Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

We made three stops in Montana: Missoula, Butte, and Bozeman. Missoula sits in a bowl surrounded by mountains, and this keeps the climate milder that it would otherwise be. Locals say it is in the Montana “banana belt.” Of course, warm is relative, and it gets cold in the winter, though less so than Butte, which is at a higher elevation and in the mountains. Missoula is a pleasant town of about 60,000 people, and it is home to the University of Montana. The university’s Old Main overlooks an expansive green lawn. A grand walkway leads up to the brick building, built in the 1890s; the overall effect is European is its scale and layout. On a grassy hill overlooking campus there is a large painted “M” for Missoula. A long switch-backed trail leads up to it and beyond to the top of the hill, making for a strenuous hike. On campus, close to the start of the hike, there is a lovely old house donated by someone to the college. We once picked ripe currants from nearby bushes. Read More

Our last stops in Washington were Yakima and Spokane. Yakima is a town of about 80,000 people, nearly 40 percent of whom are Hispanic. One reason for this is that the region is heavily oriented toward the production of agricultural products, especially apples, cherries, grapes, asparagus, and hops. It has been called the “fruit bowl” of the nation. Wherever there is large-scale farming, there will be Hispanic farm workers, usually poorly paid. The median household income in Yakima is more than 20 percent lower than the national average. The incidence of poverty is correspondingly a good deal higher than the national average. Read More

We left Los Angeles and drove to Oakland, a trip of 370 miles. As she has done throughout this trip, Karen did all the driving. We took Interstate 5 because it was quicker, though 101, the coastal highway would have been more scenic. The highway out of the city passes through stark dry hills for many miles; sometimes the road is steep and windy. The Santa Ana winds whip through the hills in late autumn and early winter, making driving difficult and dangerous (Santa Anas are a type of wind, the result of air pressure buildup in the high-altitude Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. This air mass spills out of the Great Basin and is pulled by gravity into the surrounding lowlands. The air circulates clockwise around the high pressure area bringing winds from the east and northeast to Southern California (the reverse of the westerly winds characteristic of the latitude – Wikipedia). I remembered these winds from when I drove from UFW headquarters in Keene, California to Los Angeles. Then all of a sudden, about forty miles south of Bakersfield, after driving down a steep grade, the terrain flattens and you are in the great central valley. As I say in my book, it would be instructive for each person in the US to drive through this desert valley and observe how our food is grown. Extreme mechanization, gigantic scale, low-wage labor, subsidized water, and ubiquitous use of air, water, and soil polluting fertilizers: a lethal quintumvirate. Read More

We had a fine event in Tacoma, at Kings Books. This spacious and well-stocked store in owned in part by Pat McDermott, who was a gracious host. Jim is from Mt. Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh and where my sister and her family now live. Jim’s brother graduated from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, where I taught for thirty-two years. He also had a bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin and knows Allen Ruff at the Rainbow Bookstore, another place we’ll visit. My talk was also sponsored by a Tacoma social action group called America in Solidarity (go to www.americainsolidarity.org). More places need grassroots organizations like this. Jeff Richardson, one of its officers, helped spread the word about my visit (the interview I did with him is at www.americainsolidarity.org/news/640), and he and other members put together a small spread of vegetables, cookie, and drinks for the people who came. Hospitality like this helps to restore my faith in my fellow humans! Read More

We drove north across the bridge over the Columbia River that separates Oregon from Washington thinking how odd it was to have been in Portland, where we had lived longer than any other place the past six years, for just one day. We had thought about coming back here to live, but after seeing the city again, we both knew that we would never live there again. Something almost indefinable is wrong there. Maybe it’s just too white. We were also thinking how weird it was to be almost every day dropping into a new situation, making conversation with strangers, trying to see something of a new town in a very short period of time, getting frustrated when there are problems with the book’s distribution, promotion, etc. We wonder what this is all about. I’ve concluded that it is about talking to people about changing our lives and our society, living in a less consumption-obsessed way, putting less focus on work (at least traditional employer-employee work), really seeing the world around us, getting angry enough to do something about the problems the book describes. One journalist in Pittsburgh called us “revolutionary tourists.” Maybe we are. Or maybe we’re “vagabonds for beauty,” as was the young traveler and artist Everett Reuss, who disappeared suddenly in the mid-1930s in southern Utah. Maybe we get frustrated sometimes because we see the United States, in terms of its likely political/economic/social evolution, as a dead-end. If the future holds anything radically different than the present, especially if this future is more egalitarian and less fervid about growth, then the United States will go kicking and screaming (and probably bombing) into it. Read More