terra incognita

Today I was on the road by five a.m., in order to avoid Seattle's infamous rush-hour traffic as I launched my first road trip in a long time. Usually the road is Interstate Five, and the terrain comfortingly familiar, but this time my insecto amarillo has carried me into a big adventure, for I've ventured into Terra Incognita.

For the most part, it turned out to be Terra Miseracordia. Even though I had never visited Yakima, Washington or the Tri-Cities area (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland), I wasn't expecting to be charmed or entranced, so I can't exactly say I was disappointed. Yakima has probably the worst case of small-town sprawl I've ever seen, worse even than Apple Valley, California, and I never did find the town's only Denny's Restaurant, in spite of stopping and asking directions. I did finally get my eggs at Denny's in Kennewick, a dreadful place which exhibits all the worst aspects of latter-day America in an age of insensible decline and social atomism. In Kennewick, fry pits, muffler shops, chain motels, trailer parks, and strip malls are all inhabited by a population which has grown larger in numbers and girth at the same time it's gotten duller in its perceptions and insights.

The landscape was beautiful at first, but after the bug and I began climbing out of the Valley of the Columbia it became gradually featureless. I have no idea what most of the hill country of eastern Oregon and western Idaho is used for, if anything. Some of it is being used for cattle grazing, but most of it seems completely vacant, and I soon lost interest in looking at grassy hills.

After a brief gust of sleet, I ended the day in Boise, and the less said about it the better. I've been here before, but that was many years ago, when it was a different place in a different country. Now it's horribly swollen and infected with the corruption of a chaotic and counterintuitive infrastructure overburdened by auto traffic.

This will be a great country again someday, if we can find a way to reconfigure everyday life on a user-friendly, spiritually comprehensible, human scale once more. It's the same old story, and you've heard it here and in many other places before -- we need to get rid of Wal-Mart and bring back Main Street, where the things you need are supplied by folks you know, and community is a collective, mutually-shared enterprise.