Rebecca Henderson

On my trip up to Washington from Texas in January 2011, as my dad and I were driving on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge from Portland to the Tri-Cities, we noticed a huge mansion across the river on the Washington side, popping up in the middle of the desert seemingly out of nowhere. There was nothing else around it for a few miles, and it puzzled us why there would be such a large house stuck on the side of a mountain towering over the river. I asked a friend about it after we arrived in the Tri-Cities, and she immediately knew which house we were referring to: “Oh, you’re talking about Maryhill. It’s an art museum. Add that to your list of places you should go while in the Northwest.”

I did add it to my list, and on a recent road trip my friend Jen and I made plans to stop in and see what the museum is all about. Maryhill’s website touts it as “Without question, one of the most unusual and enchanting museums in America.” That’s a big claim to live up to when you’re perched on the side of a mountain a few hours’ drive from a metropolitan area.

Before we discuss the oddity that is this charming little collection of art, however, let me first mention the Stonehenge monument three miles to the east on Highway 14. I was driving along at a nice clip on our way to Maryhill and had to make a sliding stop and turn on two wheels to keep from missing the turn-off for the monument — but there was no way we were going to pass up seeing a replica of Stonehenge overlooking the Columbia, with a windmill farm in the background. Sam Hill, an influential Washington businessman, built the Maryhill version of Stonehenge to be a memorial for local soldiers killed in WWI, as a way of making a statement about the sacrifice of young lives to the cause of war. I really had no idea when I left my house that morning that I would be visiting Stonehenge in rural Washington before the day was out.

The Maryhill Museum itself was a very pleasant stop on our way to spend a couple of days in the Columbia River Gorge, and I recommend it for anyone traveling that direction. The varying collections on each floor are unique and seemingly random, but I was fascinated to read the placards telling how they were all connected — household and personal effects from Queen Marie of Romania (who??), Eastern Orthodox icons, a large number of drawings and sculptures by Auguste Rodin (including a plaster of The Thinker), 73 chess sets from around the world (yes, I did stop to count them), baskets from various Native American tribes, and a display detailing Sam Hill’s contributions to the road systems in Washington and Oregon. Among other things. Goodness.

It was the section on Sam Hill’s life and works that I found most intriguing. I’d never heard his name before arriving at the museum (named for his daughter), and he seems to have a rather depressing story as far as his relationships go, but I was interested to see how much he’d influenced the road system and a couple of the places I enjoy most along the Columbia. The Maryhill Loop on Sam Hill’s property near Goldendale was the first paved road in Washington state (!!) — and he was instrumental in building the Historic Columbia River Highway in Oregon and the Vista House at Crown Point, where you can stand high above the river (if the wind doesn’t blow you over) and gaze out in either direction at the grandeur of the gorge. It was also fun to note that Sam Hill was responsible for the Peace Arch at the border crossing between Blaine, Washington, and Surrey, British Columbia, near where my friends and I posed for this picture on a cold, cold day in January 2008. Who knew at the time that I was visiting my first Sam Hill monument?

It had been a while since I’d taken a day off work to spend outdoors, so when my friend Laura and her parents invited me to go snowshoeing last Friday, I jumped at the chance to clear my schedule and spend a day away from my computer.

Laura’s parents are friends with a family who go regularly throughout the winter to cross-country ski in the Wenatchee National Forest. They have the key to an old cabin owned by the US Forest Service, which they make their base on weekend skiing excursions. The cabin is three miles off the highway, meaning visitors have to pack in their supplies in the winter when the forest service road and hiking trail are snowed over. For our day out in the woods, there were four of us on snowshoes with smaller packs who were only going for the day, three with large packs on skis, and one chocolate lab who didn’t seem to mind that she was the only one tromping through the snow without something on her feet to keep her from post-holing every step.

This was my first time on snowshoes and my first time to see SO MUCH SNOW. Feet and feet of it. It didn’t occur to me until Laura pointed it out — we were passing snow covered treetops at ankle-level. After I realized that, I kept thinking about being on this trail during the summer and looking up overhead to see where we had been walking in the air on this February afternoon.

