Notes From The Road - October 2004
The Palouse and Columbia Plateau
After packing my things in the motel cabin, I filled my travel mug and said farewell to the folks at Escalante Outfitters. I figured it would take two full days drive from southern Utah to central Oregon with an overnight in Idaho. First stop was a visit with my brother and sister who live near Bend on the high desert eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains.
I remembered a public hot spring that Sue and I visited last year near Twin Falls and thought that would be the perfect place to end the day. Twelve hours and 730 miles later I arrived as the sun was going down. To my dismay a sign at the gate said, “Closed on Sunday.” Not wanting to accept this reality, and seeing that the gate was open, I cautiously drove in. It appeared that Sunday was their day to clean out the tubs and the large hot spring-fed swimming pool. When I told the proprietor of my drive and my anticipation of a hot soak, he pointed to a tub that was newly clean and filling up and said, “go ahead, be our guest.” I emerged a half hour later in a profoundly mellow and satisfied state of mind. I traded them a CD, and everyone was satisfied. I drove an hour further to Mountain Home where I found a Wal-Mart parking lot to camp for the night.
Over the next two weeks I spent more time in the inland Northwest than I ever had previously. I made a circuit through the towns of Kennewick, Spokane, Leavenworth in Washington, and Moscow and McCall in Idaho. The Columbia Plateau is the country that Woody Guthrie wrote about when hired by the Bonneville Power Administration in 1941. His job was to write 30 songs in 30 days about the benefits of electric power being created by the newly built dams on the Columbia River. He wrote 26 songs that month, some of his most famous among them, “Roll on Columbia”(now Washington’s state song), “Hard Travelin’,”and “Pastures of Plenty,” to name a few.
One day, driving from Spokane west to Leavenworth, I took a detour to see the Grand Coulee Dam. The Grand Coulee was not like I imagined. I had visions of something tall like the Hoover Dam. Rather, it was very broad, and fit perfectly into the landscape spanning the breadth of some ancient flood. Everywhere I went in eastern Washington I beheld the contradiction of desert and orchard. Irrigation is everything here. Think of what a relatively modest river the Colorado is and how many people it feeds throughout the entire southwest. The Columbia is many times larger and seems to offer a limitless supply of water to whoever will exploit it. Slopes of the most barren desert imaginable become a paradise of apple, pear, and prune orchards. Lombardy Poplars sway in the wind and protect their borders like shepherds watch over their precious flocks. Where there is water, there are people growing food.
Near Kennewick where grape vineyards abound, the Snake and Yakima Rivers join the Columbia. On two occasions I drove a lonely route east through the Palouse between Kennewick and Lewiston, Idaho. Through the villages of Waitsburg, Starbuck, Dodge, and Pomeroy I drove, each with its own grain elevator, shut down gas station, farm supply, and greasy spoon diner. This is some of the richest farmland in the world, created by two and a half million years worth of fertile dust blown in from the southwest that settled a hundred feet deep in places to create what is now the Palouse. Makes you want to grow food and milk a cow just looking at it.
After my concert in Moscow, Idaho, the pull of driving east toward home began to take a grip. Next came concerts in Helena, then a long drive across Montana and south through Wyoming to Laramie, and a final house concert in Lyons, Colorado. With the Lyons gig behind me there was nothing keeping me from home but distance. I didn’t even spend the night, just got in the van and drove east toward Kansas. My companion all the way to North Carolina was the world-series games on the AM radio. I’d scan the dial and while one signal faded there was always another ESPN broadcast to take its place. Hearing those games I revisited my childhood of holding the transistor radio to my ear and listening to Giants games under the covers at night when I should have been sleeping. Baseball is the perfect game to drive long distance with - inning by inning, the miles melted away.
The Palouse
hills of dust
dunes of ancient loam
heave like the ocean
wind and sun break
over serpentine furrows
where tractors plant wheat, lentils, peas
in Waitsburg I stop for gas
no one’s here
use a bank card
behind the store front
a bleak hill rises
of tawny stubble
swayback barn
faded pine from a distant forest
pasted with political slogans
pressed tin and metal roofing
peel off the grain elevator
five stories tall
vineyards of grapes
where King Columbia flows
the Snake, the Yakima
upon the plateau
high desert made lush
with orchards of pear, and apple
lombardy poplars slow the wind
dams every fifty miles
slow the water
Thanks for reading, everybody! Please keep in touch by dropping me a note in the guestbook. Check out the schedule and come on out for a show. See you!
- Dana