Whatever this valley has been called before, I have to submit after much consideration that Sally Portman was right to describe the Methow as “The Smiling Country”. But the smile is tricky like a coyote’s and as complex as the face of a woman keeping her thoughts to herself. The smile is often that of a friend, familiar and comfortable, or too often full of pain and empathy like a fellow mourner’s for the transition of a great soul into death. The smoker jumper smiles at his paycheck, and there is a smile in the October snow that lights on an evergreen bough, the August sun jangling on a river swimming hole, the myriad faces of Balsam Root in springtime, the tan bare arms and shoulders of a gardener, the determined grin of a novice builder driving home a pickup load of nice dimensional lumber, and there is a smile in the long curved shape of the first of a thousand zucchinis in autumn.
There is something about the smiling country that makes one smile where elsewhere, with the same trials, concerns, and obsessions he might grimace. The Methow Valley is too small to have enemies, and narrow enough to have scores of them. It is full of independence and willfulness, and this pervasive individuation, made of yoginis and Christian fundamentalists, spouses and lovers, farmers and ranchers, rednecks and socialists, man and woman and child, volunteers and profiteers shape itself into a community imperative. Instead of coming to blows or berating with profanities, the people sometimes smile instead, to survive as individuals, and for the community imperative that somehow, somewhere along the way was foisted by trickery on the unsuspecting rugged individual and stubborn intellectual. Perhaps the Valley herself teaches it, smiling to survive a human effect by magnanimously carrying her people along in spite of us.
From my narrow and puny narcissistic viewpoint, the Methow Valley is still doing what it always did, even to become. It is a grinding stone with hard rock on either side, and up and down the myriad drainages. Everything in the middle is ground down. Any of us here live in the action end of the pulverizer. Everything angular is rounded. Everything hard is converted into moon dust. Elsewhere in the West one can stand on the looming edge of a basalt plateau, or place the feet squarely on the high point of a sandstone column and be untouched except by wind. Mighty. Conqueror. Godly and majestic. Small yet engulfing. But take that same hearty soul, this epitome of evolutionary mind and excellent body, and put her in this valley, and the memory of ice will curl her into a ball and grind her competence into flour that mixes with the last independent man that came here because he thought government would never find him. Bodies, minds and souls don’t die, but rather they are ground into meal and eaten by their neighbors as nutritious and energizing hand-patted cakes, sacramental like the body of God, a god that says, “I” and “Am”, and “Here”, and I think that when he thinks it he smiles, and I feel grateful.