When we got out of our cars at the trailhead on the highway, the man who had invited us all along pointed out that “This is not a beginner trail.” Great. My first time on snowshoes and it’s not a beginner trail. I think he mostly meant that in regards to anyone on skis, since as we soon found out the trail was uphill most of the way to the cabin. 1000 feet in elevation gain over the 3 miles. Rather exhausting, and torturous for my poor feet in borrowed snow boots that didn’t fit well at all. But the experience was worth the pain in my toes and my ankles (I might not have said that if I’d been injured that day, but I wasn’t, so it doesn’t matter now). It snowed most of the way up to the cabin, six inches by the time we got back to the car — you can see what had accumulated on my backpack after the first three miles. Our hats were covered with a layer as well.

We passed one privately owned cabin (pictured below) on our way to the much more rustic forest service cabin. With the falling snow and drifts on the roof, I dreamed of spending a weekend in such a cabin, cozy in front of the fire, tucked in the forest away from cell signals and traffic noises.

With daylight ending fast, we stayed at the forest service cabin only long enough to sign the guest book, eat a snack, and dry off for a moment in front of the wood-burning stove. During the summer, there are four steps up from the ground to the cabin door. You can see from the photo below, snow had drifted up around the cabin, and we had to step down from the drifts to get in the door. It was unreal to me to be inside a building with such a view out the window.

After our quick rest, the four of us who weren’t staying the weekend put our gear back on and started back the three miles to the highway, the snow still coming down around us. Not long into the return trip, it became dark enough that we needed to put on headlamps, and we finished out our trip with the odd vista of falling flakes illuminated directly in front of our eyes, the darkness of the forest on a snowy, cloudy night surrounding us from all sides. Aside from the crunching of our snowshoes, the forest was silent. All of the usual night sounds in a forest were covered with feet of snow.

(This essay is the latest in the series on the Quinault Community Garden — previous essays include God is Good, God is Faithful, and God Works in His Time.)

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Genesis 50:20

With snow and ice covering the ground, it’s hard to imagine that anything can be happening in the garden plot behind the building at 5400 W. Canal Drive. The soil is frozen, not even visible, much less able to produce a green sprout from a seed. Winter time seems useless where gardens are concerned.

Many of us begin a Bible reading plan at the first of the year, in the starkest point of winter, and the stories of so many people from those early books in the Old Testament remind us of the long, cold, dark periods of life where the days and years seem to pass without any evidence of God’s life-giving work. Abraham, Moses, Joseph and others experienced years — decades — where they waited for God to keep His promises. They waited. And waited. And waited. Don’t you know Joseph more than once must have looked around his Egyptian dungeon and wondered if he would ever experience life and joy and the sunshine again? Surely at least once he wondered how things could have ended up this way and whether God really knew what He was doing after all.

The end of Joseph’s story tells the conclusions he drew from the evidence around him when all was said and done: God was in control all along and He was working out a plan to bring life to many people. God never stopped being in control, never stopped working in His creation, even in the deepest winter of Joseph’s life.

Even now in our garden, God is in control and He is at work. The ground rests and waits and produces no growth for the time being, but it is for a purpose. The compost pile appears to be a mess of limbs and leaves and coffee grounds and eggshells, but eventually it will become good black dirt, ready to give nutrients to the seeds we plant. God is in control of this whole process, and He will bring about life through this cold waiting season.

Lately I’ve been on a quest to overcome my dread of the cold. When I spent the summer in Alaska in 2010, I wrote about resigning myself to the fact that I’m a wimp in the cold. I’m not ashamed: I get cold easily and have to bundle up a bit more than the average person in Washington.

But I’m not going to let the cold stop me. (I will, however, let snowy and icy roads stop me.) I cannot let the four or five months of temperatures consistently below or around 40 degrees keep me from leaving my house everyday. As a full-time writer who works out of a home office, I start to go a bit crazy when I can’t get out for breaks to exercise or talk to people, to see something besides the four walls of my apartment. In Texas you can hunker down and not leave the house during the coldest days of the year — because they last for about four days. In Washington, though, I’ve come to terms with the realities of wearing wool underwear and socks, boots with fuzzy lining, scarves, and hats every day until Easter. I invested in cold weather running tights, so freezing temps don’t keep me from putting in a few miles a week. Long wool tights, socks that come up to my knees, and warm boots allow me to wear dresses and skirts year-round, something I never imagined possible. That one little consolation is helping me endure this winter — I love skirts and got used to wearing them year-round with flip-flops in tropical Yunnan, and I feel distinctly unfeminine if I have to wear jeans for months on end. I’m making the best of it and improvising with cold gear so that I can keep dressing and looking like a girl.

