How to Grow Trees

On May 18, 1980, 8:32 AM, an earthquake on Mount Saint Helens’ north slope caused the volcano to violently erupt, flattening the surrounding forest and spewing pyroclastic debris across the state. My father’s parents were living in Selah, near Yakima, Washington, when the eruption blanketed the land in sand and ash. My grandfather Merle remembers listening to the radio after church (Merle and his wife Dorothy have been attending 8 o’clock church for decades–they got the news around 8:45, in the garden courtyard, which, by the time I could remember anything of it, had been covered and fittingly renamed the Garden Room), driving home as ash began to fall (and the inability of windshield wipers to clear away volcanic ash), and the darkness of the bright spring day turned night. “The next morning it looked like a moonscape,” Merle said. “You can still see it along the roadway, if you know where to look.”
On May 18, 1995, 8:27 PM, I was born to Kay and Derek Smith at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital. My parents had been married for almost 6 years, a period through which they struggled with tragedy and infertility. They don’t talk about it much. I know they almost had a son named Cooper, and they were considering adoption. But their luck changed, and they had me. My mother says I was a miracle baby. When I was 2, my sister Karly was born. At around 4am on June 24, 1997, I toddled into my parents’ bedroom, looking for food or attention or whatever it is a 2 year old suddenly needs at 4 in the morning. My mom settled me down, and on returning to her bed noticed a large pool of blood where she had been lying–generally not a good sign. Derek got me clothed, sat me in the car, called his parents, and drove me and Kay to the hospital, which we happened to live about 2 minutes away from, and my sister was delivered via cesarean. My dad remembers seeing (and does a good impression of) Karly’s tiny arms raised to her tiny scrunched-up face as doctors held her above the operating table. Things might have gone worse if I hadn’t woken up my mom–as it was, Karly had to spend months under glass, in an incubator, in a neonatal intensive care unit, until she was strong enough to leave the hospital. My earliest visual memory is in that house by the hospital (although the lot where it stood is now just a half-acre of grass) sitting on my mom’s lap in a chair in the living room, my dad bringing Karly over so she could breastfeed, me staring back from my dad’s arms and feeling pretty indignant about the whole switch.
My sister and I both have memories of dreams where Derek lost his head. In my sister’s dream, Dad came into her room with a rose in his mouth, his head toppling off and landing on the floor in front of her, rose and all. In mine, Dad dropped me off at my elementary school for a choir event, and when I came back out, sipping on silver-colored juice, his head had shrunk down to a nub, and I worried about his brain, but we could still play checkers. Talking with my dad revealed he had worn a moustache up until a certain point in our childhood. Maybe its shaving kept us from recognizing his “new head”, and so we dreamed about the old one falling off and shrinking away. Maybe our childhood memories are so far away from us that when we look back, we mix them with dreams, or can only recognize them as dreams–or maybe we remember as we experienced the world as children, in surreal dreamy strokes where Dad’s head comes off along with his moustache.
In growing up and leaving home, I’ve begun to experience the phenomenon where my parents appear less and less as the omnipresent guardian denizens of Mom and Dad, but as Kay and Derek, as people, with identities and memories and fears and triumphs, who have lived through life at my age and whose situation I might one day be in. Additionally, as time continues to drag on, the older generations of my family become smaller and smaller, and I realize that family isn’t a permanent fixture, but a structure of relationships that constantly changes as people are born, die, and move about in between. Winter quarter this year (my freshman year) I got to know and interviewed my partner’s grandmother, and used her testimony to create a life history portrait, which made me eager to turn the lens on my own family. When my grandfather Bob passed away in 2011, I learned more about him after he died than I ever did when he was alive, so this project is a way of preserving my grandparents’ legacy and family memory when I can still hear it from their mouths. It’s a way for me to understand my position in my family, which I feel the most connected to after moving out. It’s time to go back home for a while.
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Networked buses ferry me over desert, mountains, wetlands, 200 miles from the Evergreen State College, to the east, where the verdancy of the Sound recedes and greybrown foothills fold into the waste. I was born in the Valley and again the Valley I return, to creaky hardwood floors where I slid and stomped my feet, to 100-yr-old concrete pavers and innumerable taquerias. Home is the darkness and silence of a basement bedroom and the passive animosity of territorial cats.
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To conduct research, I used a weekend to take a visit to Yakima. It’s a long way by bus–6 hours in total from Olympia to Tacoma to Seattle to Yakima–but I enjoy travel.
At home it seems like things have changed very little, for now, at least–I learned my sister will attend the University of Washington fall 2015, and soon there will be no one left save parents and cats. I watched my dad mow the lawn while my kitty cowered on my lap. My family went out for burgers at a local chain (our traditional christmastime candy cane shake location, although we missed the trip this last December) and drove around town. My mom pointed out the house she had lived in while single–a pueblo-ish duplex–and was unable to locate my dad’s first apartment.
The next day I planned 3 interview sessions with my grandparents and my parents. I wanted to know more about the places they lived, the people they knew, their experiences with their parents and siblings, and their experiences as parents with their children.
My first session was with my grandmother Joanna. Grandma Jo is my mom’s mom, a sweet, graceful lady with silver hair, a wardrobe of great cardigans, a rollicking sense of humor, and an intense dislike of cats, especially on her lap. She has a little place several blocks from our house, but she’s been living with our family for the last 4 years following the death of her husband Bob. She volunteers at the Yakima Union Gospel Mission along with my dad’s parents, serving unhoused people in the community. She does not drive, but regularly walks over to maintain her condo. My grandparents used to stay there a few times a year–during holidays we’d have Swedish dinner with homemade potato sausages; during summer my sister, Grandma Jo and me (and on very rare occasions my grandfather) would have tea parties and play hide-and-go-seek. She was initially hesitant about her ability to remember, but she recalled her life with significant and vivid details intact. I think when people get older they’re expected to lose mental faculty but my grandmother is sharp yet.
Joanna didn’t readily talk much about her childhood, though. I gather it wasn’t very easy. She was born in Jackson, Wyoming. Her mother was chronically ill, and so Joanna was left to take care of her younger sister (the strength of their bond is visible whenever Joanna visits Kathy in Bellevue). Her father worked as a wrangler at a dude ranch, in a hardware store, and as an undertaker, but his dream was to become a pastor, which, as Joanna told me, was a journey that took him and his family around the western United States. He got his start broadcasting Fuller Seminary programs over the radio from California.
They had a radio and they would bring the radio from home, he had a little church that they could go to, and they’d set the radio up on the pulpit, and the program would come through and the people would listen and they would have church that way for a while. And then Dad got to the point where he was preaching himself. Then we moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho, from Jackson, and Dad had the Covenant Church there, and we stayed there for a good number of years, and he decided he wanted to become part of the Covenant pastors and so then he had to go on and go to school, they wanted him to have more schooling, so he moved to Missoula, Montana, and he went to university there for a couple of years, I think it was, and then after Missoula we moved to Bremerton, and by that time there were 3 kids of us, when we moved to Bremerton, and he started a church there.

