Alma Mater: The Road to WSU for a Father and Daughter

Approaching from the West, you emerge from the rock scarred dessert of central Washington and slowly start seeing red-barned postcard farms. Soon you are surrounded by wheat ranches with steep rolling hills of the fertile soil that defines the area known as the Palouse. 

Alfalfa green and golden wheat, chickpeas, lentils and barley mark some of the richest farmland to be found anywhere.  Invisible settlements like Hooper, LaCrosse, Dusty, Almota, Starbuck and Hay are noted only by green signs pointing out over the hills.

Through it all is an undulating two-lane road that on a day mid-August is alive with a procession of cars. 

Crawl up the road from Colfax on the final climb to Pullman, and you realize that many in these cars have Washington State University license plates -- alumni like us, I suspect, returning to our Alma Mater. The term is Latin for “nourishing mother” for this university must have provided  each of us with something -- something that causes us to return now with our fresh faced sons and daughters, entrusting them to its care. 

My ride at WSU was a bit of a rough one, things weren’t always smooth and perfect, but I met some of the kindest people in my life, some of my best friends.

It was at WSU that I discovered that I could write -- a career that carried me for a dozen successful years. I bought my first motorcycle, made some of my biggest mistakes and learned that I loved learning.

It was at WSU that I met my wife -- which is the best thing that ever happened to me. 

People that know me, know I’m a fan of Washington State University.  Not just a fan for the football team -- for most of my life they have never been all that good -- and I worked on game days and missed most of the home games while I was up there. I’m a fan of the University and the generous camaraderie that came with attending the cow college on the far side of the state. A university that most Seattle city folks looked down upon. 

Things have changed in the past 30 years. 

On that long drive up to deliver my daughter to her dorm I wondered if it was the same welcoming place that could be trusted to nourish her mind and allow her to grow into her ambitions. I worried too, that I emphasized WSU too much. I told the girls that even if they decide to go to college someplace else, I wouldn’t mind. 

Yet, with Lindsay’s interest in agriculture and food science, it was hard to imagine a school better suited for her. She’s visited WSU several summers now for 4H conferences, so she is more familiar with its culture and campus than most Freshman arriving this week.

 I have nothing but confidence in her. 

Yet, I’m a dad, so I wonder and worry. 

My ride to WSU was a rough one.

Growing up in the tiny town of Lyle, we didn’t have much in the way to help deciding which school to attend. The school guidance counselor was out after a bad car accident, so I took it upon myself to research colleges for my classmates. As a high school senior, I organized tours of the University of Oregon, Western Washington University, University of Puget Sound and the University of Washington. 

I didn’t even know about WSU until the parents of one of my friends -- Bill and Wendy Hamm -- suggested I apply to the school where they had met. It had a good broadcast journalism program, they said. I was already working as a DJ in high school. So without much more research than that, I submitted an application.

Years ago, the old knock against WSU is that you only went there if you couldn’t get into a better school. However, I got accepted to Rutgers, Tulane and the University of Oregon.  By then, however, I realized how much private and out-of-state colleges would cost to attend. 

WSU was the least expensive and so I went there. 

I knew barely anything about WSU.

In this age of the internet, it is hard to emphasize how difficult information was to come by 30 years ago. Research amounted to reading the glossy brochures that arrived in the mail. I had to pick out my dorm based on a map and a written description.

I had never seen the Palouse before that hot summer day when I loaded up my car and drove out of the Gorge into the desert guided only by an atlas and driven by a desire to leave my little town behind. 

In the decades since, WSU has doubled in size and gained in academic prestige and subsequently, the costs have gone up exponentially as well.

When I attended, however, it seemed like a big small town. Unpretentious and friendly in the that Eastern Washington way.  I got lost and found my way. I got embarrassed, and learned that the only cure is to be the first one who laughs. I changed my major and changed it again. I dropped out for a semester and then found myself welcomed back with open arms. 

At 18, you are technically an adult but your head is heavy with unearned confidence.

I worked my way through -- sometimes three or four jobs -- but you could do that back then. One of my side jobs was writing articles about the history of the school for state centennial celebrations. Researching and writing stories of these early days at a tiny agricultural college cemented my appreciation for this school. 

