I’m from all over. I was born in Arizona, grew up in Northeastern Ohio, went to school in upstate New York, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then Connecticut, and now here.

I found Bend in a Title 9 catalog. Literally. My husband and I were living and working in Connecticut, and longing for the open-space-bluebird-sky-desert-mountain-hiking-camping lifestyle that we had grown to love in New Mexico. He was finishing his cardiology fellowship, and was looking for his first ‘real job.’  We were so hungry for the West that we were contemplating just returning to New Mexico.

One day, I was flipping through the winter issue of a Title 9 catalog, which featured pictures of fit, outdoorsy women in fun attire engaged in various athletic pursuits, like snowboarding and snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing. I happened upon a picture of a woman with a dog sled team; the caption said something like, When she’s not dog sledding, Kayla enjoys hot yoga and cocoa in Bend, OR. The image on the page was my dream landscape — snowcapped mountains, ponderosa pines, bright blue sky — and defied all of my preconceived notions about the Pacific Northwest. Huh, I thought, dog-sledding in Oregon.

A few Google searches later, we ‘discovered’ Bend, and were pleasantly surprised to find a job opportunity for Gavin as well.  When he flew out for his first interview, he told me that the landscape reminded him of Taos, New Mexico. That was all I needed to hear.

Our families were perplexed. Ore-gone? they said, like Easterners. Why Ore-gone? They couldn’t understand the need to be out West.

I have always told myself that when we are born into a place, the landscape we are born into leaves a little mark on our DNA. I needed to be out West, I told myself,  because I’m originally from the West. I couldn’t otherwise explain my particular thrill at hearing the funky call of desert quail, or the romantic swoon I would feel when the rabbitbrush turned gold in its late summer bloom. Or the dance of mint-green sage against black lava rock.

There is something about sitting in the desert, relaxing your eyes and watching a landscape that looks barren at first glance slowly reveal its layers of life: lizards skittering over the sand, ground squirrels peeking from behind the rocks, birds quietly preening while perched on the skeleton of a gnarled tree. I’m almost a kid again, standing in my grandmother’s yellow kitchen in Tucson, the two of us looking out the window and watching the desert come alive against the backdrop of the Santa Catalina Mountains.  It’s in my bones, I told myself. And since Gavin was also born out West, I convinced myself that it must be in his bones, too.

I have spent much of my adult life running from home in one way or another, restless with where I was because something about it didn’t fit. Or because something about me didn’t fit. I’ve written about that elsewhere, but my point is that Bend was the first place I really felt at home, the first place where I felt comfortable in my own skin. Like that first love who adored you for who you are, accepted you despite all of your shortcomings.

But now, for reasons that are larger and more important than me, I must leave. We are moving to Vermont, to be closer to our families, to re-engage Gavin with the reasons he went into medicine in the first place. These are good reasons, and the odds are in our favor, transplanting our family to the fertile soils of Vermont. We will be fine. I am sure that we will thrive.

Still, this move feels a bit like a break-up. Like the one I endured years ago, when I’d met the man who would become my husband, and had to say goodbye to the one I already had. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. I simply loved my husband more.

The days count down and I watch others enjoying all there is to love about Bend: the mountains, the Deschutes, the beer and music on cool summer nights. I think about the ski season we will miss on Mount Bachelor, our annual moonlight snowshoeing trip, and the dog sledding I never did.

Because perhaps that wasn’t quite me. And maybe the reason I feel comfortable in my own skin here has less to do with the landscape, and more to do with the fact that I’ve finally confronted my reasons for running away from home.

Maybe. Or maybe I’m finally figuring out what it really takes to make a home.

Photo Credit: Moonrise over Bend, Oregon — www.reddit.com

The post Farewell Bend appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Understated as it may sound, I’m sad.  We’re all sad, even though we are lucky to have a willing recipient (the Deschutes Public Library) to take some of NOW’s creative writing programs and carry them forward within their own program structure, to align with their own strategic goals.  Even with what I truly believe is an important and beneficial consolidation, I’m still feeling sad.  Because like it or not, NOW’s closing doors say something about this community, about what is happening here.

One thing I know for sure is that within this primordial stew of needs and ideas and blood and sweat and money and tears and everything else that exists within a community of passionate people — within this primordial stew, there are usually a few things around which we can coalesce.  For a while, at least when I first moved here, I thought that one of those organizing principles in Bend was the idea that art is a basic need.  That creative self expression is as necessary to human life as air, as food, as water.   Ask the residents of The Shepherd’s House homeless shelter, for whom The Nature of Words provided creative writing residencies as part of their healing and empowerment process.  I think they might agree.