Joanna spent most of her school years in Bremerton. A year ago last spring, my parents took her over–she wanted to donate her old girl scout uniform to the museum and see what had come of their house and the church her father had built.
We found where the church was, but it was nothing what I remember as a church building. I remember it as being quite a large–well, fairly good-sized church, and having a steeple, and it had a basement, and another floor for the church part, and pews and all. In fact I was confirmed there, but when we came back the house was gone, and had been gone for some time, you could tell that. The church was different.

My grandmother hopes she can visit Bremerton again to learn the fate of the church.
Joanna’s family moved again to California, where she finished high school. She met Bob there, when she was 20, in a car on a trip to a camp. I wish my grandfather was still around so I could learn more about his past, but I do know he was the son of Swedish immigrants, and a precocious kid. He had enlisted in the Navy and served with the Seabees (a military construction unit) and planned to attend Colorado State University on his GI bill. Bob and Joanna hit it off, evidently, and got married about 5 months later–bear in mind that this was the 1950s, but my grandmother was eager and happy to have a family and to be a mother, so they piled up Bob’s miniscule Nash Metropolitan convertible with belongings and wedding gifts and took off across the country to Fort Collins, Colorado.
That was kind of hard, to move away from home, from what I knew as home, for me, for a while, and particularly to go away, just brand new, newly married, not really knowing each other that well, either, with only having months that we’d gone together as a couple. But it worked out alright…You just love each other and help each other along.

