debacle will be tough to beat, and the “Liar House”—so named because it looked cute on the outside but was awful inside—just sucked too much to work hard enough to be king of the ignoble hill. 
Trans/plant/portation 