It’s a long road to understand someone, especially when they road-trip differently

What is it like to live and farm here, I wondered, taking in views of central Washington’s landscape of round green fields of corn and alfalfa, each with a center-pivot irrigator on its radius. I’m familiar with farming in the Midwest and the Willamette Valley, but this looked like an entirely different process.

A hundred miles farther, I had the same question, except it seemed no one actually lived among these endless hop fields and apple orchards to my left and a giant brown ridge rearing out of the landscape to my right. 

Despite the heavy traffic on the twisting two-lane highway and the tidy cultivated orchards with hundreds of apple crates stacked at the edges, ready for harvest, we didn’t see any houses for miles.

It’s good to get away, to see what life is like in other places, and to get a new perspective. What is it like, living in other places? How is life just like mine, with the same smell of rain after a dry spell creating an instant connection, or the same excitement at harvest time?

And how is it an unfamiliar world, so different that I don’t even know what questions to ask?

We had spent the weekend in northern Idaho, near Bonners Ferry, where Paul preached at the Mennonite church on Sunday morning and we stayed with his cousin, Brian, and his wife Twila in their beautiful home in the Kootenai Valley.

It’s a different place than the Willamette Valley. The mountains feel closer, the roads a bit rougher and narrower, the air cooler, the land less tamed. We attended the farmers’ market where Twila sells her home-grown bouquets and saw the same sort of goat-milk soaps and produce that one sees here, and the same loose earth-toned clothing, but no blue hair anywhere.

On Sunday afternoon, Twila opened the gate on the deer-proof fence around her large garden and led me inside. It was lavish with vegetables, exotic specimens like the huge red castor bean plant, and colorful cosmos and dahlias and fillers that form her famous bouquets.

Just outside the fence, a pile of cow manure from the family’s small herd spread its sharp fragrance, evoking pleasant childhood memories of going for milk cows in a well-grazed pasture.

I took pictures of Twila’s flowers, not only for their beauty but to remind me of her clever method for containing them with metal fenceposts and twine.

I think it’s good to see both outer and inner worlds through someone else’s eyes. Brian, Twila, Paul and I talked for hours, exploring our shared and individual experiences and how we responded: the Smucker family dynamics, church and mission experiences, and raising a family. It was good to both feel understood and to find how it was completely different for someone else.

Sadly, the four of us belong to that exclusive and unfortunate club of parents who have lost a child. Our son Steven passed away in November. Brian and Twila’s oldest daughter, Ramona, passed away suddenly in April, also from a medical condition.

We listened to them; they asked good questions of us. In some ways, our paths of grief are identical. In others, they diverge widely.

We all tried our best to understand, the mutual gift of seeing how it is through someone else’s eyes. Paul and I left feeling validated and cared for.

We had traveled to Idaho at a brisk clip on interstate and other four-lane expedited highways as much as possible. Then Paul suggested taking a more scenic route home, heading farther west instead of dropping down from Spokane to Hermiston and then toward Portland.

Forty years ago, I would have been shocked at this suggestion. Paul was the most driven road-tripper I had ever seen, conquering the miles as we barreled from my parents’ house in Minnesota to Oregon just before we were married.

“Wouldn’t it be cool to chase down one of these side roads and see where it leads?” I had said as we passed through Montana’s infinity of wheat fields, longing for a bit of diversion. 

Eyes on the goal, Paul had grunted a reply, not realizing that my “Wouldn’t it be fun?” meant “Let’s actually do this.” And his response felt like rejection.

Very slowly, we have learned to see life from each other’s inner perspective. I learned that he thought in literal terms only, and I’d better say exactly what I meant. He came to encourage my curiosity, even if it meant more bother or a slightly later arrival. His suggestion of taking a new route home on this trip felt like he understood and honored how I saw the world.

So I took in the rolling landscape in areas of Washington I had never seen before, marveling at the contrast of rivers and mountains and trying hard to identify every crop from milo to grapes to Red Delicious apples.

Paul offered to drive on a small road on the north side of the Gorge to extend our explorations, but I said, “No, let’s just get home,” not only because I was tired, but also because I was grateful he drove this route for my sake, and I have come to understand a bit of the inner landscape where he lives, and it turns out to be as valid and interesting as my own.