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Jun. 4th, 2009
(no subject)
Jun. 4th, 2009 10:53 amJune 2
JUMP: Royal City, WA → Warden, WA – School Property: 45 miles
LEFT out of the school parking lot… arrows back to HWY 26 EAST
LEFT onto HWY 17 NORTH just past Othello
RIGHT onto HWY 170 EAST to Warden… arrows to the lot
Shows at 5/7:30pm
Beyond the Yakima river valley, eastern Washington is naturally high desert. Sun beats down, wind blows. Tumbleweeds chase heat devils across rutted county roads. Within this arid zone though are areas of cultivation, end result of irrigation projects that carry western Washington’s vast reserves of water to local ditches. Why was this patch of desert transformed and not that one? I wonder. I suppose it has something to do with who owned what, how foresightful they were once, back in the day, when the only possible use for this land most people could imagine was mineral rights.
Royal City has no real reason for being where it is. Nor could I figure out how it came by its name. For one thing, it’s not a city. For another, no one I saw sported a Hapsburg chin or appeared to be suffering from hemophilia. A mostly Mexican community, cluster of Section 8 housing surrounding a bean processing plant, a grain silo, a fertilizer factory, two auto parts stores and a huge school complex. The high school football team, the Royal City Kings, have won the state championship five times in recent years. It’s the final destination on a bus route that starts in San Antonio, Texas – field worker underground, I suppose – and that made me wonder whether Central Washington isn’t in line to take over from California’s Central Valley as the nation’s prime vegetable growing region. There isn’t going to be any water in the Central Valley this year, and the financially beleaguered state of CA is gonna be hard put to come by any aid for the farmers that might help them stay in business in a ba-a—ad year.
Circus did great business there and I had my first actual conversation with Chance Van Zandt.
“She’s still in heat,” he told me, gesturing gloomily at the caged Delilah.
“Oh,” I said. There are very limited possibilities for banter in a conversation about a tiger’s estrus cycle.
“She shouldn’t be in heat,” said Chance Van Zandt. “I mean she should be out of it by now.”
“Maybe you could put her on birth control pills,” I said. “I mean – just to regulate her cycle.”
“I thought of that but the vet says you run the risk of false pregnancy symptoms.”
“Oh,” I said again. “I’ve been trying to figure out why there’s a town here.”
“I know. I’ve been trying to figure out what the elementary school’s sports teams are called. I mean the high school is the Kings, and the middle school’s the Jacks.”
“The Serfs,” I said, and Chance Van Zandt laughed and laughed even though the quip wasn’t all that funny.
June 3
JUMP: Warden, WA → Bridgeport, WA – Old Track Field: 105 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… arrows to LEFT onto >HWY 170 WEST
RIGHT onto HWY 17 NORTH and follow it all the way to Bridgeport
***After Moses Lake you probably won’t find a fuel station you can get into for 80 miles to Bridgeport***
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
June 4
Jump: Bridgeport, WA → Omak, WA – East Side Park: 45 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… arrows out of town
LEFT onto HWY 17 NORTH to Brewster
RIGHT onto HWY 97 NORTH to Omak… arrows to the lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
I liked Alice Hoffman’s The Probable Future. True, it’s a romance novel. But a well-written romance novel. And anyway what’s not to like about the union of true hearts overcoming impediment? Plus the novel is extraordinarily grounded in its sense of place – an historic Massachusetts village with a past that glimmers 10 feet in front of its characters like mist floating up from a magical subterreanean spring. Place is really what my life is lacking right now.
Maybe place is what my life has lacked for quite some time.
Three weeks into this adventure, and I haven’t really gotten it together yet. Writing going very, very s-l-o-w-l-y, I haven’t given it any kind of priority even though the Little Store memoir is my best bet for extricating myself from this horrible mess I’ve made of my life.
Though even at that, it's a long shot.
Some of the Great Robin Home-Schooling Project is going well – RTT and I had great fun pillorying Romeo & Juliet and I think I did a decent if undistinguished job on neurons, action potentials, sulci, gyri and the parasympathetic nervous system. But really all that is stuff that can be faked by a reasonably intelligent person. What can’t be faked is algebra. And I’m just terrible at algebra. In particular, I’m terrible about extracting mathematical formulae from clumps of words: if Donald Trump drives his Porsche at 60 miles per hour and is carrying debt on his Atlantic City casino in the neighborhood of $3.5 billion, how many pints of superglue does it take to keep his toupee on his head?
Can. Not. Compute.
