Today (which when this is published will be last week or the week before) I am looking out the window of a cabin toward the Pioneer Mountains, one of the series of ranges in southwestern Montana near the confluence of the headwaters of the Missouri river. We've come here to this area most years since the mid nineties. We've come to this cabin for the last three years. A small creek, tributary to the Beaverhead River runs by the front of it. The Beaverhead is a tromp through a couple of fields and over a couple of fences away. The formation which gives the river its name can be seen from the front porch of the cabin. Beaverhead Rock was what Sacagawea recognized as the summer campground of her people when she arrived here with the Corps of Discovery with Lewis and Clark.
After 24 years I am beginning to feel more like a westerner. I am still not, could not be, will never be wholly; but what is so is that these grand western scenes are feeling more like home to me.
I am a transplanted New Englander. It's where I was born and where I lived much of my adult life, and where I never thought I would leave once I found my way back to it. I went from Maine to the suburbs of New York City as a young child, living on Long Island and later in Connecticut. When my parents split up I went with my mother to Kentucky and what in my memory feels like ten years of hell, but in reality was only about four and a half. Kentucky may have been a "border state" but bible belt memories are long and they were still fighting the Civil War in the mid fifties. I was known as "Conneticutt" or "Conn" for short my first two years there, and worse in another one horse three church no movie theater town we moved to later. Getting back to New England with my father was a partial answer to prayers even if living with him and his drinking was less than ideal. I have no good memories of my time in Dixie.From 1959 until 1987 I either lived in Boston and environs or within 60 miles of it. It's where I graduated from high school and where I went to college and my first round of grad school, and where I began what became my career. One son still lives there, his mother not far away. I never imagined leaving. My attachment to Boston survived an intense long distance relationship with a woman committed in the same way to New York City. What it did not survive was a work assignment that took me to Seattle, Washington.
In 1987 I began to spend a lot of time in Seattle, and in 1991 I moved there. I had fallen in love with the beauty of the place. It is one of those rare places in the world where snow capped mountains sit in sight of salt water. The city is ringed by the Cascades and the Olympics and lives in intimate relation with Puget Sound and its passages to the Pacific.
I will finish my life here.
It feels more right to me every year, even if I am not and never can be wholly a westerner. But it may be that no one really can. We are pretty much all immigrants here except for Sacagawea's relations, so none of us may be able to fully claim this place. But it does have a way of claiming us.
It happens in those days when Seattle's skies clear and the majesty of a 15000 foot mountain dominates the horizon (more often than the reputation, less often than some residents would want). It happens when you are standing in water casting a line and lose a strike because you are watching an eagle and an osprey dueling in the sky above. It happens when you get off the ferry at little Shaw Island for a short bike ride around the fifteen miles of the island. They may not be doing it now, but when I was there a few years ago, the ferry landing was "manned" by the women members of a religious order. For me it happens every time I drive over the pass from Idaho into Montana, and every time I come through the steep green cleft in the Cascades on the way home.
So I'm still on the road, but I do have a place.
No comments:
Post a Comment