Rural Tastefulness vs. Forced Urbanity

I want to offer an afterword on my visit to the Maryhill Museum on the Washington State side of the Columbia River. For those not up on the connection, we ducked away from our urban life over a briefly extended 4th of July holiday. Among other awesome rural and wilderness exploration, I could finally justify a visit to this hard to reach - and to characterize - museum. The hodgepodge there rates a qualifier-filled thumbs up. If you're close by, you really should check it out. But don't make a special trip - its honestly not that grand. I'll mention a few things to justify what might seem unduly harsh.

The surrounding hillsides are dotted with white wind farm turbines. They add a modern, idealistic charm to the otherwise hot and dusty shades of brownness - or greenishness, where an irrigation system has been employed to grow something. The Maryhill Museum features right at the entrance a collection of jewels, furniture and general whatnots from the Queen of Romania - it's overplayed payback from the founding of the museum and a real deadening factor to kick things off. My brief interactions with the staff were also occasionally a bummer. Here's where I'll play the scold in saying that none of us have to visit, so please try to be pleasant. With that snark out the chute, the Native American art struck me as a particular strength. It's delivered with well-researched support for the artistic and cultural differences between the nine regions of North American peoples - I learned a bunch and wanted more. Their Rodin collection (not just the sculpture - the dood could draw) and accompanying education it provides is wonderful. At long last, someone explained the essence of Balzac to me. Not that I went in looking for that.

In overview terms, the man behind the museum was Sam Hill (named it for his daughter, Mary, with no explanation offered for why its not the "Mary Hill Museum" instead). I wish he made for a better story. He's not even the one memorialized in the old line "what in the Sam Hill?" Basically, Sam was a railroad company lawyer from Minneapolis who made a boatload of cash and then took on "good road" for cars as his personal quest. Yes, promoting highways partly inspired him to build his mansion/museum way out in the Sam Hill part of the State. The fact that the money now keeping his museum running comes from wind power seems like an irony that's been lost on almost everyone. The weird combination of the original museum's poured concrete - quite unique back in that day, but now about as inspiring as a poured basement - and the new modernist wing and the sculpture gardens with new works from around the Northwest and all sorts of far less noteworthy works give the Maryhill the feel of shifting sand. It's almost like they're trying to make up for the fact that they're out in the middle of nowhere by being a little bit of everything to everyone. They don't want to be rural. But they surely aren't urban. So what are they? I think, at best, an invitation to debate something ephemeral.

To take in the full scope of this area's strangeness, visit the (fake) Stonehenge a few miles east. Look for Sam Hill's tomb as a challenge and tell me if you don't agree that it represents a particularly inglorious end for a man whose ego must have been huge. Better yet, stop at the Gunkel Orchards down in the Town of Maryhill for some tree fruit. I also really enjoyed the winding drive just north of the Columbia between White Salmon (where a stop for a juice and joe at 10 Speed Coffee Roasters was a particular fave) and Trout Lake. That stretch allowed me to think about real (and metaphorical) bridges between rural and urban sensibilities. Not as much as our stay at the Farmgate Homestead (just outside the awesome town of Trout Lake and within constant sight of Mt. Adams). That's a place we'll definitely visit again. Not just to cross it off some list of curiosities. Because it's awesome and we now know it.

Just a few degrees of newsie separation

Before we do a holiday getaway, I'd like to offer a few newsie reflections. The connections to my book's larger theme of issues might seem a bit more stretched than usual. Consider the following as akin to packing for a roadtrip - not everything thought to make sense at the get go will get used. But it's there for a reason.

• For a needed family mini-vacation, we're renting a house with another family of local friends. That means we're bringing along and seeking out all the usual outdoorsy distractions. I'm rather blissfully unaware of the logistics. In fact, the only contribution I bring to this getaway is the hope to take us down the road a piece further one day to visit the Maryhill Museum of Art. That supremely-isolated, decidedly-odd museum expanded recently. Plus they have their very own Stonehenge replica, along with what appear to be stunning views of the Columbia River. The oddity of being effectively endowed thanks to a wind farm more than keeps the lights on there. Hopefully, I'll report back later on what's also worth seeing in their collection.
• I'd be remiss in my newly amplified Canadian awareness if I didn't acknowledge that yesterday was Canada Day. I've continued to think a great deal about Canada and its history since my recent trip. Museums such as the one in Lachine just outside Montreal and the decidedly thoughtful and complete view of Canada's history seen in Ottawa got me rolling. I even dug Kurt Andersen's "rebranding" effort on last week's episode of "Studio 360". The resulting "Know Canada" campaign is a damn good one - I wonder what the view of it is from the northern side of the border. I even asked a financial planner last week about specific Canada funds - Fidelity has one, and there are certainly others. My newfound embrace I think might go on for a while.
• Our other next door neighbor, Mexico, had a big day yesterday. Or a depressing return to form, depending upon your political persuasion. They elected Enrique Pena Nieto. Barely. And the next closest candidate - Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador - is pulling the same trick as he did last time around by not conceding the result. I tried to observe Mexico's process the last time out in 2006. We lived for a month in a small Mexican city (Cuernavaca, an hour south of Mexico City), just prior to the election of Jose Calderon (think Romney, without being so Mormon-y). I do dig Mexico's term limit rules - one six-year term per President, no chance of another. This time around, Mexico's problems with drugs and constant mayhem - combined with what sounds like a total yet superficial embrace of their President Elect's style and soap opera star wife - drove them back to the party (the PRI) that ran the country for 70+ years. The PRI is totally sketch. And fascinating, from what little I've read. Still, they're back on top. The point being that if we don't know Canada, we really don't know Mexico. Which is sad - you should always get to know your neighbors.
• Speaking of what we Americans don't know, Minitel is gone. Oui, it's true - France's partly beloved old jalopy of a precursor to the internet is no more. If you've ever heard of it, you might also know that Minitel looked like a phone with a stripped down computer screen. I'm talking production value straight out of that seen on the infamous show "Space: 1999". They finally shut 'er down over the weekend. I never got to use it, but it was often discussed in my grad school back in the early 1990s as an pre-"information superhighway" model to understand in operation, not just in theory. Obviously, the worldwide web spun onward and everywhere else. But I was instantly touched by the piece I read last week about French dairy farmers in Brittany being some of the first and then some of the last heavy users who as a subculture seriously hated to see Minitel shut down. Unlike vinyl records, manual typewriters or whatever sort of old-timey standard might enjoy a new utility, there will be no rebranding of these old units. And as of Saturday, the plug has been pulled on Minitel. Au revoir, ancienne et adorables téléphone.