I’m trying not to let circumstances stop me in other areas, as well. At this point in life I don’t have the home furnishings or space necessary to have big groups of people over for dinner or to hang out. Having an open house is important to me, and I want my home to be a place where I can entertain, serve meals, show hospitality to people who might need a place to stay. Right now, I only have enough space around the table for six, and two of those people will need to sit on a patio chair or bar stool. Depending on what we’re eating, I don’t have enough place settings to serve those six. But I’m making do. I’ve determined not to be embarrassed about the little I have and to invite friends over now — not wait until I have a larger kitchen and table and plenty of bowls and plates for a big dinner party. I’m not going to let my limitations stop me. If I don’t invite folks over for dinner now, what makes me think I won’t find another excuse to prevent it in two years?

Writing is another example. It’s easy to wake up each morning and look at all the things I need to get done for my bill-paying freelance jobs, or the chores to be done around the house, and think to myself, “I wish I could be completely care-free and have all the time in the world to write each day.” But that kind of care-free scenario is the stuff of dreams. I can arrange my life so that I have as much writing time as possible, but ultimately I have to just sit down and do the writing, stop looking at all the obstacles, get down to business. I can’t let any number of hesitations or fears or distractions keep me from doing the tasks that will lead to my end goal: completed essays and stories and books.

And now I ask, what about you? What are some areas where you catch yourself saying, “One day when the stars are perfectly aligned, I would love to start doing this or that.” Could you take a small step toward preparing for those possibilities, not letting the present circumstances stop you from enjoying today what you desire for the future?

view of Mt Rainier from White Pass Scenic Byway

Over the weekend I went to Seattle to visit my sister and niece. Since the weather was gorgeous (first time to reach 80 degrees in Seattle this year) and I’m on the last week before my national parks pass expires, I decided to drive the long way from here to there, through Mt Rainier National Park — or Mt Rainy, as my niece calls it.

view of Mt Rainier from Sunrise Point in the national park

view from Sunrise Point, in the opposite direction from Mt Rainier

It’s been a fun year, and I hope to have a reason to buy another annual pass soon. To celebrate a great year of parks, here’s a recap of stories from the blog:

Last July I took my first ride in a bush plane and experienced Alaskan mosquitos in Kobuk Valley National Park.

In September, I bought the annual pass at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and drove as far as I could on the Trail Ridge Road.

I fell in love with West Texas on a camping trip in Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains last October, but missed out on the opportunity to camp in White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.

On the drive to Washington in January, I stopped at Saguaro in Arizona and Joshua Tree in California for a quick intro to a couple of desert southwest parks.

I saw the end of the Lewis and Clark trail at the national historical park in Washington and Oregon in March — and the beginning of the trail at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia in April. I squeezed in a drive through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia on that April trip east, as well.

When my mom came to visit in July, we saw the Whitman Mission National Historical Site near Walla Walla, a couple of bonus parks in Canada (Kootenay in British Columbia and Banff in Alberta), and had a gorgeous drive through Glacier National Park in Montana.

I think I got my money’s worth this year.

close-up of Toppenish Depot Mural

On Labor Day I went with a friend to visit her grandmother in the Yakima Valley, and to get there we drove through the town of Toppenish, famous for its 70+ murals decorating buildings, walls, other flat surfaces. The murals depict scenes of the old West, native Yakama culture, and other history from the area, and the city adds a new mural each year during their Mural-in-a-Day event.

