Rain shadow

Yakima is a strange, arid city, east of the Cascades. Arriving there from the other side of the mountains was like landing in Oz. All the lushness of the evergreen Western, side of the state was gone. Even now, in February, Yakima seemed almost desert-like, the city itself, dropped in a plain, surrounded by parched hills and mountains that cast an orangey-yellow glow over the squat buildings. It seemed to me then that this place belonged in a different state altogether, Idaho or Colorado even. I couldn’t understand how or why the land here was so very different, just sixty miles from Mount Tahoma, which spawned at least five rivers, the surrounding area adorned with velvet forests, subalpine meadows and waterfalls every which way you turned, despite her snowy peak.

The weather was better those few days later, when we drove across Snoqualmie Pass and down to Yakima. I didn’t tell Denny we were coming. We weren’t in regular contact anyway. Mobile phones were not yet ubiquitous, as they are now. I had a Nokia mobile, which my Dad had gifted me, (monthly contract and all) to give me some respite from worrying about Sammie when I was driving between buildings with landlines whilst she was at school.

Denny had called the day after my mini breakdown driving through the snow and told me their rough route and approximately when they would be at different rest stops on the journey but I hadn’t said much. What was there to say? Here we were, me and these two children, thousands of miles from anyone else who loved us and he had told me he didn’t want to come home. I stood in the house, listening to him, papering over that reality and gazed out of the front window, at the Mountain. He could do what he wanted. So could I. I didn’t have to sit there for five days and wait for him to come home when he felt like it. I couldn’t. I had to do something to bring my family back together, to give me and the girls, Lola especially, some sense of agency in the situation.