Mud Puddle, Cherry Blossom
I was so distraught by my breakup with Salem, Oregon, that I decided to send the city a love poem to explain my complicated feelings. I was aware that this sounded like something a crazy person might do, so I decided to do the job at the public library, where I would be in good and understanding company. It was a cruel and windy April day, the kind of weather that punishes daffodils and tulips for blooming. The newsroom of the Statesman Journal, where I worked as a reporter, smelled like rain-soaked parkas and spilled coffee. I had just informed my editors that I would be quitting my job to go to graduate school away from Salem. That had been hard, but not as difficult as saying goodbye to this godforsaken, wonderful town that I’d spent more than half a decade in.
Few would deny that Salem is a strange town for a young lady to fall in love with. Where Portland has endless bike lanes, cool bars that serve beer in glass jelly jars, burlesque dance troupes, vegan grocery stores, and bicycle repair workshops to spare, Salem has a maximum-security prison, a notorious mental hospital, and big, Soviet-style state office buildings that empty of workers at precisely 5 p.m. each weekday. “So-lame” is a popular nickname. For a person in their early twenties, Salem was usually a place to escape, not to become rooted. So why did I love this town so? And if I loved it so much, why was I leaving it for good?
I had come to Salem as an eighteen-year-old to attend Willamette University, the historic liberal arts college in the heart of town. Growing up in the featureless Seattle suburbs (where you can see a Starbucks from the window of another Starbucks) I always longed to live in a real town. For me, that meant somewhere that wasn’t just a collection of subdivisions with names like Bordeaux and Windsor Greens: a place with some discernable soul.
As a college student and later as a newspaper reporter, I came to know Salem intimately. I knew, for instance, that families visiting relatives in prison often stopped to feed the bizarrely large geese that congregated on a little pastoral slice of land outside the facility, that a meth bust in a neighborhood known as Felony Flats once yielded the improbable discovery of a rusting helicopter in a backyard, and that a bar downtown featured a 7 a.m. happy hour. That getting lunch at the Soup Cellar took a long time but the homemade bread was unbeatable. That a little-known scene of avant-garde musicians practiced upstairs at the musty used bookstore downtown, that the most urban high school featured an agriculture program and a patch of green land where kids in baggy pants delightedly raised vegetables. But the deal wasn’t sealed until the day a friend drove me through the soft hills of West Salem, where subdivisions meet farmland. We stopped on a rural road, at a hill covered in tall golden grass. I asked who owned the property.
“It’s just a secret spot. Only the locals know about it,” she answered.
We climbed up to the top and sat on warm, decomposing haystacks. We could see as far as Mount Hood to the north, the lazy Willamette River carving its way through this fertile valley. Before us a patchwork of green fields stretched to the Coast Range, behind us the Cascade Range hugged the eastern edge of the wide valley. It was a warm evening, and everything smelled like green and fresh. I had a secret spot. I had never felt as at-home anywhere in the world.
Salem was plain-faced, but it had a beating heart that was so sincere, so Oregonian, and so utterly American that I could not look away. It began to piss me off in earnest when people disparaged the place. And they did—all the time. Some even questioned my sanity: A former colleague living in Bellingham, Washington, asked warily if I had known I was moving to the “ugly part of the Northwest.” My friends wondered what I was doing stuck in such a dumpy little town. I began to sense that a whole raft of less-celebrated Northwestern towns—the Roseburgs, Kennewicks, and Centralias—were quietly bleeding out, losing young and vibrant populations to a handful of cultural centers like Portland and Eugene. And I made myself a promise that I would see the quirky beauty in Salem, Oregon, and that I would stay there and try to enrich it in any way that I could. I would stay put.
And then I didn’t. Like so many before me, I grew restless with Salem, even angry. Every attempt by the city’s inchoate scene of art and music pioneers seemed to be met with resistance by the city. New concert venues, nightspots, and restaurants all started out with promise but seemed to stagger into failure quickly. When it came down to it, Salem remained, for most, a town in love with its new Applebees. Sitting each day under the fluorescent lights of the Statesman Journal’s newsroom, listening to the fiercely mediocre goings on of the town, I began to feel that there was a better place I could be spending these years. And soon the thought had rooted in my brain: I. Have. To. Get. Out. Of. This. Damn. Place.
I set out to walk through the streets of this godforsaken town, to see both the lovely old brick buildings and the drunken bums one last time as a Salem resident. In the library I chose a spot on the second floor, near a big bay window that overlooked downtown. A homeless man I recognized sat nearby, wearing an elaborate art project made of colored yarn and laminated magazine clippings on his head. We smiled at each other and he went back to reading his magazine.
I wrote all of my loves and grievances down like a half-mad widow, scribbling two full pages of an elegy to my first hometown. Salem, why did my car always get broken into? Why did a profoundly drunk man named Gumby once drive all the way up onto my lawn? Why did the best businesses go under and why, oh why, was downtown deserted at 11 p.m. on a Friday night? Why were your urban streams filled with syringes? And who was that heroin-shellacked lady who had once stumbled up onto my porch and told me her stories of woe while I fed her pie and called every shelter in town, only to find out that they were all full?
We are gluttons for splendor here in the Northwest. Unaccustomed to seeking out humble loveliness—the way flat land begets huge sky, the gnarled trunk of an old cherry tree—we expect to be knocked out. And, increasingly, a lot of us want to live in the most urbane cities with the most bountiful farmers’ market, the best bike paths, and the neatest bookstores, near the pointiest mountains with the best snow. And why shouldn’t we? That’s quality-of-life. That’s why we live here. But what happens to the places in between? What do we sacrifice by living in places of concentrated cool? The last thing that Eugene, where I would be attending graduate school, needed was another writer. Salem, on the other hand, needed all the young energy it could get.
In the end, I decided to tuck my crazy-lady love poem to Salem in between the pages of a slender book called Moon Crossing Bridge. It was a book of poems by Tess Gallagher, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, the writer Raymond Carver. It seemed appropriate: Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River. He had grown up in Yakima, Washington, and lived with Gallagher in Port Angeles, another rainy mill town on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. He had become famous for writing terse stories that illuminated blue-collar dramas of everyday life in the sort of rainy green-gray towns that reminded me of Salem—stories that might feature a guy who drove his car drunk onto somebody’s lawn.
It was getting late, and I was still a newspaper reporter with daily deadlines to meet. I gathered my things and walked out of the library and into the bleak light. I stepped over a mud puddle, and noticed that it was sprinkled with floating cherry blossoms. If you looked hard enough, you could find something beautiful even in a mud puddle. But you had to be looking.
Michelle Theriault is a second-year student in the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction program. A Washington native and graduate of Willamette University, she worked as a features reporter at newspapers in Washington, Oregon, and California before returning to school. Reporting for the literary nonfiction program has taken Michelle from truck driving school in Creswell to, literally, Sodom and Gomorrah, the name of the West African slum she immersed herself in for her final master’s project. After a summer fellowship at the Johannesburg, South Africa, bureau of the Associated Press, she and her fiancé are moving to Alaska, where she plans to write, teach, and learn to love snow.
