The Palouse Tourist

Dear ________

I’ll confess I stopped skimming Lucy Lippard’s article “The Tourist At Home,” after this part:
“Tourism is the apotheosis of looking around, which is the root of regional arts as well as how we know where we are. Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around” (13).

Here is a little test: What kind of birds hang out in your neighborhood? What is the last varmint (defined as anything furry and pesky that some people like to shoot) you have seen scampering around? How high is the Palouse River that runs through downtown Pullman, and how many feet must the river rise before it floods the Subway parking lot?

O.K, I’ll accept just about any bird or critter you mention, and I’ll give credit if you know that the river well above its normal level.

I don’t know if you have ever thought why people smoke (not including the addictive part), but in searching for an answer to why people smoked cigarettes, one old roommate suggested it had to do with breathing, which is something everyone does (kinda like “live free or at least breath, or die” as a motto for life’s license plates) but not very deeply or with much conscious effort. Just as smoking gave people permission to breath deeply and with conscious effort (something this roommate thought was important to one’s physical and spiritual health) looking around and taking in the visuals of one’s environment is deeply seated human activity that too often requires special locations and lots of time set aside. We are tourists because we need to breathe, that is, we need to know what the birds look like, how the trees arrange themselves, the pitch of the sky, the color of the rivers, the scum in the gutters, the smell of urine in an alley—we can’t just take in these sights sounds and smells when we get two weeks off, or go to an academic conference.

For example, the human penchant to gawk and marvel at the natural world is now perverted (like smoking and breathing) into an unnatural alliance. Wrong! Remember what Frank Sinatra said about “love and marriage” –“can’t have one without the other” but that is too easily laid to waste. Surely we can look around without Birkenstocks and Nikons, or even return tickets. What would happen if people started to breath in the sights around them, even if they think there is nothing worth looking at?

I know when I do travel, I find the birds to be more exotic than they really are. The birds are supposed to be more colorful in tropical places, but I am shocked at how exotic regular brown birds can be when you give them a good look. The patterns on a few Warblers inspired me to get out my binoculars the other day, which I often use to gaze out my windows at the birds milling about the low shrubs and empty lots near my house. I am amazed at how the blue tints in Magpies wings can be so rich and varied, sometimes shimmering metallic rays of grey and white. I swear, if I ran into one of these big loud Magpies for the first time in another state or country, I’d be sure to think of them as exotic. In fact, I have begun to see my environs as exactly that—exotic, colorful, rich—as if I was a tourist in my own town. I often wonder what real tourist see when they come to Pullman, and pick out things to do that tourist might find amusing or edifying. I went to Kamiak Butte because its too close for locals to visit, and the same for the Boyer Park on the Snake river, both not an hour away, but full of people from places very far.


It is easy for me to talk about looking around where one lives, well, because I don’t get around all that much. Above 40 years of age, I thought by now I would have spanned the globe (my childhood visions globe trotting await my second childhood, which is coming soon!).