The Trip of Dissonance
It was just before the rotation of the earth would be angled just so. That transcendent moment when the line-of-sight photons from the sun would announce a new day in that little sleepy college town of College Place, WA. It was July of 1963. He was 17. His high school commencement had been a few weeks prior. He was now in full earnest commencing mode.
The humid air was heavy with the odiferous infusion of earthy-scented world-famous Walla Walla Sweet Onions. Sweet fresh comestibles that were being harvested, transported, processed, disbursed from this little fertile garden plot of eastern Washington State. The fragrant air was truly palpable.
In a obtuse way, he too was a part of the agrarian economy. His summer job was working in the afternoons at the College Dairy dairy barn . . . building stalls in the huge loafing barns. The mornings were spent taking English Composition 101. His attempt to continue the jump start of his freshman year in college. That jump start commenced the year before by taking Principles of Accounting, College Algebra, and Analytical Geometry and Calculus, while yet still in high school. As a 15 year old immigrant from Canada, who arrived at that high school three weeks late in the fall of his high school junior year ('61), mercifully, thankfully, he fell in with the crowd of kids who were focused, serious, and striving for college and professional careers. There is no force on earth like the force of peer pressure. He was so very thankful for the force that he found and which both welcomed him and accepted him.
On this morning, his heart was filled with anticipation, with joy, with a feeling of connection. Yet, that imbedded feeling of an unexplainable dissonance that hounded is every waking minute simply would not be sequestered.
The little robin-egg-blue, still-to-be-declared unsafe-at-any-speed, 1960 Corvair was filled with gas. His Dad have given him the Texaco credit card for subsequent refueling. A battered cardboard suitcase contained a few essentials and was stowed in the front trunk.
It was still dark, but at his first stop, his friend was standing on the sidewalk, his cardboard suitcase in tow. At the second stop, the scene was repeated.
They drove north on College Avenue, crossed the train tracks, dodged a black cat that darted across the road, kidded and ribbed by the two guys about not running over that cat, made the left turn on the cut-off and headed west on U.S. 12.
They were going for the weekend to visit their mutual friend at his summer job, a kitchen attendant at a church sponsored youth camp, situated at Sunset Lake on the western slope of Mount Rainer.
The sunlight was coming from behind them now and so put a rich glow around the diamonds of dew decorating the passing foliage. They talked. Joked. Laughed. Told stories. Entered periods of silence. Contemplative. Watching the passing scab land as they entered the Walla Walla River delta area where it empties into the mighty Columbia River.
To the casual observer, it truly was a scab land. Awful. A horrible trick by a creator that had just plain given up when he got to eastern Washington State. Wide wind-swept expanses. Miles of tumbleweed. Exposed layer on top of layer of basalt. Oasis of green where water is siphoned from the Columbia River to bring a little life to the loess soil.
The trip progressed through the Tri-Cities. The home of the Hanford Nuclear Agency and its atomic bomb nuclear secrets and residues of destruction that haunt that area to this day. Three little disparate communities: the haves, the wannabees, and the have-nots.
Progressing up U.S. 12, where there was water, there was a functional fertile corridor. Hops. Field after field of hops. Those engineering feats of poles and trellises and wires and cherry-picker pickers used in the harvest. Barley and hops. The makings of brew. Brew that those three kids knew to be akin to demon rum himself . . . and brew that was simply the flaming part of the sinner-kid sizzling in hell for so much as even smelling the stuff.
And they progressed onward and westward to Yakima, leaving the institutionalized sin of hops behind to be replaced by the more innocuous apple. The geometric patterns of apple and apricot and cherry orchards. The ubiquitous processing houses, stacks of fruit bins, road-side fruit stands.
It was only this past year the he heard of the Missoula (Montana) Floods.
Some 50-60k years ago, a massive ice sheet covered the prairies of western Canada. The melting water was sequestered in a mammoth lake in western Montana, and held in place by an ice dam in northern Idaho.
And the dam broke.
And eastern Washington became a torrent of a lake.
And the mile-wide gorge at Wallula Gap, at the "Great Bend in the River," at the point where now the Walla Walla River enters the Columbia River, was inundated and totally succumbed by a raging onslaught of water, raging upwards to 80 miles an hour . . . for days through that small vent. It was the only escape for all of that water.
