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Thank you for bringing Words and Pictures this far. We are on our fifth issue -- and just short of two
years old at this writing. That we have received an accolade from Utne Reader, without being
officially distributed, says everything about the integrity of our content and about who is “listening.”
Our belief here at Words and Pictures is that there are readers who, like us, prefer content over
commerce in a periodical.

If there is a renaissance in reading, and there seems to be (if you consider the popularity of
magazines like “Utne”, not to mention a boom in “Salons” and Book Clubs,) perhaps it is bigger than
the sum of its parts? Why is it that not only special interest publications but also “depth” interest
publications have cropped up on the internet and elsewhere? Has a void in depth, made more
obvious by newsstands offering “Martha Stewart” as the alternative to advertising fodder, grown so
large as to crave its own cure? I hope so. To wit, are we now a mainstream readership so hungry we’
ve resorted to feeding ourselves? I hope so. For our part, the most gratifying compliment we get at
the magazine is that the excellent writing and art published here is being seen, read, admired,
respected, re-read, and recommended to others -- thus gaining its own life apart from the attention
we first gave it here.

On that note, this issue, like the ones prior, seems to have wandered astray. Or perhaps to put it
more aptly, this issue has strayed like Mary’s little lamb, away from -- and then toward its own home.
As we gathered the work over the past few months, Wendy and I noticed an issue leaning
thematically towards the West. The Western United States, that is. And not Northwest or Southwest,
but WEST, meaning the entire left side of the Map. To boot, we decided not to interfere. Why chop it
down - or up - into Northwest versus Southwest? We’re editors, not mapmakers. Furthermore, while
we are both from the Seattle area, Wendy and I hold no special currency obliging us to localize the
issue.

Strangely, an issue left wide open came to assert itself more particularly. That is, the more we left it
alone, the more it managed to narrow itself, as if territorially down, until it began to take on a thematic
“second subject” -- that subject being -- Home. At least, home is the word that first comes to mind.
And then, quite naturally, the word “shelter” seems to crop up.
The difference between these words: home---shelter---can be ever so subtle in some cases and
sweepingly broad in others. I suppose the most obvious distinction being that a home is almost
always a shelter, while a shelter need not always be a home. Then, too, surely some homes don’t
rightfully qualify as shelters (the woman I saw sleeping under the park bench recently, for example,
using the newspaper to further shade her face, comes to mind).

At any rate, the concept of home is more obvious in some of our pages, such as Francesca Lyman’s
research into sustainable communities, and the photographic essay telling of Cate and Warren Buck’
s experience of building an earthen home - piece by piece and literally by hand. Less obvious, our
cover art work by Valaree Cox (however untranslatable visual art is into words) puts me in mind of a
sort of house/boat, or community of them...? in which the whole wears, like a hat, its own bird’s nest
on a beam. This house/boat/community becomes all but human as it tips slightly, congenially
towards us, as if to doff the bird’s nest like a cap.

As the word home is to shelter, so the word territory is to place? That is what comes to mind when I
read author N. Scott Momaday’s description of rocky Southwestern terrain. In a piece from his essay
titled “Landscape with Words in Foreground”1, Momaday manages to convey, entirely via
description, the process by which the mind’s eye both humanizes as it territorializes even the
rockiest of terrain. I am reminded that rock is the earliest shelter, in the form of caves - and is
possibly even the earliest communicative instrument, as evidenced by symbols begetting language,
carved by and into rock of those caves.
Is territory what happens to a place? How far from territory is home? How far from place is it? Sand
flies to humans, the habitation of territory may well have its first and last definitions in the eye of the
beholder.

Region -- the word -- also comes up. How and when do we decide as individuals, and then eventually
as a culture, what a region - as opposed to a territory - is? A home stretches into a street or
boulevard which stretches into a community, which gathers itself a “region” somewhere along the
way. There are no points of demarcation while it’s happening, I suppose. We put them on later - to
recap, record, and provide a consensus for community agreement. But regions defy county lines;
they are as often unofficial as they are unspoken and assumed.
The same rock Momaday describes would, if obtained for human habitation, be sandblasted.
Patterns which describe a man/woman’s upward mobility - upward or straight or across or in several
directions - cut through the trees, the rocks, whatever is in the way. “Some people go both ways,”
says the Scarecrow to Dorothy and Company as they scoot on down the 1950’s film version of a
Kansas-like dream-scape called “Oz.” And so it appears to be true that the patterns collect layers,
much like the rock, and history is not linear.