Their first child was born two years later–a boy named Karl. (My uncle Karl now lives in Vancouver, WA, with his wife June and their son Kyle. Karl gave me a Weird Al mix CD which I credit as my introduction to popular music. My mom used to tell me about her brother blasting Pink Floyd through their house speaker system, which Bob had wired himself. Bob did a lot of things himself. He assembled the first color TV on their block. He earned his Ph.D. when he was 50.) Bob worked at a nursery during his school years, and Joanna worked at a hospital as a receptionist up until her baby was born (and delivered right next to where she had worked checking in patients). They lived in the basement apartment of a quonset hut with water pipes right above their heads, neighboring a policeman, who helped right the tiny Nash Metropolitan after goonish college students had turned it on its side one Halloween.
After graduating at the top of his class, Bob starting working for the US Forest Service as a research scientist, and moved down to Albuquerque, New Mexico, when Karl was 3. My mother was born in Albuquerque, but has no memory of it–they moved back to Fort Collins when she was 6 months old, and stayed there until she was 8. Bob got a job offer from the Canadian Forest Service, so he switched allegiances and they moved up to Calgary, Alberta. They spent a couple of years there, and then moved again up to Edmonton, Alberta. Bob enjoyed city life. He walked or took public transit whenever he could and had his family do the same. According to my mom it was “a bit bizarre. Maybe he was ahead of his time.”
Bob was ahead of his time. He was concerned about his ecological footprint. He was necessarily involved with technology–his job put him on the cutting-edge. He also seriously loved gizmos. He had a Palm Pilot.
Bob’s work meant he had to spend a lot of time in the forest, naturally, and he brought his family to camp or stay in cabins while he worked, in the American Rockies in Colorado, and in Kananaskis and the Canadian Rockies in Alberta. When my mom was 13, he had the opportunity to do research in New Zealand, so the family uprooted and moved over. They spent a year and a half there, exploring, hiking, studying trees, visiting Australia. Joanna described sort of a tree incubator Bob could use to simulate and control climate to compare hypothetical growth rates around the world, to learn how to help trees grow quickly and healthy in Canada.
Joanna and her family moved back to Edmonton where they stayed until the kids moved out and Bob retired–Karl was the first to go. He went to school in Calgary and received training in helicopters, and met the woman who became his wife. “It was June,” said Joanna, “who had come from a different province, other there, to Edmonton, and she took him away. He fell in love with her, and that really disturbed your mother… She said she missed him a great deal.” I asked my mom about her relationship with her brother and she told me they’d always been best friends: “I think part of that is having moved and lived in different countries and nobody else really having the same experience that you have, or having the same parents that you have, or any of that.” Karl got married, and quit flying helicopters after a crash. Kay left to go to school soon after. She attended Seattle Pacific University–Bob drove her all the way down from Edmonton because Joanna was starting work at a preschool. My mom wanted to go to a school far away from home, which makes sense, after a childhood spent around the globe–she didn’t really settle down until she met my father, who’s lived in the same place just about his entire life.
Joanna and Bob didn’t ever really stop moving around, either. Bob retired and they moved to Canmore, Alberta, a little mining settlement turned ski resort (which experienced a surge in growth after hosting several events in the 1988 Winter Olympics–Bob was consulted regarding snowfall on at least one of the slopes). Around 2008, they sold their home in Canmore and moved to Creston, British Columbia, to be closer to Kay and Karl and their families. Creston is barely across the border but distinctly Canadian–ketchup chips and Québécois migrant workers in Tim Hortons Canadian. Bob spent these years battling with cancer, but by early 2011 the end was in sight. Kay was with him for his last weeks, talking, driving, listening, and she was with him when he passed. I remember going up later in the year to his funeral at a tiny church in Creston where he’d managed to touch the lives of most of the congregation and seeing all these slides and photographs of his youth and their family that’d I’ve never seen–never even thought about looking for–and learning all these things–that he had received a Ph.D., that he had been born in California–that I had never known when he was alive. It was a tragedy. It was the first major family loss for me–too young to remember great-grandparents. My mom had the big task of managing what Bob had had, selling the house in Creston, leveraging accounts so Joanna would have control, and moving her down to live with us, where she’s been since. I love living with my grandma. It makes our family a little less nuclear and a little more multigenerational.
I first remember the toys at Joanna and Bob’s house in Canmore–which might’ve once belonged to Kay or Karl–particularly a little toy tea-bag that stained brown in hot water. I also remember my grandpa’s toys, his office and computer room, stuffed with books and gadgets, where on occasion I’d be allowed to play online games. Their home was a neat little condo in a retirement community, which was innocuous enough–although the bear-proofing on the dumpsters might perturb the uninitiated. It’s hard to keep bears away when you’re sharing mountain territory. This last summer, Joanna furnished a trip up to Canada, through Creston, Cranbrook, into the Canadian Rockies to Banff, Canmore, and up across the plains to the city of Edmonton. In Canmore we encountered taped-off trails and signs warning of a dangerous bear in the vicinity, and we had a good laugh about it. We also encountered a lot of tourists, which surprised my sister and me. As kids, Mom would drive us up to Canada to visit our grandparents most summers. We remembered Canmore as this tiny podunk ski resort mountain village and instead found a rather trendy ski resort mountain village. It’s hard to tell if this was a recent change or the limited memory (or bizarre awareness) of childhood–after all, we visited at the height of tourist season–but at Lake Louise, my mom did note how absolutely packed it was, compared to the last few times we’d been, when the pristine turquoise-teal glacial lake was practically vacant (or at least, our photographs were). The vacation was quite literally a trip down memory lane. We drove through the suburbs of Edmonton, past the house where my mother spent her teenage years. We stopped at the government building where Bob worked and the church where Joanna worked. It was like saying goodbye.
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the trees are ancient, gnarled hands
choked over with wildflowers.
hornets make their home in my father’s first car.
here is a tired-out truck graveyard.
the wheel wells have rusted over.

