Making room

In one room, a pair of hands whips bed sheets into perfect squares as dryers hum. Upstairs another woman cleans 16 rooms today, whisking away the crumpled towels and tiny bars of used soap. She smoothes the wrinkles from the white landscape of the bed, wipes dust from the television's blank face.

This is Yakima's Hilton Garden Inn, and each room is not simply a bed, four walls, and a few hours of quiet. These rooms hold hours untethered to the past, and unworried about the future. This is a place cut free from the distractions of daily life lived in a single place.

This is a place where a new story is written and erased nearly every night. There are 111 rooms and, on most nights, each is home to a different traveler, a hundred different journeys. Unlike the well-worn walls of home, these rooms do not bear the scars and imprints of daily life. Routines are not etched into surfaces by feet marking the same path across the floor, familiar faces framed along the halls. These rooms are, instead, perpetual blank pages, new each day and waiting clean for life's messy evidence.

Here, against this blank slate, a person can reflect or rest. Nothing of the past or future is in these rooms except what is brought in, a temporarily acquired personality made of suitcases, briefcases, take-out containers.

The builders and maintainers of this quiet are the housekeeping staff, their work vigorous, continuous. They rewrite these stories. A child's fingerprints scattered across the shiny expanse of silver elevator door, rubbed away. Sheets rumpled from dreams or passions, stripped and washed, laid out without wrinkle or suggestion or memory.

A fleck of paper -- from a list? A business letter? A love letter, or a sandwich order? -- is vacuumed away. No smudge marks the mirrors. Even the hangers in the closet, hang in prescribed order, prescribed place.

This is the product, as much as the bed, the ergonomic desk chair, the identical soothing and abstract painting hung in each room. This space where only this story matters, this moment, this now, while all around, practiced hands are busy, repairing, preparing.

"Here, Now" is a monthly photo column by Yakima Herald-Republic photographer Sara Gettys that explores the connection between people and place, a look at the physical and cultural landscape of the Yakima Valley, entwined and inseparable.

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