A land grant school built on a cabbage patch, WSU’s earliest years were all plucky perseverance. The writings of the 13 students in that first class are infused with a can-do attitude and a spirit of “we are all in this together.” It was a spirit that still survived a century later when I was there. 

These days WSU has campuses all over the state and a brand new medical school that will be turning out its first class of doctors soon. You can be a city Coug and never set foot on the Palouse. 

Yet there is something about this landscape, this brick-built underdog campus far away from anything except endless examples of bountiful agriculture, that I love. It is a place that helped me become the person I am today. 

Each time I visit, I hate to leave it behind. 

It is the nexus point of my adult life.  

Alma Mater, I am entrusting you now with my eldest daughter. 

Don’t let me down. 

On the ride home, we stop to pick a few sunflowers growing on the side of the road, I ask Grace -- my 15 year old daughter -- if she thinks she’ll go to WSU too. 

“I don’t know Dad!” she said. “I just want someplace I can take my horse!” 

Go Cougs.

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WE Came in Peace, for All Mankind

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. 

We choose to go to the moon. 

--John F. Kennedy, Rice University, 1962

We went to the moon 50 year ago.

When I say “we” that doesn’t mean you or I ever set foot on its dusty soil.

We as a species harnessed the powers of our minds and our might and spurned gravity’s ever-oppressive grip to leave Earth … to leave footprints on the second-brightest object in our sky.

We did this thing not because it was easy, but because it was hard. 

Just 35 years before JFK set us on a course for the moon, aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh entitled his autobiographical account of his solo flight across the Atlantic “We.” The title was meant to surprise readers. It had been a solo flight. 

Yet, Lindbergh understood the hands and minds of the many people who financed, designed and built it for that purpose. 

We is a word you’ll hear often as the world looks back on Apollo 11 this week. 

The quest to land a man on the moon started with an ambition beyond the reach of the possible technology at the time. We took the impossible and made it possible.  It was an accomplishment that required more than 400,000 Americans -- men and women, black and white, immigrants and refugees. It required the sweat and imagination of a nation to reach that far goal. 

My dad-John Hunt-was one of that army of peace and exploration -- that great mobilization of human resources challenged to design and build a machine that could take mankind to the moon and return them safely to Earth. I grew up with the echo of that accomplishment ringing in my ears, optimistic at what people can do when they come together focused on a single goal. 

My father first met Wernher von Braun while tending bar at the officers club in Huntsville, Alabama where the Army Missile Command and the Marshall Space Flight Center are located. 

Hunt -- a whiz kid from South Jersey just out of college -- had already been working for the army in Huntsville testing the Sergeant Missile system when he got drafted under the looming threat of war with the Soviet Union.  

“The Cuban Missile Crisis ended occupational deferments,” Hunt said. “I had a draft notice in my mailbox by the end of the week.” 

Yet, after basic training, Hunt found himself called right back down to Huntsville to finish the project he’d been working on. This time in an army uniform and getting paid “a lot less.” 

So he picked up a side job tending bar at the officers club, where he recalls Von Braun, charming the Congressmen and VIPs sent down to investigate his building program. 

“It was cigar smoking and hard drinking,” Hunt recalls. “He had them eating out of his hand.”

It was partly Von Braun’s charm and ambition and his cadre German rocket scientists and engineers that helped turn Huntsville into the of the major centers of the space race. When Navy Vanguard rockets repeatedly failed on the test stand. Von Braun said he could put a man in space with the Army’s Atlas rocket, Hunt explained. When Atlas succeeded, Von Braun proposed a bigger rocket - the Saturn 1B. 

“The test stand he built for it was massive,” Hunt remembers, “you couldn’t even see the 1B in it and we’d wondered why he built it so big. He was thinking ahead. He’d built it for the Saturn V.” The rocket that would eventually take men to the moon.

“You know when Kennedy said that we were going to the moon, nobody had a clue as to how we were going to do it,” Hunt says. “The guys at NASA were dumbstruck.”

Hunt was just about to get out of the army when Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. 

“I knew it wasn’t the end -- NASA was already ramping up,” Hunt said. “It was a beehive of activity and they were grabbing anybody with any talent or knowledge they could use.” 