hornets make their home in my father’s first car.
my father’s father’s father lived in this house,
tumbled down, eye-sockets punched in.
the wheel wells have rusted over.
cherry juice leaves heart stains.
–from orchard song, by Karly Smith
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When I was in high school, in the summers, I’d work for my granddad Merle, sometimes with my cousins, lending a hand where it was needed on the family orchard, and it was needed just about everywhere. He grew cherries, a few trees of peaches, plums, pears, nectarines, and a couple rows of asparagus–but mostly cherries. On my first day, Merle took me out to the bird trap. The thing is: birds eat fruit. To make a living farming cherries, you have to deal with birds. You can cover your trees with nets and keep the birds from getting to the fruit, but that’s a big investment which requires a lot of labor (more than a few grandsons can provide) and a high crop yield in return, and Merle’s operation was too small for that to be feasible. You can use chemical repellant, but my granddad was proud to keep his orchard 100% organic, and although we made repellant from mint mineral oil and garlic powder, effectiveness is limited. He had a propane cannon to scare birds off with periodic noise, but still relied on the bird trap, which is just what it sounds like: a baited cage that birds could get into but struggled to get out of. I remember riding passenger on Merle’s trusty 4-wheeler in violation of clearly visible safety stickers (which went by-and-large ignored) across the orchard through rows of cherry trees to a hillside vista, where the trap was. My granddad entered the cage and proceeded to club starlings. He filled up a bucket with 30 or so. I can’t remember the exact figure. One of them was still twitching as I helped him bury the pail of birds, and I learned some alternate uses of a shovel. Merle must’ve realized he was coming a little strong because we never went back to the bird trap. There was plenty else to do around the property–weeds to be removed, buds to be grafted onto new trees, cherries to be picked, hauled, and dumped in big bins for the warehouse, things to be picked up and taken somewhere else, trash to haul, lawns to mow, jugs to wash, stumps to grind, fences to paint…
By now, the orchard has grown old. Most of the original trees–planted by Merle’s father–are bearing fruit that is smaller and less sweet every year, and as my grandfather ages alongside it, he probably shouldn’t worry about running the whole farm by himself anymore. It’ll be sold soon, maybe to Joanna’s sister, my great-aunt Kathy, and her husband–last I heard they were going to tear up the trees to plant a vineyard.
When I met with my grandparents, they had just come from a funeral. So it was a little somber. For my second session, I sat them down at the dining room table and interviewed them both. I’d have loved to do proper life histories and have multiple interviews with each of them separately, but I didn’t have the time, and I think they were glad to get it over a little quicker this way. Getting both of them together proved valuable, too, as they retreaded family histories together.
My grandad Merle was born in Paola, Kansas.
Merle: My family’s a farm family, nearly all the aunts and uncle I have–Mom and Dad each had 6 brothers and sisters, and most of them were in the farm deal. My earliest memories of doing stuff with family was always hunting and fishing and stuff, starting at a very young age. I probably started in the cradle… Dad was plenty strict, but not really hard strict, he loved his family a lot. Mother was a good quote ‘psychologist’ about raising kids. She was smarter than the kids were. She got them to do what she wanted to do, but it wasn’t by force at all.

He had a brother and a sister. His family moved out to Washington for a year and a half, and on the way back out to Kansas he witnessed an accident–I’d been told the story while we were working together on the orchard, so I asked him to recall:
Merle: Course, the roads weren’t as good, and we were coming around Lake Coeur D’Alene, and a bunch of motorcyclists past us, and then we caught up with them on the curves, because one of the motorcyclists had hit gravel or something in the road, sand, and lost control, and he–his woman passenger, wife, I think, wasn’t hurt, but he got skinned up pretty good, lots of blood on the road. That was my deciding issue, I probably didn’t want to use a motorcycle after that, which I never did.

