ASSEENBYSUSAN BLOG: Home is Where the Heart Is

Where I Belong

For those readers who also follow my WallaWallaDailyPhoto blog, this is a repeat of my end-of-the-year theme post for City Daily Photo. My apologies. But I think it is a good way to re-start this blog by filling in a few blanks for new readers. I invite you to follow along as I share my life and travels in pictures and words.

I have lived in the Walla Walla Valley since 1987 when I moved here with my husband and two young sons. It was a nostalgic return for my husband since his great grandparents homesteaded here in the mid 1800s, and he was born in Walla Walla in 1930. For me, it was moving to what I would soon refer to as a quintessential small town with good schools, a quaint downtown, and nice homes on tree-lined streets. In short, it was a good place to raise a family.

Nearly 30 years later, it is still a quintessential small town, although both the town and I have undergone significant changes. I divorced after 20 years of marriage, and my children have grown to be thirty-somethings now. As for the Walla Walla Valley, miles and miles of wheat fields interspersed with commercial pea, onion, and asparagus fields have given way to wheat fields and vineyards. . . lots of vineyards. With that change, old-time mom and pop stores in the downtown corridor went out of business and have been replaced with tasting rooms, upscale restaurants, and a variety of retail shops geared more for the new wine tourist than the local customer. But that's not all bad because overall the town and valley have been revitalized with an aesthetically pleasing, low impact wine industry while keeping the charm of a small rural town in Eastern Washington. 

The schools are still good, the downtown is quaint, and the streets remain tree-lined. 

So it's a win-win.

This photo epitomizes "where I belong" for a number of reasons. First, it's been my home for 30 years, longer than I lived in any one place including my childhood home in Birmingham, Michigan. However, it hasn't always been my favorite place. On my first visit to Walla Walla in 1977 while on my honeymoon, I wasn't so enamored. The drive here from Seattle through miles and miles of seemingly lifeless and dry high desert blinded me to the beauty of this tree-filled oasis nestled in the Blue Mountains. To me it was the armpit of the world. It took 10 years along with a new perspective on life as a parent with two school-aged children, that on a second visit to Walla Walla in 1987 I saw its charms. And they captivated me.

Second, it's an aesthetically beautiful setting. The Blue Mountains in the distance hold the valley in a cradle and change visually with the season, the light, and time of day. Likewise, the wheat fields that undulate north into the heart of the Palouse are ever-changing. The curves and folds of the hills are sensuous embodiments of Mother Earth herself--whether under plow, under snow, under combine, or under sunlight. I have had the pleasure of traveling to many beautiful places in this country and the world, but no single place is any more beautiful than the Walla Walla Valley.

And the open road is an important metaphor in my life. I bicycled up and down this very road for years when I was a passionate and younger road cyclist in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The ride toward the mountains reminded me that life is always going uphill even if it appears flat, so it's best to keep my head down and pedal, pedal, pedal. And while the trip away from the mountains was much easier, it was still best to keep pedaling to maintain my momentum. Then in the summer of 1998 this life lesson that I learned by riding on Walla Walla's roads was repeated for 47 days and 3,254 miles on my 1998 Big Ride Across America: 

Roads go up and roads go down, so it's best to just keep pedaling.

Finally, the open road symbolizes my love of traveling. I don't travel on the seat of a bike anymore after a stupid bike accident in 2010 left me with a shattered wrist and shattered confidence. So now I travel in the air, on the sea, in a bus, or on the back of a camel to see the world. But no matter how far I travel or what I see, I always love coming home to the Walla Walla Valley and to this sight. 

It is where I belong. 

HELLO-O-O-O, I'M BACK!

Yes, it's been a very long time since I wrote and posted on this blog. What was meant to be a short hiatus while I traveled in May, became weeks and then months as I traveled again in October and then faced the task of sorting through thousands of accumulated photos (i.e. 20K+) of scenes from Turkey, France, Italy, Morocco, Germany and Iceland. How do I even start? 

When I chose the title for this blog about a year ago, my intention was to leave it broad enough to allow me to grow or expand or even bird walk from time to time about topics that interested me, with traveling and photography being at the top of my list. And so I began by posting photos along with my commentary about places I traveled and things that I saw. And unlike my Facebook travel posts in which I would post my reactions in real time, my objective for this blog was to be after-the-fact and more in depth. Sounded easy, or so I thought.

Then along about March I was enticed to join an online photo community--City Daily Photo--to begin a second blog about my own hometown, thus WallaWallaDailyPhoto.blogspot.com was born. And that has been a commitment. Posting a daily photo challenged me to see my town in new ways. I started off strong, but admittedly, 'daily' eventually became weekly with spurts of daily photos when I found a particularly interesting topic. And it did dilute my creative energy with this blog taking the biggest hit.

But like the paperwhite narcissus that stores its energy inside itself only to grow and blossom when given light, with the increasing light of this new year, I am ready to blossom again. 

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PALOUSE FALLS STATE PARK, WASHINGTON STATE

Palouse Falls is always a beautiful sight, no matter the season. But with a dusting of snow and freezing temperatures, the falls and the surrounding stark landscape is even more stunning and very worthy of an afternoon drive to see it.

The falls, a part of Washington's Palouse Falls State Park, lies on the Palouse River which is a tributary of the Snake River in southeast Washington which in turn is a tributary of the Columbia River.Thus, the Palouse River and its falls are a part of the Columbia River Basin.

On February 12, 2014, the Washington State House of Representatives passed HB 2119 unanimously to make Palouse Falls the official state waterfall in Washington State. The proposal for the bill originated when a group of elementary schools students in the nearby town of Washtucna lobbied the state legislature.

The canyon at the falls is 377 feet deep, exposing a large cross-section of the Columbia River Basalt Group. 

 The Palouse Falls and surrounding canyons were carved out during the catastrophic Missoula Floods of the previous ice age known as the Pleistocene Epoch. But early in the 20th century, this was not a given. In fact, J. Harlen Bretz sparked one of the biggest debates in geologic history when he proposed his Ice Age floods theory in 1923.

Bretz spent decades meticulously documenting evidence to support his theory that massive Ice Age floods carved the Channeled Scabland of Eastern Washington. But the geologic community only ridiculed and scorned his work, that is, until they saw the evidence themselves.

As a curious aside, on April 21, 2009, Tyler Brandt ran the falls in a kayak setting an unofficial world record for the highest waterfall run.