WW: Desert snapshot

(Photo taken during my outbacking trek through the Columbia Basin last summer. Mt. Rainier in the distance.

Open link in a new tab to see it to better effect.)

WW: Sunset on the Columbia Plateau

(Another shot from my trek through Eastern Washington last summer.)

WW: Sky on the Hanford Reach

(Here's a photo from my outbacking excursion to Spokane last summer, taken on the northwest limit of the Pasco Basin, just a few hundred yards short of the Priest Rapids of the Columbia River. This view is west to Umtanum Ridge. [Open the link in a new tab to see it bigger.]

I never get used to those electric Gold Side skies. People who live there walk around under them like nothing's going on, oblivious to the Greensider ratcheting off shots of nothing in particular above them.

But I recommend you avoid driving these backroads – lowest elevation in the state – in July if you have the shadow of a choice. Especially if your truck has no air conditioning. A thermos of heavily-iced tea was all that stood between me and posterity.)

WW: Crane

(On my recent visit to Spokane I was struck by the sci-fi aesthetics of this building going up on the far side of the river. The crane dramatically frames and accents the distopian structure below, its bold red steel startling against a classic vibrant blue Gold Side sky.

Tourists often complain about cranes ruining their photos, but I find them uplifting.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Battered but not beaten

(I made this fudo [look left; hanging from the bell] in 2009, for friends in Spokane County. When I took care of their farm for a few weeks 6 years later, I posted a photo of it here. It was still looking pretty smart then, all things considered.

On a visit last month I noted that 16 years' continuous duty in the desert hadn't done it any favours. But given the conditions, the old warrior still serves our patron well.)

WW: Novel architecture

(The Spokane Regional Health District is an arresting sight, inspired as it apparently was by the architecture of West and Central Africa. I can't remember seeing such a structure anywhere before. And I certainly wouldn't have expected to find one serving as a government building on the Gold Side of Washington – arid though it is. Hats off to an inspired county facilities committee.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Okanogan cactus

(Opuntia fragilis or x columbiana, depending where you sit in that debate.

It's important to know where you sit when Opuntia's about.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Sarsarpkin

(This passage, drawn from my manuscript Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, refers to the Sinlahekin Valley, a region of northeastern Washington that's one of my favourite places on Earth.)

The ghosts of the Sinlahekin don't live in town. Wade into a blue-skied draw, far from roads and barbed wire, where wormwood and dry grass ripple in the mind, and there, in the earth's own cleavage, wait. They will come.

By the late 1800s, every indigenous civilisation in the Oregon Country was lost or losing. The Haida were decimated, the Modoc deported, the Palouse ground to dust between soldier and Shoshoni. Smohalla died of grief; his dream, of Homily and Moses. Leschi, great statesman of the Nisqually, the settlers studiously strangled, following due process of law.

In this time Sarsarpkin withdrew his tiny Sinkaietsk band to the upper Sinlahekin. Congress had once reserved the entire American Okanogan to the First Nations, but the whites had never respected this. When gold was discovered, even the pretence of treaty was dropped. In the idiom of the day, the reserve was "opened to the public", leaving Sarsarpkin with an ultimatum: abandon his home and join the nations already herded onto the Colville reserve, or accept what we, in our own idiom, call "privatisation". Sinkaietsk land would be "allotted" – parcelled out – to individuals, who would be empowered to sell it to strangers if they wished. This, the old man knew, would only defer his people's dispossession of, and expulsion from, the Sinlahekin.

Sarsarpkin had fought the occupiers in the canyons, and he had fought them in Congress. He had never won. And so he lived the remainder of his days on a Sinlahekin allotment, still the moral, if not political, leader of his people. He attended Mass, maintained relations with Colville and Canadian nations, and by all accounts practiced neighbourly acceptance of the usurpers. None of which convictions suffered from his equally well-documented addiction to alcohol.

Neither could they overcome it. In November 1887, Sarsarpkin's older son Peter, also drunk, pushed his father over a cliff and killed him. The following spring, younger son Jack bashed in Peter's skull in like circumstances. The other Sinkaietsk families fell to similar pressures, kicking their allotments one by one into foreign hands. The scant survivors straggled into Nespelem, their very name shattered like busted sod.

Sarsarpkin was buried, along with his widow and his children, on a low rise outside Loomis. Years later the town erected a high marble cross on the site, but even that eventually disappeared. This day, a wire enclosure and two headstones were the only clue that a nation slept there beneath the scrub and jumping cactus.

But Sarsarpkin's heart still spoke, in words those who stood beside his grave could hear. In the end, he'd had a single choice: die somewhere else, or die here.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the Sinlahekin Valley courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Déjà vu all over again

Crashing from a precipice of six inches, this raging cataract of last week's rainstorm runoff has chewed its overhang backward about three feet, leaving a broad, cliff-bound foot kettle that's as deep as eight inches in the middle.

OK, probably not the stuff of tourism, but worth pointing out that the photo above is a precise duplicate of the monstrous Missoula floods that completely reshaped much of the Gold Side over a period of just 24 hours. Viewed from the air, the coulees they left look exactly like this, except measured in miles.

Hair

(This is an excerpt from a manuscript about an epic outbacking trek I took six years before I became a monk. As you can see in the photo at left, some things have changed.)

Shortly after 0700 I coasted down the long hill into Conconully, skirting its round, post-card reservoir. Motoring quietly through drowsing neighbourhoods, bright clapboard glowing like a remembered summer, I was struck, as often on the Gold Side, by a sense of place. Hometown, as few Puget Sound ones are anymore.