I grew up in a “Suburb” near Chicago. This word, suburb, already feels a tad mothballed, somehow
insufficient. We, my family of ten (ten was nothing in those days!) had landed in a house southwest of
Chicago. The commuter train my father took to his job in the city ran due west, angling southward in
the exact manner of the suburbs southwest. Like their train depots, these suburbs looked to have
been plunked like board game pieces along a mostly linear grid.
Land outside Chicago was the “plains.” Flat were the Plains. Flat and as if floating weather from the
sky to the first obstacle. A tree or stand of them became a filter and shelter in the same way an
awning or a whole barn seemed to have been erected - in certain weathers - to permit friction. I saw
a snow dune cover the Eastern side of my house one winter morning. We could not open our front
door for some days, and were kept from being shut-ins only by a western entrance my father, with
neighbors, had added to the back of our house.

Sometimes the end product of suburban mobility grew out from a hub, like spokes from a wheel.
Other times it was more like a grid forced over nature’s more or less fluid meanderings. But when
speaking of the suburbs of the fifties and sixties, it is impossible not to mention commerce and
consumption - upward mobility. Railroads and ports had to be set down first, either of these being
both the literal means and ends of commerce.   Already a railroad station in such a town or suburb
can look all but humbled by its apparent obsolescence. With trains having diminished in status
enough by the 1990’s, only the ones pulling crude freight are routinely seen - usually while one waits
from the car at the crossroads for it to pass. In the background, if there is one, the station it passes
can be seen hunkering like a kind of municipal souvenir.

Will future generations witness something similar if -- when -- the internet highway displaces the
actual physical one? Already the internet looks promising when you consider how motor
transportation ills continue to beset us. What if our oil-dependent way of life truly could be
supplanted with its virtual counterpart? I, for one, will be hard-pressed to justify my technophobic
suspicions in such a scenario!

Meanwhile, just up the street from me, a considerable piece of latter-day wetland found itself paved
over where a housing complex managed some sort of rezone. This is just one of several examples
of why a local highway is being expanded in turn. I went away for a week in July and when I returned
six to eight house foundation slabs sat on mock-yards exactly where coyotes had slept only weeks
before. Everywhere a bulldozer seems to linger with a half-chewed cottonwood dangling from its
teeth. They’re called “luxury homes” these. Yet, while the foundations do suggest they’ll be amply
sized, they sit on pedestals themselves only big enough to “suggest” a future yard.

In a favorite poem by William Carlos Williams1, an old woman being escorted by her grandson from
her life-long home grumpily remarks, as shadows from elms sweep past the window, “What are all
those/ fuzzy looking things out there?/ Trees? Well, I’m tired/ of them.” After which, the poet writes,
she “rolled her head away.” As if to say, in the end, even nature will have seemed a tad careless
compared to the more streamlined version(s) of it towards which we humans might have ultimately
aspired. (“The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” by William Carlos Williams.)
In Illinois back then, farming still dominated our economy. Even our suburban tract home was once
neighbor to a farm. Cows had to graze and chickens to roost. But, there are places now where only
the names of the things dozed for condominiums and houses and malls remain ...”Quail’s Landing,”
or “Fox Valley.” Why, I often wonder, are there no malls named after the barns razed? Perhaps an
old barn is not as nostalgic in its absence yet as a Pheasant or Fox. Still, I can imagine “Lost Barn
Way,” or “Old Milk-Road Place.”

At any rate, as Francesca Lyman’s essay, “Twelve Gates to the City” so clearly conveys, we have
World War II to thank or blame for the suburbs we see surrounding most of our cities. These same
suburbs originally built to promote family-friendly living are now being questioned as to the
“community-friendliness” of their design. The automobile sits center of this controversy, of course.
How could its inventors know that the automobile would cause pollution so massive as to pose
immediate human threat to future users? ... Or how predict global oil dependency grown so vast as to
threaten a World War III? ... That the stakes of either might finally combine to stir up religious, civil,
and territorial rifts the complexity of which impact us, ironically, at our most intimate and human --
that is -- at the level of faith and hearth? Clearly, a certain foresight does not prevail where the
human condition is concerned.