Hunt found himself as one of hundreds of thousands of contractors working for NASA based on his work at Marshall.  This time Hunt was tasked with figuring out safe and effective equipment designs for the Astronauts to use when they had to work outside the spacecraft -- Extra Vehicular Activity. Working in space is difficult and Hunt helped develop the designs for boots and gloves and other equipment, including the lunar module as well as designs for the Apollo Telescope Mount and Skylab that would fly later.

Hunt spent a lot of time monitoring the Astronauts in the giant swimming pools used to simulate weightlessness -- testing critical equipment like boots and gloves, handholds and tools that needed to work in reduced gravity environments. They would also take astronauts up in a KC-135 plane on rollercoaster-like parabolic flights that provided a handfull of seconds of weightlessness at the top and bottom of the arc. 

“We were kind of figuring things out was we went along because no one had ever attempted, what we were trying to do,” Hunt said. “It was the greatest job in the world.”

Still in his 20s, Hunt remembers working side by side with Astronauts Michael Collins, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Jim Lovell as well as Skylab pioneer Owen Garriott. Hunt also became friends with future shuttle commander Joe Engle. 

“The thing to remember,” Hunt said.  “We were working with these guys -- the astronauts, traveling together, eating with them, we weren’t awestruct -- they were regular people. They were fun loving but very serious. It was life or death and the attitude was, we’ve got to get it right.” 

It is hard looking back to remember how much pressure there was to get it right -- that this was a life or death situation for those Astronauts. It is even harder to recall that half a million contractors from every part of the country had a hand in putting those footprints on the moon with the primitive technology of the day. Seamstresses skilled at sewing girdles and bras were stitching space suits. The computers -- which became overloaded in the last seconds before landing on the moon -- were hard wired -- their connections woven by hand. 

“We were working with nixie tubes, we weren’t even solid state,” Hunt added. “Your phone has thousands of times more computing power than they had on the flight. It was an amazing feat and nobody … everyone was holding their breath because we knew there were a million things that could have gone wrong. People today, I don’t think they realize what we accomplished.” 

The effort to put a man on the moon wasn’t without controversy, there were protests at the Kennedy Space Center the day before the launch. There were other demands for the money being spent on this one ambitious goal. Reaching for the moon drove innovation and created a wealth of knowledge far beyond what on the surface appeared to be a narrow competition between Cold War nations. 

 Yet, the race to the moon ended up providing dividends in knowledge and technology still paying off 50 years later. 

“It was the chance of a lifetime, a dream job,” Hunt said. “But once they landed on the moon, you could feel that the public and political support was going to die. I hope we go back, we’ve started to talk about that again,” he added. “We are starting to say hey, we did that.”

The lesson of Apollo is that we are bound only by our flagging ambitions and petty squabbles. “We can’t” is heard more often today, than “we can.” 

 Yet Apollo gave the lie to illusion that our reach extends no further than the end of our arms. We can accomplish great things. 

Should you forget, look up tonight and know, on the surface of the moon there is a plaque that says, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

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A Meditation on Rivers

Your dream is a worry that nothing will keep

But time is a story and there will be more

--Joe Henry, Time is a Lion

I love that my daily run takes me across a river. 

I find that rivers are a reassuring reminder that change is the one constant we can rely on. 

Rivers are never the same. The water flowing past is in constant movement. Whether it is the slow waters of the Grays River, or the urgent snowmelt driven rapids of the Klickitat, there is unending movement to the sea. 

This first spoke to me paddling the waters of the Brandywine river in Pennsylvania. As my older brother and sister paddled, I was free to gaze over the side of the canoe, it’s rootbeer water toe-dipping cool in the humid summer air, its smooth stones always in clear view, reassuring to a nervous young boy discovering the joys of messing about in boats. Some of my earliest memories are of those canoe trips -- moving over water that was moving through space and time. 

A few years and 3000 miles later,  I used to watch the mighty The Dalles dam release great torrents of the shackled river as we crossed the salmon pink bridge. Or hold back the river to let the water level drop to expose the broad flat rocks spiked with dipnet platforms seemingly held together with nothing more than frayed rope and hundreds of years of native traditions. 