Also the very few practical things I have to do, I’m just not doing. The phone call I have to make to the Time Warner pension people. The phone call I have to make to the Census. Apprising friends of my new email address. It’s not laziness. I’m not really sure what it’s about. It’s as though the present tense is quicksand and I’m just not struggling.
###
Of course it’s a mistake to think of any place as uninteresting but it’s an easy mistake to make when you live with a circus.
Every morning you’re leaving somewhere, going somewhere else. After a while change becomes the constant. Paradoxically constants are always the unchanging factor in the equation.
But boredom is also a defense mechanism of sorts. For example: if I hadn’t been bored by Warden, Washington, the place would have terrified me. Another farm town of two thousand or so squatting in the middle of a desert, Warden exists solely to fill its Big Agribusiness Overlords’ need for human capital. Big employer in town is the Jolly Green Giant. (They slice His onions.) Other big employer is Campbell’s Chunky Soup. (They dice its potatoes.) What else? A barley seed silo, another fertilizer plant, a concrete tiendas by the dusty highway, an abandoned downtown.
A town utterly without beauty. Do people dream in Warden? Do people even know how to dream in Warden?
Leaving Warden felt like escaping.
###
A small gold rush along the upper Columbia river in 1859 attracted white and Chinese miners alike, the latter abandoning their unremunerative railroad jobs to take up panning for gold, an even less remunerative employment (unless hope can be considered a payoff of sorts.) Those Chinese miners were Bridgeport’s earliest settlers.
We followed the twists and turns of the Columbia river through some wild country to get there, buttes and canyons, foreshadowings of journeys yet to come through Wyoming & Montana:
Funky little town, Bridgeport. About the same size as Warden but a whole lot more appealing.
Bridgeport is home to the second largest hydroelectric power plant in the nation, the Chief Joseph Dam. Chief Joseph was the leader of one of the Nez Perce tribes. In the late 1870’s, towards the end of the Indian Wars, he led his tribesmen on a 1700-mile retreat to Canada, hotly pursued by the American cavalry. When they finally caught up with him and he surrendered, Chief Joseph gave a moving speech that many historians believe marked the turning of the tide in white Americans’ sentiments towards the Indian War.
It was close to a hundred degrees in Bridgeport so I had an excuse for doing nothing all day – not that I ever look for an excuse. I may be worthless and slovenly, but at least I don’t apologize for it.
Crowd was huge for the second show. I snuck into the tent and tried to take photos of the Jungle Cat act. They didn’t come out.
JUMP: Royal City, WA → Warden, WA – School Property: 45 miles
LEFT out of the school parking lot… arrows back to HWY 26 EAST
LEFT onto HWY 17 NORTH just past Othello
RIGHT onto HWY 170 EAST to Warden… arrows to the lot
Shows at 5/7:30pm
Beyond the Yakima river valley, eastern Washington is naturally high desert. Sun beats down, wind blows. Tumbleweeds chase heat devils across rutted county roads. Within this arid zone though are areas of cultivation, end result of irrigation projects that carry western Washington’s vast reserves of water to local ditches. Why was this patch of desert transformed and not that one? I wonder. I suppose it has something to do with who owned what, how foresightful they were once, back in the day, when the only possible use for this land most people could imagine was mineral rights.
Royal City has no real reason for being where it is. Nor could I figure out how it came by its name. For one thing, it’s not a city. For another, no one I saw sported a Hapsburg chin or appeared to be suffering from hemophilia. A mostly Mexican community, cluster of Section 8 housing surrounding a bean processing plant, a grain silo, a fertilizer factory, two auto parts stores and a huge school complex. The high school football team, the Royal City Kings, have won the state championship five times in recent years. It’s the final destination on a bus route that starts in San Antonio, Texas – field worker underground, I suppose – and that made me wonder whether Central Washington isn’t in line to take over from California’s Central Valley as the nation’s prime vegetable growing region. There isn’t going to be any water in the Central Valley this year, and the financially beleaguered state of CA is gonna be hard put to come by any aid for the farmers that might help them stay in business in a ba-a—ad year.
Circus did great business there and I had my first actual conversation with Chance Van Zandt.
“She’s still in heat,” he told me, gesturing gloomily at the caged Delilah.
“Oh,” I said. There are very limited possibilities for banter in a conversation about a tiger’s estrus cycle.
“She shouldn’t be in heat,” said Chance Van Zandt. “I mean she should be out of it by now.”
“Maybe you could put her on birth control pills,” I said. “I mean – just to regulate her cycle.”
“I thought of that but the vet says you run the risk of false pregnancy symptoms.”
“Oh,” I said again. “I’ve been trying to figure out why there’s a town here.”