His family lived in Kansas City, Kansas. His father worked as a welder during WWII. When Merle was 16, they moved permanently out to Selah and began farming in earnest. It was a “great big adventure” for Merle, who loved living, hunting, and fishing in the shadow of mountains (the peaks of Mount Adams and Mount Rainier poking up through the foothills of Eastern Washington would seem extra mountainous coming from flat Kansas). He wasn’t eager to move far away right after high school–he’d only been in the state for 2 years before graduating–so he attended Washington State University, in Pullman, and studied biology and wildlife management, earning a degree in zoology. In the summers he’d go back to Selah and work on the orchard. He met Dorothy on a blind date, and they got married soon after.
Dorothy was born in Columbus, Montana. Her father owned a dry goods store chain in Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Michigan. He was big into hunting and fishing, too, and very detail-oriented, keeping a record of the places he’d been, the fish he’d caught, the game he’d hunted. He died when Dorothy was 10. His father–my great-great-grandfather–helped establish Bethel College, a Mennonite school on the Chisholm cattle trail, in Newton, Kansas, where he also built an opera house. There’s a plaque about him there. Dorothy’s maternal grandfather was an inventor and explorer.
Dorothy: He was the inventor kind of guy, he invented the car coupler for railroad trains coming together, but he never got the patent, and then he built an airship, a dirigible, and took it to the St Louis fair, and on their trial flight–did it hit a guide wire, or something, the wind came up–
Merle: The wind came up.
Dorothy: And blew it over, so it didn’t get to–
Merle: He was the one with the balloon thing.
Dorothy: And then he did discover the chrome mine, near Columbus, where I was born, and that did operate during WWII. In fact there was a great movement of people in town and they really did mine it, built a mill site up there and people lived there, and then after the war they tore it down.
Merle: Well, chromium was really a important part in steelmaking during the war, but the chrome we were getting came out of Africa, I believe it was, and they couldn’t get it because the submarine activity was so strong, from Germany, so very fortunate that he found this mine, because they needed chrome here in the United States. At that time, it was the only chrome mine–basically still is.

Dorothy’s mother wanted her to attend an all-female school, so she attended Monticello College in Godfrey, Illinois, and after one year, she decided she’d rather go to a co-ed college. Her mother agreed, and so she went to WSU. She was one year ahead of Merle when they got married, and after graduating with a degree in art she spent a year working at the graduate school there while Merle finished up. He went in to the Air Force, which took the couple back to Kansas, near Merle’s family.
Dorothy: Sheri, your aunt Sheri was born there. She was an Air Force baby. She cost 5 dollars, and that was just for my food. Then we came out here and aunt Robin was born soon after we got out here, and then a couple years later, then your dad was born.

They lived in a trailer home on the parents’ property while Merle tried to get a job with the National Park Service, but he never found an opening. They had decided their family wouldn’t move around, since Merle remembered the loneliness of entering high school at 16 in a different state. So they started farming on their own. I have memories of the house where my dad grew up in Selah–old books, bas-relief plates on the wall, cable TV, spidery basement, Red Rose tea, although all those things are in the house they’re in now–so I asked him about it:
Derek: We were on the edge of town, town being fairly small to start with, but our house was right on the city limits, and there were houses around us, but there wasn’t a lot of activity, there was still a fair bit of farmland or fields, about a quarter of a mile away from the junior high school, so when I went to school I could walk there. In fact, I remember the day when one of my teachers caught me standing at the bus stop and he asked me where I lived, and I pointed to the house–you could see it from the school–he asked me, why are you riding the bus? So I thought, why am I? So I started walking after that. It was nice, it was fairly quiet, excitement being sometimes the neighbors cows would get out and get into our yard, things like that. My grandparents had their orchard, so part of growing up would be spending a great deal of time over at their place, just a couple miles away.

Merle had a job as a fruit and vegetable inspector for the state, but since 1971, he’s been on his own, working for himself. Dorothy started working again when Derek was in high school, when their family was struggling financially, and she worked 21 years as a secretary for First Presbyterian Church in Yakima. One pastor who’d moved to a church in Texas sent his new secretary up to train with her–she’s essentially a secretary sensei.
Merle: We didn’t have a boat, we built a boat, to go salmon fishing in, didn’t have a motorhome, so we made them out of school buses or whatever we could do, so if we didn’t have a way to do something, we just usually made it ourselves. That’s always been the modus operandi.

Most of their extended family lived right around them, so family events made up a big part of their social life, and they’d take trips to visit geographically distant relatives on holidays. While en route with grandparents and cousins to Kansas one year, their retrofitted bookmobile caught fire near Boise, Idaho. They had pulled over and all piled out of the bookmobile when a state patrolman came up and told them brusquely to get back in the vehicle and start driving. They’d managed to douse the flames and get going so as to avoid loitering on the side of the road while President Carter’s motorcade passed the other way.
Derek, like most of his family, attended WSU. (When I was a junior in high school and thinking about what college to go to, I told Dorothy I was considering Central Washington University, and got the full list of relatives who’d gone to WSU. I didn’t even know Evergreen existed then.) He graduated with a degree in drama, and moved back to Selah, and eventually got an apartment in Yakima. My dad currently works as a graphic designer. He worked for a few companies in town, but permanent employment opportunities have been hard to come by in recent years, so most of his work is freelance. He designs for his buddies and for our church. Like his father, he enjoys working for himself doing what he loves.
My mom moved to the Yakima Valley to teach elementary school in Toppenish (now she works for the Selah school district as a literacy coach, teaching teachers), and she moved to Yakima in search of a larger community than tiny Toppenish. I grilled my parents for my third and final interview and managed to squeeze out the story of their union. Neither of them had had much luck in finding partners–at 29, Derek had given up on looking and decided to wait and see, and shortly thereafter fell victim to the plot of a mutual friend, who set my parents up. Kay and this friend had gone on a spring break road trip to Napa Valley, California–they’d both suffered from heartache and decided to do something about it.
Kay: We wanted to be in a different spot a year from there, so then we just talked about what would be proactive steps in making that happen, and that was widening our circle of people that we knew, particularly men that would be marriage material.

