Washington State Magazine

Summer 2013

© 2013 Board of Regents, Washington State University

First Words

Small Towns You Should Visit

by Tim Steury

I’ve been very fortunate to have visited many of the world’s great cities. Buenos Aires, Boston, Kiev, Merida, Bangkok, Paris. Even Seattle. 

Regardless of having seen Pa-ree et al., I still always feel a thrill of anticipation passing the city limits sign of a small town, and I’ve encountered a lot of them while pursuing stories for this magazine over the last decade: Sunnyside, Neah Bay, Waterville, South Bend, Marblemount, Starbuck, Winona, and others equally euphonious. How did the town come to be? What are its people like? What surprises might wait in its architecture, history, cafés, or whimsy?

The deep red door on the little white church in Prosser. The experimental jet plane hanging from the ceiling of the café in Waterville. The wonderful camarones al diablo in Sunnyside. The windmill garden in Electric City.

Consider my latest adventure. After driving a couple of hours, I stop in Wilbur at Billy Burgers for an order of onion rings. While waiting, I get to talking with a gentleman somewhat older than I. His grandson, who is actually from Lind, attends WSU. He loves to hunt, says his grandfather. When he arrived on campus, he figured he’d show up at a shoot sponsored by the gun club. And amazed everyone by consistently shooting 25s. At least that’s what his grandfather says.

Later in Pepper Jack’s Bar and Grill in Grand Coulee, I ask the server (who is not the least bit ironic, nor does she think I need to know her name) what kind of wine they have. Cabernet, chardonnay, white zinfandel. Turns out the cab goes pretty well with the walleye (“best fish you ever tasted”), the canned green beans aren’t bad with a little Tabasco, and the French fries are truly the best I’ve had in a long while. Once the family next to me leaves, I have the place to myself.

The walls are filled with photos of dam construction and history, and the décor is frozen somewhere around 1963. The town outside the window is absolutely dead on a Thursday evening in early March.

But Grand Coulee was not always so still. If you listen carefully, you can just hear the shouts, music, and laughter of the town’s infamous B Street that grew up around the Grand Coulee dam construction. And much fainter, the music of children playing as their parents fish for salmon on the undammed Columbia.

Despite my best efforts, there are many Washington small towns that I have not yet visited. Aeneas, Bruce, Climax, Springdale, Yacolt. There is much to learn about and to report on these small towns sprinkled across the Washington landscape. And not just the towns, but also the spaces between, the dark spaces below as you fly east over the state at night. 

Dark, but hardly empty. How full those spaces are, old ranches, native fishing spots, and of course the landscape itself, the biological, evolutionary, geological stories everywhere, illuminating the shortness of our time, the shallowness of our focus and understanding.

Tim Steury, Editor

Posts

Posts for Summer 2013

Florence “Flossie” Wager ’54

Flossie was my aunt, and looking for a name of a park I couldn’t recall, I Googled her and found your article. It was so fantastic and really captured her essence; your description of her smile brought a vivid image to my mind. It’s been very sad without her. She was my role model and encouraged me to go back to school (WSUV 2006–2008 English) and to pursue my master degree at Antioch University in creative writing. I graduated in December. Flossie lived long enough to know I’d be graduating, but passed before I actually did. I was one of those kids she “borrowed,” and there was never a dull moment when she was around. Her mother, Amy, who lived to be 105, had the same attitude and genes; all us Wager women hope we get the same luck. I’m not sure I’ll be floating on an inner tube down the Lewis River in my 60’s like Flossie, but I hope to continue on with some of her great work.

Thanks for reminding me how amazing Aunt Flossie was.

Chris Geraci

Vancouver 

Flossie Wager’s work with Vancouver parks was featured in the Winter 2009 issue of Washington State Magazine, “Florence Wager ’54–Vancouver park activist without par.”

How Washington Tastes

Enjoyed your article on “How Washington Tastes” re apples and cheese. One note: the Granny Smith apple was originally from New South Wales, Australia. [cf.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny_Smith

The Australians will tell you about it quickly. Actually, they raise some nice apples there too. We lived in Sydney for seven years and enjoyed it. Fresh fruits and veggies are absolutely the best. Worth your time sending some horticulturalists to Australia to see the fruit and veggie stands all over the place.

Mark Welch ’62 BS 

My two daughters are graduates of WSU. They give me their Washington State Magazine and I look forward to reading it. The Spring 2013 issue has an article called “The Apple meets Cougar Gold” by Tim Steury that interests me greatly. I am a Big fan of Apples and Cougar Gold.

I believe the Gravenstein to be the best apple out there so that gives you an idea of where my tastes lie. Of course it is not a great keeper so it is rarely found at the local stores. For decades I ate an apple with lunch every day starting with the Granny Smith, then Pink Lady, and Braeburn most recently. 

The Pink Lady was good for a few years before the flavor dropped off and I switched over to the Braeburn, which was also good for a few years until its flavor dropped off. I tried a few other apples that were along the tart side of the fence but they had a blandness to them so I quit buying apples. One of those bland trial apples was the Jonagold.

Recently I discovered an apple orchard nearby that is on recently acquired State Land that is being allowed to revert back to forest. There are at least 45 varieties of apples (most have tags) and I have tried all of them. One stands out way above the others. It’s the Jonagold! So this is what a Jonagold is supposed to taste like! What the hell are they doing to those poor apples in the supermarkets? I picked several boxes of Jonagolds around the end of October and finished off the last one in mid January. They tasted the same till the end. The texture of the flesh had softened a bit but who cares with flavor like that.

My theory was that when the apple industry comes out with the so called “Next Big Thing” it sends the apple out to the world in its fresh picked state to get us hooked. Then the storage scenario begins. By that I mean fresh apples never get to the store again. I think they are picked too early as the Jonagolds I pick are not so good when picked early. Only apples out of prolonged storage are supplied until no one buys them anymore.

I wonder how long before the Honeycrisp goes bland?

This fall I will be tripling the boxes of Jonagolds I store.

I hope they fix this someday. Meanwhile I am planting Braeburns and Jonagolds.

Robert Walker 

Seabeck

Correction 

Due to mistaken information, WSM erroneously printed in the Spring 2013 issue that retired history professor O. Gene Clanton had died. He has written to let us know he is alive and enjoying retirement.

video

The Lost Country. Peter Chilson, a Washington State University professor of English, estimates he has spent six years of his life in Mali and the Sahel region of Africa. He was there at the time of last spring’s coup. Read an excerpt from his ebook, We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali (Foreign Policy and Pulitzer Center, 2012) on page 36. Watch a video of him discussing the current situation in Mali and his experience there at wsm.wsu.edu/extra/Chilson-Mali.

TwitterViewers of crime dramas more likely to help sexual assault victims http://t.co/TQ9o8aRXnE

TwitterNews #Cougs can use: Ferdinand’s ice cream shop, or shoppe, to expand. http://bit.ly/VSZJuw

TwitterWSU Neuroscientist Attempts To Re-Build The Connection In Nerve Cells http://bit.ly/UCBLbU RT @KHQLocalNews #NFL

What’s New

Replacing the greenhouses on Wilson Road, the Horticulture and Landscape Architecture Display Garden was designed and built by horticulture and landscape architecture students under former WSU professor Phil Waite ’79. Students continue to maintain the garden as part of their coursework. Photos Emily Smudde/WSU News

Panorama

Why aren’t plants more sick than they are?

by Brian Clark

Tree in the sun. Wikimedia
Staff photoillustration/Wikimedia Commons

Why are plants immune to most of the diseases surrounding them in the environment? Lee Hadwiger, Washington State University professor of plant pathology, has been wrestling with this question most of his career. 

Were it not for a commonplace but mysterious trait called non-host resistance (NHR), plants would be constantly attacked by fungi, bacteria, and other pathogens swarming in the air, soil, and bodies. For the most part, plants are immune to those challenges because NHR gives them their most robust and durable immunity to the myriad pathogens challenging them. 

In the January issue of Phytopathology, Hadwiger and his colleague, USDA Agricultural Research Service plant pathologist James Polashock, offer new insight into the mechanism triggering the NHR response in plants.

“Innate immunity has to be triggered by something,” Hadwiger says, “but we are only now gaining some insight on how signaling occurs at the molecular level.” 

Hadwiger and Polashock show that fungal DNase enzymes trigger the NHR response in a variety of plant species. They further theorize that these fungal DNase genes appear to provide an unlimited source of components for developing transgenic resistance in all transformable plants.

DNase is the generic term for a wide variety of enzymes that catalyze changes in DNA molecules. Hadwiger explains that DNases from fungal mitochondria have a small peptide molecule that enables them to move through plant cell membranes and thus induce expression of NHR in the plant. Hadwiger and Polashock demonstrated that when a plant encounters a fungal DNase purified in the lab, the NHR response is triggered.

Hadwiger and Polashock used baker’s yeast, a relatively innocuous fungus not known to cause disease, to trigger the NHR response in a pea plant. Hadwiger and students in his laboratory had previously induced this defense response by transferring a fungal DNase gene to tobacco. The tobacco plants then expressed the NHR response to a known tobacco pathogen.

“The potential positive impact of this for agriculture would be a reduction in the use of fungicides,” Hadwiger says. Currently, disease resistance genes are typically introduced in commercially important plants through conventional breeding techniques. But, Hadwiger says, conventional breeding targets races of specific diseases and the introduced immunity may last only about seven years before the fungus evolves and overcomes the plant’s resistance.

“The natural NHR resistance would be preferable,” Hadwiger says. Toward that end, Hadwiger says he will remain vigilant about how best to transfer this natural process to plants that succumb to their specific diseases. He is optimistic that non-genetic engineering techniques may be devised to enhance the activity of the DNases transferred in the fungal-plant interactions.

Panorama

Chicha in the landscape

by Tim Steury

Urubamba Valley in the Peruvian Andes, near the Inca capital of Cusco and below the ancient city of Machu Picchu. From thoughtunbound.com

Terraced hillsides in the Andes are amongst the most beautiful examples of what archaeologists refer to as “domesticating the landscape.” Generally constructed during the Incan Empire, the terraces, many of which are still farmed, are framed by often-elaborate stonework. Perhaps too elaborate for its assumed use, says archaeologist Melissa Goodman-Elgar.

Using techniques such as microscopic soil analysis and geochemistry, Goodman-Elgar explores how humans have transformed natural landscapes and the cultural implications. Much of her work is focused in the Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia.

In the case of the terraced hillsides, however, she started from her perception as an archaeological soil scientist and explored her observations through ethnographic and historical accounts. 

Throughout the Andes, pre-Columbian inhabitants transformed mountainsides too steep to farm into terraced fields in order to grow maize, wheat, and other crops. Not only does terracing enable farmers and their crops to remain on the hillsides, it controls drainage and positions the fields so that they better absorb solar radiation. Some of them were built with the same sophisticated and intricate masonry used in the monumental urban architecture of the region.

Indeed, the masonry is so sophisticated—and so overbuilt—that Goodman-Elgar suspected that maybe some of those terraces were for purposes beyond simply growing crops. She explores those purposes in her chapter, “Places to Partake: Chicha in the Andean Landscape,” of a recent book, Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes, edited by anthropologists Justin Jennings and Brenda Bowser (formerly at WSU) and published by the University Press of Florida.

Chicha, a beer made from maize, is prevalent throughout Andean culture. In fact, Goodman-Elgar proposes that it defined the use of some of those overbuilt terraces. 

“The highly planned geometric designs, specialist cut-stone masonry, niches, and other embedded features are all distinctive in elite Inca architecture and serve to identify specific places with Inca hegemony,” she writes. “The use of these elite features in certain Inca terrace systems indicates that they may have had roles beyond crop production.”

Goodman-Elgar’s reasoning stemmed not only from the observation that the terraces were overbuilt, but that the soils in some of them were poor, not at all suited to the crops that they presumably supported. Her approach as an archaeologist is a studied contrast from others in the book, which start with the role of chicha in terms of ceremony and power. 

“Research on chicha has tended to concentrate on its manufacture and consumption within ceremonial public spaces, domestic contexts, and institutions such as Inca acllawasi, where acclas, women dedicated to the Sun cult, prepared chicha and other goods for the state,” she writes. However, historical documents also make frequent reference to the use of maize chicha in agricultural terraces, both as an offering in ritual activities and as a beverage during group cultivation.”

“I studied it from the other side,” she says. “I studied the dirt.”

In a broader sense, agricultural landscapes generally are excluded from discussion in favor of monumental architecture and natural features as shrines, she argues. This exclusion reflects the common ideology that separates built environment from “wild” agricultural spaces.

However, Andean culture tends to break down this separation. “Terraced fields figure prominently within the plans of many pre-Columbian Andean settlements,” Goodman-Elgar writes. “This may indicate that these settlements did not reflect a notion of separate conceptual spheres for domus and agrios.” 

Both Incan peasants and the ruling class seem to have used the terraces as a social venue. In such a remote and difficult landscape, not only work, but celebration and ceremony took place in the terraced fields. Many Andean communities are structured through ayllu, a social network that includes “bonds of kinship, reciprocal exchange, and corporate landholding. The Spanish found that a version of ayllu organization was used by the Inca for administration and taxation, and the ayllu may be a longstanding Andean tradition.”

One reason that particular terraces were elaborated, says Goodman-Elgar, is that a lot of social practice that we might pursue in the home or an urban social environment took place out in the terraced fields.

Not only was chicha considered sacred and offered during agricultural ceremonies, it was also used as payment for the labor expected of the ayllu participants.

The Incan state did the same, she says, only on a grander scale.

“Certain fields, particularly in the Cusco region, were elaborated because the crop of the sun was maize.” Participants would make offerings of maize and chicha, as well as llamas and guinea pigs. “The Inca emperor would come and take a gold-tipped plow and symbolically till the earth,” restarting the seasonal cycle.

Panorama

Let everyone eat bread

by Eric Sorenesen

For the better part of four decades, Mark Wildung (’89 BS, ’92 MS) felt lousy.

He felt like he had a flu, but wrote it off, thinking everyone felt that way. He had a hollow leg, packing twice as much food as his friends on backpacking trips, but his body was withering away, his weight dropping to 138 pounds.

Finally, at a going-away party before a trip to Germany, a physician-assistant friend suggested he might have celiac disease, an autoimmune reaction to certain gluten proteins found in grains like wheat, barley, and rye. His symptoms got worse in Germany, a land of great bread and beer, and he confirmed he did indeed have the disease.

“When I was diagnosed, my ability to absorb nutrients had stopped,” says Wildung, 47. “I was eating, I don’t know, well over 5,000 calories a day and losing weight.”

Back in Pullman, where he is senior scientific assistant in the WSU Genomics Core Lab, he ended up deciphering genetic codes of wheat that the lab of Diter von Wettstein is investigating to develop a grain that celiac patients can safely eat. As it happens, the lab is making some of the greatest progress in the world on the problem.

About one in 100 Americans have celiac disease, with more diagnosed each year as awareness of the condition grows and the phrase “gluten free” permeates the food marketplace. In addition to weight loss, symptoms can include diarrhea, a distended abdomen, osteoporosis, and anemia. There’s no treatment other than a complete abstinence from gluten-containing grains.

At the heart of the problem are certain proteins that aggravate microvilli, hair-like membranes through which the small intestine takes up nutrients. Through an autoimmune reaction, a celiac patient’s gut in effect erases the microvilli, creating what Wildung calls “smooth pipes.”

While gluten generally gets blamed for the problem, not all glutens are alike when it comes to celiac disease. Gluten comes in two basic forms, glutenins and gliadins. And it turns out that celiac patients generally don’t have a reaction to high molecular weight glutenins, which conveniently are enough to give wheat its baking properties. So in theory, one could have a non-toxic, nearly gliadin-free bread that bakes just fine.

Writing last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sachin Rustgi, an assistant research professor, reported with von Wettstein and other colleagues that they could turn off a gene responsible for the creation of the toxic proteins but leave the high molecular weight glutenins.