“I know. I’ve been trying to figure out what the elementary school’s sports teams are called. I mean the high school is the Kings, and the middle school’s the Jacks.”
“The Serfs,” I said, and Chance Van Zandt laughed and laughed even though the quip wasn’t all that funny.
June 3
JUMP: Warden, WA → Bridgeport, WA – Old Track Field: 105 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… arrows to LEFT onto >HWY 170 WEST
RIGHT onto HWY 17 NORTH and follow it all the way to Bridgeport
***After Moses Lake you probably won’t find a fuel station you can get into for 80 miles to Bridgeport***
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
June 4
Jump: Bridgeport, WA → Omak, WA – East Side Park: 45 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… arrows out of town
LEFT onto HWY 17 NORTH to Brewster
RIGHT onto HWY 97 NORTH to Omak… arrows to the lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm
I liked Alice Hoffman’s The Probable Future. True, it’s a romance novel. But a well-written romance novel. And anyway what’s not to like about the union of true hearts overcoming impediment? Plus the novel is extraordinarily grounded in its sense of place – an historic Massachusetts village with a past that glimmers 10 feet in front of its characters like mist floating up from a magical subterreanean spring. Place is really what my life is lacking right now.
Maybe place is what my life has lacked for quite some time.
Three weeks into this adventure, and I haven’t really gotten it together yet. Writing going very, very s-l-o-w-l-y, I haven’t given it any kind of priority even though the Little Store memoir is my best bet for extricating myself from this horrible mess I’ve made of my life.
Though even at that, it's a long shot.
Some of the Great Robin Home-Schooling Project is going well – RTT and I had great fun pillorying Romeo & Juliet and I think I did a decent if undistinguished job on neurons, action potentials, sulci, gyri and the parasympathetic nervous system. But really all that is stuff that can be faked by a reasonably intelligent person. What can’t be faked is algebra. And I’m just terrible at algebra. In particular, I’m terrible about extracting mathematical formulae from clumps of words: if Donald Trump drives his Porsche at 60 miles per hour and is carrying debt on his Atlantic City casino in the neighborhood of $3.5 billion, how many pints of superglue does it take to keep his toupee on his head?
Can. Not. Compute.
Also the very few practical things I have to do, I’m just not doing. The phone call I have to make to the Time Warner pension people. The phone call I have to make to the Census. Apprising friends of my new email address. It’s not laziness. I’m not really sure what it’s about. It’s as though the present tense is quicksand and I’m just not struggling.
Of course it’s a mistake to think of any place as uninteresting but it’s an easy mistake to make when you live with a circus.
Every morning you’re leaving somewhere, going somewhere else. After a while change becomes the constant. Paradoxically constants are always the unchanging factor in the equation.
But boredom is also a defense mechanism of sorts. For example: if I hadn’t been bored by Warden, Washington, the place would have terrified me. Another farm town of two thousand or so squatting in the middle of a desert, Warden exists solely to fill its Big Agribusiness Overlords’ need for human capital. Big employer in town is the Jolly Green Giant. (They slice His onions.) Other big employer is Campbell’s Chunky Soup. (They dice its potatoes.) What else? A barley seed silo, another fertilizer plant, a concrete tiendas by the dusty highway, an abandoned downtown.
A town utterly without beauty. Do people dream in Warden? Do people even know how to dream in Warden?
Leaving Warden felt like escaping.
A small gold rush along the upper Columbia river in 1859 attracted white and Chinese miners alike, the latter abandoning their unremunerative railroad jobs to take up panning for gold, an even less remunerative employment (unless hope can be considered a payoff of sorts.) Those Chinese miners were Bridgeport’s earliest settlers.
We followed the twists and turns of the Columbia river through some wild country to get there, buttes and canyons, foreshadowings of journeys yet to come through Wyoming & Montana:
Funky little town, Bridgeport. About the same size as Warden but a whole lot more appealing.
Bridgeport is home to the second largest hydroelectric power plant in the nation, the Chief Joseph Dam. Chief Joseph was the leader of one of the Nez Perce tribes. In the late 1870’s, towards the end of the Indian Wars, he led his tribesmen on a 1700-mile retreat to Canada, hotly pursued by the American cavalry. When they finally caught up with him and he surrendered, Chief Joseph gave a moving speech that many historians believe marked the turning of the tide in white Americans’ sentiments towards the Indian War.
It was close to a hundred degrees in Bridgeport so I had an excuse for doing nothing all day – not that I ever look for an excuse. I may be worthless and slovenly, but at least I don’t apologize for it.
Crowd was huge for the second show. I snuck into the tent and tried to take photos of the Jungle Cat act. They didn’t come out.