Vignette from the Palouse in Summer

We barreled along freeways across ancient landscapes, the two of us, strangers unknown to the other, me in my beat up, old, green minivan, she in a little red car. One could tell hers was a new car even tho dusty from long hours on the road. Both of us headed West across Palouse Country toward the Pacific. The Palouse is a mix of rolling hills, wooded groves, and raw, naked canyons carved by ice and water thru prehistoric fire and lava. Now the Palouse seems quiet aside from the sound of blowing wind and heavy farm machinery. Local farmers and ranchers worked off in the distance churning up clouds of dust and chaff as they brought in the last of the wheat harvests.

Howard, a migrant farmworker during my youth in Virginia once told me one of his most cherished life experiences was the magic of working the wheat harvest. He and his fellow laborers would start in the South and work their way towards the Far North across the Great Plains of the American and Canadian Heartlands. They called it, “following the harvest.” Howard considered it a pilgrimage, tho he didn’t use such words. It clearly affected him deeply in a religious sort of way. He did chuckled once as he reminisced following the harvest was about as close as going to church as he was ever gonna get.

Today the hills rolled forth under a hot August sun and all seemed earthbound shades of yellow and brown ringed by evergreen trees. I-90 stretched across the Northern states and out here ran from Spokane in Eastern Washington near the Idaho border all the way into Seattle on the Salish Sea. Along the way the interstate traversed multiple ranges of the Rockies to cross the Palouse. Then the blacktop zooms across the Channeled Scablands of Washington Desert, an arid, rocky morass of steppe, sagebrush, and astonishingly huge canyons carved by immense Ice Age floods, to push on thru the mountains and passes of the heavily forested and still icy Cascade Range. The road dropped down the mountains into the urbanized lowlands along Puget Sound where ships come down thru the Salish Sea from the Pacific Ocean. 

She zoomed towards me from behind in her little red car, passed a line of trucks barreling west, and then passed me on my left. Curious, I glanced over as we sped along around 75 to 80 miles an hour. Young White woman. Blonde hair. Aquiline nose. No glasses. Not even sunglasses. Looked straight ahead. Unwavering. Hunched over and gripping the steering wheel. Sun visor down. She kept steady, tho, and, I, uninterested in racing, slowed down a tad to give her space. Her short, little red car shot on by. Continue reading →