In progress

You
were not here twelve years ago when my young sister, then very much neophyte in the world came to Pullman- crying. The transfer from the security of home in the comparitively under-developed suburbs of Redmond in 1995, and indeed from the comfort of being possessed of a very tangible family, to the independence of an isolated, small town and its bustling university was rough. She wept for weeks into the starchy blue comforter my parents bought just for the regulation twin xl dormitory bed she often foresook to call home (still crying) to beg for a chance to come home from this "hell hole." It was not that my sister's contempt for her new life in Pullman derived from the painful emotional cramps of comsopolitian withdrawl that often plague young, West-side men and women accustom to a life of traffic choked highways, tall buildings, and an array of shopping outlets to appease their boredom and desire. This (the) one-grocery store, one-book store, no-mall town terrified Heather not for a lack of variety and urban development but because the wide open swath of wheat in which she floated, lost on a sea of her own tears seemed to tremble with the signicance of loneliness she- alone for the first time in her life- suffered.

When mom and dad, having decided even before her departure that college education trumped all other concerns or complaints (be it loneliness, depression, or nervous collapse) from their daughter, she turned to me. You were not there in those days, when having taken my place in the vacant bedroom she left behind I listened with guilt - and a little fear- to her describe the landscape of her exile. On those long phone calls Heather took me on a tour of what seemed like a agrarian hell, surrounded on all sides by miles of nothing but wheat. I was quite sure listening to her talk about the miles and mies of wheat that nothing else existed in Pullman but her cramped dorm room (which she alternately described as "suffocating" and "big and lonely") a few classrooms where she was forced to sit out a few hours of the day. I imagined her wading through wheat back to her bedroom, back to the blue comfortor and telephone- te only human being for miles (excluding of course those few cranky professors that when they weren't hiding in the wheat emerged to torture her). It was not until her graduation, when dad and mom packed me in the car to head to Pullman that I discovered in fact much existed in Pullman beyond wheat. There were at least some shops to speak of, a grocery store, and much larger university than I'd imagined (complete with several dorms and departmental buildings no less). I was likewise surprised to see how many people there were in such a small town. Even over the years, when Heather moved in to a Soriority and began to acquire a clutch of friends, it seemed only these few girls existed beside my sister, as if like refugees of loneliness they'd stumbled upon each other one day and formed a bond against the wheat (and the lurking professors). When I arrived in the front hall of Alpha Phi, I was shocked to see so many women, parents, siblings, and friends moving about in the same space. A series of photos picturing classes of soroirity memebers over the years suggested that in fact there had always been a gathering of people in Pullman. One picture, in which my sister smiled sweetly from a row of other girls her age suggested that she in fact was only one of many that had lived some years out in the the town.

However, I confess that back then on my first encounter with Pullman, I like many present visiting loved ones was a mere tourist. Although, having become quite accostum to and dependent on the increasingly urbanized world of Seattle and it's East Side, left in my mouth a taste of disdain for such a removed, and what seemed to be underdevelped town I was shocked by the disparity between my expectations and the reality of the place. In fact, my sister's complaints about the "alienation" and "emptiness" of Pullman seemed to me then to be more mellow dramatic than true. Sure, we had to drive to Moscow, Idaho to see a movie, and yea, the grocery store was miniscule compared to the massive markets the family frequented at home, and yes, the mall was really more of a collection of small shops- most of them uninteresting, but the town was in fact a town rising up from, rather than drowing in the wheat.

But tourists seldom know what it means to immigrate, and assimilate to the reality of a place, and how doing so can both open up and shrink the geography of both the home departed from and the home made. A tourist then, I merely observed with a sense of detachment the difference between the images trasmitted home from my sister over the years and what I now saw for myself. I do not know if you came to Pullman before immigrating here yourself as a graduate student this past fall, but back then the town was indeed much smaller, and what we now take for granted did not exist- even in a whisper. In 1999, when my sister graduated college the same old buildings that exist now, existed then, but with far fewer new developments to break them up. In reflection, the absence of new infrastructure did indeed make the distance between Pullman and the larger cities of Spokane and Seattle seem farther.....