On their first date, Kay and Derek went to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Kay: Which I had seen, like the night before or something, but I didn’t tell him that.
Derek: You didn’t tell me that!

They were married about a year later (and incidentally, so was the mutual friend).

Kay: It was interesting, we had a lot of things in common, our family backgrounds are very similar, it was kind of an easy relationship to have. It wasn’t difficult, I just think we have a lot of things that are a match to each other. We used to joke that we were separated at birth. We even have this little book, I don’t know if I bought it or you bought it, but it’s people separated at birth. We just thought we had so many common experiences that had happened about the same time growing up, and our parents were very similar, same kind of involvement. That all changes once you get married and start living together, and you realize, nope, you don’t have a lot of things in common at all. But it felt that way at the time!

I’d never really thought of my parents having a lot in common, either, besides living together and begetting me, but I can see how they really could’ve hit it off. Kay’s family moved around and Derek’s family made roots, but as a result they were both very close-knit. Their Christian faith and the presence of the church has been central to their lives and the lives of their family. They’re both musicians and theatre-lovers. Kay got to know Derek’s family while sorting cherries for a couple weeks on the orchard (probably pretty well–sorting is such menial labor, you have to keep on talking to avoid losing your mind) and Derek met Kay’s parents on a road trip up to Edmonton.
Then I was born, and my sister was born, and now we’re here, with one kid out of the house and the other about to leave home. It seems like the family I knew in my childhood is poised on the brink of disintegration, but I guess that’s the nature of things. People are born, they leave their homes, they form bonds, they have their own kids, they die–so what is the family? It’s not just a roster of names and dates delineating genealogical hand-down. It’s bigger than 4 seats around the dinner table and more than you could capture in any photograph. Maybe it’s the time spent in a place, or between places, between people who love each other.
When I had run out of questions to ask my parents, my mom turned the interview around on me. She asked me, “How do you think you’ve grown, from last year to this year?” A year ago I was kind of broken. After high school I had no plans. I moved to Tukwila, Washington, with a friend and lived off what I made working at Best Buy. I was so thrilled at first to have my freedom and independence and to support myself, but it was lonely, and after a year and a half I was worn thin. I was going nowhere but deeper into depression, I felt. My relationship with my roommate broke down, and I didn’t have anyone to turn to, except my family, who told me the door was always open if I needed to come back. So I did. I got accepted to Evergreen and left for Yakima soon after. For a while, going home felt like giving in, like the time I’d spent in Tukwila had been wasted, but with the support of my mom, my dad, and my sister, I started to feel better about myself. I worked in a cherry packing warehouse and it was like learning social interaction all over again. I worked on music and started writing my own songs. I found real friends. I came to understand that the time I spent in Tukwila wasn’t wasted, that I could learn from mistakes, and I went off to college feeling better about myself than I ever had. Attending school on my own has had its own set of challenges, but living and working by myself helped prepare me for a lot of them.
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I asked each of my interview participants what was the most challenging thing about being a parent. It was a little surreal asking my own parents about being parents, but I realize their side of the relationship is a perspective that I haven’t really gotten up until now.
Joanna: Oh, the whole thing. *laughs* Particularly when they’re young and you don’t know–they cry, babies cry–and you don’t know what to do next to help them out. One of the things that Karl would do is he would kind of throw up after you would feed him. That would kinda always be, “Oh why? Why does have to do that?”…That probably isn’t a good thing to say.

Merle: Well, finance always seemed like it was an issue.
Dorothy: Yeah, that was the issue.
Merle: I didn’t, couldn’t find work when I first got out of the Air Force. Then, it was kind of tough, had two kids by then.
Dorothy: Well, there weren’t any serious challenges other than just the day by day little things that happen, you know, when kids are growing up, that kind of thing–that we know of!

Derek: Well, each stage has its own challenges, and I think the–probably the overarching challenge is the fact that we’d never done it before. I can still remember the day that they actually allowed–the hospital people actually allowed us to take you out and put you in the carseat and go home with you, and we’re just looking at each other, okay, now what? What do we do?

