Bold Journey: Meet Aaron McKenzie

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by the folks over at Bold Journey. Here's a snippet (read the rest here):

I was born in Idaho, and I was also born on wheels, so to speak: our family moved every year or so until I was in junior high school: from Boise to Sprague River to Walla Walla to Milton-Freewater to Whiteson and then to Salem and to McMinnville and to Oregon City, the end of the Oregon Trail and of our own rootlessness.

The West – both its culture and its spaces – shaped my childhood. This was due, in part, to money – specifically, our family had very little of it. And even if my parents had had the means, I’m not sure it would have occurred to them to take a family vacation to, say, New York City, let alone to Europe or Japan. Vacations were when we visited family, or went camping, or went camping with family. And so we spent our summers fishing the Breitenbush River in the Oregon Cascades or playing in the surf at Cape Lookout on the Oregon Coast. We hiked in the Columbia River Gorge and took long road trips to family reunions in Southeastern Idaho, out on the northern reaches of the Great Basin. We seldom traveled by airplane and I never went east of the Rocky Mountains until I was sixteen years old. Instead, we drove west through the Coast Range, or east over the Ochoco Mountains and the Wallowas and the Elkhorns, across the Owyhee and Alvord deserts, through California’s Central Valley, and along the dramatic sweep of the state’s coastline. We couldn’t afford to “go anywhere” but I sure did see a lot of the West as a kid.

None of this is a complaint. Quite the contrary: our family’s lack of money turned out to be a gift. Our modest adventures gave me an intimate relationship with a region; they gave me my own deep-rooted sense of place, a sense of where I’m from. My childhood bound me forever to the West’s canyons and peaks, to its rainforests and deserts, to its farmland and to some of the most desolate stretches of road on the continent. To borrow from Wallace Stegner, I was blessed as a kid to learn something from being able to look a long way, out across the sort of expanses that only the West offers, and to learn something which one can only learn from feeling very much alone in such a place. I learned, as Black Elk put it, that anywhere is the center of the world.