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of books and bales
Jul. 23rd, 2010 12:13 pmBrooks Library is growing on me. As far as book selection goes, it's still a poor excuse for a university library, the organization is completely backwards of what I'm used to (A-J is on the third floor, K-Z is on the fourth floor, the stacks are set up so that one keeps going down the shelves instead of coming to the end of the bookshelf and going around to the other side), and I still haven't quite figured out why there is a whole floor (the second) where there are no books, but -- it's growing on me.
Compared to Howard-Tilton Library at Tulane, it's a small library. I don't have pictures -- I still haven't put new batteries in my camera, not that I take it to school with me anyway -- but although there's usually a scattering of people when I go in there, it's by no means the amount I can expect to see at Tilton on a usual day. Of course, it's summer quarter, so that might account for it, but I find a rather like the idea of Brooks being a lonely bastion of books and learning, a little archaic, a little behind in its ways. Depending on the mood I'm in, it's fun to go exploring in the stacks, finding a subject I would never have guessed the CWU would have a section on and settling down to pick through books that haven't been checked out since they were published and purchased, sometime back in the seventies or eighties, sometimes earlier. I suppose there's not much of an interest in medieval British folklore and custom; it's a treasure trove for me. At Tilton I never would have noticed those books; Tilton is big enough that as soon as I find the call number, I go straight there, maybe nose around the books in the immediate section, but never try and go through the whole DA section. That's a quarter of a floor: that's a lot of books. I can take my biography of Alfred the Great and go home, but Brooks' selection is small enough that I can browse the British history section, find books I never knew existed, that I never would have thought to search for in a larger library.
Central Washington University is a very west coast university. I could never mistake it for Tulane; there are slopes, little sloping hillocks that raise you from University Way to Nicholson Way, so that it's easy to walk from the Language and Literature Building to the SURC or to Lind Hall, but a little harder to walk back the same way. If the day is clear -- and this time of year in central Washington, it usually is; we haven't had any major forest fires in that direction yet -- you can see all the way to the mountains. Not the Cascades, not Mt. Rainier or Mt. Baker or Mt. Adams, none of the big volcanoes of Washington, but smaller mountains, teenagers to the old men of the West. It's been a cold summer; they're still snow-capped, but their slopes are covered in evergreen forest scattered with hiking trails and lonely summer vacation homes, usually owned by city folk from the west side who want to flee Seattle or Tacoma for a few weeks. Everywhere you look in Ellensburg, there are hills; we lie in the heart of the valley, and sometimes the hills can smother you. Sometimes they're covered in snow, for a few brief weeks of the year they turn green; now they're brown from the dry heat of summer, a familiar sight. On one side of the valley, ugly white windmills poke up on the hills, a blemish on the horizon; on the other side, the wind farms are still in production, huge white pieces of metal lying scattered around like an alien vessel's bones. Nobody in the valley asked for them. Just another imposition on a long list of impositions the city slickers in Olympia forced on the county after being denied. Central and eastern Washington is a different animal entirely than wet, green western Washington.
Central is a small school, a shock for the west siders that come here every year instead of the U-Dub, Western, or Evergreen State. This is different country: home to cowgirls and cowboys, where the pulse of the valley revolves around the hay harvest, where the university parking lot fills up every Labor Day weekend with Ford trucks and horse trailers, glossy mustangs decked out in western-style tack escorted by men and women with prize belt buckles and cowboy boots and hats worn unironically. Just outside the city boundaries are cows, horses, sheep, the odd llama; go a little farther out and you'll find the beefalo ranch. Even in the town, a traffic jam is two trucks and a tractor; venture away from the constraints of the town and every farmer with a few acres to spare has laid down hay, rich and grassy, stinging your eyes and your nose and your throat during cutting. The big machines can cut fast and bale faster; everyone watches the skies nervously while the hay dries in the summer sun. Even a smattering of rainfall can ruin the harvest. Just because we're in the twenty-first century doesn't mean that those who live off the land aren't prey to the foibles of the weather. Hay brokers and their clients fill the restaurants during the season; the same clients show up at the same restaurant every evening with a different broker. There's a lot of hay: they can take their pick based on who's willing to shell out a few more cash for beer as well as dinner. The big trucks rumble by on the streets, stuffed with hay packed in tighter bales than anywhere else on the planet. We don't roll hay here, we don't bale loosely: our hay goes to Japan, and the more hay that can be packed into a shipping container, the more you'll sell.