Crossing that bridge from Washington to Oregon, the dam on the left, the dipnetters on the right, representing changing permanence of the Big River.   The flat rocks of The Dalles and the drowned falls of Celilo area were the site of the largest Indian salmon fishery on the Columbia River prior to the construction of The Dalles Dam in the 1950s -- when the dam flooded Celilo village - it destroyed the oldest continuously occupied permanent settlement in North America.  The fishery and the village had existed for seasons without counting -- on a river that was alive with churning life -- before the falls were flooded and changed forever. 

Rivers are constants of change. 

We live our lives on a river of time, only sometimes realizing that the current reduces jagged wounds to smooth stones. 

People ask me if I am bothered by the accumulation of birthdays, the scars of the passage of time. It helps that I have done my best to appreciate the inevitability of the river’s flow, to watch its changes as they come. 

Salmon do this thing that has always fascinated me -- they are hatched in smooth stone shady creeks and are nourished by the microlife of that freshwater nursery. At a certain age, they take themselves out into the sea which  is much richer in experience and plentiful in nutritional forage. Later when they are fat on the bounty of the ocean, they swim back up the river, returning to the creek that gave them birth. Here they seed the next generation -- eggs buried among the smooth stones.

Then they die. 

The purpose of their death has become evident to scientists over the years of research. We have come to understand that the  nutrient rich dead salmon carcass becomes food for 137 species of plants and animals as it decomposes -- and those plants and animals create the food, fertility and shelter for the next generation buried amid the smooth river stones.

Salmon have evolved to collect the rich nutrition of the ocean, and transport it up river to fertilize the nursery for a generation of their offspring that they will never lived to see. 

Life is not a permanent condition, but it can create the environment of its own perpetuation if we do well in our time here. We can take the richness of our varied experience and create communities that raise heroes we will never meet. 

Sometimes the world can seem so short sighted. 

Those days, I like to look out on the river and realize that it is not the same as it was the day before, or even the second before I look at it. That it changes and in changing will never be the same.  

Now I realize that the water is being recycled too. 

Water molecules are very hard to destroy -- they may transform their states -- evaporate and fall as snow in mountain range, or rain on green green coast. Eventually, they make their way to the creek, to the river, to the sea and to the sky again. 

Rain to river to sea and again, ever the same, but each time different nonetheless. 

The water we see when we look out on a river is never the same as the day before -- yet perhaps that is a misapprehension -- a trick played on us by the short sight of our human eye

The water in the river is the same that has been traveling through our atmosphere for our lifetimes and the lifetimes everyone who has come before. So too, the atoms of our bodies spun out from the stars to form minds and hearts and souls that sail about for some fraction of a century thinking they are the center of the universe, only to be smashed to the dust in the end. 

A carcass on the river bed, rich lives feeding generations of change. 

We can try to stem the tide with formaldehyde, but our destruction and reconstitution is inevitable and on geology’s clock -- but a click of the second hand.

The river’s twin messages of change and permanence remind me that you can get through this, whatever this may be.

Rain falls where it will -- without regard to want or worry. It returns from the sea in the form of a storm with a gunmetal gray fist of thunder or an ever-present swirling mist. 

Nothing is permanent, the river is always moving, and yet always there. 

There is a Japanese sentiment Ichi-go, ichi-e -- it means treasuring the unrepeatable nature of the moment. Since each encounter or moment is singular and unrepeatable, it is our duty to give them our full attention. 

When I look out on a river, I am reminded of this. I know this river, it is the river that I cross every day, yet this river is new today, this river will not be here tomorrow. It waters will be replaced by other waters, its hidden stones turned and smoothed by time. 

I am not good at it -- this giving my full attention to an unrepeatedable moment -- but I aspire to be better, each day, as I cross the river. 

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x

In a Sea of Change, A Constant Blue

“...what we’ve done, where we’ve been, the cars that we have had have been the fulcrum of our lives.”

-Leon Mandel

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“What are you going to do,” the mechanic asked. “drive this thing for 500,000 miles?”

"Probably," I said. “I can’t imagine ever letting it go.”

We bought the little blue Honda CRV two months after my oldest daughter Lindsay was born.

Next month, she graduates from high school.

When my wife Amy and I were married, I was driving a Volkswagen van and she had inherited her parents Volvo station wagon.

Yet, when we got around to having kids, I was driving a two door pickup and she had a Honda Civic coupe.