“It’s like a process of production,” explains Nuan Wen, a doctoral candidate in molecular plant science and a co-author on the paper. Once the gene is turned off, she says, “it’s like the machine is locked.”

This method might knock out 75 percent of a grain’s toxic proteins, says Rustgi. It’s a step in the right direction, but it might not be enough.

“It may be useful material for some of the celiac patients because not all proteins are toxic to all patients,” he says. But it’s hard to say which patients will be good enough with just gliadin- or glutenin-free wheat.

So the researchers are also working on a way to have certain enzymes degrade the toxic proteins into smaller, non-toxic units. Stanford University researchers have developed similar enzymes that can be taken as a dietary supplement, but the WSU researchers are working to get a plant to synthesize the enzymes in the grain itself.

“You’re actually degrading everything into amino acids and leaving it non-toxic for humans” with celiac disease, says Rustgi.

By making the grain’s proteins more digestible, the work could make wheat more nutritious. 

“It’s a fringe benefit,” says Rustgi. “Not only can wheat be less toxic for celiac patients, it can be more nutritious for everyone. Maybe eating one bread slice, you will get enough, when earlier you were eating two bread slices.”

A third approach would directly target the genes responsible for the toxic proteins by breeding a grain without them.

For his part, Wildung is most excited about what a bread tolerable to celiac patients means to von Wettstein, “a loves-science kind of guy,” and his team. And while Wildung would be able to eat bread again, other celiac sufferers would be able to eat it without enduring the travails of illness and a diagnosis.

Infographic of celiac condition. Courtesy Children's Hospital Boston
Courtesy Children’s Hospital Boston

Panorama

Training the island police

by Larry Clark ’94

Bryan Vila (second row) joins police officers--his trainees--in a 1979 ceremony to celebrate Kosrae's status as a state in the newly formed Federated States of Micronesia.
Bryan Vila (second row) joins police officers—his trainees—in a 1979 ceremony to celebrate Kosrae’s status as a state in the newly formed Federated States of Micronesia. Courtesy Bryan Vila

When he learned about a job training police in the Pacific islands of Micronesia in 1978, former Los Angeles police officer Bryan Vila seized the opportunity to work in paradise. Little did he know that the hard lessons of teaching police officers from 2,000 different islands over six years would make him an expert on training in other cultures.

Vila, now a Washington State University professor of criminal justice and criminology at the Spokane campus, had been a Marine in Vietnam as well as a member of the sheriff’s department in Los Angeles, when he landed with a bang on an unpaved runway in Saipan.

The island-hopping plane rides, lack of communications, and tropical humidity were not the only things that surprised him. In Micronesia, with 12 different cultures and nine different languages in an area the size of the continental United States, he taught young police officers how to be effective at law enforcement while Vila himself learned to adjust to new cultural norms.

He was part of a group of police trainers and others who were assisting the former U.S. Trust Territory as it became the self-governing Federated States of Micronesia, with a goal of developing culturally appropriate institutions.

“Our role wasn’t to encourage American police methods on them. It was to help them find ways to meld our ways with the new legal system they adopted,” says Vila. “You try not to stuff what you’ve got to teach down their throat, but show them and help them develop a connection that would make sense for them. It’s nice to say, but actually doing it is horribly complicated.”

For example, Vila and another trainer had to address an incident after a homicide in which a “bunch of boys were out drinking and somebody urinates on somebody else. Someone takes offense, grabs a piece of concrete and caves the guy’s head in. The police were trying to find out who did it. They took one of the suspects and dangled him off this bridge, fifty feet off the water at night, until he talked.”

Vila was not shocked. “I’d been a barrio cop, and it wasn’t my first time on the merry-go-round. But we had to say, ‘Your job is not just to solve this crime, it’s to instill respect for the law and respect the law yourself.’”

He drew on the strong community and family connections of the police officers to explain the proper procedure, asking if they would treat their own brother that way.

Vila details this story and many others in his 2009 book Micronesian Blues: The Adventures of an American Cop in Paradise, which he co-wrote with his wife Cynthia Morris. They hoped it would impart some of Vila’s experiences to others training police around the world.

“When we wrote the book, Iraq and Afghanistan were in the forefront and we were uncertain about how the idea of the lessons learned in such a different seeming place could apply to somewhere other than Micronesia,” he says. 

He found the storytelling approach did help anchor universal ideas of the skills and knowledge for training police effectively in foreign cultures, as trainees absorb more and remember the captivating anecdotes. Vila received endorsements for the book from former ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, members of the military, and policing experts.

Some of those universal lessons, such as respecting local cultures without compromising core values and human rights, were often thorny ones to negotiate while he moved from island to island in Micronesia.

Vila enthusiastically embraced other lessons, like participating in local culture and learning some of the language. As part of his work, he took over as police chief on the island of Kosrae (pronounced Koash-RIE) because the former head officers died or were gone. Several months there taught Vila about really learning local customs.

“There’s not a lot of entertainment on this remote island, so these guys power-lifted and they had arms like my thighs,” says Vila. “So I’d be walking down the road talking to one of my cops about procedures or training, and I’d be holding hands with them. It was the way they worked, so it was the way I worked.”

From trying out betel nut chewing to learning the Kosraean language, he found ways to connect to his hosts’ cultures. Vila’s six years on the island taught him something else: Don’t underestimate the trainees. Even though many of them had faded uniforms and wore flip-flops, Vila realized that the cops he taught on Palau, Truk, and the other islands were there to serve as police and eager to learn.

Vila’s WSU research work now focuses mainly on sleep and fatigue among police officers and infantry troops in counter-insurgency operations, but he hopes his experiences with policing in Micronesia 30 years ago can help U.S. troops and contractors training police and military forces around the globe today.

“How do we train people to start to gain these skills and help cops and war fighters see these skills as part of their core field craft, so they value them just like they do being able to shoot straight or fight?” he asks.

Another lesson he tries to impart is sustaining the law enforcement establishment when the foreign trainer is gone. Vila says, “You need to find the right people to train up and become the cadre of trainers. Who are the best people with ties to the community who can be effective agents of change?”

For all of this to work, Vila says, it takes an investment of more than money. “It’s not enough to say, ‘We’ll fly a big airplane in here and dump off this stuff. We’ll give you two weeks of training and be on our way.’ That won’t make any change. Change takes time.”

Sports

Games everyone can play

by Larry Clark ’94

Battleship in the pool. Video frame courtesy University Recreation.
Video frame courtesy University Recreation

“You sunk my battleship!”

A familiar cry from the popular board game, but why is it ringing across Gibb Pool at Washington State University?

Because it is one of the latest offerings in WSU’s long-established and popular intramural sports program, joining perennial favorites flag football, basketball, soccer, and softball.

Battleship—the Gibb Pool version—has teams of four in canoes with buckets and shields. Their goal is simple: To fill their opponents’ canoes with water until they sink, while blocking water from filling their own canoe.

Matt Shaw ’06 MEd, assistant director of competitive programs and youth sports at University Recreation, says the battleship game started last fall and has been popular, but “traditionally flag football has been our biggest sport. In the mid-2000s we were getting nearly 300 teams,” he says.

The intramurals at WSU have long offered students and other members of the University community a chance to be active, meet people, and compete. Students who played basketball, soccer, or other athletics in high school can continue those activities. Others can sample new sports and games, thanks to a variety of leagues at different levels of ability.

“We usually have about 50,000 participations a year in intramurals. About 6,500 different people play every year, and 3,500–4,000 people play each semester,” says University Recreation Programming Director Joanne Greene ’02 MBA.

The sports program started with the Athletic Association of Washington Agricultural College in 1894, when faculty and students at WSU’s earliest incarnation each paid 50 cents a year to participate. While the games have changed, the spirit of friendly competition across the campus remains the same.

In 1897, the college held an “Open Field Day,” when students and faculty competed in such events as the one-mile bicycle race, pole vault, and hurdles. A faculty vs. seniors baseball game in 1898 got its own write-up in the first Chinook. The faculty won 46–14, due in part to the skillful play of chemistry professor Elton Fulmer and botany professor Charles Piper. 

Intramural flag football in 1963. Courtesy WSU Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections
Intramural flag football in 1963. Courtesy WSU Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections

As the institution grew, so did the intramurals. The program became more formalized as part of the Department of Physical Education. Competitions among fraternities, sororities, other living groups, and classes became a staple of campus life. In the 1930s, Washington State College basketball coach Jack Friel oversaw the expanding program of sports such as touch football, golf, and boxing.

“I spent more time on intramurals than I did on basketball,” said Friel in a 1982 interview. “I’d have to be up there nights, schedule facilities so it wouldn’t interfere with varsity. We had a lot of people participating. We had three courts for basketball at a time and about six games a night on each court.”

Like battleship and dodgeball now, that era also had its own smaller sports. Horseshoes, archery, and “playground ball” (a past name for softball) filled out the roster.

After a hiatus during World War II, the program continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s, and included a competition among living groups for overall points across the sports. In 1957–58, more than 3,500 participants from 38 organizations played 20 sports.

That tradition of participation has increased WSU’s reputation for intramural sports, and WSU has consistently won awards for marketing from the collegiate recreation association NIRSA. “We’ve always ranked pretty highly for the size of the school and the percentage of people who play,” says Shaw. “For the most part, students love it.”

But they don’t always love the officiating, says Shaw, something the program continues to improve on with better training for officials. “They might complain about that one night, that one call, and then come back and play all of our sports again,” he says.

The staff encourages those more vocal students to become officials themselves. “We have some people come out and ref and then say, ‘I didn’t realize how hard this was,’” adds Greene.

The intramural program employs 200–300 officials and supervisors each year, many of them officiating several sports and some gaining practicum credit for sports management or other degrees.

Greene and Shaw say they would like to see the program continue to innovate, offering popular sports along with golf tournaments at Palouse Ridge, sand volleyball, table tennis, badminton, and a variety of others. They are sure to draw participants.

“We’re really lucky that we’re in Pullman because we tend to be one of the main attractions. We’re not competing with a lot of other things,” says Greene. “At the same time, that gives us the responsibility to make sure we have things for students to do.”

In Season

Juice Grapes

by Tim Steury

Concord grapes--primarily a Vitus labrusca (fox grape) cultivar
Concord grapes—primarily a Vitus labrusca (fox grape) cultivar.

I should point out right up front that I haven’t tried unfermented grape juice in a long, long time. In fact, the last time I had it may have been as a teenager during communion at our teetotaling church, where grape juice was our “wine.”

So it’s intriguing now decades later how familiar the taste is as I sip a glass of Concord grape juice, most likely grown—in spite of the Massachusetts address on the bottle—in the Yakima Valley.

Familiar, and also quite delicious. Full-bodied, not too sweet, with a pleasing astringency and a distinctly Concord flavor that Craig Bardwell ’84 refers to as “foxy.” (That distinctive note is methyl anthranilate, a chemical also secreted by the musk glands of dogs and foxes.)

Bardwell is the chief viticulturist for the National Grape Cooperative operation in Grandview. National Grape, which owns Welch’s, produces about 60 percent of the country’s Concord crop. Bardwell says that 45–50 percent of that total is grown in Washington, almost entirely in the Yakima Valley.

National Grape processes about 10,000 acres of the valley’s nearly 22,000 acres of Concords. Grandview is also home to a Smucker’s processing plant and newcomer FruitSmart. Milne and TreeTop are in Prosser, and Valley Fruit is in Sunnyside. Most of the juice is concentrated and shipped elsewhere for bottling and further processing.

Michigan and New York also grow Concords for processing, says Joan Davenport, a soil scientist at the WSU Prosser research station. But Washington almost doubles their per-acre production, averaging about eight tons an acre.

The factors that are so beneficial to so many other crops give Washington that edge.

“Definitely some of it is weather,” says Davenport. Michigan and New York can suffer significant cold damage in both winter and spring. Also key to Washington’s advantage are low humidity, a long growing season, and lots of sunlight.

Craig Bardwell '84.
Craig Bardwell ’84

Besides overseeing production for National Grape, Bardwell has 14 acres of Concords in production and another ten being established. He says disease is almost nonexistent among Washington juice grapes.

“Any given year, I’d say less than five percent of the acreage gets sprayed with any kind of fungicide or insecticide.”

In contrast to eastern growers, Washington juice growers have no choice but to irrigate, says Davenport. Although Michigan and New York get much higher rainfall, getting that rain at the right time of year is not guaranteed.

In spite of how much Concords like the Yakima Valley, the grape actually originated in the east, near Concord, Massachusetts. In fact, the original Concord vine, planted in 1849, is still alive.

Ephraim Wales Bull planted seeds from the wild grapes around his home. He evaluated more than 22,000 seedlings before he was satisfied with having developed the perfect grape.

Although the Concord is primarily the native Vitus labrusca in origin, it is believed to have some European Vitus vinifera in its gene pool, likely hybridized during Bull’s search.

Bull’s grape won first place in the Boston Horticultural Exhibition in 1853 and was introduced to the market the next year. Thomas Bramwell Welch developed the first Concord grape juice in 1869.

Ephraim Bull with his original Concord grapevine, which still survives. Courtesy NGWI
Ephraim Bull with his original Concord grapevine, which still survives. Courtesy NGWI

Here in Washington, the Concord arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ron Irvine and Walt Clore’s The Wine Project reports that Concords were first planted in 1904 near Outlook. However, Bardwell says that during harvest last fall, a grower near Zillah told him that the two-acre block they were standing in was planted in 1902.

Clore, a horticulturist at the Prosser research station known to many as the “father of Washington wine,” launched his grape research with the planting of seven vinifera varieties and 20 labrusca hybrids.

In 1949, Ernest and Julio Gallo purchased 4,000 tons of Washington Concords to ship to California to make its famous Cold Duck.

As recently as the 1980s, says Bardwell, Milne Fruit in Prosser, where he worked at the time, made a product from Concords that went to Gallo.

Washington acreage is down from nearly 26,000 acres just a few years ago, a decline in spite of good prices and an actual juice shortage, says Bardwell.

Wine grape acreage has now surpassed juice grapes in Washington. Even though wine grape prices are on average about four times the price of juice grapes, because of the high expense of inputs and labor for wine grapes, a juice grape grower in a good year can earn nearly as much as he or she would for wine grapes.

Even so, recently resurging prices for juice grapes still are not at a level where it is a highly profitable crop, says Bardwell. Prices tend to be stable, so will generally not provide a big profit in a given year, as might more volatile crops such as wine grapes or hops.

Some of the declining acreage can be attributed to older or low-producing vineyards being taken out of production. They are not being replaced acre for acre with new plantings, as establishment costs are so high. Irrigation and trellis systems can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $8,000 per acre.

“Then you wait three years before you get a decent crop,” says Bardwell, “so your return on investment extends out there a long ways.

“Even when long-established growers consider expanding, they put pencil to paper,” and apples and cherries might make more sense. “Wheat, hay, everything is high,” he says. “And you get a crop the first year, with not nearly as high an establishment cost.”

On the nutrition front, let’s leave it at the fact that juice made from grapes with nothing else added is very good for you. Besides other nutrients, grape juice is very high in potassium. Potassium, in the form of potassium tartrate, is both a pain and a byproduct in processing. The crystals build up in the bottom of tanks and can clog filters. But cleaned from the tanks, the potassium tartrate is refined and used in, among other things, cosmetics and cream of tartar.

Despite the high establishment costs, however, Concords provide a steady market and are relatively easy to grow. Once the grapes are established, irrigation, fertilizer, and labor are about the only inputs. Having graced the valley landscape for over a century, they will not soon disappear.

Meanwhile, perhaps now I’ll go back and revisit the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Panorama

Gun Show Nation—a conversation with Joan Burbick

by Hannelore Sudermann

Handguns for sale at 'The Nation's Gun Show' at the Dulles Expo Center near Washington, D.C. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA.
Handguns for sale at “The Nation’s Gun Show” at the Dulles Expo Center near Washington, D.C. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA.