Leave Kittitas County and you leave hay country; go southeast into Yakima and you enter wine and apple country, the home of the great orchards of the West. Forget New York City, this is the big apple; Washington apples are shipped all over the world. In Thailand, you can buy apples from a crate marked "Washington Apples", but they aren't from Washington. The sellers know they'll sell better that way. The hills are dry and brown; no good land for fruit orchards or vegetable fields, but humans have known for millennia that grape vines don't need flat ground to grow. Plots of land sprout vines that will make a barrel of wine here or there, carefully nurtured shards of green that force their way up into the sunlight. In the better vinyards, where the owners do their work for a living and not for a hobby, the vines are trained onto trellises, spreading out green on vast tracts of land. A sign flutters in the wind on the canyon road: "Welcome to Washington Wine Country."
When I was in elementary school, a little two-classroom schoolhouse that also boasted a gymnasium and a multi-purpose room, as well as barely forty students, we used to pour out of the building every year to watch a herd of sheep go by, filling the road as cars lined up, waiting for them to pass. The field across from the school used to boast corn; now it, too, is filled with hay. I can still remember one of the parents bringing in a crate full of corn and handing out the cobs, still dew-wet from the fields. Even now you can find cows grazing on state land, up in the empty hills that surround the road to Yakima; signs warn of free-roaming livestock. Come fall, the beeves will be taken to the fair, shown off by their proud owners, then auctioned to the highest bidder. For a farmer's child, it's a good way to earn college money.
As much as the university tries to exist in its own world, it's impossible. Compared to schools on the east coast, it's a newcomer, a child still jumping up on its tiptoes to try and reach the seemingly unreachable ivy-covered red brick towers of its cousins back east. (Who reach in their own turn towards their stately ancestors on the other side of the Atlantic.) Most of the buildings are made out of brick, including Brooks Library. It seems a bit like a joke, because even inside, the walls are brick, the shelves brown wood, the books lost in their own little world. Outside the mountains reach for the skies and a battered truck with a pair of steer horns fixed to the front drag a horse trailer down University Way, but inside the library it's dark and quiet. Just you and the books. Tilton is huge and impersonal, the number of books overwhelming; the stacks go on forever and air tubes from the ceiling threaten to reach down a snatch up an errant undergraduate who's ventured too deep, but for a moment Brooks can hold the illusion of books and history. If you find a cubby near a window, you can settle down with your stack of forgotten books and stare out at the mountains, existing, for a moment, in two worlds.
Compared to Howard-Tilton Library at Tulane, it's a small library. I don't have pictures -- I still haven't put new batteries in my camera, not that I take it to school with me anyway -- but although there's usually a scattering of people when I go in there, it's by no means the amount I can expect to see at Tilton on a usual day. Of course, it's summer quarter, so that might account for it, but I find a rather like the idea of Brooks being a lonely bastion of books and learning, a little archaic, a little behind in its ways. Depending on the mood I'm in, it's fun to go exploring in the stacks, finding a subject I would never have guessed the CWU would have a section on and settling down to pick through books that haven't been checked out since they were published and purchased, sometime back in the seventies or eighties, sometimes earlier. I suppose there's not much of an interest in medieval British folklore and custom; it's a treasure trove for me. At Tilton I never would have noticed those books; Tilton is big enough that as soon as I find the call number, I go straight there, maybe nose around the books in the immediate section, but never try and go through the whole DA section. That's a quarter of a floor: that's a lot of books. I can take my biography of Alfred the Great and go home, but Brooks' selection is small enough that I can browse the British history section, find books I never knew existed, that I never would have thought to search for in a larger library.
Central Washington University is a very west coast university. I could never mistake it for Tulane; there are slopes, little sloping hillocks that raise you from University Way to Nicholson Way, so that it's easy to walk from the Language and Literature Building to the SURC or to Lind Hall, but a little harder to walk back the same way. If the day is clear -- and this time of year in central Washington, it usually is; we haven't had any major forest fires in that direction yet -- you can see all the way to the mountains. Not the Cascades, not Mt. Rainier or Mt. Baker or Mt. Adams, none of the big volcanoes of Washington, but smaller mountains, teenagers to the old men of the West. It's been a cold summer; they're still snow-capped, but their slopes are covered in evergreen forest scattered with hiking trails and lonely summer vacation homes, usually owned by city folk from the west side who want to flee Seattle or Tacoma for a few weeks. Everywhere you look in Ellensburg, there are hills; we lie in the heart of the valley, and sometimes the hills can smother you. Sometimes they're covered in snow, for a few brief weeks of the year they turn green; now they're brown from the dry heat of summer, a familiar sight. On one side of the valley, ugly white windmills poke up on the hills, a blemish on the horizon; on the other side, the wind farms are still in production, huge white pieces of metal lying scattered around like an alien vessel's bones. Nobody in the valley asked for them. Just another imposition on a long list of impositions the city slickers in Olympia forced on the county after being denied. Central and eastern Washington is a different animal entirely than wet, green western Washington.
