Cracked Window

Rarely is anything as it appears. How’s that for an overused truism? But it’s one I keep learning again and again. Take the case of this abandoned house. During a seven-day research trip last week, it was first on a long list of places and people to see on the Nez Perce Reservation near Lewiston, Idaho.

Two years ago, my daughter Erin gave me a sepia-toned and more poignant version taken by a professional photographer. The gift was tied to a book that I was writing with Ann Terry Hill about Oregon’s nearly century-old rodeo, the Pendleton Round-Up, including stories about legendary Nez Perce cowboy Jackson Sundown. A caption below the photograph, which is displayed in my office bookcase, identifies the house as Sundown’s cabin. I had emailed the photographer for directions in 2007.

I finally made it there on June 20, beginning research for a much bigger story. The house, leaning south amid a hillside of flowering peas, is on Highway 95 in Culdesac. I took a dozen photos inside and out, and videotaped everything, complete with a hushed narration meant to lend solemnity to the moment. I rubbed my hand over wood weathered black. I peered at nails protruding from a wall, wondering whether Sundown used them to hang his clothes. I wanted to feel his presence eighty-six years after his death.

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In 1978, when I was a young newspaper reporter in Melbourne, Florida, I covered a protest march by a few dozen Iranian students. Carrying placards and shouting slogans, faces flush with anger, they looked as if they had wandered onto the wrong movie set.

I didn’t know much about the target of their rage: the Shah of Iran and his hated secret police, SAVAK. Passing motorists gave the group confused looks. Nobody was paying attention to the unrest in Iran, of which these Florida Institute of Technology students were a distant part. Nobody could have guessed that the rich and powerful Shah would be overthrown the next year, or two years after that, in 1981, Islamist revolutionaries would seize fifty-two American hostages, ensnaring the United States for decades.

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I’m afflicted with vegetable garden envy. Sure, we have many things growing and gracing the dinner table. Way too much lettuce in fact. But our urban bounty has come to harvest slowly because no part of the yard has day-long sun. And there’s one raised bed in which everything seems frozen in time despite the adjacent house wall radiating afternoon sun. (The soil testing kit — pH, nitrogen, potassium, and potash levels — arrived late today.)

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Isn’t the appeal of this photo the immediate emotional response it triggers? And that response, different for every viewer, likely has nothing to do with the moment captured or starkly beautiful landscape or its inhabitants. I guess that’s why it ranked first in this contest.

I don’t agree with everything President Obama does or doesn’t do. But too many people miss his essential, rare quality: he is a real leader, a leader unafraid to take on difficult and complex problems by confronting them with blunt yet uplifting language, language that holds up a mirror, a mirror reflecting truth. From his speech in Cairo today about the Middle East, religion, and much more:

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.