While researching her book Gun Show Nation, WSU English Professor Joan Burbick joined the National Rifle Association, visited gun shows around the country, and steeped herself in the history of American gun culture. Looking beyond the romance of the West, of Buffalo Bill and the magazine American Rifleman, she found issues of race, gender relations, moral crusades, and political and financial concerns.

As someone who writes nonfiction exploring the character and culture of America, Burbick has studied rodeo queens, examined Henry David Thoreau’s efforts to integrate natural history with human history, and looked into the American national culture of the 1900s. Now a professor emeritus, she is exploring violence and memory.

Recently, she participated in the PBS documentary After Newtown: Guns in America. The hour-long documentary, which aired in February, tapped into her gun show expertise. She talked about the politics, history, and patriotism—and fear. “Fear that if you don’t have a gun, you aren’t safe.”

A gun owner herself, Burbick recently visited with Hannelore Sudermann to talk about her experience researching and writing the book and exploring a subject that for some Americans is an obsession and for others taboo.

You wrote the book six years ago. Is it still relevant? Yes. I talk about it with journalists frequently. Now in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, many people inside and outside the United States are trying to understand what is happening in America.

What prompted the book? Two things. The first was a dinner with an old friend who is a Vietnam veteran. He said whenever he gets mad at the government he goes out and buys a gun. I realized that guns have become a form of political expression. And then I wondered, “What are guns saying?”

And the second, I was thrown out of the Moscow [Idaho] gun show. I had been working on a photography project, shooting pictures of the West. The gun show seemed like a good opportunity. But when I got out my camera, I was escorted out really fast.

I wanted back in. Since the event was held at the public fairgrounds, I checked with the city attorney and was allowed in to shoot before the public arrived. I stayed and many of the people I talked with gave me long lectures about politics and not guns. So I decided I had to do this project. As somebody who writes about American culture, I wanted to understand gun talk.

Joan Burbick. Courtesy The New Press
Joan Burbick. Courtesy The New Press

Why didn’t they want you shooting pictures of the attendees? I was told it was because of alimony. I was completely baffled by that response. I learned that women are seen as gun grabbers. In divorce, or through restraining orders, guns are taken away.

Are all gun shows the same? No. In different communities they vary tremendously. In some small towns there were people selling fudge and historical guns and had booths where they showed their collections. At bigger gun shows, there were huge discount gun markets. Many shows have racist, sexist, and neo-Nazi book exhibits.

What did you learn? When I started, I was very naive. I joined the NRA for three years and attended their grassroots training, annual legal seminar, and national meetings. I was surprised at how much the organization has a political message that directly benefits gun manufacturers. There is a surprising amount of violent language directed at other Americans who do not share the NRA’s political opinions. Even librarians who advocate for gun-free zones are described as domestic terrorists. Rhetorically, many speeches advocate insurrection if gun rights are restricted.

I also studied publications like American Rifleman and its predecessors back to the nineteenth century. For many decades the content had been about shooting sports, hunting, and equipment reviews. But the language changed dramatically in the 1970s. That was when the modern gun rights movement became part of American culture. Some key people inside the NRA felt the United States was headed in the wrong direction during and after the 1960s social movements. They felt the civil rights movement was benefiting minorities at the expense of the white majority. They began to see civil rights as civil riots, and “gun rights” emerged as a language to fight their vision of America threatened by crime.

Why are guns often a taboo subject? Many people don’t like to talk about guns. Most households in the United States do not have a gun of any kind. These Americans don’t want to read about guns. Many women, including my daughter, don’t want to own a gun. They don’t want guns in their homes. But women who don’t have guns also need to be part of the conversation. It’s also an issue for urban, low income, and minority communities. The NAACP advocated for decades to promote good laws to restrict gun sales and make gun manufacturers liable if they sell to gun stores known to have ties with criminals. But anyone who wants to talk about gun regulation is labeled a “gun grabber,” even if they’re gun owners themselves. The national conversation must include everyone.

What motivates gun culture? The fear of crime has motivated a lot of gun sales and beliefs. The industry is using it to promote more guns. For instance, conceal-carry laws have resulted in an entire range of new nano-weapons. There’s also the notion of the gun as an answer to social problems. That a person can, through purchasing a gun, resolve the problems he or she might have. And there is the romance of the gun as a symbol of power, entertainment, and even defiance.

What’s in it for industry? Guns are durable goods. They don’t wear out like a pair of jeans. To keep selling them you have to find different methods—new products, improved technology, more exciting advertising. Even movies can be used to trigger the purchasing of particular guns. Certain handguns and military style weapons become cool to own. The problem for industry is that the market needs to keep expanding. Somehow, I’d like to see some gun manufacturers say enough, we’re not going to sell certain firearms to the civilian market. But that will never happen.

Should people own guns? The question becomes not gun ownership, but what are the limits for civilian guns? To me it’s an urgent question because guns are technological machines that continue to become ever more lethal. Large magazines that make it possible to fire a large amount of bullets in a very short period of time do not belong in the domestic market no matter how thrilling they are to fire. In the gun rights world, some gun owners think that any restrictions limit their political freedom. We are in the absurd situation where police and military are under strict command when they engage their weapon, but some civilians are asking for no oversight at all. The question is what kind of lethality are we going to allow?

Is anything changing? After Newtown, Americans are now much more open to talking about guns, even though emotions are still high. We are asking what can we live with in our society. At the end of the day after finishing this book, this issue concerns me even more. There should be a shift from protecting gun rights to talking about how to make communities safe without arming everybody. There are other ways to make communities secure by addressing the big issues of jobs, housing, and education. Even smaller communities face crimes like drunk driving, domestic violence, and drugs. Any community with high unemployment and an alternative drug economy with easy access to guns will have a high rate of homicides. No matter where in the world it is. There’s no way to fix this by arming ourselves. Arming ourselves has allowed us to avoid the real solutions. It interferes with our ability to create public policy that really develops security for our communities. We even need simple things in cities like streetlights, safe parks, and places where kids can go and teenagers can work for a living wage. We need to invest in people, not guns.

How has the book been received? It has been trashed and praised on the Internet and in reviews. The debate online is raucous and often verbally violent. I have also been invited to talk about my book on radio and television and give readings at places like Harvard Medical School and the National Press Club. Intense debate about my book will often disappear until there’s another mass shooting. I find that quite unsettling. I never expected to write a book whose relevance is clear when people die. I would encourage everyone to go to a gun show in their community or nearby. There are 5,000 gun shows every year in the United States. Go look at the book exhibits. See what booths are there. Become part of the conversation. This is your community, too.

Infographic of gun ownership and feelings about gun sale laws in the United States
Using data from two different Gallup polls, we illustrate both gun ownership in the United States and feelings about gun sale laws. Gallup first started looking at preference for laws covering the sale of firearms in 1990. Sources: Gallup’s annual Crime poll and a USA Today/Gallup poll on gun laws conducted December 19–22, 2012

Panorama

Soldiering on

by Hannelore Sudermann

The veterans' monument at WSU Tri-Cities. Zach Mazur
The veterans’ monument at WSU Tri-Cities. Zach Mazur

The newest landmark on the WSU Tri-Cities campus is a sculpture of an open book with pages floating up from it to the sky. The bronze, titled Stories, is a statement for the military veterans who come to study at Tri-Cities.

What better way to show that there’s a place for them? And what better way to show the community that we’re here? asks Erick Flieger, the campus Vet Corps representative and one of around 130 military veterans attending WSU Tri-Cities last semester.

In the two years since campus leaders pledged to become a veteran-supportive campus, the school has increased its resources to accommodate veteran students and their families. At 8 percent of the student body, a disproportionately high number of students on campus are veterans.

Flieger transferred to WSU after two years of community college and 12 years in the military. School is a means of transitioning to civilian life. For him that meant moving his family to the community where he could pursue a degree in mechanical engineering. And for him and many others, it required redefining himself without the structure and stresses of his military past.

At minimum, you’re the odd one in a class full of 18- to 22-year-olds, says Flieger: “You feel like the old guy.”

Moreover, it can be confusing. These veteran students have come out of a strict and disciplined environment. They have been deployed abroad, lived in combat environments, and now they’re trying to concentrate in classes where the students around them don’t seem as focused: chatting, sending texts, checking their emails. Some veterans have significant hearing loss. In a room full of ambient noise, it becomes hard to concentrate, hard to hear the instructor, he says. And time management can be an issue. So can post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. “Simply put, stress for a veteran is different than stress for a regular student,” he says.

Artist Tom McClelland '87. Zach Mazur
Artist Tom McClelland ’87. Zach Mazur

A view into the veterans center on the Tri-Cities campus. Zach Mazur
A view into the veterans center on the Tri-Cities campus. Zach Mazur

For many combat veterans “the adjustment to the collegiate setting has been a challenge,” says Janice Kusch ’05 PhD, who works for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Many on the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill have not been getting the grades they wanted nor completing their degrees. Some are repeating courses, for example, and they’re not graduating before their money runs out, she says. It’s a national problem.

Recognizing that, in 2011 the Department of Veterans Affairs started a program to provide these students with access to a clinical social worker or psychologist on campus. In 2012, WSU Tri-Cities joined 12 other schools in hosting the VITAL (Veterans Integration To Academic Leadership) program. “Student veterans already have an extraordinary amount of life experience,” says Kusch, who manages the VITAL program. But they struggle with adapting to new rules, relating to their classmates, and coping with challenges like disrupted sleep patterns, which can lead to a host of issues, including difficulty concentrating and anxiety.

Through VITAL, clinical psychologist Steve Malone runs a one-man outpatient clinic to help students who may be having issues like stress, difficulty adjusting, anxiety, and PTSD. Malone also works with the University’s Access Center to meet the specific needs of the veteran students who may have injuries or disabilities. He also helps them find resources in the greater community and liaises with the VA hospital in Walla Walla if the student requires medical treatment. VITAL also offers a professional counseling component. And one unexpected benefit, says Flieger, is that Malone can be an advocate for the veteran students with the University. He can recommend things like smaller classes and greater resources from the perspective of a mental health professional, adding weight to the veteran students’ requests.

The WSU Tri-Cities Veterans Center, near Malone’s office, offers tables for studying and a sofa to hangout, and a headquarters for Veterans & Allies, a student club for veterans and friends. Through efforts like pizza parties, community charity events, and workshops on things like how to transform your military résumé to a civilian skills-based résumé, the students can bond and build relationships with their community.

Through the Vet Corps program sponsored by the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs, students can use the center to meet up with classmates having similar challenges. After living and working in a system with discipline, orders, and schedules, it is hard to be self-directed in a looser environment, says Flieger. Last fall he started a study-buddy program. “It’s like battle buddies,” he says, referring to the practice of assigning soldiers a partner in combat. “It’s connecting veterans with other veterans in the classroom.” The practice decreases stress, and provides the students a backup when it comes to notes, understanding the material, and preparing for exams. “We see benefits, with responsibility and accountability to buddies. They check up on each other,” he says.

Another layer of support brings in veteran tutors. Sometimes it can be discouraging to try to find help at the general tutoring center, says Flieger. This just makes it easier for them to get help with their classes from someone who knows what they’re going through.

As word gets out that the Tri-Cities campus is supportive of veterans, Flieger expects more will be drawn to study there. For him, the lure included cost of living, a larger community where his wife might find a job, and a small campus with small classes.

It’s a small enough community that everyone can feel a part of special projects, like the Stories sculpture, which was dedicated last October. The veteran students spent three years fundraising and collecting to build the monument and commissioned Tri-Cities artist Tom McClelland ’87 MFA to create it. The floating pages contain selected personal stories from the former soldiers, a tribute to all those touched by military service.

“The students built it to show they‘re not alone,” says Flieger, “that there’s a connection to campus and to other veterans.”

Feature

by Eric Sorensen

Jaak Panksepp set out to find the biology of emotions. He found the biology of animal consciousness.

Last July, an international group of scientists with “neuro” in their titles convened in Cambridge, England, to give good weight to a radical idea. The conference participants, including the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, sat through some 15 presentations and closed the day by endorsing 612 precisely struck words that, in effect, said many of our fellow animals, including all mammals and birds, also have consciousness.

Jaak Panksepp. by Robert Hubner
Jaak Panksepp. Robert Hubner

It’s an underwhelming notion taken on faith by those who commune with pets or embrace the fight for animal rights. But scientists hold to a tougher standard than the baleful look in a dog’s eyes. The question of animal consciousness has bedeviled them for centuries and drawn speculations from the likes of Charles Darwin and Nobel laureate Francis Crick, the Cambridge conference’s namesake.

Now an accomplished core of scientists cited the next best thing to a smoking gun—“the weight of evidence”—to say, “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” When it comes to the anatomy, chemistry, and physiology of our brains and the way they play into our consciousness, they said, we are not alone.

The keynote speaker that day was Jaak Panksepp, a proper, white-bearded figure with an accent that seems to blend his native Estonia and the New Jersey of his youth. The words the scientists endorsed could have easily come from his pen; as it was, roughly half had. The flag they were planting, while largely unnoticed by the outside world, was for Panksepp a career milestone, following several decades and countless hours documenting the nexus of activated brain regions, an animal’s behavior, and its attendant emotions.

At the start of his career, that third element, the animal’s emotional life, was terra incognita to psychologists, particularly the behaviorists who dominated the field.

“The ‘emotions’ are excellent examples of the fictional causes to which we commonly attribute behavior,” said B.F. Skinner.

“Because subjective phenomena cannot be observed objectively in animals, it is idle to claim or deny their existence,” said Niko Tinbergen, who won the Nobel Prize for work on animal behavior.

But Panksepp, WSU’s Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science, helped pioneer a new field of affective neuroscience. In the process he helped map out seven core emotional systems that lie deep in our brains. A stickler for language, he capitalized the systems, lest they be confused with their ordinary uses: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, SADNESS, and PLAY. For millions of years, these affects, or feelings, have guided animals to find food, fight off enemies, avoid predators, reproduce, raise young, cling to caregivers, and engage with others.

“These are our tools for living and they have consciousness as part of the endowment,” he says one morning in his McCoy Hall office, a two-room lair crowded with books, papers, and artistic prints of animals. “Feelings are useful. They help us survive. If they can’t help us survive, then by evolutionary theory they wouldn’t be there. But why people still debate, ‘Do other animals have feelings?’ is crazy because feelings are a very primitive form of survival.”

Every good feeling, he adds, “tells you that you are on the probable path of survival. Every bad feeling anticipates the probability of destruction.”

Perhaps as much as any scientist could—“there are only 24 hours in a day”—Panksepp has observed and documented the emotions on display in hundreds of experiments with chickens, rats, guinea pigs, cats, dogs, and other animals. In perhaps his most well known experiment, he found that rats emit hypersonic chirps akin to laughter when they are tickled. The work earned Panksepp the nickname “the rat tickler.” More to the point, Panksepp calls it “the first validated indicator of social joy that we’ve ever had in animal science.”

His work inspires a litany of ramifications beyond the already impressive notion of animal consciousness, which Panksepp calls the “capacity to have experience.” It has philosophical implications, not only for how we should treat animals, but whether we have free will and where we might search for the meaning of life. It suggests that our most basic values are biological in nature. That we’ve been encoded to anticipate the future. That our fundamental consciousness is thought and feeling, heart and head. That we’re innately optimistic. That some of our most vexing psychological problems, like depression, might be addressed through these emotional systems.

Panksepp himself has seen the raw power of the emotions he has fathomed. Twice, he’s lived through the up-at-4 a.m. existential fear that comes with a cancer diagnosis, including one that gave him less than a year to live. He’s endured the crushing grief of a lost child. Perhaps more than anything, he’s personified the life of a seeking animal, pulsing with enthusiasm over the prospect of new discovery.

Emotional trauma came early to Jaak Panksepp.

He was born in Tartu, the intellectual center of Estonia, in 1943, shortly before the Soviet Army broke the siege of Leningrad and began pushing German troops back south. For Estonians, this was not a good thing, as they had looked at the German invasion as freeing them from Soviet occupation and rule.