Kay: Probably always feeling like whatever you’re doing may not be good enough, or in some way is going to mess up this human person that you’ve been given and blessed with… Rarely do I feel in control, like I know what I’m doing. It’s very much unlike the job that I do at school. Most of the time, I feel like I know what I’m doing, or there’s research or there’s people to go to talk to–there’s always the next year’s group to try stuff out on again, there’s a restart button–there isn’t on your kids, they’re always with you.

I also asked them what they found most rewarding about being a parent.

Kay: I think really right now you’re discovering all those things about yourself that I feel like I’ve always seen and known were there, but maybe not quite known how to–I don’t want to shove you into them, or tell you you’re supposed to do this or that, gotta watch you discover them for yourself and grow into them. I think that’s really rewarding.

Derek: Having children certainly makes you less selfish. Your mom and I could’ve just gone on and done whatever we wanted to do as a couple, but in deciding to have a family, it grounds us, too. We get a little bit of an education.

Joanna: Watching them develop and grow, change.

Dorothy: Just everything, I mean, just to have a little person that you could call your own, that you loved.
Merle: Yeah.

.

On May 18, 1980, 8:32 AM, an earthquake on Mount Saint Helens’ north slope caused the volcano to violently erupt, spewing pyroclastic debris across the state. My father’s parents were living in Selah, near Yakima, Washington, when the eruption blanketed the town in sand and ash. My grandfather Merle remembers getting the news over radio after church (Merle and his wife Dorothy have been attending 8 o’clock church for decades, so it’s likely they got the news around 9, in the garden courtyard, which, by the time I was born, had been covered and fittingly renamed the Garden Room), driving home as ash began to fall (and the inability of windshield wipers to clear away volcanic ash), and the darkness of the bright spring day turned night.
On May 18, 1995, I was born to Kay and Derek Smith at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital. My parents had been married for almost 6 years, a period through which they struggled with tragedy and infertility. They don’t talk about it much, but I know they almost had a son named Cooper, and were considering adoption. But their luck changed, and they had me. My mother says I was a miracle baby. When I was 2, my sister Karly was born. At around 4am on June 24, 1997, I toddled into my parents’ bedroom, looking for food or attention or whatever it is a 2 year old suddenly needs at 4 in the morning. My mom settled me down, and on returning to her bed noticed a large pool of blood where she had been lying–generally not a good sign. Derek got me clothed, sat me in the car, called his parents, and drove me and Kay to the hospital, which we happened to live about 2 minutes away from, and my sister was delivered via cesarean. My dad remembers seeing (and does a good impression of) Karly’s tiny arms raised to her tiny scrunched-up face as doctors held her above the operating table. Things might have gone worse if I hadn’t woken up my mom–as it was, Karly had to spend months under glass, in an incubator, in a neonatal intensive care unit, until she was strong enough to leave the hospital. My mom says I saved their lives. My earliest memory is in that house by the hospital (although the lot where it stood is now just a half-acre of grass) sitting on my mom’s lap in a chair in the living room, my dad bringing Karly over so she could breastfeed, me staring back from my dad’s arms and feeling pretty indignant about the whole switch.
My sister and I both have memories of dreams where Derek lost his head. In my sister’s dream, Dad came into her room with a rose in his mouth, his head toppling off and landing on the floor in front of her, rose and all. In mine, Dad dropped me off at my elementary school for a choir event, and when I came back out, sipping on silver-colored juice, his head had shrunk down to a nub, and I worried about his brain but we could still play checkers. Talking with my dad revealed he had worn a moustache up until a certain point in our childhood. Maybe its shaving kept us from recognizing his “new head”, and so we dreamed about the old one falling off and shrinking away, or maybe our childhood memories are so far away from us that when we look back, we mix them with dreams, or can only recognize them as dreams–or maybe we remember as we experienced the world as children, in surreal dreamy strokes where Dad’s head comes off along with his moustache.
In growing up and leaving home, I’ve begun to experience the phenomenon where my parents appear less and less as the omnipresent guardian denizens of Mom and Dad, but as Kay and Derek, as people, with identities and memories and fears and triumphs, who have lived through life at my age and whose situation I might one day be in. Additionally, as time continues to drag on, the older generations of my family become smaller and smaller, and I realize that family isn’t a permanent fixture, but a structure of relationships that constantly changes as people are born, die, and move about in between. Winter quarter this year (my freshman year) I got to know and interviewed my partner’s grandmother, and used her testimony to create a life history portrait, which made me eager to turn the lens on my own family. When my mom’s father passed away in 2011, I learned more about him after he died than I ever did when he was alive, so this project is a way of preserving my grandparents’ legacy and family memory when I can still hear it from their mouths. It’s also a way for me to understand my position in my family, which–ironically enough–I feel the most connected to after moving out.
To conduct research, I used a weekend to take a visit to Yakima. It’s a long way by bus–6 hours in total from Olympia to Tacoma to Seattle to Yakima–but I enjoy travel. Sleep-deprived and semi-delirious, I chugged a cup of coffee and scratched in my pocket notebook:
Tacoma loves vapes and titty espresso drive ins. The sharply slanting city, situated between legs of my journey like a groin, used to be in my mind the most populous city in Washington, although minor reference proves that was practically never true. Today I passed through rapidly, taking a second to loiter in Starbucks from bathroom rights, no companion save my wits to show me around. Someday I’ll savor long moments and afternoons sipping tea in Mad Hat, poring over thick texts, but today my destination lays on further horizons. I’m going home, to do fieldwork. Networked buses ferry me over desert, mountains, wetlands, 200 miles from the Evergreen State College, to the east, where the verdancy of the Sound recedes and greybrown foothills fold into the waste. I was born in the Valley and again the Valley I return, to creaky hardwood floors where I slid and stomped my feet, to 100-yr-old concrete pavers and innumerable taquerias. Home is the darkness and silence of a basement bedroom and the passive animosity of territorial cats–mom and grandma discussing celebrity TV dance drama–dad wafting banjo-plucked-bluegrass up the stairwell–sister camped out on living room couch watching Netflix with the subtitles on and headphones in, screen tilted so no parent bears witness. From one life to another in the span of a morning.