Toppenish Depot Mural

The town of Toppenish (pop. 9000) is completely surrounded by the Yakama Nation. Hops, grapes, and corn made up our view for a good portion of the drive through the area, with Mt Adams and Mt Rainier popping in and out of sight in the distance.

walking through Toppenish

One mural/map told us that Toppenish is 990 miles from Mexico, 198 miles from Canada, 198 miles from the Pacific, and 2376 miles from the Atlantic. In case you were curious.

looking at murals in Toppenish

I thought it was fun to find this mural mentioning the Cowgirl Hall of Fame — a great little museum in my hometown, Fort Worth, Texas.

Ruth Parton Webster, 1988 inductee to Cowgirl Hall of Fame

(Note: I’ve corrected the spelling of Yakama Nation — it’s different from the spelling of the city of Yakima. Thanks for the correction, Laura S.)

“Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,

for in you I trust.

Make me know the way I should go,

for to you I lift up my soul.”

Psalm 143:8

The sun came up 10 minutes earlier today than it did on my last try at sunrise on Badger Mountain near the end of May. I was pulling out of my driveway by 4 am, and the sky was clear. On my walk up the mountain, the moon was still bright, and its light reflected in a silver strand on the Columbia River when I glanced back over my shoulder at the horizon behind me. The wind whispered early morning salutations in the tall grass, and birdsong rose from the hillside in reply.

Sunrise happens every day, but how often do I consider it? God’s love is new every morning, and I don’t want to miss it.

Once upon a time in China, I owned a beautiful red leather couch. I loved that couch and enjoyed it as the centerpiece of my living room for years. Alas, red leather couches don’t fit in duffel bags, and my lovely couch remains in China.

I’m ok with that. If I had to choose a couch again, I would choose the same one. But I’m at a point in my life where I just don’t feel like buying a couch. Because they don’t fit in duffel bags.

My dining table and chairs were a necessity because I love to have people over for dinner. I’m thankful for friends who loaned me a bed and dresser for my room, and I now have a desk and bookcases (sadly, two boxes of books still languish at the dead letter offices in Seattle and Dallas — if you see any of my stuff for sale at a mail recovery auction in Atlanta, please buy it back for me, ok?).

But I’ve decided that for now my living room will go couchless. I’m also TV-less, but that’s not a “for now.” I plan to never own one of those again.

Instead, I’m putting lots of cushions around the walls and on the floors. A friend also hooked me up with a nice coffee table that works perfectly for eating on from a sitting position.

My living room will be my daily reminder of Asia. Asian seating on the floor and Asian cushions. The large red and black one came from a Dai market in Yunnan. I found standard size pillows for $2.50 at WalMart and bought a bunch to destroy for the sake of my cushions. I put the stuffing inside this big cushion and several other smaller ones, and I’m going to use the white fabric from the outside of the pillows to make cloth napkins. How thrifty and domestic is that?

The other cushions come from various parts of Asia — a set of covers with Hmong embroidery came from Thailand, another embroidered cover came from Yunnan, and one set was a gift from a fellow teacher who vacationed in India one Christmas.

I’ve also set about using fabric from old clothes to make more cushion covers. I have an embroidered top from Thailand that never fit quite right — easy to recycle into a small throw pillow. And for some reason I’m not sure of, I bought a pair of stripey-sparkly fisherman pants in Thailand many years ago and never wore them. Actually, I know the reason I haven’t worn them: they’re big enough to put an entire standard size pillow in one pants leg. New pillow coverings!

No need for a couch around here. Cushions fit much more easily into duffel bags.

Not long after I moved to the Tri-Cities, I began volunteering with the refugee agency World Relief. I had some exposure to refugee work in the Fort Worth area through friends at Catholic Charities and some writing work I did with Chin young people in Dallas. My heart continues to feel an affinity with Southeast Asians, after so many years working with ethnic groups along the Burma-China border, and it seemed natural for me to connect with the local refugee community in Kennewick.

My default when talking to the volunteer coordinator was to tell her I could teach English as a Second Language. I was quickly given a beginning level class of mostly Somali women (I blogged about that earlier this year). Not quite what I had been expecting. Soon, though, I was also assigned to be a mentor for a newly arrived Karen family of seven. The Karen are a heavily persecuted ethnic group from Burma, and this family had spent time in refugee camps in Thailand and arrived in Washington only two weeks before I met them.