But recently, I can’t help but wonder whether people do believe that art is a basic need.  I can’t help but notice that this feels more like a stressed ecosystem — where the culture part of our habitat is being leached to such a degree that a student’s first exposure to the personal essay might be on a college application.  Or that the occasional instruction of “Art-in-a-Box” at school has become an acceptable form of art education.  This cannot be the new standard for exploring creativity.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the parent volunteers who teach it, but I have to confess: Art-in-a-Box as a concept makes me die a little inside.

Here’s the thing: art is what connects us as human beings.  The arts are the means by which we inhabit one another’s experiences.  We become more human when we share our stories — and the truth is, as Brian Doyle would say, stories are our food.  Whether they’re written stories, spoken stories, painted, sculpted, and acted stories, or stories that are musically composed.  Culture is part of our habitat.  A basic need.  Necessary for us to thrive.

These needs are provided by a great many local organizations — The Nature of Words was among them, and is again lucky to have a partner who is capable of continuing to meet that need.  But what about the others?  What would happen if they went away?  How would we all get fed?

I think it’s easy for us to become complacent about the importance of the arts — until we’ve suffered a loss that reminds us of that particular nutritional need.  Example: how many Facebook posts of Dr. Maya Angelou did you read upon her recent passing?  And what would our habitat be like if she hadn’t shared her words?

I hope the vacancy left by The Nature of Words will be felt in this community, and that it will motivate all of us to ask ourselves how much we value our arts and culture organizations.  Not just appreciate, but value.  The distinction is important.

Photo credit: World of Paris Blog, http://worldofparis.wordpress.com/tag/art-is-a-basic-need/

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I linger on the edge with my camera around my neck.  I had intended to take pictures of the parade, but instead I lean against the chain-link fence around Troy Field —where the fair is held— noticing the line of dead grass around the entire fenced perimeter.  It appears they must have sprayed.

Later, I will learn that Troy Field is named after Troy Laundry, a former dry-cleaning facility that used to sit adjacent to the field, where the city’s parking lot now resides, next to the learning garden beds.  Later, I will learn that the business burned to the ground after 60 years of operation, and that when the city purchased the land nearly 20 years ago, they discovered perchloroethylene in the soils beneath the site.  I will read about how they had to excavate and remove 41,000 pounds of contaminated soils, and I will resurrect my technical training and wonder if what they did was really enough.  I’ll wonder what happened to the ground water, or if they even bothered to look.

But I won’t know about that until later.  Now I just watch, with a feeling of unease, the bright green grass fluttering against the blanched color of straw.

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Original artwork by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, image courtesy of The Nature of Words

On Earth Day, I attend a presentation by artist Irene Hardwicke Olivieri about turning emotions into art.  Her work reminds me of Frida Kahlo’s paintings: vibrant and twinged with pain, but gentler in its form.  The characters in Irene’s paintings are deeply rooted and intertwined with all manner of plants and animals — sometimes even painted as animal-human hybrids, and always rising up from the burden of emotional despair.

She flips through the slides, telling us the stories that inspired each painting.  Family secrets, animal cruelty, environmental harm.  The stories are interconnected.  And yet, her work is steadfast in its transcendence above the suffering.  In seeking a natural and spiritual oasis.  I think her message is this:  Save Nature — Nature Saves.  Or maybe the other way around.

I understand this, as someone who retreats to the trails whenever the demons start to show.  And I understand the healing power of natural immersion.  There is nothing quite as grounding as locking eyes with a bird of prey, or mixing tracks with a herd of elk.  There is solace in the company of animals.

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When I was a kid, Earth Day was a day when you paused to remember the plight of the spotted owl, a day when you expressed your hope that the wilderness you’d taken for granted would still be there after you passed on.  Earth Day was like a prayer that the animal pacing the cage at the zoo or slumped in the corner on the other side of the glass wasn’t the only animal left of its kind — a prayer that the artist’s rendering of their habitat wasn’t all that remained.

But that was just my childhood view, uninformed in the permeable membranes between earth and plant and animal and human and animal and plant and earth.  I am reminded of this now, looking at my research about chemicals in water and soil, chemicals in us.  I am thinking about Irene’s painting of a woman in the belly of a cat, lapping water from the edge of a lake.  We are the animals, too.  And every year that passes, it seems that Earth Day becomes more about saving us.

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Procession:  The act of moving along or forward; progression.  This procession should yield progression.  Consider: Wouldn’t it be nice if we celebrated Earth Day with the Progression of the Species from the field of our past mistakes?

Photo Credit:  Original photography by Carol Sternkopf Photography

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