“When the German army was being pushed back, right through my father’s farm pretty much, the battle lines were moving back and forth, so the people living on the land had no idea what the hell was happening,” says Panksepp. “And once it was very clear that the Russians were going to push the Germans south, a lot of people felt they would not survive another occupation.”

The family packed what they could, headed to the Baltic Sea, and caught a boat to Poland. On board, a relative was pouring hot water into a jar when the jar broke. The Panksepp infant was underneath it and got third-degree burns.

“It was bad enough,” says Panksepp, “that there was every indication that I was going downhill and was going to die.”

Landing in Gdansk, an uncle found medicine on the black market. Years later, Panksepp’s mother told him it was morphine. He suspects it would have stemmed an infection-induced diarrhea, a major killer of sick children, while easing his pain enough to let him rest and fight the infection.

The family eventually emigrated to the United States and settled in an Estonian community in Delaware, then moved to the piney exurbs of Lakewood, New Jersey. His father bought land and planned a home in the mid-’60s; the teenage Panksepp designed it and helped build it. He went to the University of Pittsburgh, studying electrical engineering, trying his hand at writing fiction and poetry, and talking philosophy with a crowd of humanists that included the author-to-be John Irving.

“I had no conception of being a scientist,” Panksepp says.

But he did work as a night orderly in a psychiatric hospital. He saw residents with chronic psychosis, acute psychosis, in padded cells and straightjackets. At night, after putting patients to bed, he would read their charts and life stories. He developed an interest in psychology and the burning question that would go on to illuminate his life: What is an emotion?

Panksepp spent his senior year at Pitt powering through psychology courses and went to the University of Massachusetts for graduate studies in clinical psychology. The program was more focused on “behavioral modification” than treatments of specific emotional disorders, as mid-’60s therapies often attempted to change maladaptive behaviors through structured learning.

“Emotions weren’t even talked about,” says Panksepp. “There might be anxiety disorders, but that was a behavioral problem, being scared of spiders or something.”

But he got a Veterans Administration traineeship outside mainstream clinical psychology, seeing a range of medical issues at a local veterans hospital. He landed in an electroencephalography lab, at the time the best way to get close to the human brain. Plotting surges of electricity in general brain regions, it was like a low-resolution lens, “Galileo’s telescope compared to the Hubble.”

The chief of the lab, Arnold Trehub, asked Panksepp what he wanted to do.

“I’m really interested in emotion,” said Panksepp.

“At that moment I got the very best advice I’d ever gotten in my career,” he recalls, “which is, ‘Well, just do it.’ I knew what he was saying: ‘We’ve got the resources. That’s not my interest but if it’s your interest, do it.’ That’s the way education should be. Students should be allowed to ask the questions they really want to ask, which is much harder these days. It’s much more regimented.”

He had at his disposal rooms full of surplus electronics: relays, resistors, transistors, vacuum tubes. Remember: He had originally majored in electrical engineering. A lab tech, high school dropout, and World War II vet who had picked up surgery secondhand taught Panksepp how to precisely place electrodes into a rat’s brain.

“After that, it was do it myself,” he says.

The biology of emotions has intrigued scientists back to Charles Darwin, author of The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, which featured these illustrations.
The biology of emotions has intrigued scientists back to Charles Darwin, author of The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, which featured these illustrations.

In one of his first experiments, Panksepp stimulated a rat’s medial forebrain bundle, which researchers were exploring for its role in how an animal pursues a reward. Panksepp made an apparatus that would send a current into the bundle when a rat pushed a lever. The rat not only kept pushing the lever, it would energetically explore its environment. Panksepp wondered if this was different than a food reward, so he arranged to have sugar water injected into the rat’s stomach when it pushed the lever. If the animal was trying to satisfy its appetite, he figured, it would let up on the lever as it became full.

He then went to lunch. When he returned, the rat had overdosed on sugar. Clearly, it was motivated by something else.

That something else was SEEKING, a system that encourages foraging, exploring, investigating, curiosity, and expectancy. Paradoxically, it operates independent of what it might actually find, “a goad without a fixed goal.” It’s like radar that never turns off, or a party guest who keeps scanning the room while holding a conversation, or a web surfer who finds a right-priced pair of Air Jordan 11 Retro shoes on Amazon, but keeps looking.

“The Internet is the perfect metaphor for the SEEKING system: endless, endless seeking,” says Panksepp. “Remember, these animals pressed the lever until they crashed from exhaustion. No other reward does that.”

For his dissertation, Panksepp studied anger and rage in rats, again by stimulating specific areas of the brain via a lever, letting them turn the current on and off. This let Panksepp see if they liked the stimulation or not.

They liked predatory behavior, accompanied by stalking and certain modes of a “quiet biting-attack.” Panksepp realized this was a form of SEEKING.

But they would turn off the more aggressive, agitated “affective attack” that resembled anger. This, reasoned Panksepp, was a RAGE system, a phenomenon both physiologically and psychologically different from hunting other animals. It’s “a wonderful way to get your resources, get your way,” he says. But it also feels bad, as do the arousals of FEAR and PANIC, two other states animals turn off.

The persistence of SEEKING, reasons Panksepp, is an indication that evolution itself, the driving force behind these emotional innovations, is optimistic.

“The positive emotions carry life forward,” he says. “It’s the negative emotions that have to deal with crises. So our basic nature biologically is positive. I think that’s true. Think about it. If the negative emotions were prevailing, we’d be wretched creatures from the outset.”

Panksepp’s work took a more positive turn, so to speak, when he joined the faculty of Bowling Green State University in Ohio in 1972 and turned to the relatively upbeat CARE, PANIC, and PLAY systems. CARE is essential for raising offspring, a sort of built-in Spock manual. Rearing techniques and results will vary, but the drive to care will be there, particularly in females. And as Panksepp learned from some of his earliest work on bonding, measured by separation-distress or PANIC calls, CARE is backed by brain opiates. He administered tiny doses of opiates to dogs, guinea pigs, and chickens and recorded some of the most robust effects described in the research literature.

He also found that young animals given tiny doses of opiates like morphine cried less or not at all when separated from their mothers. The same could not be said of anti-anxiety medications, suggesting anxiety grows more from FEAR circuits than the PANIC circuits involved in social separation, loneliness, and sadness.

In other words, social bonds are mediated by brain opioids, says Panksepp.

“That appears to be one of the main sources of opiate addiction,” he says. “People that are isolated, they’ve got a lot of psychological pain, they learn to treat themselves.”

But when Panksepp tried to say as much in a paper submitted to a leading journal, the editor, without necessarily disagreeing, said it was “too hot to handle.”

The idea didn’t go over well elsewhere in the scientific community. In an interview last year with the magazine Discover, one of several large media outlets to have tapped Panksepp for his thoughts, he said, “we simply got rejected as being crazy.”

Funding dried up, forcing the closure of the canine lab he inherited. He was disappointed, but not necessarily daunted. Turning to guinea pigs, his lab demonstrated connections between the brain’s ancient periaqueductal gray, the medial thalamus, and the basal ganglia and separation calls. In 1982, he laid out four affective systems—EXPECTANCY/SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, and PANIC—in an article titled “Toward a general psychobiological theory of emotions.”

The hypersonic chirps of tickled rats, says Panksepp, are the 'first validated indicator of social joy' in animal science. Video frames courtesy Jaak Panksepp
The hypersonic chirps of tickled rats, says Panksepp, are the “first validated indicator of social joy” in animal science. Video frames courtesy Jaak Panksepp

PLAY was just around the corner as he studied rats gamboling about in various contexts: alone, with family, after being separated certain lengths of time, bouncing, touching, jumping on one another, wrestling, often in front of cameras used to tease out measurable behaviors.

In one experiment, he removed their neocortex, the most recently evolved part of the brain. They continued to play, showing that the PLAY system, like the other core emotions, is a primitive process embedded deep in the ancient parts of the brain. But it also goes a long way to develop a sophisticated, social animal. It’s not all fun and games.

One day at Bowling Green, then-postdoc Brian Knutson asked if rats might somehow be vocalizing during play. He and Panksepp set up equipment to listen for it and soon detected playful chirps well above the range of human hearing, at 55 kilohertz. They later found that, after about 20 minutes of play, the positive chirps were outnumbered by negative, 22-kilohertz “complaints.”

It’s as if they were tired children, griping about this slight or that. It also suggests that play helps animals engage in a potentially positive way, negotiate rules and limits, and establish group dynamics in a world that changes too fast for genes to keep up.

Panksepp’s thinking on this extends to humans.

“If we’re taking real play away from our kids, what do we have?” he asks. “We don’t have fully socialized children. We also don’t have the benefits in the brain, and we know play activates all kinds of genes up in the cortex. That brain area is not needed for play but play programs the cortex. And the children will have a terrible desire to play. What do we call that desire? At least in some of the kids it’s ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”

Late in his tenure at Bowling Green, Panksepp was rounding out his list of seven affective systems, adding LUST, as in sexual excitement, and CARE, or nurturance. Around the same time, trauma returned to his life.

On Good Friday in 1991, a car driven by his 16-year-old daughter was broadsided at an intersection by a drunk driver. She and three friends were killed.

Panksepp writes about the moment in his recent book, The Archaeology of Mind (Norton 2012), bringing a personal perspective to a chapter on the GRIEF/PANIC system.

“That night, I cried for the first time since I was a child,” he writes. “For a long while I experienced deep grief and depressive sadness with little hope of resolution. It did not help, indeed it perplexed my mind, that this was happening to me, as I was a neuroscientist who was trying to empirically illuminate the ancient brain mechanisms of separation distress, one of the major emotional sources of our earliest social bonds.”

Panksepp softened his “descent into darkness” with antidepressants, but in limited doses, fearing the drugs could cause long-term changes in his brain chemistry. For the most part, he says, he avoided chronic depression through the love and care of his wife, the poet Anesa Miller, and friends.

Other people might someday get help for depression thanks to other Panksepp efforts and insights. Two years ago, he and graduate student Jason Wright ’09 reported in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews that they induced depression-like behavior—fewer high-frequency chirps, eating less, exploring less—in rats who received electrical stimulations in the dorsal periaqueductal gray. The midbrain area controls perceptions of pain and the fight-or-flight response, as well as emotions of grief, panic, and social loss.

Panksepp and Wright wrote that similar efforts could pinpoint the brain systems and chemistries underlying depression and lead to more effective medicines. The study was funded by the Hope for Depression Research Foundation, where Panksepp was a research co-director.

In a six-year stint at Northwestern University after Bowling Green, he helped with the development of GLYX-13, a fast-acting antidepressant now in Phase II clinical trials. The GLYX molecule is probably amplifying positive feelings of brain regions that are chronically underactive and get disengaged in depression.

“SEEKING is the thing that you want in a healthy mind,” says Panksepp. “And depression is amotivational. People describe that they no longer have the enthusiasm to do things, and they also describe a special negative feeling, a psychological pain. We thought that this PANIC system is the source of this psychological pain that leads to an amotivational state. It gradually takes away the urge to explore in the world.”

Infographic of guinea pig brain during separation distress. Based on an illustration from 'Feeling the Pain of Social Loss,' Panksepp, Jaak. Science, October 10, 2003
Areas of the guinea pig brain activated during separation distress are similar to areas of the human brain activated during sadness. This suggests that human feelings may arise from the instinctual emotional action systems of ancient regions of the mammalian brain. Based on an illustration from “Feeling the Pain of Social Loss,” Panksepp, Jaak. Science, October 10, 2003

At the start of his keynote address at the Cambridge conference on animal consciousness, Panksepp mentioned that he has trouble maintaining his blood-glucose levels after a bone marrow transplant a few years ago.

“So if I kind of sit down at some point, I won’t be unconscious,” he said. “But if I fall down, I will be unconscious. So if I sit, just chuckle. But if I fall, go for help.”

It’s been a tough road for Panksepp, but he’s still standing.

The bone marrow transplant came after the second of two lymphoma diagnoses. The first was discovered in his lung just as he left Bowling Green in the late ’90s. He was given a year to live, reacting to the doctor’s prognosis, he says, “just like anyone else. It’s an existential crisis. You feel like your legs have been knocked out from under you. You feel like it’s the crisis of your life.”

A person who has not wondered about his or her feelings, says Panksepp, has not lived a full human life. But those very feelings, no matter how well understood, can nonetheless be torture, as they were during the bleak moments in which Panksepp wondered about his demise.

“You get up at four o’clock in the morning, saying, ‘Oh my god,’” he says. “You can’t get back to sleep. Emotions are so powerful that no matter how much you understand them, they will still be incredibly powerful forces in your life, everyone’s life.”

His first tumor, it turns out, was a treatable lymphoma, not the small-cell carcinoma that was diagnosed at first. He beat that, and then about ten years later, after joining the WSU faculty, he endured several ineffective chemos before getting a stem-cell transplant at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and beating another bout of lymphoma in his stomach and bones.

The outcomes of his long-fought scientific battles have been more mixed.

Over more than four decades, he has authored or co-authored more than 400 papers. His h-index, a measure of productivity and impact, is higher than most every other WSU scientist and comparable to members of the National Academy of Sciences. Douglas Watt, a colleague at the Boston University School of Medicine, calls Affective Neuroscience “brilliant and groundbreaking” and a “seminal publication” on emotion and the brain.

Writing in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, Watt notes that science has struggled to establish tests to characterize the links between neural processes, emotions, and consciousness.

“Although this question gets much explicit and even at times rather hot debating,” Watt says, “there are few hypotheses generated that lead directly to testable predictions, and Panksepp has done a great service in outlining some here.”

Three years ago, Paul Sheldon Davies, a philosophy professor at the College of William and Mary, compared Panksepp to Darwin, “the nineteenth century’s most audacious naturalist of the history of life on earth.”

“Panksepp is one of today’s most audacious naturalists of the mammalian mind,” Davies wrote, adding: “his discoveries and innovations in affective neuroscience are changing our knowledge of the minds of all known living things.”

“My field still says you cannot study the mind of an animal,” Panksepp says one afternoon. “And I said you can in the emotional realm, because we can ask whether the actual brain circuits are rewards and punishments. And that was the first experiment I did at the VA hospital.”

From then until now, he followed that fundamental question: What is the biological underpinning of an emotion? The techniques have improved. Science will bring more refinements. But for the first time, says Panksepp, science has “a rather thorough understanding of the primal network structures of emotional life” and the animal world’s shared foundation of affective consciousness.

To this day, Panksepp will talk freely about scientific disagreements large and small but in a nearly objective, rancor-free way. He understands he is working in an inherently conservative area of science filled with skeptics. Still, he’s chafed by scientists moved more by the weight of history and their own idiosyncratic points of view than the weight of evidence.

“Simply saying animals have emotional feelings puts you into the radical camp where no one wants to be unless they have the conviction that they’re on the right side,” he says. “Certainly I always thought I was on the right side. The times are moving with me.”

Feature

by Hannelore Sudermann

Every wedding needs something old.

Why couldn’t it be one of the grandest old hotels in the Pacific Northwest, says Dana Schroader ’07.

Wedding decoration. Crystal Toreson
Crystal Toreson

It’s mid-afternoon and about 250 guests are due to arrive at the Fairmont Olympic in a few hours for an elegant evening wedding. Schroader, dressed discreetly in a black skirt and jacket, slips through the two-story lobby of the 1924 Seattle landmark toward the Spanish Ballroom, stopping at the base of the stairs to straighten a welcome table. She steps up to the foyer, which is dotted with tables for a cocktail hour, and pushes open the gilded doors to the ballroom, where a florist is dressing tables with cream cloths and towering floral arrangements rich with hydrangeas and roses.

“Oh, this is a pretty wedding,” says Schroader, surveying the room and opening her list and seating chart to run a quick check. She sweeps past the cake table to pick up the bride and groom topper, takes another look around the room, and heads down a long cool hallway to the kitchen, where a pastry chef is assembling and frosting the cake.