A regiment of impact sprinklers had swept the state campground's day use area as clear as a July schoolyard, but that suited me fine; its deserted parking lot was perfect for peeling off my Michelin Man layers.

So laying down in the bed of the truck, I shed my December kit by stratum, cool air sweet on my nakedness as the long underwear at last came off. Then I squirmed back into my trousers, grabbed my toilet kit, and scrambled back over the tailgate. While setting bath water from the nearest sprinkler on the stove, I caught my reflection in the canopy.

The trendiest salon in New York City couldn't have given me that hairstyle. It fractalled off in a hundred directions, licks and wisps corkscrewing out like an armoury fire. If I'd had a black turtleneck, I could have passed for the hippest artiste in all of Greenwich Village. But bare-chested in dirty jeans, I just looked like an extra from Deliverance.

I dipped my comb and started in, and was soon dripping like I'd dunked my head to the shoulders, but never really mastered the situation.

Buddhist monks say they shave their heads to free themselves from attachment. Bollocks. They do it to free themselves from their hair.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson.)

WW: Afternoon on the Palouse Slope

WW: Radio road trip

(My QRP rig set up in a friend's back garden.)

WW: Homesick

(Sagebrush [Artemisia tridentata] collected on my last trip to the Gold Side hangs on the foot of my cot.)

WW: Coulee country

(Open in a new window to better appreciate the beauty of this unique habitat.)

WW: Cactus flower

(Opuntia sp.)

Gold Side Gothic

These Okanogan Forest Service roads are punctuated by the weathered husks of farmhouses, their glass and paint long departed, their Norman Rockwell profiles drooping with iron sickness.

But not rot; that wants rain, and the only moisture that ever flowed freely in this country was the blood, sweat, and tears of homesteaders.

When even that ran out, families surrendered.

Standing by those vacant windows, you can feel the handshake, smell the wash, taste the bacon, and in the keening of a wind-blown hinge, touch a sorrow full as deep as it was four generations ago.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of Douglas County derelict courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Snow in the Spokane country

WW: Okanogan moonrise

Rough Around the Edges: Pullman

Pullman is improbable. Even from a distance, the town looks, not out of place, but out of epoch. In theory it's a typical prairie town: terraced into four loamy knolls, shaded by spreading maple, pine, and spruce, all of it drifted together by steel rails. In its leafy streets and neat switching yards you could believe you're trapped in an HO layout, especially if you throw in a train. Which you often do, in a city named for the man who invented the sleeping car.

But even from the horizon – say, the top of Kamiak Butte, eleven miles north – there's something incongruous about Pullman.

Only on approach does it land: it's the brick. Lots of it. Pullman's ruddy walls rise like the defences of a medieval town, which it also resembles, once you've put your finger on it. But those ancient cities were not walled in factory-made terra cotta, and so Pullman has a futurism, like a robotic eye in a human face, that contradicts and complements the train set and the Templars.

Those red ramparts, rising amidst what Greensiders sneer a cow town, are the source of cognitive dissonance. Because Pullman is nowhere. It's near nothing of consequence in three states, of which it lies outside all but one. Had matters so rested, Pullman would today be what its constituent bits still are: a Gold Side hometown in dusty decent coveralls.

But in 1890 the red came. That year, the federal government extended its network of land-grant agricultural colleges to Washington, and with atypical boldness, the State Legislature sited the new institution, not merely in eastern Washington, but in southeastern Washington. That is to say, in Plutonian space.

And as Pluto was not a real planet, so Pullman was not really a city. Incorporated just four years earlier, its 200 farmers and railroad workers were quickly inundated by a veritable lahar of staff and students. And so the first product of the Agricultural College, Experiment Station, and School of Science of the State of Washington, was that most Washingtonian of things: a mill town. Except that this mill splits from its raw resource, not shakes, but scholars.

In our motherland of apple carts, that was just the first the new college upset. For all the novelty of its location, today's Washington State University serves a region more cultural than physical. Olympia may be capital of the map, and Seattle the money, but Pullman is the capital of nowhere. All of it (the nowhere), from Sumas to Sekiu to Skamokawa to Scotia, and every backwater between. Country kids statewide aspire to WSU, not just for agronomy, veterinary, and teaching programmes, but also its world-class faculties in media, literature, and archaeology.

And behind the carrot, the stick. Growing up in rural Thurston County I engaged daily with WSU's army of barnyard Green Berets. Their Cooperative Extension ran my 4H programme. They ran FFA. They ran the tansy-ragwort eradication campaign, the artificial insemination service, the whole head, heart, hands, and health consultancy. They answered questions about recycling plastic, feeding babies, canning corn. With an irony I did not remark at the time, they sponsored the marine science summer camp I loved.

From WSU's guerrilla intellectuals I learned as much about war, Watergate, and women as rabbits and razor clams. They wore gumboots and flannel, got our jokes and fears, and saw no incongruity between our podunk ZIP codes and their university degrees.

The Extension Service is the reason a King County town can lie 30 minutes and a million miles from the University of Washington. To those of us in the woods and prairies and mountains, the difference was never about football.

I'd never been to Pullman before that day, but even from afar I knew those brick battlements for the college. As they encadre that city's neighbourhoods and thoroughfares, so too do they gird every small town in Washington.

The bone and sinew of the Academy.


(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Joe Mabel and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Okanogan sunset