I don’t think we are the only parents to have that sudden moment of anxiety, that realization that the nurses were handing us this baby, and expecting us to be responsible enough adults to keep it alive for 18 years. Our perspective of the world and its dangers, the meaning of our lives all changed as we walked out those hospital doors on a blue-sky February morning.

With that hanging over us, driving home in a two door coupe with a three day old baby strapped into her carseat in back, each logging truck and SUV on the road home from Astoria loomed over us and threatened our little Honda civic with its precious cargo.

I poured my nervous energy into researching small SUVs that would be sit up high and be safer on the winter roads when we visited family in the Columbia River Gorge.

We found a used 1997 Honda CRV that already had 80,000 miles on it, but the mechanic said it had been well maintained and we liked sitting up higher, with the good vision of the road it provided.

Moreover, it was much easier getting the baby in and out of the car seat in the back compared with crawling over the seat of the two-door coupe. When she fell asleep in her carseat, I didn’t wake her up trying to extract her.

That was important, because Lindsay didn’t like going to sleep as a baby. There was too much to see and do. You had to keep her moving out in the world so she could experience new things. Movement was relaxing to her, so we would drive the blue CRV around the Grays River Valley with the soundtrack to Oh Brother Where Art Thou playing to send her off to dreamland.

Change is such a overwhelming experience in our lives, the few constants can take on weighted meaning.

So much has changed since 2001.

When Lindsay was born I worked at home as a writer, but soon after I went back to school to become a nurse. The blue CRV took me through many a snowstorm to arrive at school and work in Longview and brought me safe at home again.

Yet most of the time it was the family car.

Lindsay and her younger sister Grace attended the Astoria School of Ballet for years, and the little blue CRV was my wife’s reliable transport across the river and back late at night. It was in the blue car that we started off on our many family adventures -- sledding on Mt Hood and Huckleberry picking on Mt Adams.

In the great Hanukkah Eve Storm of 2006, it got caught in rapidly rising flood waters before I could pull it out of my garage. We dried it out and it was not much worse for wear. It was stolen in 2012 from the street outside the hospital in Longview while I was working. I came out after my night shift to find an empty parking spot where it had been. It was such a humble and unassuming car that I couldn’t believe anyone would steal it.

Miraculously, it was recovered by Police in Vancouver just before it got chopped up for parts.

When I gave Lindsay her first driving lesson in the Rosburg School parking lot, it was in the CRV that we had bought just after she was born. I sat in the passenger seat giving her instructions, while glancing backward, thinking about the car seat that used to always be strapped in the back.

When she got her license, the blue CRV became “her” car. She put a hula guy on the dashboard and drove off to school with her younger sister and our exchange student riding along. I trusted her with this responsibility somehow. It wasn’t the car -- with its all wheel drive and its airbags and antilock brakes -- but the girl driving it.

At the start of her senior year, Lindsay came back from one of her many trips across the state as part of her student leadership activities renewed with ambition. She wanted to take jazz band in Ilwaco. Naselle High School didn’t offer jazz band and she was wanting to challenge herself and grow as a saxaphone player, to try something new.

I was skeptical. The class started at 7 am, and that meant she’d need to leave the house by 6 am every weekday morning for the long drive. Most teenagers like to sleep in and I didn’t think this adventure would last. Instead, she unerringly wakes before anyone else in the house and gets herself out the door before the sunrise.

The rewards for that effort have been enormous, she’s made new friends, grown as a musician, performs amazing solos during the band’s performances.

She also takes advantage of the Grays Harbor College facilities in Ilwaco for her running start college classes.  Her senior year and she is technically attending classes at two high schools -- Ilwaco and Naselle -- while earning college credits.

The blue CRV has become the symbol of Lindsay’s ambition and independence for me as well as her reliability. She even checks the oil -- because at 313,000 miles, it does burn a little. The back hatch is stuck shut and the air conditioner doesn’t work, but the plucky little thing just keeps on running.

In the Fall, Lindsay will be off to Washington State University and will leave the little blue CRV at home -- parking fees on campus are almost as much as tuition.

That will work out fine, because her younger sister starts driving lessons soon.  

UPDATE: After her first semester as a student at WSU, Lindsay missed her car. So when she came home and took it to school, we found a nice used 2007 CRV with 200,000 miles on it because, as my wife says, "we couldn't imagine life without a CRV."

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