There are a lot of moving pieces in a wedding this size. While Schroader stops to check in on the prep for the à la minute meal service, the bride dresses in a room upstairs with her bridesmaids. A photographer is posing the groom and the men of the wedding party on an upper landing of the lobby. The bride’s father in his tuxedo strolls through the reception site. A worker delivers the wine and champagne. And out-of-town guests check into their rooms.

Schroader’s job as the hotel’s catering sales manager, or more simply, wedding coordinator, touches on many components of the field of hospitality, including the lodging of the family and guests, planning and coordinating the cocktails and meals, and running the event itself with its waiters, bartenders, and musicians. And she gets to do it in the heart of a city that she loves in a spectacular setting. The job is not what she imagined when she was working after classes at Pullman’s Holiday Inn Express and Fireside Grill to gain experience and pay for college. “It’s better,” she says.

Washington State has a $16.4 billion travel and tourism industry, according to the Washington Tourism Alliance, making it the fourth largest industry in the state. The leisure and hospitality sector alone, which includes restaurants, hotels, and motels, employs about 330,000 Washington workers.

Dana Schroader '07, catering sales manager, helps set up a wedding in the historic Spanish Ballroom at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle. Crystal Toreson
Dana Schroader ’07, catering sales manager, helps set up a wedding in the historic Spanish Ballroom at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle. Crystal Toreson

Like Schroader, many of the Washington State University students who graduate with a hospitality business management degree go straight from Pullman to a management job in the industry, says Nancy Swanger, director of WSU’s School of Hospitality Business Management. One reason for that is the rigorous business training they get in Pullman, and now at WSU Vancouver as well. About 25 percent of their curriculum is in core business subjects including finance, business law, economic statistics, and accounting.

The program requires 1,000 hours of industry or internship experience before a student can graduate. “It allows them to have practical experience to compare to the theoretical things they have learned in class,” says Swanger. “And recruiters want experience.”

But that’s just a part of it. As the concept of hospitality grows and changes, the school is adapting, too. It must, to prepare its students for an ever-changing industry.

Back in 1932, when Washington State College introduced its hospitality program, no one had yet imagined an airport hotel, a drive-through restaurant, a convention center, or the boom of international travel. According to old program paperwork, the hospitality degree was founded simply for the purpose of “training men in hotel operations and women in dietetics.”

Georgina Petheram Tucker ’33, now 102, was a student in Pullman when the Washington State College introduced a limited curriculum in hotel management. “Possibly no single action involving curricular expansion ever brought [WSC President] Holland more praise from the College’s constituency than did this one, as compliments continued to reach him from year to year,” according to the book E.O. Holland and the State College of Washington. The Spokane-born girl found more than a major. She found a role shaping a young industry.

Tucker’s degree led her to housekeeping and dining services work in Spokane, Boise, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and a 42-year career with Westin Hotels. Her jobs in housekeeping and later as Westin’s corporate food director included menu creation, staff training, and developing food service plans. As she grew in her career, her focus grew from simply cleaning rooms and coordinating schedules to managing issues of health and safety, staff diversity, and working with unions. “She really professionalized housekeeping in hotels,” says Swanger.

“She is such an amazing person,” says Swanger. The toilet paper end folded into a triangle is her most amusing legacy. “It’s called the Tucker point.”

After retiring, Tucker worked as an industry consultant and wrote The Science of Housekeeping and The Professional Housekeeper, which for years were used for training industry-wide.

As the years passed, the Washington State program grew. A page tucked in with the hospitality program’s archival materials from the 1940s shows how the school recruited new students. “Our graduates have the advantage of stepping out of college into a new and uncrowded field… rapid advancements are assured on securing a position, for the men now actively engaged in the work have nothing but the school of hard knocks as a teacher.”

In 1942, the program was temporarily halted because of war. It started up again in 1946, but recast as a training program for hotel, motel, and restaurant managers and relocated from Home Economics to the newly-formed School of Business and Economics. Early coursework included personnel administration and institutional purchasing, and was later enhanced to include the law of innkeeping and tourism.

Jerry Burtenshaw ’56, who enrolled in 1952, says it wasn’t all numbers and textbooks. He’ll never forget the interactive class in how to break down a pig carcass. It made sense back then, he says, because it was valuable to know the process for anyone wanting to go into restaurant management. And he did, since his family operated the Alpine Cafeteria in Bellingham.

“The program was only 20 years old,” he says. “It was still in the embryo stages.” But the country was seeing a boom in the industry. Chains like Hilton and Sheraton were fast expanding, and Holiday Inn had started up in 1952. The demands of a mushrooming industry and the influx of Korean War veterans studying hospitality on the G.I. Bill “really gave it a big push,” says Burtenshaw.

The program took advantage of the campus resources, putting students to work in the dining halls. “We’d go in early each morning and help set up the food,” says Burtenshaw. They were also involved in creating plans for what would become the Rotunda Dining Center.

Burtenshaw’s training served him when his family expanded their local Alpine Cafeteria into a major industrial catering business with outlets in Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, as well as concessions contracts at places like Husky Stadium, the King Dome, the Tacoma Dome, and Joe Albi Stadium in Spokane. As more people dined out and sought food at entertainment venues, the business grew. And as the nation’s hospitality industry evolved with expanding restaurant chains, hotels, and motels, the program adapted again.

Brian McGinnis '77 led the extensive renovation of the Alderbrook Resort and Spa on Hood Canal and now oversees the management of the century-old resort. Matt Hagen
Brian McGinnis ’77 led the extensive renovation of the Alderbrook Resort and Spa on Hood Canal and now oversees the management of the century-old resort. Matt Hagen

In the 1970s, Brian McGinnis ’77 found his way into the hospitality program and discovered that he enjoyed the coursework, which included an internship requirement. To fill it, he took a summer post as maître d’ at the Rosario Resort in the San Juan Islands, tying together his training and his love of beautiful places.

After graduation, McGinnis went to Hawaii for a vacation and stayed for a job at Westin Hotel’s resort in Waikiki. He became front office manager, was transferred, and started to climb the corporate ladder. “People think of hospitality as just minimum wage and tip jobs,” he says. “But where else can you start out as a bellman or dishwasher and move up to general manager? There are many rags to riches stories within hospitality.”

Eventually, McGinnis went to work for Westin’s development group and had a role on a number of projects including the Westin Tokyo. In 1997, after 11 years in development, he left the company and stepped into one of the most interesting resort projects to take place in Washington in the last 20 years: the Alderbrook Resort.

The old Hood Canal vacation site was up for sale. The facility had been established in 1913 as a collection of camp tents outfitted with potbelly stoves and accessible only by water. Over the years, it changed hands, a highway came in, buildings went up, and with each new owner, it engaged a new generation of guests.

A family with a home nearby asked McGinnis to help them make an offer. It didn’t suit the Alderbrook’s owners, who instead sold the property for more money to another buyer. McGinnis went on to other projects, but was brought back in in 2001 when the new owner, who hadn’t made the place profitable, was looking to sell. This time Jeff Raikes, a former Microsoft executive, and his wife Tricia ’78 were interested in restoring the property. With McGinnis coordinating the negotiations, the deal succeeded.

Buying the property was only the first step, says McGinnis, pointing to an aerial photograph of the site. The overhaul involved moving a half-mile of the highway back into the hillside. Then it required taking down some buildings, restoring others, and building new elements to harmonize the architecture of the entire place—which included 21 small cabins from the 1940s. “It had been operated as a funky old inn,” says McGinnis. “It was in rough shape.”

Once the sale was complete, “I got in the car with my construction manager and my designer and said we’re going on a road trip,” says McGinnis. “We went to the Salish, Semiahmoo, Skamania, and the Salishan, all the S’s.” He wanted his team to see each Northwest resort and pick the brains of the owners and operators to “understand what we should be doing here to make it successful.”

The Alderbrook project included new kitchens, meeting rooms, a spa, a bar, waterfront dining, a ballroom, and repairs to the marina. At the same time it protected the saltwater shoreline as well as the freshwater streams that run through the site. It enhanced the Northwest vibe with elements like peeled wood posts in the lobby, pine floors, fireplaces, works from artists of the Skokomish tribe, and inviting furniture.

The whole idea was to create the feel of an old family beach house—only in the hands of a new tech-friendly generation, says McGinnis. That in itself was a good notion, since a number of long-established Northwest families have their beach retreats nearby.

Alderbrook reopened in June 2004 as a full-service upscale hotel and resort. Not everyone can own a house on the beach, says McGinnis, but with Alderbrook they can have that experience.

Washington has been fortunate when it comes to investors willing to rescue and restore historic hospitality landmarks. In Spokane, thanks to a couple willing to venture into the hotel business, the 1914 Kirtland Cutter gem known as The Davenport was saved from the wrecking ball. The downtown grand hotel had been shuttered since shortly after Matthew Jensen ’88 attended his senior prom there.

Jensen, who credits his time as one of the first Cougars to study at Institut Hôtelier “César Ritz” in Le Bouveret, Switzerland, with his understanding of luxury hotels, is today the Davenport’s director of marketing.

Matt Jensen '88 is head of marketing at Spokane's Davenport Hotel. Bruce Andre
Matt Jensen ’88 is head of marketing at Spokane’s Davenport Hotel. Bruce Andre

Jensen’s career route back to Spokane started with a job as a resort and management trainee at the Hyatt Hotel and Spa in Monterey, California. He soon transferred to the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco. He next took a job with Kimpton Hotel Group, which has boutique hotels in cities around the country. He became Kimpton’s director of sales at the San Francisco Hotel Monaco, moved to Seattle to open another Hotel Monaco, and then became the regional manager overseeing the Monaco, the Alexis, and the Hotel Vintage Plaza in Portland.

To succeed in hospitality, you have to be ready to respond and adapt, even if it means moving from hotel to hotel, says Jensen. “It’s a 24-hour-a-day business. And the only thing you can absolutely count on is change.”

One day a friend in the business encouraged him to look into Spokane’s Davenport Hotel, which had been closed for 15 years but was in the midst of a $30 million restoration. He moved back to his hometown and took the post of director of marketing for the hotel. In just five months, he put together a sales team and a marketing plan to launch the reopening. Eleven years later, the Davenport owners have added a tower to the hotel and picked up the boutique Hotel Lusso across the street to form The Davenport Collection. They are planning still more projects. It’s quite a success for an old grand hotel that was nearly demolished, says Jensen.

As the hotel has modernized, so have the operations. The Davenport’s guests are more savvy and traveled than ever, says Jensen. They have high expectations and many take the extra time to research hotels before making their choice. And the hotel has had to keep apace, says Jensen. “There are so many ways now to show people what you’re like.”

Back in the 1980s, when Jensen was at WSU, the school ran a Seattle Center for Hotel and Restaurant Administration based at Seattle University. Students could spend the last two years of their degrees working in hotels and restaurants in the highly-populated Puget Sound region. The program ended in 1998 after funding was reduced.

It was a real loss, says Burtenshaw. But he and other alumni have created other ways to connect industry leaders with the students in Pullman. In 1981, Burtenshaw and his wife Angelina started a lecture series in honor of their son Brett, who died a few months before his freshman year as a hospitality major at WSU. Each year, the program brings in speakers from around the industry like the co-founder of Panda restaurants, Joe Fugere ’84 of Seattle’s Tutta Bella, Napa Valley vintner Stan Boyd ’78, the chairman of McCormick & Schmick’s seafood restaurant management group, and most recently the president of the Holland America cruise line. The diversity of speakers shows that there are so many directions to go in the hospitality industry, says director Swanger.

Dana Schroader’s colleague Sarah Carter '05 plans meetings and stays for professional clients. Crystal Toreson
Dana Schroader’s colleague Sarah Carter ’05 plans meetings and stays for professional clients.

Scene from a wedding coordinated by Dana Schroader. Crystal Toreson
Scene from a wedding coordinated by Dana Schroader ’07. Photos by Crystal Toreson

Food alone offers so many opportunities. Under the guidance of faculty and alumni advisors, the culinary program has been enhanced to reflect the growing focus on food in the travel and hospitality industry. The school now has a commercial kitchen, and is using local produce and expertise in training students in the essentials of cuisine.

The school also recently added a degree in wine business management. Given that there are now nearly 700 wineries in the state, it’s time, says Swanger.

As hospitality is growing in new and unexpected directions, the school is working to respond. Cruise lines are bringing a new wave of tourists into our region, and they’re spending extra days in our hotels and exploring our cities and landmarks. And the state now has more than 30 casinos, many of them with accompanying hotels, restaurants, and entertainment stages. Those are more opportunities for exploration and training, says Swanger.

The school is already diving into the new senior living operations around the state. Much more than senior apartments and cafeterias, they offer restaurant-style dining, housekeeping and linen services, outings for shopping or cultural events, even a concierge. The people who plan, coordinate, and manage these places use the same skills WSU’s hospitality students learn on campus, says Swanger. In 2011, WSU offered its first course in senior living management, tapping into several industry experts from around the state to help teach the course.

More recently, alumni like McGinnis, who now leads the board of advisors for the hospitality program, encouraged Swanger to push the curriculum to include hotel development. A class debuted last spring bringing hospitality students together with students in architecture and construction management to learn first-hand from developers and designers the process of siting and building a new property. They learned about siting projects from representatives of Marriott, land use and design planning from architects Degen & Degen, budget from hotel developer Larry Culver ’64, and revenue projections from the company that manages the Salish Lodge.

Hospitality students today are still grounded in those original subjects of management and food service, but they’re also learning how to build hotels, run senior living campuses, address changing consumer behaviors, and work in an international setting.

“I think that business foundation helps us right away,” says Sarah Carter ’05, who works with Schroader at the Fairmont Olympic. When Carter came to the hotel in 2007, her job was in conference services running events like small corporate board meetings and large conferences. She has recently moved over to sales, where she plans meetings and hotel stays for corporate clients, advisory boards, sports teams, and government delegations.

Since they are trained in so many areas of the business, graduates like Carter can adapt quickly, moving from one area of the business to another, says Swanger. Carter says her time abroad through the program at César Ritz was probably the best part of her degree. “You really learn how to work with other cultures and overcome language barriers,” she says. “Our industry is definitely global.” Carter also credits the industry classes, the help in knowing what to put on her resume, how to dress for her job, how to interview, and how to adapt. “The professionalism they taught us, that really gave us an edge.”

Feature

by Peter Chilson

In the impenetrable Dogon highlands of Mali, the storm of war is coming.

An excerpt from We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali

Washington State University English Professor Peter Chilson happened to be in Mali in March 2012 when a military coup ended the country’s two decades as a model democracy. Within days, the Malian army in the troublesome northern part of the country collapsed. As a result, Tuareg and Islamist fighters claimed 60 percent of the country, creating a safe haven for al Qaeda and other Islamist forces and threatening West African stability and European security.

Since the coup and collapse of the north, Chilson has been reporting on the country’s crisis for Foreign Policy magazine and, in a rather remarkable publishing feat, producing a fast-track e-book, We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali, which was published in December by Foreign Policy and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Chilson’s relationship with Africa began with his Peace Corps assignment teaching junior high school English in Bouza, Niger. Since then, he estimates he has spent six years of his life there, traveling, writing, and researching the history of Mali and other West African countries.

In his new book, Chilson muses briefly on what takes him back repeatedly to the Sahel and the southern Sahara: “The land is so big and so extreme. The other reason, and maybe it’s not all that surprising, is that the people who live there are so resilient.” Over lunch recently, Chilson elaborated on the draw of the area, noting the “feeling of being in a vastly different place.”

On top of the area’s exoticness, however, “Malians are very open,” he says. “You can enter a village and present yourself, looking for a place to stay, and they’ll welcome you with open arms. It’s a unique place in Africa. It’s what makes this war so tragic.”

Chilson’s book and his articles for Foreign Policy, one of which we reprint here, are an absorbing blend of history and current affairs, lending unique insight on an unexpectedly troubled country and an unfolding and disturbing conflict of culture.

