East of the Mountains

This country looks best at the fringes of day. Mornings and evenings I'm slunk low in the sagebrush of some coulee - the word for it in the wheatlands. I would have said gorge. The landscape is more Utah than Washington. High stone pinnacles, flat bottomed coulees, circling hawks and tormented lizards. Rock bluffs slink off to the mountains, hiding their streams like relapsed addicts. I followed one till it exhausted and gave out its water, then promptly dropped its sides and I came onto the plains of Eastern Washington, as bewildered by the change as tho I had lately popped up from a hole.

There was around me a vast Nothing in one of its more desolate incarnations. I had been warned as much while still in the towns on the slopes of the Cascades, but realized then that my interpretation had been vastly more populated. Acre beyond acre of sage, raked earth, and sprouted wheat like a cloth on a tabletop, and so much sky overhead it could never be drunk but must swallow the world entire. From where I came out of the coulee, I could spot a grain silo eight miles distant. It held the horizon till I arrived and passed it and found it to be just that: a lone silo with no house or barn or shed to accompany. Tho, mercifully, an outhouse. And then again, the emptiness of wheat, earth, and sage.

It is a hard land. The soil so parched it must be irrigated 2 years before it can grow grain. Packed stiff against graves and not a tree to burn. None that got there by its own power, anyway.

There are towns - clustered around a silo even when they have a church - but they are minute, utilitarian, and infrequent. And in the space between there is often this: a house with no one to fill it, the windows in pieces, and outside, trees dying for water.

My shadow has woken before me, waiting quietly for the rest of me to rise so we can go on looking for wherever that sun keeps coming up from. Together we are just about the only things to walk across the plains. Everything else moving has wheels or wings or is the wind itself. Larks are great in number, singing so loud that most mornings I am woken sure that one has gotten into my tent. But no, it is the stone some meters distant he is singing over, telling the screeching killdeers to lay their eggs somewhere else. Predatory birds stalk the air: coopers and red-tailed hawks, burrowing and barred owls. Golden eagles. I watched a pair of male red-tails circle each other screaming for dominion of a shelf of sage and lupine. They wheeled and dove and cried, with no determined victor for the while I watched. And then the mystery of a pool of water in all this drought, and ducks, geese, and - strange to see 200 miles from the ocean - sandpipers, California gulls, whillets. How did they know that on the other side of those 10,000 foot crests and another hundred miles of desert there would be this?

This is not a wilderness, and marks of man abound. For starters, there is the wheat, whole square hectares of it coming up. Then the road. Then the lonely towers of the silos, and the rails where trains once carried people. Now that function is performed by the pickup truck, packed three to a cab.

Swinging across the fields, like Cervantes' giants, the pylons stride. Quixote would recognize this place, a new world Estremadura, where the land is a smoothed vellum that smells of dust and stale seeds and the inhabitants know there is more beyond the plains, but pretend that nothing could be better than to live where no feature can interrupt either sunrise or sunset. ("Not the middle of nowhere but the center of everything," brags the town of Hartline.)

The image of the elder knight in my head, I find it hard to think of anything else. I see the same mirages. I turn the electrical lines to gargantua and the combines to mirrored adversaries. A book I have never read but mean to. It must be time. Ah, but the la Manchan is unknown here. I ask the librarian of Davenport for a copy of Quixote, but there is not one in stock. ("Did he write fiction or non-fiction?" she asks.)

And then the sunset comes, and my shadow has gotten to my resting place before me, but I will outlast him. I still have my dinner to cook, which may be done at the same time as his shadow meal. But likely he will retire before, and I will be alone beneath the stars, boiling my rice on a fire of sagebrush. An owl may fly over.