I don’t speak Burmese or Karen. They don’t speak English. But every Tuesday afternoon I go to their house and help them with any errands that might require a car or “translator.” Now, like I said, I don’t speak Burmese or Karen. But I can translate standard English into a very simplified English that they can understand, so that when a clerk hurriedly asks for their “date-uh-birth” I sloooooowly repeat “birthday” until they get it. And they usually do get it.

We’ve gone to the local Department of Licensing to get their official Washington photo IDs.

We’ve gone to WalMart to pick up prescriptions (a true act of compassion on my part, given my aversion to WalMart), where I taught them to look for Equate brand products to save money whenever possible.

We’ve gone to the Asian market and to WinCo. When we go grocery shopping, they find enough friends in their apartment complex to fill up both my front and back seat, and they buy enough groceries to fill up the trunk. I’m reminded of trips to B Mountain in Yunnan, where I would drive the truck full of village friends in the cab and their goods in the bed.

A couple of weeks ago I had my first experience helping my Karen friends with a WIC food voucher. I had never seen one before they handed it to me. Every state does it differently, so I hear, but in Washington families are given a voucher with a very specific list of items that they can purchase. My friends’ voucher was for 2 gallons of milk, 1 quart of milk (I don’t get it, why the odd amounts?), 1 dozen eggs, 16 oz of rice (that will last approximately one meal for a family from Burma), 16 oz of beans, and 2 containers of juice. It was like a scavenger hunt for me to go through the store and find the items for them, to show them which products and sizes were eligible for their voucher.

I’ve been overwhelmed through this whole process — overwhelmed on their behalf. How difficult it is to arrive in a foreign land, have so little money, and not be able to do much to change the situation and support your family better. Learning English is difficult, learning to navigate a new system is confounding, leaving behind a previous life is heartbreaking. I know my Karen friends would rather farm their own land on a mountainside in Burma, grow their own rice and raise their own chickens to feed their family. But that freedom was taken away by a hostile army.

My own memories of adjusting to life in a new country are vivid, but I went to China willingly — and I went with a college education and plenty of money in my bank account. My own experience is nothing like the upheaval the Karen and Somali and Iraqi refugees in the Tri-Cities go through each day as they adjust.

Some stereotypes become stereotypes because they are, in actuality, true. This can annoy the people who fall in the category being stereotyped, like Texans who don’t like being lumped in with cowboys and get irritated when people ask “Does everyone in Texas ride horses to school?” (an actual question I’ve been asked by a sincere yet naive questioner). And then my dad (or uncle or grandfather or any number of relatives on that side of the family) walks in the room wearing his boots and big old belt buckle and hat, and the stereotypes are confirmed. (For the record, I’m proud of my cowboy heritage, so no emails or comments knocking me knocking cowboys — I’m just trying to make a point here.)

Before coming to the Northwest, I assumed that the whole coffee-shop-on-every-corner thing was just a stereotype. When I visited Seattle and Vancouver with friends in 2008, one girl in our group pledged to make our trip as “caffeinated” as possible. We were successful in that endeavor, only because the stereotype is well-founded.

Seattle coffee shop, 2008

Since moving to Washington earlier this year, I’ve expanded my awe at the number of coffee shops (the sit-down-and-enjoy-the-wi-fi-and-conversation variety) to also include the proliferation of espresso drive-thrus, like Dutch Bros. This one is pretty fancy, but most of them remind me of sno-cone stands in Texas.

Dutch Bros drive-thru

This kind of drive-thru is found in pretty much every parking lot in the Tri-Cities. I really like coffee, but I honestly don’t understand how the population of this area can support that much espresso-related commerce. Somehow it does, though.

Over this past weekend, I drove to Vancouver with friends, and we visited Tim Hortons, the most famous Canadian coffee chain. You can see in the background of this photo that we passed up another popular chain to get here.

at Tim Hortons in Vancouver

We made up for it on a stop in Seattle on our way back to the Tri-Cities. The stop was more for wi-fi than coffee, but we did find a Starbucks within 90 seconds of pulling off the freeway.