The town of Bandiagara, population 12,000, sits on a plateau of smooth sandstone bluffs, grass, acacia, and palm trees that ends at an astonishing complex of cliffs so high and abrupt that any of them on a dusty day can surprise a traveler as if a piece of the globe has suddenly broken away. Bandiagara’s dirt homes, shellacked with mud stucco, bear the red tinge of this land’s iron-rich soil, farmed for centuries by the Dogon people and roamed by Fulani and Tuareg herders. Homes stand along wide dirt streets useful for driving cattle and sheep to market, and at dawn and dusk buildings glow under a dusty sun. A few miles east of town, the cliffs drop 1,600 feet, grooving sharply in and out of the plateau along a 100-mile front, running from the south to the northeast like the edge of a saw. For over a thousand years, the cliffs have been a natural hideaway for one tribe or another, most recently the Dogon, a few hundred of whom came here 700 years ago to flee the Mali Empire’s embrace of Islam.

Peter Chilson with friends in Mali. Courtesy Peter Chilson
Courtesy Peter Chilson

This history means more now that Bandiagara—once popular with European and American trekkers—is settling into a new role as border post and garrison town facing al Qaeda-affiliated jihadi groups spread across Mali’s vast Saharan north. France and its allies, namely the United States, call northern Mali a jihadi “safe haven” that threatens the West. As a result, a U.N.-supported multinational African attack on northern Mali is moving closer to reality. U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney repeatedly cited Mali in his October foreign-policy debate with President Barack Obama. But the jihadi takeover in the north, now six months old, carries a touch of bitter irony in Bandiagara as history’s tide washes back across this town that 160 years ago was capital of the Toucouleur Empire. Founded by El Hadj Umar Tall and ruled by the code of sharia, a strict interpretation of Islam, he reportedly killed more than 100,000 people across inland West Africa during a reign that lasted more than four decades. French force of arms and tribal uprisings brought it down in 1893.

Yet Mali was not yet a campaign issue on May 8 when I drove into Bandiagara in late afternoon with Isaac Sagara, a Dogon friend who grew up in a Christian family in a village just below the plateau. Isaac was guiding me on a trip along the edge of Mali’s northern zone, a strange new borderland that no one has quite figured out how to draw on a map. Some news agency maps show Mali cut in half along a razor-straight line that runs from west to east, while others show a wavier division, with the new border sloping off to the northeast roughly parallel to the Bandiagara cliffs. In any case, Mali, shaped like a top-heavy hourglass, is today divided at the narrow middle. Bandiagara sits square on the border between what remains of Mali’s tattered government in the south and jihadi control in the north.

Isaac, at the wheel of our aging Land Cruiser, hummed and smacked his lips through a mouthful of mango. I think the tune was “Amazing Grace,” but he lost the melody in the chewing. He liked “Rock of Ages” and French hymns that I didn’t know, never breaking into words, just the outlines of song. He carried plastic bags of peanuts and dates in his pockets and put mangoes on the dashboard. He told stories about guiding tourists across the Dogon cliff country and about people he met in the international aid business, like the American Peace Corps volunteers in a Dogon village who obsessed about building a hot tub out of clay. Once, working a rural health project, he was stranded in a village cut off by monsoon rains during a cholera outbreak. “Terrible,” he told me. “A dozen people died.” Then he’d pluck a mango off the dashboard, bite into it, and peel back the skin with his teeth, all with one hand on the wheel and another hymn spraying from his lips.

I’d been in Bandiagara a dozen times over the past 25 years. Here and across Mali, soldiers have always kept a low profile, in my experience. My tensest encounter in this town had been to fend off a pesky cliff “guide” who kept shouting “hakuna matata,” the Swahili words for “no problem” immortalized in Disney’s The Lion King. Mali, even under the army dictatorship that endured nearly three decades until 1991, has never embraced military culture like other African countries. Mali’s army, in the words of a Western diplomat I met in Bamako, the Malian capital, “was never a military of soldiers. Most are farmers putting in the time for a paycheck.”

That army, stressed by the growing Tuareg rebellion in the north, took back control this year in a March coup, ending 21 years of democracy. Since the coup, however, the army, true to the diplomat’s words, has ruled without the curfews and endless checkpoints that define other African military governments. In the streets of Bandiagara and Bamako, soldiers generally keep to themselves, though there is evidence that the army command structure is in decay. In October, on a remote road near the border with Mauritania, Malian soldiers shot to death 16 unarmed Muslim clerics traveling from Mauritania to Bamako for a conference. The attack was apparently unprovoked.

But in May, Bandiagara looked like a military camp, expecting an invasion at any moment. Isaac drove slowly across the town square, where an armored vehicle with a cannon and crew of soldiers occupied the concrete center island protected by sandbags. As we turned down another road, Isaac slowed the car and fixed his eyes on a large gun mounted in the back of a parked pickup truck. A soldier was standing behind the gun at the ready. “Now that is very serious,” he said, shaking his head with a broad smile and both hands on the wheel. “We aren’t used to seeing the army out in the open like this.” His mood lightened as if the sight encouraged him. Later he said, “I can tell you that by December, Mali’s nightmare will be over. Our soldiers will retake the north.”

“Really?” I said, squinting, trying to keep the doubt out of my voice.

“I’m certain of it.”

Isaac’s hope for action is not baseless, though it likely won’t happen in December. On November 11, leaders of the Economic Community of West African States settled on a military plan to retake northern Mali with 3,300 soldiers, mainly from Nigeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The plan awaits U.N. Security Council approval, which means action against the jihadists is a real possibility. The U.N. decision is still months away.

The French have committed aid similar to what they (with help from Britain and the United States) gave the rebels who killed Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi last year: arms and intelligence support, including surveillance drones. France, which once ruled 2 million square miles of West Africa, including Mali, helped end Qaddafi’s rule, inadvertently releasing a flood of arms from his looted arsenals into the hands of hundreds of battle-hardened Malian Tuareg mercenaries he trained for his armies. In January, these men launched a war for an independent Saharan state they call Azawad, taking Mali’s north and splitting the country in two. In March, riding the Tuareg wave, three jihadi groups—al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar Dine, and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa—arrived in force. By June they’d chased the Tuareg nationalist rebellion underground and its leaders into exile. This is the situation Mali, including Bandiagara, faces today.

For days I’d been gently pressing Isaac on what the jihadists in the north might mean for him and his parents, who lived in a village a few hours’ drive east of Bandiagara, off the plateau. But he kept changing the subject. Now, as we drove through Bandiagara, where everywhere we were reminded of war, I decided to be blunt: “You know, they’re talking about sharia law in Timbuktu and across the north,” I said. “Doesn’t that worry you?”

Isaac never got cross, but he looked at me as if I’d accused him of something. “Of course we’re worried,” he said.

I realized neither Isaac nor his family had foreseen a drastic change in Mali’s Islamic power structure. Events in the north echoed what unfolded in this region in the early 19th century with the short-lived rise of jihadi Islam.

After a few minutes of silence Isaac said, “We may have to move the family.”

“Where?”

“Maybe Mopti or Bamako. We don’t know. My sister wants my parents to live with her.” Isaac’s sister lived in Mopti, the regional capital.

“That might be a good idea,” I said. “Until things calm down.”

From the looks of things in Bandiagara, however, that calm might be a long time coming. Soldiers stood guard behind sandbags all about town. Government agencies and aid organizations had removed identifying plaques, hoping to escape notice of rebel looters, and many offices were shuttered. The people of Bandiagara, like most of Mali, are Muslims of a tolerant persuasion. Mali is a Sunni Muslim country, known for its Sufi traditions guided by the Quran while recognizing mystical worship that gives individuals room to define their spiritual pathway by personal experience and revelation, including through music and poetry. In Timbuktu and other northern Malian towns, many Sufi saints are enshrined in mausoleums. In this atmosphere, since the fall of the Toucouleur Empire, the Dogon have thrived. Today they number about half a million.

But the Islamists who now control northern Mali are Salafists, who live by a strict reading of the Quran and the life of the Prophet Mohammed. They discourage icons and music because such things distract worshippers from devotion to God. In April, the jihadists began destroying the Sufi mosques and mausoleums of Timbuktu and the city of Gao. It’s unclear what has happened to the 700,000 ancient manuscripts—papers that detail the story of Islam in West and North Africa—in the old libraries of Timbuktu. Even worse, however, is the jihadi program of public amputations for thieves and executions, by stoning, of unmarried couples who bear children out of wedlock. Public flogging awaits anyone caught consuming alcohol.

Bandiagara has a few bars normally marked by neat placards advertising Heineken, Castel Beer, and Coca-Cola, but the signs were now gone. The hotels had closed. Tourism on the Bandiagara plateau had taken off in recent years. But now schools, too, had shut down. Shops were open, but without signs or any hint of the sale of alcohol or sweet drinks. I wondered whether the people of Bandiagara knew something the rest of us didn’t, as if they carried history with them instinctively.

Just a few miles from here, in 1864, in the village of Hamdallaye, Umar Tall died during a broad uprising of Tuaregs, Arabs, Fulanis, and Bambara against his Toucouleur forces. He fell not in battle, but in the explosion of a gunpowder cache. According to one historian, when Umar Tall’s soldiers conquered new territory, he ordered them to bring before him idols he would smash to pieces with an iron mace. After his death, Tidiani Tall, his nephew, moved the Toucouleur capital to higher ground here in Bandiagara, where it remained as capital until the French conquered what they would call the colony of French Sudan, today known as Mali.

Tall is to Mali a little like what Jefferson Davis, leader of the Confederacy, is to the United States: a vaguely familiar name to many, a total unknown to most, but a frightening reminder of a past that has left unsettled business for a few others.

Take my friend, Isaac. He grew up in a Dogon village below the plateau and went to high school in Bandiagara. He knows all about Umar Tall and the jihadi threat. He speaks three languages, French, Bambara, and his native Dogon, as well as a little Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg. Together we spoke French and he promised to take me into the cliff villages to talk to people about what had happened to Mali and about the jihadi threat.

“The Dogon country cannot be invaded,” he said. “We are a good defense against the rebels. You’ll see. I’ll show you.”

Isaac was telling me this as we drove through town, drawing looks from soldiers and townspeople. No one in Bandiagara had seen anyone like me since January, when the rebellion in the north broke out and foreigners evacuated. Sitting beside Isaac, I wore simple clothing to be less conspicuous, including a short-sleeve shirt and a ball cap. We stopped at the offices of an American evangelical aid group Isaac had once worked for, where he picked up the keys to the guesthouse where we would sleep. The offices were in a villa surrounded by high concrete walls and shaded by eucalyptus trees that grew inside the compound. As we entered, Isaac’s old colleagues greeted him warmly but in haste. They were busy boxing up files and office supplies, the framework of rural health and literacy programs Isaac had helped build. Some files would be trucked to Bamako and the rest burned. Outside in the dirt street a large pile of paper burned silently, flames whipped by a hot wind. A man kept returning from inside the villa with a cardboard box full of paper to dump on the fire, trying to erase evidence of the agency’s presence. “We can’t take any chances,” he said to me.

When we left the compound, Isaac was near tears. “I spent many happy days in villages working side by side with these people.”

At the guesthouse, a small two-room mud building, we ate dinner in the cramped courtyard around a kerosene lamp in plastic deck chairs. The electricity had been cut. Dinner was white rice with salty tomato sauce and tough goat meat we bought from a woman who ran a roadside food stall in town. She also sold yams in tomato sauce and spaghetti. Stone-faced, she’d stared at me as we waited for her to spoon up our food. She kept glancing at me as she and Isaac spoke in Dogon.

“What were you talking about?” I asked later. “That woman looked at me as if I were the enemy.”

“She wanted to know what you are doing here, and I told her you are a tourist,” he said. “She said she did not believe me, but she told me that I was brave to bring you here, whoever you are.”

We both laughed a little nervously.

Near dawn on May 9 we drove into the cliff country, about 30 miles northeast of Bandiagara to a village called Begnemato, to meet a friend of Isaac, Daniel Andoulé. He was a Dogon farmer and self-styled historian. Isaac told me the Dogon built the village on a shelf partway down the cliffs far enough back from the cliff face that it cannot be seen from the plain or from the plateau above the village. The Dogon, according to Andoulé, had been there for 600 years, hiding from slave raiders and jihadists—Umar Tall’s men. We crossed the plateau, sometimes hugging the cliffs, following an old track the French built in the 1930s across impossibly rocky ground, sliced by ravines shallow and deep. We passed troops of women portaging baskets of dirt scooped from dry riverbeds for resurfacing fields eroded by wind.

Finally, at about 9 a.m., in brilliant heat, Isaac parked the Land Cruiser in the thin shade of a rare acacia tree a few yards from the cliff. Standing on the edge, we could look down and see Begnemato in the distance. I picked my way down the cliffs on a crude, well-worn stone staircase while Isaac walked with a swift agility that amazed me for his size. I carried a daypack with peanuts, mangoes and water for us both, stepping down while holding the rock face on my left and looking away from successive drop-offs on my right, a few dozen feet here and 100 feet there. The path descended about 600 feet to a broad sandy field pleasantly shaded by palm trees. A half-mile away we could see cone-shaped mud granaries and a long concrete school building. The Malian flag flew from a pole beside it. We walked across the field and past the school, which was closed, and into a village built of rock slabs broken from the cliffs and roofs made of thatch from grass or dried millet and corn stalks. A group of polite teenage boys escorted us. One boy said, “We saw you coming from the top of the cliff.”

Isaac beamed and nudged me at the boy’s words. “You see?” he said. “It is hard to surprise a Dogon village.”

Andoulé was, he guessed, about 70. He stood tall, with a large shaven head dimpled like a grapefruit, a barrel chest, and a thin graying beard. He wore khaki shorts and a brown tunic of woven cotton over the large frame of a man who’d once been much stronger, more muscular, used to physical work in the fields or breaking rock to repair homes. He still had large thighs, though his arms were thinner. “I don’t go to the fields anymore,” he said. “I let my sons do that.”

He’d worked with Isaac on understanding Begnemato’s religious demographics, information Isaac used for the thesis he wrote for his rural sociology degree. Isaac found that 600 people of Muslim, animist, and Christian background lived in the village. They lived in separate neighborhoods. Andoulé was Catholic. “We’ve always lived in peace with each other,” he told me. “It is not the Dogon way to impose our customs on others.”

Andoulé led us to a shaded veranda on the roof of his home. We sat on mats and ate rice and chicken in tomato sauce. In a mix of French and Dogon, with Isaac helping to translate, Andoulé talked of the Dogon struggle with Fulani herders who grazed their animals, mainly goats and cows, on Dogon farmland on the Seno Gondo plain below the cliffs. “We’ve had terrible fights,” he said, “but that has not happened in a few years.”

The point of our visit was to talk about food, drought, and war. Begnemato sits in central Mali, in the east of Mopti province, where staples like millet and rice sell for six times what they did a year ago. Andoulé blames their food problems on the fighting in the north and last year’s poor rains. The rains have been better this year—the drought broke over the summer, after I left Mali—but aid agencies have reported persistent food shortages across the Sahel because the rains have been spotty, and for other reasons. The previous year’s drought had depleted village seed stocks, and the conflict in northern Mali has either cut off many farmers from their fields or frightened them away. Mali, along with the rest of the West African Sahel, from Senegal to Chad, is under the strain of a food crisis that has put 15 million people at risk of starvation.

“We have not known starvation in a long time,” Andoulé said. “Even in the bad years [the droughts of the 1970s and mid-1980s], we were able to survive with the money tourists brought us. But we have had only three or four foreign visitors here in the past year. The French and Americans are afraid of being kidnapped.”

I swallowed hard.

When I asked whether he feared the Islamists, Andoulé laughed. “I am much more afraid of drought.” Then he said, “Let me show you something.”

