Nothing To Call It But Ellensburg

Ellensburg, it's a city in Eastern Washington. It's across a mountain range and into the hot, deserty, Eastern planes. It is, according to a billboard I read this morning while Sparklehorse played lightly in my ear, a winner of some national award. The whole darn city won.

Now, I do not get most of my learning from billboards, save everything that I know about long distance service and the books full of numbers that said long distance providers have, but I was unaware of this national award given to cities. Which I guess is the reason for the billboard...

What I know of Ellensburg (prior to my billboard encounter this morning) is based on two things:
1) In "Soul Of A Whore", the Denis Johnson play that I was in, there's a discussion of a double murder in the city of Ellersburg, and not the Canadian Ellersburg, the Ellersburg in Texas. Ellersburg is apparently a small and dusty town, and every time I heard it coming from the stage it made me think of Ellensburg. I guess this doesn't really count as knowing a damn thing about Ellensburg...

2) People go to play women's softball tournaments there. My mom was on a softball team that went to some sort of championship in Ellensburg when I was a wee young boy. I remember it being hot and dusty. I remember softball fields and a cheap motel. This is my only real point of reference to Ellensburg, and it hardly seems award worthy.

All of this Ellensburg revelry reminded me of trying to carve a replica of Devil's Tower out of a dirt clod that sort of already resembled Devil's Tower. I remember also wanting to cause serious bodily damage to my brother when he broke my dirt clod Devil's Tower.

There was a short time in my life that I was obsessed with Devil's Tower:


Not in the Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind sort of way, but it was because of Close Encounters that I was obsessed with it. For a few years in my childhood, it appeared that Steven Spielberg and I shared obsessions. We both were apparently taken with UFO's, aliens, giant sharks and daredevil archeologists chasing biblical artifacts capable of melting the faces of Nazi's. At some point our interests took separate roads; mine towards heavier plotlines and Bunuel/Lynchian surrealism, his towards Tom Cruise.

Anyway, congratulations Ellensburg, I bet you torqued off Wenatchee but good