Readers Digest Condensed States

Central Washington: Who Needs It?

By Joan Opyr, 4-23-06

I spent more than seven hours yesterday driving from Moscow, Idaho to Vancouver, Washington, accompanied by my long-suffering partner and the primary source of long-suffering, our children. We made the trip in a Ford Freestyle, a large, comfortable station wagon sort of thing that, when we bought it, seemed like the perfect tripmobile. I now know that a jumbo jet would not have been roomy enough to have made this trip comfortable. Quite aside from the usual complaints of "Mom, she's looking at me," and "Mom, he's picking his nose again," my kids have come to the conclusion -- and I'm afraid I have to concur -- that there is no point whatsoever to the boring, empty scrublands of central Washington. They ought to be eliminated. I don't care what we do with the scrublands; we should just get them out of there. Let's condense everything from, say, the town of Dusty (population 3) to the Columbia River. As for the rest? Washtucna, Richland, Pasco and Kennewick, I say we just toss it. We don't need it. We need Vancouver, and we need Portland. We need the Columbia River. The rest just gets in the way.

And, while we're at it, let's do something about the so-called "Heartland of America." Thirteen years ago, before we had children to really let us know just how miserable a car trip can be, my partner and I drove from Ohio to Idaho in a 1991 Dodge Colt. Back then, our involuntary passengers were three dogs and a Siberian hamster named David G. Riede. There is another David G. Riede, a world-renowned Professor of English at The Ohio State Univeristy. That David Riede has authored several fine studies of the Romantic poets. The hamster David Riede just bit people. I came close to losing a finger on that cross country trip. The human David Riede, on the other hand, gave me an A+ in the long seminar in Victorian Literature. Guess who I like better?

What I learned driving from Ohio to Idaho is that there is nothing to be found in the southern wastes of Minnesota or South Dakota that can't be found in Montana, and, to be brutally frank, Montana does it all much better. Montana has lots of silver and gold. Montana has Yogo sapphires. Montana has no sales tax. Hell, I even like Butte, the giant open mining pit that passes for a town. The Irish of Butte are excellent folk with strong sense of history and self. (I'm afraid of green beer, which isn't the only reason I wouldn't want to be in Butte on St. Patrick's Day, but it's the only reason I'm willing to name. All the rest involve getting the tar beaten out of me by drunken women with shamrock tattoos.)

Also on that infamous trip, my partner and I passed through the badlands of Wyoming, but it was at night and we didn't see them. What we saw of Wyoming come daylight was a lot of old trucks with dead antelope strapped to the hood. Turns out we had the good fortune to arrive in the Dead Antelope State on the opening day of hunting season. What fun.

If Readers Digest can produce a condensed Bible, then why can't we produce a condensed United States? Let's fold the map, leaving only the good bits of all that Louisiana Purchase crap. Or, alternatively, why don't we take a good, hard look at Central Washington? Who lives there? Is there something potentially interesting there? Some persons with a rich and storied culture who are at present frightened, unacknowledged, and undocumented?

We grow things in southern Minnesota and South Dakota; corn, I think. In Central Washington, we grow fruit. Apples, cherries, wine grapes and onions -- Walla Walla sweets, to be specific. Very nice; very tasty. And who picks these crops? Who feeds this nation? Undocumented workers, that's who, most of whom come at great risk and terrible expense from south of the border. Not only should those of us lucky enough to have been born in the United States allow these workers to stay here and become citizens themselves, if you're reading this and you're an Anglo, why not consider letting our new immigrants to do things the way our ancestors did? Call it homesteading. Grant them land, lots of land, and the starry skies above; don't fence them out.

A hundred years ago, the Germans, the Irish, the Scandinavians, and the Danes all found something of value in the very same scrublands that my kids and I drove through yesterday, yawning and complaining and wishing for Godspeed. Those immigrants displaced native peoples violently, belligerently, and without so much as a please or a thank you. Our new immigrants (or perhaps migrants is a better word, as the history of human beings is a history of migration) have better manners. They're asking to stay, and they're asking to work. They're not displacing anyone. Let's give them their opportunity. Let's do the right thing. At the very least, it might go a long way toward making Central Washington more interesting. I can't afford a trip to Germany, but I can go to Leavenworth. Why would I spend a fortune making my way to Cozumel if there were a beautiful, cultural slice of Mexico proudly and legally within driving distance of Idaho?

No more racist diatribes on The O"Reilly Factor. No more offensive yammering about "The Great American Giveaway" on CNN's Lou Dobbs. Instead of railing against "illegal aliens" or calling for a wall between the United States and Mexico and more and more dangerous armed border patrols, why don't we acknowledge the eternal fact of human migration? Why don't we cultivate an open appreciation for the richness that Chicano and Latino immigrants might bring to Central Washington? The only thing George W. Bush and I have ever agreed upon is the pressing need for an American guest worker program. A people and a culture driven underground would, if allowed to flourish in the light of day, enrich us all.

In the meantime, if anyone can think of a way to shorten the distance between Portland and Idaho, please, do share. I'm all ears.

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