I remember Sandpoint, Idaho.
In the opening moments of the 2016 documentary “The Art Life,” David Lynch, at work before a large canvas, recounts his childhood history, including what is perhaps his earliest memory:
I was born in Missoula, Montana. Then, my parents got a house in Sandpoint, Idaho, and I lived there for two years. So I remember Sandpoint, Idaho. Little Dicky Smith, my friend, he and I sat in a mud puddle under this tree. My mother dug a hole — or my dad did — that we could sit in in the hot weather, and they filled it with, you know, water from the hose, and we’d sit in this mud puddle. It was so beautiful. You get to squeeze mud and sit with your friend under the shade of this tree? Forget it. And then they moved to Spokane, Washington.
To most others, this story would seem an innocuous curio, a well-tread biography stepping stone: birthplace, hometown, a childhood marked by moves. But for me, it was jarring. It startled me significantly enough that I paused the film and rewound just to be sure I’d heard correctly. Even the second time through, my mind and ears tuned for accuracy, it was hard to believe. He said Sandpoint, Idaho. David Lynch spent part of his childhood and had one of his earliest memories in my parents’ small hometown.
How could it be? My parents, born and raised in rural farmland, grown into average vocations and a comfortable middle-class home, had sprung from the very same earth that awakened the consciousness of one of the great American artists, never mind one of my favorites?
Even stripped of the shock, the concept was anathema to me, near impossible to hold in my mind. It was like hearing they’d grown up in the same neighborhood as David Bowie or gone to school with Lou Reed. Disbelief was quickly followed by a flood of comparison, a scrutinizing of history, an attempt to find patterns between my lineage and that of an idol.
Almost intuitively, I began reconciling my knowledge of my parents’ childhood and my interpretations of Lynch’s work. Though separated in age by twenty years, thus preventing any physical overlap or interaction, there was nevertheless connective tissue between the stories my parents tell of their childhood and the stories told in Lynch’s work.
Between the late-40s of Lynch’s time in Sandpoint and the late-60s of my parents, Sandpoint remained a rustic backwood, with a population never surpassing 4,400. Surrounded by the Idaho National Panhandle Forest and nestled along the shore of the 43-mile-long Lake Pend Oreille, it is only an hour’s drive to the Canadian border. In those days, its primary industries were lumber and railways, while the nearby Farragut Naval Training station brought tales of otherworldly conspiracy in the form of glowing orbs often seen hovering over the lake.
Sandpoint might have been called Twin Peaks if not for the fact that it is surrounded by three mountain ranges instead.
It is well known that small-town life, generational patterns, and the Pacific Northwest pervade Lynch’s work, even if abstracted and obfuscated by dream logic. But there is a difficult-to-articulate sense of accuracy to these portrayals of outlandish eccentricity and darkness, which those who have lived here will tell you are authentic. The sound of wind through Douglas Fir, the speed of falling night, the grey, shifting topography. These things affect the people as much as the place.
Less the murders and mysticism, the story of Twin Peaks was one I’d been hearing my whole life, told and retold around the campfire of our family vacations, from the real-life stories of my parents’ adolescence in Sandpoint, where they were given a frightening amount of free reign to explore a place of loose, untrammeled wilderness in all the gilded excitement and tightrope danger of youth. I would experience similar stories firsthand, following in their footsteps, as my childhood was often spent unaccompanied outdoors in Oregon.
The emotional geography of Lynch’s work, particularly Twin Peaks, was one I had unconsciously been prepared for my whole life. It was even through my mother that I was introduced to his work. It was she, seeing a child interested in more bizarre and challenging forms, who gifted me that show, perhaps unwitting of how quickly and intensely my obsession with it and its creator would skyrocket and domino into other areas of my life. It wouldn’t be long before I begged them to take me to film festivals, theatre productions, concerts, and art exhibitions hours away in Portland. And they did. Through their graciousness as parents, for the love of their child, for their understanding of what it meant to be lost in that world for having lived in it, they let me roam wherever my interest led and often followed me there.
My initial reluctance to believe such different minds had come from the same place quickly reversed. It became clear, in retrospect, that it was the only way it could have happened, that it was the only way I would have experienced Twin Peaks and other Lynch works as I had, with such intensity, now so a part of my being that I can’t conceive of my life without them. I understood how similarities in their childhoods, albeit brief, could create such disparate paths which were yet always in view of each other. They wandered in entirely different times and places, crossing other rivers and separate borders, but for starting at the same trailhead, the same root, were populated with deeply familiar features, similar points of reference, and recognizable crossroads. My parents saw something they knew in Twin Peaks and knew I would see it, too.
There before me, unobscured, was the predictable push of generational patterns, a cycle in repetition toward its destiny. However, unlike in much of Lynch’s work, thanks to the careful skill, emotional acuity, and boundless understanding of my great parents, such cycles and patterns were undoubtedly of love.
Nikolas Kalar was born and raised in Pacific Northwest, Oregon, where he continues to live and work. He spends his time drinking coffee, reading, and trying to convince his cats to go on hikes with him and his girlfriend. His non-fiction has previously appeared in Chicago Literati. Find him on Twitter @NikolasKalar.
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