That raging violence made eastern Washington the scab lands that it is today.
But those three kids did not know that. If they did, they would not have believed it any way.
For in six days, God made heaven and earth, and rested on the seventh-day the Sabbath . . . on October 24, 4004 BC.
And because God finally got so pissed off with what he had wrought, he inflicted Noah's Flood to drown the whole earth. Except for the few lucky creatures that ended up in the ark and didn't eat each other up.
And whatever it was that those kids saw . . . it was that crazy Noah and his flood that was the direct and undisputable cause. For the Bible said so. The years were even inserted at the top of the center column in his Bible. Some old Early Church Bishop named Usher had worked all the math out.
It was now mid-morning. Getting hot. Real hot. The 4-by-60 air conditioning system was rolled down and kicked in. As they wended their way on U.S 12 beyond Yakima, and made the right turn onto highway 410 near Naches, the elevation increased and the coolness was refreshing.
The foliage changed from the desert-like junipers and scrub pines to thick luscious fir. They were climbing the eastern slope of the Cascades. They were moseying on their way to Chinook Pass.
He had never been this way before. The other two had.
After skirting the edge of the long mountain slope, the road twisted and turned and finally made an abrupt right on the crest of the pass. Something akin to OH MY GOD! spurted from his lips.
He was stunned!
He had only seen Mt. Rainier before from a long distance.
Now it was literally in his face.
A massive mound of ice cream covered in whipped cream and strawberry syrup punching through the cobalt blue sky!
They stopped at the over-look pull out. Moments of the requisite awe-ing and gawking. Letting the cool wind rising up over the pass muss up their hair. Finding a lingering snow bank hiding in the shadow. Making snowballs. Plastering snow on a friend's neck. Playing. Touching in a way that was safe to touch. Manly.
The consolation of having best friends. The dissonance of needing more.
They piled back into the-wheels and started the long decent northward to skirt the northern edge of Rainer.
A discussion about how Enumclaw had obtained its name.
Proceeding through the heavily forested western slope of Rainer . . . so very, very lush with ferns and wild flowers and little streams and waterfalls and colors and smells and textures and shadows and highlights and markers for trails that begged to be hiked.
Oh to be a docent for nature.
Oh to hike hand-in-hand on one of those trails with that one other who knows, who cares, who understands, who feels that dissonant feeling too.
But alas, that feeling of dissonance tempered the joy of his sharing of this weekend get together.
They drove on, following the written directions, to make their way to that little mountain village of Wilkeson and then to turn down the gravel road that led to Sunset Lake.
He was so excited about finding his friend again. It was so good for all of them to be a herd once more. The catching up to do. The quiet reflection. The wind-down from the tension of driving.
And oh that tension. He had no idea how tense he was from that driving experience. The second time in his life that he had ever driven that kind of distance on his own. This time without family being present.
After the supper chores were completed, for they had gone to visit a friend whose job was a kitchen attendant, and all had pitched in to help him finish his tasks as quickly as possible, the time for foolin' around could begin. [The camp food service was operated by the foodservice of the college we were all attending, and the full-time college food service staff would go out to operate these summer camps, taking student workers with them.]
They had to be shown around the camp. The swimming area, water slide, horse stables, confidence course, amphitheater, canoe storage, class rooms for doing crafts on rainy days, trail heads. And the tent and cots that they would all share.
Meanwhile, the earth had continued on in its rotation. The direct path of the sun's photons was now interrupted. It was dark. Chilly.
A small fire was burning in the main fireplace in the dining hall. They gathered there, along with other student workers . . . the one's that weren't actually counselors that is and who were with their charges.
One of those student workers was Ruth, a senior in college, and studying to become a physical therapist. She was in charge of the water sports activities.
Somehow Ruth had made an assessment that he really, really was tense, and her reputation for giving massages had preceded her.
He was instructed to skinny down to his tighty-whities and lay down on one of the dining room tables.
That about freaked him out.
He was nearly incapacitated with fear and angst about his body. He hated his body. Gawd, how he hated his body. It had characteristics that were an anathema to manliness.