At home things have changed very little. I learned my sister has decided to attend the University of Washington next year. I watched my dad mow the lawn while my cat cowered on my lap. My family went out for burgers at a local chain (our traditional christmastime candy cane shake location, although we missed the trip this last December) and drove around town. My mom pointed out the house she had lived in while single–a pueblo-ish duplex–and was unable to locate my dad’s first apartment, although the impression I got was of someplace uniform and grey.
The next day I interviewed my grandparents and my parents, starting with some questions I wrote down in my notebook:
Where did you grow up? What was it like? What were your parents like? What were your siblings like? How was leaving home? What was the first place you lived away from your family?
Which kid was easier to deal with? What were the challenges of being a parent? The rewards? How did you feel when your first kid left? When they were all gone? When they started their own families? The first time you met your grandchildren?

First off was my grandmother Joanna. Grandma Jo is my mom’s mom, an elegant lady with silver hair, an affinity for cardigans and Dancing with the Stars, and an intense dislike of cats, especially on her lap. She has a little place several blocks from our house, but she’s been living with our family for the last 4 years following the death of her husband Bob. She volunteers at the Yakima Union Gospel Mission along with my dad’s parents, serving unhoused people in the community. She does not drive, but regularly walks over to her condo a few blocks away. My grandparents used to stay there a few times a year–during holidays we’d have Swedish dinner with homemade potato sausages, and during summer my sister, Grandma Jo and me (and on very rare occasions my grandfather) would have tea parties and play hide-and-go-seek.
Although Joanna didn’t speak at length about her childhood, I gather it wasn’t very easy. Her father was an entrepreneur and aspiring pastor, and didn’t have much time for family. Her mother was chronically ill, and her older brother was physically abusive (according to my mom. Joanna mentioned her brother’s name during the interview, trailed off, swallowed dryly and changed the subject), and so Joanna was left to take care of her younger sister. They still have a strong bond–Joanna visits Kathy in Bellevue regularly. When I asked my grandmother what she had wanted to be when she grew up, she told me she had wanted to start a family, but placed that desire within the context of her time–the 1940s and 50s. She met Bob in a car on a trip to church camp and they hit it off, getting married about 5 months later–she attributed this decision to the period and circumstances of their relationship. Bob enlisted in the Navy and served with the Seabees (a military construction unit). Their first child was born two years after their marriage–a boy named Karl. (My uncle Karl now lives in Vancouver, WA, with his wife June and their son Kyle. Karl gave me a Weird Al mix CD which I credit as my introduction to popular music. My mom used to tell me about her brother blasting Pink Floyd through their house speaker system, which Bob had wired himself. Bob did a lot of things himself. He assembled the first color TV on their block.)

Todo- write the rest of Joanna’s life portrait, as well as Merle’s, Dorothy’s, Kay’s and Derek’s–with focus on episodes of overlap (like kids leaving home, parents coupling up)–insert quotes from transcript throughout–more themes: death and birth, moving around and staying in one place, what are the effects on a family?–more testimony from my sister–one more interview for each person (or maybe a phone call to clear things up)–exact dates? does it really matter–conclusive thoughts, lessons learned, changes in how I view my position in my family (or maybe how my family members view it)