A trip to Yakima, WA has stirred up thoughts about place. Why people leave places, why people stay in places.

Yakima is a small, small town on the steppe in eastern Washington. The Yakima Folklife Association describes the town as “culture-hungry,” and the Yakima Folklife Festival, which is what brought me to town, is one of the biggest events of the year. What I discovered, through conversations with locals and explorations in the Yakima Valley Museum, was a deep irony; right there in the midst of people who seem to be clamoring for a kind of big-city “culture,” is a land of rich history and fascinating tales.

This primarily agricultural community has an incredibly well-documented history and a large collection of artifacts from the daily lives of its residents. Among other things, there is a collection of spurs, a neon sign garden, and one of the country’s largest buggy collections. There is an entire exhibit dedicated to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a Yakima native. The front wall of his exhibit bears this quote:

Why this compulsion to leave the valley? Why this drive to leave the scenes I loved? To reach for unknown stars, to seek adventure, to abandon the comfort of home? But what of pride? What would I say if I returned?

If “culture” is some sort of notion of urban, cosmopolitan living, people and things that tour the country, then I think it speaks more of the speaker than of the objective value of experience. For instance, in yesterday’s NYT, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes about “footprints of vanished places,” about the familiar experience of imagining all the past events that have happened in the apartment we live in, or the “for lease” space across the street. Understanding that things in the past have a very real place in the present - that is culture. In New York City there have been more people in more places, but the equation does not add up in a linear sense; it does not mean that New York City has more culture than Yakima.

“And what of pride?” Belief in the power of the past to fuel the future is an essential part of living. It’s no accident, I think, that V. Klinkenborg is a writer of a column on rural living, being accustomed to these sorts of observations on animal nature. Something that I found out this weekend is that sometimes this belief runs stronger in the places in which you would least expect it, where it cannot be taken for granted.

After I forwarded Klinkenborg’s moving essay to my friend Leslie Blitz, she wrote back:
I know exactly what my grandparents house looks like - I know what the stains in the carpet look like next to the front door and where the wallpaper in the kitchen peels away from the wall next to the phone.  But, actually, these things havent been there in like 8 years at least.  But, I know where the peanut butter is in the refrigerator.