Central is a small school, a shock for the west siders that come here every year instead of the U-Dub, Western, or Evergreen State. This is different country: home to cowgirls and cowboys, where the pulse of the valley revolves around the hay harvest, where the university parking lot fills up every Labor Day weekend with Ford trucks and horse trailers, glossy mustangs decked out in western-style tack escorted by men and women with prize belt buckles and cowboy boots and hats worn unironically. Just outside the city boundaries are cows, horses, sheep, the odd llama; go a little farther out and you'll find the beefalo ranch. Even in the town, a traffic jam is two trucks and a tractor; venture away from the constraints of the town and every farmer with a few acres to spare has laid down hay, rich and grassy, stinging your eyes and your nose and your throat during cutting. The big machines can cut fast and bale faster; everyone watches the skies nervously while the hay dries in the summer sun. Even a smattering of rainfall can ruin the harvest. Just because we're in the twenty-first century doesn't mean that those who live off the land aren't prey to the foibles of the weather. Hay brokers and their clients fill the restaurants during the season; the same clients show up at the same restaurant every evening with a different broker. There's a lot of hay: they can take their pick based on who's willing to shell out a few more cash for beer as well as dinner. The big trucks rumble by on the streets, stuffed with hay packed in tighter bales than anywhere else on the planet. We don't roll hay here, we don't bale loosely: our hay goes to Japan, and the more hay that can be packed into a shipping container, the more you'll sell.
Leave Kittitas County and you leave hay country; go southeast into Yakima and you enter wine and apple country, the home of the great orchards of the West. Forget New York City, this is the big apple; Washington apples are shipped all over the world. In Thailand, you can buy apples from a crate marked "Washington Apples", but they aren't from Washington. The sellers know they'll sell better that way. The hills are dry and brown; no good land for fruit orchards or vegetable fields, but humans have known for millennia that grape vines don't need flat ground to grow. Plots of land sprout vines that will make a barrel of wine here or there, carefully nurtured shards of green that force their way up into the sunlight. In the better vinyards, where the owners do their work for a living and not for a hobby, the vines are trained onto trellises, spreading out green on vast tracts of land. A sign flutters in the wind on the canyon road: "Welcome to Washington Wine Country."
When I was in elementary school, a little two-classroom schoolhouse that also boasted a gymnasium and a multi-purpose room, as well as barely forty students, we used to pour out of the building every year to watch a herd of sheep go by, filling the road as cars lined up, waiting for them to pass. The field across from the school used to boast corn; now it, too, is filled with hay. I can still remember one of the parents bringing in a crate full of corn and handing out the cobs, still dew-wet from the fields. Even now you can find cows grazing on state land, up in the empty hills that surround the road to Yakima; signs warn of free-roaming livestock. Come fall, the beeves will be taken to the fair, shown off by their proud owners, then auctioned to the highest bidder. For a farmer's child, it's a good way to earn college money.
As much as the university tries to exist in its own world, it's impossible. Compared to schools on the east coast, it's a newcomer, a child still jumping up on its tiptoes to try and reach the seemingly unreachable ivy-covered red brick towers of its cousins back east. (Who reach in their own turn towards their stately ancestors on the other side of the Atlantic.) Most of the buildings are made out of brick, including Brooks Library. It seems a bit like a joke, because even inside, the walls are brick, the shelves brown wood, the books lost in their own little world. Outside the mountains reach for the skies and a battered truck with a pair of steer horns fixed to the front drag a horse trailer down University Way, but inside the library it's dark and quiet. Just you and the books. Tilton is huge and impersonal, the number of books overwhelming; the stacks go on forever and air tubes from the ceiling threaten to reach down a snatch up an errant undergraduate who's ventured too deep, but for a moment Brooks can hold the illusion of books and history. If you find a cubby near a window, you can settle down with your stack of forgotten books and stare out at the mountains, existing, for a moment, in two worlds.