But his camp-attendant friend, the one who raved about Ruth's massages, was stripping down to his tighty-whities too.
And so with a racing heart, pumped with the adrenalin of the risqué, he bit his lip with fear, succumbed to the what-the-hell-I've-already-lost-it acquiescence, and did it.
And she had to work and work to work out the tension in those muscles . . . those muscles in the neck, the back, the legs, the feet.
Her hands were warm, soft, firm, slicked with lotion. But he simply could not relax.
Why was not his friend the one that was doing the massaging?
Why could he not be the one massaging his friend?
And that 17 year old kid knew that he could both answer and not answer that primal plea.
To live was to deny.
To deny was to live.
The next night, they all found themselves huddled together such as blackbirds on a fence, on the ridge pole of an old out-building at the side of the road up on the western slope of Mt. Rainer.
The sky was constantly changing from that sky-blue pink at the horizon to that intensely deep black overhead and behind. Back over the silhouette of Mt Rainier's sundae topping, stars of eons past reminded one of the awesomeness of it all with their restless and persistent twinkling.
They watched the jets from Alaska, from New York, from Dallas, from Los Angeles, from Tokyo appear as little specks in the sky, approach, circle and land at Sea-Tac airport. They watched the lights of the little pockets of bustling communities flare-up and flicker. They watched the concentrations of light at the intersections of commerce and the strip malls profligate consumerism. They watched the subdued light emitting from the intimacy of the bed room cul-de-sac communities. They listened to a loon laughing at life itself from the breeding area of some lost lake. They listened to the howl of a coyote pleading for love. They howled back. Laughed back. Amazed at the echo and re-echo of their conversation with nature. They felt the chill of the mountain breeze. They felt the warmth of community. The singing of folk songs wafted into oblivion. Some boys wrapped an arm around willing chilly girls.
The weekend ended.
It was a far more quiet trip home.
In time he smelled again the earthiness of those Walla Walla Sweet Onions.
He still had an English Comp assignment to complete.
He had stalls to build on the morrow.
He had dissonance in his life.
He still would wonder, but why-for me.
The Refectory Manager
The humid air was heavy with the odiferous infusion of earthy-scented world-famous Walla Walla Sweet Onions. Sweet fresh comestibles that were being harvested, transported, processed, disbursed from this little fertile garden plot of eastern Washington State. The fragrant air was truly palpable.
In a obtuse way, he too was a part of the agrarian economy. His summer job was working in the afternoons at the College Dairy dairy barn . . . building stalls in the huge loafing barns. The mornings were spent taking English Composition 101. His attempt to continue the jump start of his freshman year in college. That jump start commenced the year before by taking Principles of Accounting, College Algebra, and Analytical Geometry and Calculus, while yet still in high school. As a 15 year old immigrant from Canada, who arrived at that high school three weeks late in the fall of his high school junior year ('61), mercifully, thankfully, he fell in with the crowd of kids who were focused, serious, and striving for college and professional careers. There is no force on earth like the force of peer pressure. He was so very thankful for the force that he found and which both welcomed him and accepted him.
On this morning, his heart was filled with anticipation, with joy, with a feeling of connection. Yet, that imbedded feeling of an unexplainable dissonance that hounded is every waking minute simply would not be sequestered.
The little robin-egg-blue, still-to-be-declared unsafe-at-any-speed, 1960 Corvair was filled with gas. His Dad have given him the Texaco credit card for subsequent refueling. A battered cardboard suitcase contained a few essentials and was stowed in the front trunk.
It was still dark, but at his first stop, his friend was standing on the sidewalk, his cardboard suitcase in tow. At the second stop, the scene was repeated.
They drove north on College Avenue, crossed the train tracks, dodged a black cat that darted across the road, kidded and ribbed by the two guys about not running over that cat, made the left turn on the cut-off and headed west on U.S. 12.
They were going for the weekend to visit their mutual friend at his summer job, a kitchen attendant at a church sponsored youth camp, situated at Sunset Lake on the western slope of Mount Rainer.