He walked Isaac and me outside the village and across a broad, solid mass of sandstone, part of the shelf on which the village had been built hundreds of years ago. We hiked up a sandy pathway to a rock ledge above the village, right on the cliff face looking out over the Seno Gondo plain far below. By now it was nearly 1 p.m., and the flat, sandy expanse below us was shrouded in thin dust. I’d seen pictures of the Seno Gondo as a lovely green savanna, lightly forested with acacia and palm trees, but now it looked like solid desert, nothing but sand with a few trees.

“Les rebels,” Andoulé began in French, switching to Dogon as he pointed across the plain, “they would have to come up into these cliffs.” He turned to Isaac and me. He was smiling, sure of his security in the cliffs. “They do not know this country. No one knows this country like the Dogon. We have pathways through these cliffs that no one knows about but us. The rebels cannot travel up into here. Our army knows that. There are Dogon officers in the army. No one has ever attacked us and succeeded.”

In the distance we could see a dense and narrow dust plume, rising like a geyser. “Dust devil,” I said.

“Maybe,” Isaac said, “or a rebel pickup truck.”

Peter Chilson’s reporting in Mali was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. This article first appeared December 4, 2012, on www.foreignpolicy.com and is excerpted from We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali. Chilson’s account is the first in the new Borderlands series of e-books from Foreign Policy and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Foreign Policy PDF and Kindle versions of the full text are available online.

Tracking

Eric Zakarison ’81 and Sheryl Hagen-Zakarison ’83, ’91—Thinking small

by Tim Steury

Sheryl Hagen-Zakarison and Eric Zakarison--and their three Belgian mules--at their farm north of Pullman. by Zach Mazur
Sheryl Hagen-Zakarison and Eric Zakarison—and their three Belgian mules—at their farm north of Pullman. Zach Mazur

Somewhere along the Norwegian-Swedish border in the 1920s, Eric Zakarison’s grandfather and his family decided it was time to leave.

“They literally put on their packs, with everything they owned on their backs, skied down to the fjord, got on a boat, and came to Minnesota,” says Zakarison. After farming there for three or four years, they picked up and moved again, to the Havre/Chinook Hi-Line area of Montana.

Tired of northern Montana, Eric’s aunt ran away. She married a wealthy railroad man and they bought land north of Pullman. She invited the rest of the family to come further west, which they did, settling on the land where Eric and Sheryl Zakarison now live.

“As they say, farming the Hi-Line, you have a three-year rotation,” says Eric. “You get a crop the first year, second year the grasshoppers get it, and the third year the hail takes it out.”

The Palouse has been much kinder to the Zakarison family since they settled here in 1935. 

The Zakarisons currently farm 1,300 acres, which is a bit over the median size in Whitman County. Eric notes that their farm, just a few miles north of Pullman, originally was five smaller farms. Even so, much grander consolidation throughout the Palouse can be measured by the number of abandoned homesteads and homesteads separated from their land to become commuter retreats. Counter to a trend toward consolidation and steady growth, Eric’s father Russell ’54 and uncle Walt “decided to stay more moderate in size, for whatever reason.”

The Zakarisons have also bucked another trend, one of dedicating all the land to the standard wheat rotation to the exclusion of animals, a trend that USDA official, formerly a Washington State College scientist, William Jasper Spillman decried already in 1924. Spillman believed that the steeper land should be given over to grazing rather than erosive tillage. Few listened to him.

But some like-minded souls have heeded that observation. “We have always had livestock on our farm,” says Eric. And he and Sheryl keep adding more.

Currently, they raise about 800 broiler chickens a year along with 100 turkeys, all on pasture. They process the poultry under a permit from the Washington Department of Agriculture, and customers pick them up on site.

They also have a flock of White Dorper sheep, which have hair instead of wool, and from which they raise locker lamb. And there’s a small dairy goat herd.

“They’re the board of directors,” says Sheryl, laughing. “They oversee everything.”

The Zakarisons also raise hay for local sale and have a feed business, grinding peas and barley for small livestock growers around the area. 

And lately they have been experimenting with camelina, a plant historically raised for animal feed and oil. They will start pressing a 15-acre crop this summer for cooking oil.

“The way we’re farming now is pretty labor intensive,” Eric says. “We’re always thinking of downsizing.”

Downsizing, that is, only in acreage, not in scope or ambition. They are considering renting out some of their conventional wheat land to focus more on their livestock and alternative crops and methods.

Forming Eric and Sheryl’s vision are belief in diversification and system resilience. “Sustainability” has become a cliché, easily bandied about but more difficult to define and implement. But it increasingly defines their goals.

Essential to such a concept, they believe, is a strong community, which in turn requires infrastructure. One of the casualties of an increasingly scaled-up and concentrated agriculture is the steady disappearance of certain services, such as locally ground feed.

Integral to the Zakarisons’ vision is reesta-blishing that infrastructure.

On the agronomic side, Eric urges a closer attention to the soil.

“On our conventional land, for our part, we don’t know the land,” he says. Tilling with mules is making him more aware of the condition of his soil. Yes, mules. Belgian mules.

“When I get behind Rhody and Katy..., pulling the harrow right behind them, hearing the chains jangling and smelling their sweat and sensing their lean into their collars, that’s when you really realize what you’re doing. You’re working the soil. There’s an awareness there that we’ve completely lost... Whether we can feed the world, I don’t know.”

What is missing yet in this system?

“The next generation,” says Eric laughing, yet echoing a concern that permeates all of agriculture.

Their son Aaron ’11 is currently in Afghanistan on a classified mission with the Stryker brigade out of Fort Lewis. Their daughters, Shannon and Ariel, live together in Brooklyn. Shannon is a drummer. Ariel is an artist pursuing her MFA at Hunter College.

Still, one never knows.

Sheryl came to the Palouse by a route even more circuitous than the Zakarisons. Born in Texas, her family moved to Tacoma. She began her life in agriculture in the 1970s on an Israeli kibbutz.

“I really liked what I was doing and wanted to continue doing it,” she says. So she came to Pullman to study agronomy.

Resilience is another attribute that occupies Eric and Sheryl’s conversation.

Resilience for Sheryl means training young people. Nate Bitz ’13 is the latest in a series of WSU interns working on the farm. A philosophy major whose father farmed dryland wheat near where Eric’s family originally farmed, he has focused on Eastern philosophy, from which he has drawn the notion of “right livelihood.” Which has brought him back to agriculture.

The Zakarisons have also opened some of their land to graduate students conducting research on quinoa and a long-term project on organic farming.

They see the Palouse, its agriculture and a reemerging small farm culture, and the university as part of a dynamic system into which they will continue to invest as long as they can.

Tracking

Marcia Steele Hoover ’90—Running with a mission

by Hannelore Sudermann

Marcia Steele Hoover '90 at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. by Bill Wagner
Marcia Steele Hoover ’90 at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. Bill Wagner

Nike World Headquarters is its own strange utopia. A visit to the well-groomed grounds just south of Portland starts in the parking area with sounds of children from the outdoor play yard of the child development center. A walk into the campus meanders between four-story office buildings named for great athletes and coaches, and then past geese on grass and a group of women doing jumping jacks and stretches on a plaza in front of Lake Nike before starting their run.

The plaza connects to a cafeteria, one of six eateries on the property, where Marcia Steele Hoover breezes in wearing running shoes and two layered zip-ups. It’s this culture of business, creativity, health, nature, and energy that she’s focused on promoting as global director of the Nike Communications Center of Excellence. She slides into the booth across from me, plunking her notebook on the table.

“We all walk around with our little notebooks,” she says. Some are digital; hers is paper filled with small, elegant handwriting. Lists, paragraphs, reminders—all a mix of her creative process and her job guiding a large team of writers, editors, artists, and videographers, or as she calls them “end-to-end talent.”

When she joined the new Communications Center of Excellence in 2011, it had just a handful of people. In two years it has grown 300 percent, says Steele Hoover. That’s particularly significant for a corner of the company that isn’t a revenue generator, and for which it is difficult to show a return on investment. But Nike has 8,000 Portland-area employees, 48,000 worldwide including those with subsidiary companies like Converse and Hurley, and the company’s leaders prize employee engagement and satisfaction, which is a boon to productivity, she says. “Our employees live and breathe the Nike culture.”

Steele Hoover’s job is to reinforce that culture and connect the employees, which can be difficult for a company so large. More, it’s to promote the characteristics the company prizes like energy, imagination, and attachment to the brand. “Nike does more than outfit the world’s best athletes,” reads a recent job posting. “We are a place to explore potential, obliterate boundaries, and push out the edges of what can be. We’re looking for people who can grow, think, dream and create.”

The internal communications group uses every kind of vehicle: a Facebook-like social media platform, videos, newsletters, information campaigns, even signs on campus. They must be creative, even outrageous, if it helps communicate. “We really don’t have any guardrails,” says Steele Hoover. To promote the launch of a new company-wide technology platform, “the most boring thing ever,” she says, they built anticipation over several weeks by planting giant blue footprints around campus to stir interest. It helped catch the attention of every employee who needed to adopt the new platform.

Steele Hoover credits her time at WSU with preparing her for the jobs that led to this one. “Cable 8 was great because we were interviewing the same players and coaches as the major sportscasters,” she says. She also majored in political science, which helped her to an early job as a press secretary with U.S. Senator Frank Murkowski, and then to work in a prosecutor’s office in Alaska. She moved into a job with Pacific Telecom, which eventually took her out of Alaska and into the Portland/Vancouver area.

There she went to work as an analyst for several different business consultants. She visited clients at their headquarters around the country and advised them on their brand and marketing strategies. “I was on the road 100,000 miles a year,” she says. In that job, “you know more about their companies and their strategies than they know themselves.”

“I’ve had an interesting ride with many different companies and roles,” she says. “And my jobs have just gotten better.” But the constant themes have always been corporate strategy and marketing communications.

Her appreciation of WSU goes beyond her academic training. A member of the Greek system and a volunteer coxswain with the crew team, she made many good friends. “They are my best friends today,” she says. She prizes those ties.

When Molly McCue ’12, was looking for a job at Nike last spring, she discovered Steele Hoover was a fellow alum and asked for a meeting. “She let me pick her brain all because of our Cougar connection,” says McCue, who felt elated just to have a meeting. “Professionally, her reputation here is second to none.”

“When Molly showed up, she didn’t just have a CV, she had a full-on portfolio,” says Steele Hoover. She had worked for the athletic department and amassed a ton of experience. “That’s what WSU gives you,” she says. When a job came open, Steele Hoover encouraged McCue to apply. Now McCue is a full-time project coordinator.

Nike jobs aren’t all that easy to get. One recent search brought in 1,000 resumes. “Our pull is so great because we are the biggest [sports] brand in the world,” says Steele Hoover. “Some people make it a full-time effort to get here.” She, herself, set Nike as a goal, and started working for the company as a contractor, leaving her full-time consulting job to put all her energies into her Nike work. It paid off. “I found my niche and they brought me in,” she says. She celebrated by going home and having a pint with her husband.

The daughter of a coach, she planned at WSU to become a sportscaster. “We all thought that ESPN was going to come knocking at our doors,” she says. But the instructors were clear that most of them would never reach the national news market. “They didn’t sugarcoat anything,” she says. “They tried to make it real so that when you get out into the corporate environment there are no surprises.”

Steele Hoover may not be at ESPN, but at Nike she has found similar work in sports and communications. A few of her colleagues are former professional athletes and she gets to meet and be involved in projects with some of the world’s most exciting players and coaches. In this job, “I feel like I’ve come full circle,” she says. “Now I work for an athletic company doing what I’ve always wanted to do. How awesome is that?”

Tracking

Dan ’44 and Val ’46 Ogden—Staying activist in older age

by Eric Apalategui

Val and Dan Ogden at their Vancouver home. by Bill Wagner
Val and Dan Ogden at their Vancouver home. Bill Wagner

Last fall in Vancouver, with the voter registration deadline looming, Dan Ogden ’44 wasn’t about to be held up by Parkinson’s disease or two artificial hips.

He pushed his walker around his new apartment complex and through a recently completed cul-de-sac to make sure his neighbors could take part in the November general election. At his side was Val Ogden ’46, his partner in Democratic Party politics and wife of 66 years. She was spry enough to negotiate steps and stairways to ring doorbells beyond her husband’s reach.

The Ogdens are in their seventh decade of political and social activism—with roots going back to their student days at Washington State College in the 1940s—and neither has any intention of retiring to a recliner. Val, 89, ran the local YWCA and then represented the area in the State House of Representatives for 12 years, ending in 2002. Dan, 91, is a past chairman of the Clark County Democratic Central Committee and has been active in the party whenever he wasn’t working for the federal government.

“I’m 62 and they wear me out,” says Marsha Manning, district chairwoman of the Washington State Democratic Central Committee. “They have something going on every day.”

Among the Ogdens’ many accomplishments is an unwavering support of the WSU Vancouver campus. As a state lawmaker, Val Ogden pushed for funding to open and expand the campus in the Salmon Creek area on the north side of Vancouver. The couple endowed the campus’s first graduate-level scholarship, which supports a public affairs student.

“When Dan and Val become active in something, they become very involved,” says Jennifer Miltenberger. As director of development and alumni relations for the Vancouver campus, she has long been amazed by Val Ogden’s energy. “She can run circles around all of us.”

Late last year, the campus honored the couple with its Community Award of Distinction for Community Partnership. The award has extra meaning because both are so deeply rooted in WSU, where they met and where two of their three children and two of their grandchildren have also earned degrees. “They bleed crimson and gray,” Miltenberger says.

Nearly 70 years after receiving their own degrees, the Ogdens get fired up when the discussion turns to higher education and the shifting of college costs from state funding to students. “What we’re doing is erecting a barrier to higher education,” Dan Ogden says, “and that’s not in the interest of society at all.”

The couple met in Pullman in 1946. Dan Ogden had already completed a degree in political science and served in the U.S. Army at the close of World War II. He returned to campus to visit a friend and met Valeria Munson as she was wrapping up her degree in sociology. They married that December.

Dan Ogden went on to earn advanced degrees in political science at the University of Chicago, where his doctoral dissertation explored federal power policy in the Pacific Northwest. Last December, more than six decades later, he updated that history with a second volume that is finding a home at public power agencies throughout the region.

Ogden started his academic career teaching political science for 12 years in Pullman, where some might recall the 1956 mock political convention he organized for more than 1,000 students. After Pullman, he held a variety of jobs with federal agencies, universities, and public power organizations. The work took the Ogdens from Washington to Washington, D.C., and back again.

During the 1960s, he was assistant director of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation and later budget director for the U.S. Department of Interior. He helped advance bills that brought about today’s National Trails and the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System as well as national parks in Washington’s North Cascades and California’s Redwood Forest. He retired back to the Pacific Northwest in 1988, but delivered lectures for another 20 years.

Meanwhile, Val Ogden worked in the non-profit sector, including Campfire Girls of America and the Southwest Washington Center for the Arts. In 1990, a year after retiring from YWCA in Clark County, she was urged to run for office. Both Ogdens had lost races running as Democrats in Republican-majority districts while living in Colorado during the 1970s, but this time she had the edge in party registration and swept into office.

As a legislator, she took a special interest in promoting education and equality. She was a strong ally for state-run schools for the blind and deaf located in her district, and fought for WSU’s new campus.

Lately, Val Ogden keeps a full calendar, serving on the WSU Vancouver Advisory Council and on a roster of nonprofit organizations focusing on education and the arts. When she’s not out in the community, she is home cranking out 15 to 20 emails a day and staying connected to friends, family, and her community through Facebook and LinkedIn. Both fill their days with work for the Democratic Party, their Unitarian church, local arts organizations, and travel. 

“There’s too much to do,” Val Ogden says just a day after hosting a houseful of Democrats for a training session. “It’s too interesting.”

Tracking

Greg Blanchard—On timing and taste

by Eric Sorensen

WSU executive chef Greg Blanchard. by Robert Hubner
WSU executive catering chef Greg Blanchard. Robert Hubner

Greg Blanchard is making dinner for 224. From the cramped confines of the CUB kitchen, he and his staff have just a few hours to create three different types of crostini, chicken parmesan and linguine, garlic bread, Caesar salad, and strawberry shortcake, with exceptions for vegetarians, the lactose intolerant, avoiders of gluten, and one person who just doesn’t like cheese.

