...AIR STAGNATION ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 1 PM MST
FRIDAY...
* WHAT...An extended period of stagnant air, with light winds
and little vertical mixing.
* WHERE...Portions of south central, southwest and west central
Idaho and northeast and southeast Oregon.
* WHEN...Until 1 PM MST Friday, and this time may be extended.
* IMPACTS...Periods of air stagnation can lead to the buildup of
pollutants near the surface.
* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Winds will be strong enough today,
Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons in portions of the Upper
Treasure Valley and Western Magic Valley to limit stagnation.
However, parts of the zones will experience stagnant air and
were therefore included in this advisory.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
An Air Stagnation Advisory concerns itself with meteorological
conditions only. For more information on air pollution in Idaho,
visit website www.deq.idaho.gov. For Oregon, visit website
www.oregon.gov/deq.
If possible, reduce or eliminate activities that contribute to
air pollution, such as outdoor burning, and the use of
residential wood burning devices. Reduce vehicle trips and
vehicle idling as much as possible.
&&
In the earlier years of their stay there, most students hated Moscow. That’s how my memory has it, that among the freshmen and sophomores, it was in fashion to be scornful of the town. To grumble and groan about all the things it lacked, compared to wherever they called home. For kids from more populous environs— e.g., the Boise Valley, the Pocatello-Idaho Falls corridor, the Twin Falls area or Coeur d’Alene — Moscow was a dumpy little burg with nothing fun going for it, and none of their old high-school buds around to make it any better.
For those from Idaho’s even littler burgs — say, Preston, up through Dubois and Whitebird, all the way to Bonners Ferry — Moscow was perhaps too big, too exotic, too intense, and again, too far away from the childhood friends who might have cushioned the cultural shock had they all enrolled in the same school together.
Many of them — us — were surprised at how being long-distance-phone-rates far from family for the first time wasn’t as exhilaratingly free-spirited as they had anticipated it to be. I knew at least three fellow freshmen who didn’t make it to Christmas break. My first roommate, in fact, called his parents in October — about two months into his first semester — and sobbed until they agreed to come and get him. The rest of us gathered in one dorm room or another in the evenings, mooched our first cigarettes from the upperclassmen we’d coaxed into buying our first booze, and bellowed out the chorus to “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” along with Eric Burden.
The winters were the worst, especially for those of us from the relatively arid deserts of down-state. Colder. Rainier. And the snow could be brutal when you were slogging from class to class over those campus hills. To get from my dorm to the building in which I would spend most of my academic time felt like crossing the Continental Divide; “up” wasn’t as bad as “down,” not when the sidewalks were iced over.
Come my junior year, I left dorm life behind and went off-campus. I was out and about Moscow a great deal more than when the university was seeing to my basic needs, and the more I got to know the town, the more I liked it. The more I felt at home. I’d grown attached to a Moscow girl and was meeting her Moscow friends, her Moscow parents, her Moscow cousins, aunts, and uncles, and I realized, eventually, that not every Moscow citizen had an existential umbilical connection to the university — that their town would be their home even if the U of I were to be swallowed whole by those giant earthworms rumored to be slithering about under all that winter wheat and lentils.
What I had at first perceived to be a mutually-distrustful attitude twixt students and townies turned out not to exist at all, at least from the townies’ side. While the incoming freshmen may have inherited from the sophomores the suspicion that the permanent residents were out to screw them at every possible turn, I found those permanent residents proud that they could provide a setting to such a grand institution, and deeply appreciative of the students for being part of their community, if only for a handful of years.
I began spending the whole year there, rather than retreating back to Meridian come summer. I got part-time jobs there. I got married there. Neither the jobs nor the marriage lasted very long, but by then, I had gone from liking Moscow, to loving Moscow. Instead of merely hating the winters, I came to relish the autumns, the summers, and especially the springs. (I have never come across a more glorious day anywhere than a May morning in Moscow, when it feels like the air itself has just come out of the dryer.) Instead of resenting the lonely farmland isolating Moscow from the rest of Idaho, I grew to treasure those rolling Palouse expanses. (You’ve never had your breath stopped with beauty like when you’re driving over some twisting Latah County back road, you top a hill and there before you is a 1000-acre slope of blooming rapeseed.)
I never wanted to leave. By the time I’d accumulated enough credits to make it clear to my faculty advisors that I was just stalling, I’d decided there could be no better place to live out one’s days. I entered a community within the community, comprised of people who, like me, were done with their schooling, but not done with Moscow.
Circumstances change and the most sincere of intentions usually have to change with it. In the late summer of 1973, I packed my eight years of Moscow experience into my trusty Rambler and moved on. I told friends I’d be back. That I just had to stretch out a bit. To get clear on my proper trajectory. To tend to some matters of maturation. To see if I was missing something.
And indeed, I had every expectation of returning. Of making Moscow — after all the wanderlust and curiosities were satisfied — my permanent place. Probably, it was for the best how that wishful thinking evolved into the impossible dream. I’ve spent 50 years now with my time there lingering like a charmed perfume on the skin of my soul, a brush with paradise that might well have dissipated long ago had I gone back to stay. I suspect a lot of U of I alums, those who didn’t call their parents early on to come get them, think of Moscow like that — a winsome reflection in which life was sweet, simpler, and safe.
Not that such nostalgia can mean much next to the unfathomable crime that befell those four kids. Those bright and hopeful, tragically unfulfilled kids. But I have to pray that, after being the background for such a horror, the town can some day return to that gentle place in the heart, my secret might have been garden.