The sunlight was coming from behind them now and so put a rich glow around the diamonds of dew decorating the passing foliage. They talked. Joked. Laughed. Told stories. Entered periods of silence. Contemplative. Watching the passing scab land as they entered the Walla Walla River delta area where it empties into the mighty Columbia River.
To the casual observer, it truly was a scab land. Awful. A horrible trick by a creator that had just plain given up when he got to eastern Washington State. Wide wind-swept expanses. Miles of tumbleweed. Exposed layer on top of layer of basalt. Oasis of green where water is siphoned from the Columbia River to bring a little life to the loess soil.
The trip progressed through the Tri-Cities. The home of the Hanford Nuclear Agency and its atomic bomb nuclear secrets and residues of destruction that haunt that area to this day. Three little disparate communities: the haves, the wannabees, and the have-nots.
Progressing up U.S. 12, where there was water, there was a functional fertile corridor. Hops. Field after field of hops. Those engineering feats of poles and trellises and wires and cherry-picker pickers used in the harvest. Barley and hops. The makings of brew. Brew that those three kids knew to be akin to demon rum himself . . . and brew that was simply the flaming part of the sinner-kid sizzling in hell for so much as even smelling the stuff.
And they progressed onward and westward to Yakima, leaving the institutionalized sin of hops behind to be replaced by the more innocuous apple. The geometric patterns of apple and apricot and cherry orchards. The ubiquitous processing houses, stacks of fruit bins, road-side fruit stands.
It was only this past year the he heard of the Missoula (Montana) Floods.
Some 50-60k years ago, a massive ice sheet covered the prairies of western Canada. The melting water was sequestered in a mammoth lake in western Montana, and held in place by an ice dam in northern Idaho.
And the dam broke.
And eastern Washington became a torrent of a lake.
And the mile-wide gorge at Wallula Gap, at the "Great Bend in the River," at the point where now the Walla Walla River enters the Columbia River, was inundated and totally succumbed by a raging onslaught of water, raging upwards to 80 miles an hour . . . for days through that small vent. It was the only escape for all of that water.
That raging violence made eastern Washington the scab lands that it is today.
But those three kids did not know that. If they did, they would not have believed it any way.
For in six days, God made heaven and earth, and rested on the seventh-day the Sabbath . . . on October 24, 4004 BC.
And because God finally got so pissed off with what he had wrought, he inflicted Noah's Flood to drown the whole earth. Except for the few lucky creatures that ended up in the ark and didn't eat each other up.
And whatever it was that those kids saw . . . it was that crazy Noah and his flood that was the direct and undisputable cause. For the Bible said so. The years were even inserted at the top of the center column in his Bible. Some old Early Church Bishop named Usher had worked all the math out.
It was now mid-morning. Getting hot. Real hot. The 4-by-60 air conditioning system was rolled down and kicked in. As they wended their way on U.S 12 beyond Yakima, and made the right turn onto highway 410 near Naches, the elevation increased and the coolness was refreshing.
The foliage changed from the desert-like junipers and scrub pines to thick luscious fir. They were climbing the eastern slope of the Cascades. They were moseying on their way to Chinook Pass.
He had never been this way before. The other two had.
After skirting the edge of the long mountain slope, the road twisted and turned and finally made an abrupt right on the crest of the pass. Something akin to OH MY GOD! spurted from his lips.
He was stunned!
He had only seen Mt. Rainier before from a long distance.
Now it was literally in his face.
A massive mound of ice cream covered in whipped cream and strawberry syrup punching through the cobalt blue sky!
They stopped at the over-look pull out. Moments of the requisite awe-ing and gawking. Letting the cool wind rising up over the pass muss up their hair. Finding a lingering snow bank hiding in the shadow. Making snowballs. Plastering snow on a friend's neck. Playing. Touching in a way that was safe to touch. Manly.
The consolation of having best friends. The dissonance of needing more.
They piled back into the-wheels and started the long decent northward to skirt the northern edge of Rainer.
A discussion about how Enumclaw had obtained its name.
Proceeding through the heavily forested western slope of Rainer . . . so very, very lush with ferns and wild flowers and little streams and waterfalls and colors and smells and textures and shadows and highlights and markers for trails that begged to be hiked.