Come 6:30, student waiters and waitresses in black ties will serve the food on individual plates, a timing play that ups a chef’s game from, say, a buffet. If the food is ready too soon, lettuce will get flat, chicken will get dry, strawberries will bleed into frosting. If it is late, well, no one likes to keep hundreds of hungry people waiting.

Blanchard is preternaturally calm, bent over a stainless table and cutting board, slicing strawberries to put on top of half a dozen fruit-and-whipped-topping cocktails for guests who don’t want the shortcake. For now, he has a single focus, that being the right-sized strawberry.

“It’s got to be fairly wide,” he says without looking up, because a good cook with a sharp knife knows you don’t look away from what you’re cutting, “so you can get six or seven cuts out of it.”

All so the berry can be pressed down from the top, creating a strawberry fan garnish.

It’s all to be expected in Blanchard’s daily whirl of details, of menus and food orders and recipes scaled up and down, of yellow pads running down the tasks behind a banquet, of perilously sharp knives and hard-to-find, mid-winter produce, of ovens and warmers, pans and plates, sheet cakes and chicken filets that must never get dry, all aimed at the singular, satisfying moment that comes at the end of a fork.

“People have said again and again and again, ‘How do you keep the moisture in the chicken?’” he says one afternoon in his Stephenson Hall office. “Practice.”

This July, after 25 years of cooking for WSU students, faculty, administrators, guests, and alumni, most recently as the executive catering chef, Blanchard will take off the big white hat and retire. By then, he will have had a hand in preparing upwards of 6 million meals. And he still cuts onions.

“We all cook,” he says. “We all clean. We all chop. We all slice. We all dice. The coat, yeah, I’ve earned the right to wear it. But if I couldn’t cook side by side with my people, and if I didn’t, they wouldn’t work for me. I hate sitting by my desk.”

He started at the age of 10, bussing tables at a seafood restaurant in Florida, and over the years served as a grill cook, baker, salad person, fry cook, and franchise manager. He spent a year cooking offshore in California’s oil fields, where the seas could get so rough the coffee pot was welded to the bulkhead.

He arrived at WSU in 1988 and has worked in the Rotunda Dining Center, the CUB, the Hillside Café, the Wilmer-Davis Dining Center, and the Stephenson Dining Center. He’s been in catering the last five years.

He helped serve as many as 5,000 customers a day. At the all-campus picnic, he sees that many served in one meal.

He can scale up a recipe for eight to serve 500 (use half the spices and salt or it will be inedible). He’s prepared deep-fried alligator tail, emu chili, ostrich burgers, and rattlesnake, which arrives clean but coiled.

“Your knees kind of give out when you open the box,” he says.

He’s done a banquet with comedienne Betty White, a friend of the vet school, and cooked for Beasley Coliseum performers like Huey Lewis and Jeff Dunham. Tim Allen was first through the buffet line. Kelly Clarkson’s three-page contract rider called for six pairs of colored socks.

“I delegated that to someone else,” Blanchard says.

Over the years he’s seen a shift from long-warmed overcooked vegetables to food that’s got some snap, that’s fresh and has flavor, words he pronounces in slow motion, as if they’re sacred heirlooms.

“If I were going to tell people one thing, I’d tell them to stop boiling and steaming vegetables,” he says. “I made that change at the CUB in 2005. Zucchini, squash, we started to sauté. Asparagus—olive oil, a little bit of coarse salt. The only thing we ever do is roast it. Baby carrots, in the steamer just a little bit so they’re not quite so hard, toss them in olive oil, a little bit of spices, bake ‘em. You’re keeping the flavor. You’re not bleeding out all the nutrients in the water.”

Gone are buffets with cheaper, bulky food filling plates at the front of the line. Now the spread will have some Cougar and artisan cheeses, a nice salad with two or three dressings and toppings, fresh fruit, dinner rolls, and several tasty entrees.

“That’s what people want,” he says. “They want it simple and elegant. And they want it to taste good. And that’s what we do best. Now it’s not making stuff before or too far ahead. It’s kind of an ‘as needed’ cooking, or ‘at service time.’”

The transformation has been personal, too.

“I used to weigh 280 pounds,” he says. “That was 95 pounds ago. So what I eat now, I really want it to be good because I’m not going to eat a lot of it.”

To be sure, he knows a few tricks. To save money—he works in a self-supporting unit—he will buy 4,500 pounds of St. Louis ribs at $2.80 a pound and squirrel them away. He can look at a chicken filet and know it cost 63 cents; a slice of garlic bread, 22 cents. Need to chop a lot? Put two equally sized knives in your chopping hand. Serving several hundred steaks at once? Brown and mark them ahead of time on a grill and finish them in the oven just before serving.

The same goes for the chicken on this night, ASWSU’s Multicultural Fundraising Banquet and silent auction. It was dipped in a mayonnaise base, breaded in spiced panko, and browned in the middle of the afternoon, sealing in its juices. Brian Guthmiller, the lead cook, can then bake it shortly before serving and keep it ready to serve in a bank of glass-doored warmers.

By six p.m., as students and guests start filing into the CUB Senior Ballroom, Blanchard has circled and checked the list of tasks on his clipboard. Christine Ballard, catering manager, has the student wait staff shuttle salads and desserts to the tables.

At 6:22, Ballard announces that President Elson Floyd is just about done speaking. Plating begins.

“You do chicken, you do sauce,” Blanchard says to his help as he and Guthmiller head up an assembly line, portioning out hot linguine with double-gloved hands before passing the plate on. At different points, they substitute an eggplant parmesan for a vegetarian or plain chicken breast for a gluten-free, dairy-free diner.

On average, it takes the crew a little more than four seconds per plate. They’re done in 17 minutes.

Just then, an order comes in for an alternate dessert, the tall glass of fruit and topping. One of the wait staff is set to whisk it out to the ballroom when Blanchard shouts, “Wait, wait, wait! The strawberries!”

Someone passes him a plate. He peels back its plastic wrap, picks up a single, sliced, fan-shaped berry, and delicately garnishes the top.

WSU Alumni Association News

Cougars pounce on new plates

Jeff Groat with his Cougar license plate. by Robert Hubner
Jeff Groat with his Cougar license plate. Robert Hubner

Frequent sightings of the new Cougar license plates all around Washington prove that the WSU Alumni Association’s three-year endeavor to get the plate approved has paid off. 

Since the release of the crimson-colored plates with the WSU Cougar logo in January 2012, more than 7,000 alumni and friends have purchased them. More than half are first time WSU plate holders, 4,200 and counting.

That’s good news for Cougar fans and even better news for students. The new plates have generated more than $110,000 in new scholarships.

While many sport letters and numbers assigned by the state, a number of Cougs and fans have doubled up on their school spirit by ordering personalized plates to reinforce the WSU theme. Among them: COUGS02, TLG8ING, COUGUPP, WAZUFAN, CUGRFAN, WSUGIRL, and COUG RV.

Jeff Groat, a long time Pullman resident and Cougar football season ticket holder, went with “ARRRGH.” It is a subtle reference to football Coach Mike Leach urging the players to act like pirates by being fierce and working as a team, the “Pirates of the Palouse.” But it’s not too subtle. “I get comments all the time,” says Groat. “Most people immediately understand it’s a pirate thing from Leach.”

When it comes to declaring school affinity, the Cougars still dominate. The new crimson plates, combined with the earlier WSU version, number more than twice as many as the state’s next highest selling collegiate plate, bringing a total of 16,572 WSU plates on Washington’s roads.

For information about getting your own crimson Cougar plate, visit the WSUAA website, alumni.wsu.edu/license, or the Washington State Department of Licensing.

For more information about WSUAA and alumni chapters visit alumni.wsu.edu or call 1-800-258-6978.

New Media

Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories
by Sherman Alexie ’94
Grove Press, 2012
Review by John Streamas

Most writers’ volumes of “new and selected” stories add only two or three new pieces to twenty or thirty old ones. More than half of Sherman Alexie’s Blasphemy is new, however, including a few lengthy stories. The success of Alexie’s teen novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian seems to have invigorated his short stories, and readers who regard them as his best work will be delighted by this new book. To be sure, this is not for very young readers, though the reason is not the occasional sexual reference but the grimness of many characters’ struggles to live. Alexie seems to say that the survival of his community has cost the deaths of too many of its people.

And yet this is not a grim book. It is very funny, sometimes raucously. In the new story “Cry Cry Cry,” young Native “fake gangsters” go “drive-by cursing” and throw government food at each other. The narrator of “Salt” describes the editor of a newspaper as “a bucket of pizza and beer tied to a broomstick.” A character in “This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona” tells a story of two Indian boys who want to be warriors but who, lacking horses, park a car they have stolen in front of a police station and walk home to the reservation.

Alexie is indigenous literature’s version of Dave Chappelle and Richard Pryor, reasoning that illness and poverty and death may as well provoke laughter along with tears. Some of the funniest moments occur in the saddest stories. “War Dances,” the title story in Alexie’s previous collection, recounts a father slowly dying, yet it opens on a section called “My Kafka Baggage,” in which the narrator considers a dead cockroach he finds in his luggage, and in a late section the narrator imagines his father’s exit interview.

The humor is desperate, then, and yet Alexie seems to want readers to laugh heartily, not uneasily. His characters are not paranoid—they would never let themselves become paranoid. They do, however, know their history, and this is their burden. They play basketball, they drive cars, they move off the reservation and into big cities. But their relationship with American culture is troubled by their history, and there is no Native American Dream for them. In the long story “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?” the middle-aged title character returns to school to play basketball, not foolishly to recapture boyhood glories but frantically to recall long-lost family and friends. An injured Frank lies screaming in agony on the basketball court, then he chants to his parents.

Readers in the interior Northwest will know the settings of these stories, even if they have never seen the Spokane reservation. WSU is mentioned in the longest story, “The Search Engine,” in which Corliss is a literature student, the rare indigenous student who strives to rise above, knowing that, even as “a middle-class Indian, she seemed destined for a minimum-wage life of waiting tables or changing oil.” She takes a bus to Seattle, where she tracks down Harlan Atwater, a Spokane poet who published his lone book in 1972, when whites briefly romanticized both poetry and Indians. Atwater traded his fame for lonely obscurity, but Corliss, still clinging to her own romances, leaves the WSU library’s copy of his book on the poetry shelf of a used bookstore, face out, “for all the world to see.”

Alexie’s own face, merged into a bright blue sky full of clouds, laughs heartily on the cover of Blasphemy.

John Streamas is an associate professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies at WSU.

We Are the Bus
by James McKean ’68, ’74
Texas Review Press, 2012
Review by Hannelore Sudermann

This small book of poetry plays on themes of reminiscence, travel, and the bliss of simple things like being a boy with a Racket Box full of fireworks. This collection of 42 poems won the 2011 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.

In it McKean transports us to some lovely places. Fishing on the Sandy River, climbing up to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, floating on Puget Sound in a boat of hand-sawn cedar planks, even into his first car, a ’56 Buick. The title poem is about a bus ride in Costa Rica, from Monteverde to San Jose, from the perspective of the driver whose family helps him along the three-hour route:

“... from cloud forests

Through sugar cane and pineapple fields

Into the city and its fireworks,

Its crowded lanes, its blind corners...”

But much of his work is more local. “Good ‘D’” seems to draw from his time playing basketball at WSU in the 1960s. It captures a moment when a visiting player manages to steal from a guard who is “drunk on the home court’s din of expectation” and overlooks the “nobody in his dull uniform.” The author notes this poem is “after Edward Hirsch,” a poet who is known for his ability to explore the often overlooked details.

“Uwajimaya” centers on the Seattle landmark where “ancient shoppers with their wicker baskets” have come for fish, oysters, and crab.

McKean features people, too, among them his mother and father, his wife, a childhood neighbor, and a 12-year-old who calls their home but never speaks. In “My Mother-In-Law Arms Herself,” he explores the experiences of uncertainty and aging of a family member who sleeps with guns beneath her pillow. But those too have been stolen for her safety and by the author.

These poems are varied, like a box of confections, each one a different shape and flavor and best enjoyed one at a time.

After graduating from WSU, McKean completed an MFA and PhD in English at the University of Iowa. An essayist and poet, he has retired from the faculty at Mount Mercy University and now teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina as well as at several writers’ workshops.

Chicago, Barcelona Connections
by Greg Duncan ’98
New Origins Records, 2012
Review by Eric Sorensen

The Latin-themed recording is one of the great subgenres of jazz, going back at least as far as Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and running through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca” and the Getz/Gilberto collaboration that brought “Girl from Ipanema” to hi-fi consoles across the land. Greg Duncan is stepping up with his own contribution, marshaling an Illinois Arts Council grant and Kickstarter funding to bring us an exploration of flamenco borne from the Chicago-based trumpet and flugelhorn player’s years performing in Spain. Rhythm is king as the nine songs—four written by Duncan, and almost all arranged by him—incorporate five of the more common flamenco forms: rumba, tango, bulerías, tanguillos, and sevillana. The playing is superb, too, adventurous but discrete, making this record a whole body experience.

WSU Cougars from A to Z
by Carla Nellis ’90
Green Beanie Books, 2012
Review by Larry Clark ’94

Young future Cougars and current fans of the University will enjoy this volume of WSU facts, stories, and profiles put together in an alphabetical “A is for…” format and illustrated with full-page watercolors. Nellis, a 1990 communications graduate, dug through WSU’s history to tell the tales of “F for Ferdinand’s,” “G for Go Cougs!,” “N for Neva Abelson,” and so on. The book covers a lot of ground in the life of the WSU, from traditions to athletics to faculty and famous alumni like Abelson and her husband Phil, both leaders in science.

In addition to the illustrations, photos from the past 121 years of the school put faces to the brief but informative stories. For anyone interested in the University, WSU Cougars from A to Z delivers a fun and accessible walk around campus and through decades of interesting Cougars’ lives and accomplishments.

New & Noteworthy

Planet Rock Doc: Nuggets from Explorations of the Natural World
WSU Press, 2012

The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals about the Nature of Endless Change
Prometheus Books, 2012
by E. Kirsten Peters

The Harvard-trained geologist, columnist, and WSU employee compiles her syndicated science columns in a peripatetic, curiosity-fueled volume in Planet Rock Doc, and applies her knowledge of geological systems to climate change throughout Earth’s history in The Whole Story of Climate.

Blazing a Wagon Trail to Oregon: A Weekly Chronicle of the Great Migration of 1843
by Lloyd W. Coffman ’87
Caxton Press-University of Nebraska, 2012

Diaries, letters, and reminiscences of pioneers tell the story of the earliest wagon trains to undertake the six-month trek from Missouri to Oregon in 1843, as they faced bad weather, threatening Indians, and scarce supplies.

Career Choices for Veterinarians: Private Practice and Beyond
by Carin A. Smith ’84
Smith Veterinary Consulting, 2011

The opinions and insights of experienced veterinarians offer examples of how veterinary students, current veterinarians, or someone considering the career might find work beyond a private practice.

Last Words

Spaces between

Emil Gehrke's Garden of the Wind near Grand Coulee. by Randall Pugh
Emil Gehrke’s Garden of the Wind near Grand Coulee. Randall Pugh

Having wrapped up my business in Grand Coulee and Nespelem, it occurred to me that in all my travels around the state, I had never driven State Route 155 from Grand Coulee to Coulee City. I always opted in the past for the quicker 174 to Wilbur. Taking that road less traveled may not have changed my life, but it certainly added to it. First, the whimsy of Emil Gehrke’s creations in the Garden of the Wind just a couple of miles down the road from the dam. “I wanted to make something pretty for the young people to see,” said Gehrke, who died in 1979. “We throw away too much. I like to show that practically any object can be reused.” And then, the sublimity of the Grand Coulee, even drowned, shrouded in fog on a late winter day. TS