I’m sitting here, in my studio, at my desk, trying to decide what to tell you. It is cool outside, and even cooler inside this log house. The dogs are laying in the dirt and pine duff outside the door and the breeze is blowing in and rattling all the beautiful things that create my space here. I have been away for almost 30 days (I was home for only one day between trips). I have been in tremendously wild places. When I was driving my truck up the Methow Valley from Pateros two nights ago, when my foot was tired on the gas pedal and my eyes were full of grit, when I was braking hard to miss deer and imagining the trout treading water in the dark river to my right…I realized I was coming home; I realized I was reluctantly coming home to the Methow Valley.
When I left Montana three days ago, a beautiful Montana dulled by a thick blanket of forest fire smoke, a wild Montana I rode through on the back of a horse, the spacious Montana I saw 80 miles of from the back of a golden haflinger, I told my friends, “There is nothing for me in Washington.”
They laughed.
I think they thought I was making a melodramatic joke, of sorts. But I wasn’t. I keep thinking to myself, “We need to get back to Idaho.” I keep wondering what will take us back to Idaho. I keep wondering, “How long will it take?” I continue to remind myself to be present, to love all that there is to love here, and there is terribly much to love about the Methow Valley. Terribly much. I am spoilt to live here. I truly am.
It’s a difficult thing to explain, but I will try. Washington is a wonderful state, but it simply doesn’t hold me quite like Idaho and Montana do. It’s perhaps an issue of cultural discombobulation for me. The closer I get to the ocean, to the coast, to the mighty cities there — the greater my sense of dissolution. I can’t wrap my mind around the reality of huge populations of people who are without space (the kind of space I need). It’s all too overlapping. The stifled feel of it pours over the Mountains here and dissipates, slowly, until the heart of the interior chokes it out with its wide openness and stamping hooves.
I remind myself, the way we receive the space around us is a personal thing. I need more than the average human…I am more easily infringed upon than the average human. I always stand in a way that offers great space to the people around me.
What will take me back? What will take me back to Idaho and the space there and the emptiness there and the way those two things sustain me, cradle me, inform my work, inspire the shutters on my cameras, settle my bones in their sockets, tether my soul?
I am not unhappy here. I am happy here. Here in Washington. But the sense that the grass is greener on the other side of the state line, for me, grows stronger with every day.
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Yesterday, after an eternity of laundry loads, after cleaning the Airstream from top to bottom, after running the dogs, before dinner, before editing photographs late into the night, before I sipped on that delicious gin and tonic with garden cucumbers…Tater and I took a cruise in the ’71 and it was beautiful. I’ve been meaning to take a self-portrait of myself, driving the Ford down a dirt road, from a wide distance, for ages now. I’ll make similar pictures again, in the future, until I think I have captured it perfectly — the feel of homecoming, wandering, twilight, freedom, diamonds of dust and the nature of being on the road, headed to nowhere, headed to everywhere.
Headed to everywhere.