Oh to be a docent for nature.
Oh to hike hand-in-hand on one of those trails with that one other who knows, who cares, who understands, who feels that dissonant feeling too.
But alas, that feeling of dissonance tempered the joy of his sharing of this weekend get together.
They drove on, following the written directions, to make their way to that little mountain village of Wilkeson and then to turn down the gravel road that led to Sunset Lake.
He was so excited about finding his friend again. It was so good for all of them to be a herd once more. The catching up to do. The quiet reflection. The wind-down from the tension of driving.
And oh that tension. He had no idea how tense he was from that driving experience. The second time in his life that he had ever driven that kind of distance on his own. This time without family being present.
After the supper chores were completed, for they had gone to visit a friend whose job was a kitchen attendant, and all had pitched in to help him finish his tasks as quickly as possible, the time for foolin' around could begin. [The camp food service was operated by the foodservice of the college we were all attending, and the full-time college food service staff would go out to operate these summer camps, taking student workers with them.]
They had to be shown around the camp. The swimming area, water slide, horse stables, confidence course, amphitheater, canoe storage, class rooms for doing crafts on rainy days, trail heads. And the tent and cots that they would all share.
Meanwhile, the earth had continued on in its rotation. The direct path of the sun's photons was now interrupted. It was dark. Chilly.
A small fire was burning in the main fireplace in the dining hall. They gathered there, along with other student workers . . . the one's that weren't actually counselors that is and who were with their charges.
One of those student workers was Ruth, a senior in college, and studying to become a physical therapist. She was in charge of the water sports activities.
Somehow Ruth had made an assessment that he really, really was tense, and her reputation for giving massages had preceded her.
He was instructed to skinny down to his tighty-whities and lay down on one of the dining room tables.
That about freaked him out.
He was nearly incapacitated with fear and angst about his body. He hated his body. Gawd, how he hated his body. It had characteristics that were an anathema to manliness.
But his camp-attendant friend, the one who raved about Ruth's massages, was stripping down to his tighty-whities too.
And so with a racing heart, pumped with the adrenalin of the risqué, he bit his lip with fear, succumbed to the what-the-hell-I've-already-lost-it acquiescence, and did it.
And she had to work and work to work out the tension in those muscles . . . those muscles in the neck, the back, the legs, the feet.
Her hands were warm, soft, firm, slicked with lotion. But he simply could not relax.
Why was not his friend the one that was doing the massaging?
Why could he not be the one massaging his friend?
And that 17 year old kid knew that he could both answer and not answer that primal plea.
To live was to deny.
To deny was to live.
The next night, they all found themselves huddled together such as blackbirds on a fence, on the ridge pole of an old out-building at the side of the road up on the western slope of Mt. Rainer.
The sky was constantly changing from that sky-blue pink at the horizon to that intensely deep black overhead and behind. Back over the silhouette of Mt Rainier's sundae topping, stars of eons past reminded one of the awesomeness of it all with their restless and persistent twinkling.
They watched the jets from Alaska, from New York, from Dallas, from Los Angeles, from Tokyo appear as little specks in the sky, approach, circle and land at Sea-Tac airport. They watched the lights of the little pockets of bustling communities flare-up and flicker. They watched the concentrations of light at the intersections of commerce and the strip malls profligate consumerism. They watched the subdued light emitting from the intimacy of the bed room cul-de-sac communities. They listened to a loon laughing at life itself from the breeding area of some lost lake. They listened to the howl of a coyote pleading for love. They howled back. Laughed back. Amazed at the echo and re-echo of their conversation with nature. They felt the chill of the mountain breeze. They felt the warmth of community. The singing of folk songs wafted into oblivion. Some boys wrapped an arm around willing chilly girls.
The weekend ended.
It was a far more quiet trip home.
In time he smelled again the earthiness of those Walla Walla Sweet Onions.
He still had an English Comp assignment to complete.
He had stalls to build on the morrow.
He had dissonance in his life.
He still would wonder, but why-for me.
The Refectory Manager
Labels: adolescence, coming of age, Short story, Washington State
posted by The Refectory Manager | 3:48 PM
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