In my own “suburb” (did I ever really refer to it by “that” term while it was my home?) we were not
quite as safe and sound as nostalgia would have it. Yet, even from this distance in time, that
“suburb” did seem to have been designed for human, as opposed to economic, commerce. We had
quiet in summer; sirens and cicadas are my outstanding “noisy” memories. Being flat, with lakes
rather than oceans within reach, we had canoes, sailboats, and ice-skating where some would have
hiking and skiing. I was outside from morning till dark, summer or winter. The blue to grey to indigo
of the lake behind my home, when it iced over, became almost a mirror exact of the clear sky. Clear
or not, the ripples of ice where a current must have commenced in physics, fixed themselves under
my skates so that I felt as though I was skating over scalloped clouds.

One afternoon, I might have been about six years old, a black sedan pulled up right in front of my
house. I was at the street, curbside. Two men indicated for me to come to the open window. One,
the passenger, said that my mother had called and told them to pick me up and take me home. “But, I
live right there,” I said, and pointed to my house behind me. They drove away politely. Another time, a
man leaned out at the corner where my friend and I were tandem biking in the middle of a hot
afternoon. Only as I walked up to the car to answer his questions about directions did I notice that he
had covered his naked lap with only a newspaper --- his hand beneath, moving rhythmically as he
spoke to me.

I never told anyone. I was too young, perhaps, for the concept of that sort of crime. Plus, to speak
anything out loud - to put it into words - is perhaps to comprehend it. Not that there wasn’t more than
a hint of harm in either of those situations, or would I remember them so vividly to this day?
I suppose “upward mobility” couldn’t help but create a contradiction of needs. The compromises
always take a while to surface. For example, I wonder if the current trust in digital highways isn’t
slightly premature - or perhaps overanxious?   Computer theft owes its success to the lack of both
“hard copy” and “hard transactions.” Your name is taken, rather than dollars and/or merchandise --
but everything is lost: your privacy, credibility, and reputation! This seems eerie enough to give me
pause, but I recall a time when the idea of a plastic card supplanting money gave people great pause.
Now the card is gone and a virtual “account” supplants “it.” There is no card, just as there is no
“hard cold cash.” In fact, in the world of virtual purchase, you might say you “are your money.”
Then there’s the less virtual problem of obesity. For the first time in recorded history, at least, the
children born to a generation already grown may find themselves with shorter life spans than their
parents. Between Hostess Ho-Hos of my youth, the microwave, and now virtual communication and
entertainment, bodies just don’t have much to do.

Meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder whether the cluster of cancer deaths, breast and reproductive,
which occurred in my “backyard” in that fairly small suburb outside Chicago, had anything to do with
that same“forward” mobility gone awry. Of girls I went to high school with, at least four are gone -
most passed in their thirties. My sister died of cancer last year in her early fifties. There are
unaccountable immune disorders and other strange conditions lingering in my hometown “region” to
this day. How could we know that the beautiful fog of the bug-sprayer (white fog preceding and
following the white truck that drove down our streets in the evenings, as the bugs, mostly
mosquitoes, teemed in the humidity and air off the lake) was filled with a poison strangely obscured
by its sterile initials: DDT?

Home -- the word, the thing -- I think of this as my son spends his teen years in this lovely place we
now call home. Seattle, with its vistas that stop your heart (or mine anyway!) Mountains as purple
some evenings as any cliche. Evening ferry boats glowing, gliding at the same pace as the sun
setting over them on the lake. My son skied for the first time at age six. I had to let the teacher take
him down the relatively small hill (looked like a mountain to me!), as I would have killed both of us.
He can see the beginnings of what will be full-fledged salmon in a creek right outside our front door.
For my part, I remember with a certain fondness the comparatively oafish and dull carp of our Lake
Michigan turning from the orange to the silver of their scales.

I should have said more about the pages that follow. Poems, essays, stories, photos, paintings ... the
West coming down to Home -- and home being, as they say, where the heart is.   Then again, they
speak for themselves.

Thank you again for your “community.”
YAM

1. “Landscape with Words in Foreground” by N. Scott Momaday, published in “Old Southwest, New
Southwest: Essays on a Region and its Literature”, ed. Judy Nolte Lensink. Tucson: Tucson Public
Library, 1987.
2. “The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” from the book “The Collected Poems of William
Carlos Williams,” Volume 1--1909/1939/New Directions, publisher, New York, New York.