Where I Live
There is always a mystery
The land where I live rushes north, up from the Yakima River to the crest of Rattlesnake Ridge, and then away to the northeast and into the mystery of the Technological Century. As we ascend the southern slope of the ridge on horseback, my daughter and I meander upward away from the comfort of our primitive home. We can see the thin ribbon in Interstate 82 in the distance, cars, and trucks speeding purposefully east and west, but the sound of the freeway does not carry this far.
Once we crest the ridge the ominous reactors of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation command our attention. On horseback, at the crest of this ancient ridge, secure in the certainty of prairie grass and sagebrush, the specter of the nuclear mystery spreads out below us shimmering in the desert like the memory of some long-forgotten future time.
I trust the past, but I don’t trust memories.
A respected professional colleague once asked me if I was worried about eating “homemade beef” – the meat of animals we raise ourselves. My reply, that I knew where the meat came from and what it had been fed and who had killed it, whereas she did not when she bought meat at the market, took her aback. She assumes that buying meat in cellophane is intrinsically safer than raising, killing, and eating your own meat. She has implicit trust in people she does not know and cannot see. She has no context for trusting the nearby, the familiar.
Her solace is in distance.
This seems backward to me, as many things do. We trust the slaughterhouse and the packing plant and the trucking company and the meat wholesaler and the supermarket chain and the government inspectors more than we trust our own neighbors, our own land, our own selves. We are far removed from the fundamental facts of life and are repulsed by the hardness of it all.
We seem to prefer the mysterious future, lurking unseen in the distance.
There is a parallel situation in the packinghouse of public education: We are comforted by distance and we are frightened by what is close and familiar.
When my daughter and I ride on Rattlesnake Ridge, I wonder if she is thinking about the past to the west or the nuclear mystery in the north. The trail along the ridge is a fortunate vantage point because we can see equally well in both directions. But her attention always seems straight ahead, certain, and aware.
Back at school, I wonder if I am supposed to prepare the dazed kids in my classroom for the mystery of the future or to acquaint them with the certainty of the past. They ride their own ridge of uncertainty, staring straight ahead, guided by the lie of safety in the future, security in the distance.
More and more the answer as to which direction we should turn comes from people who do not know me or my children, but who only want them to contribute to the dubious economy of their future “happiness”. These distant officials and educational inspectors will brand and stamp my students and my own children suitable for consumption by the future…or not.
But on horseback, on Rattlesnake Ridge, the mystery is too distant. Dismounted, it is no easier to see, so I always climb back onto my big gelding and wander with my daughter away slowly to the southwest. If the future is too mysterious, too much, for me, what does the mystery say to those bewildered children who struggle through the maze of my classroom?
A favorite author, William Kittredge of Oregon and Montana and Nevada, writes of getting an education in the reality of the Elko whorehouses and the broad ranges of his father’s MC Ranch. How can the kids in my classroom possibly hope to gain Kittredge’s education in realities?
More and more, it is not meant to happen in my classroom. The wisdom of the land – hard-earned lessons of a time when there was too much real work to worry about the mystery of the future — is forbidden to these children.
But the mystery remains.