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 still 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

Escape From Lotus Land

From birth, a great wall screens the Greensider from an uncomfortable reality. We live with our backs to it, like riverboat gamblers, indifferent to the white sawtooth peaks that scrape the clouds from the sky. Everything we love – the grey air, the cold jungle, the wet asphalt – the Cascades steal for us from the rest of the state. We are like mandarins in a sea of suffering, boreals milk-fed on austral pillage. Beyond the ridge: rattlesnakes, black widows, right-wingers. The knowledge terrifies us.

Thus the passes, fabled portals hanging somewhere above our ceiling of vision, disturb our dreams. All winter long the radio intones their names: White Pass, Stevens Pass, Blewitt, Snoqualmie. When the alpine snow seals them up, we are caged in our cloying lotus land. It's a frightening thought.

I had to get over those mountains, to find refuge in reality; a real world cure for my real world pain. Now at last I was climbing east, and out. How better to shake Green Side grief than to lose it on the North Cascades Highway, whose high twin passes disappear each autumn, and stay gone, till the mountains give them back.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the Walla Walla country courtesy of Jeffrey G. Katz and Wikimedia Commons.)

Hermitcraft: Sunshine Tea

Scalding days here on the North Coast put me in mind of a great simple delicacy, the sublime sunshine tea. Nothing beats this stuff on a hot day. A shady place, a good book, and a tall glass tinkling on the apple box – there is no other enlightenment in this life.

Sunshine tea is so easy the procedure doesn't even qualify as a recipe, but like all simple things (tea foremost) the difference between good and great is in the attention. The basics are as follows:



o Fill a gallon jar with cold water

o Put in six to eight teabags. (Black tea.)

o Put the jar in full sun all day, shifting as necessary

o Squeeze out the tea bags and discard

o Refrigerate; serve over ice

Slow brewing gives this tea a lighter, less tannic flavour than boiling. For that reason, and the fact that it's served cold (and, ideally, herbed; see below), quality is less important than usual. Any respectable cutting pekoe will do; here in North America, Red Rose or Tetley are ample. (Lipton, to my certain knowledge, has no culinary uses, and those horrific "store brands" are fair-dinkum hazardous material. Keep out of the reach of children, and anything else you want to thrive.)

Water quality, however, is vital. If your tap water is heavily chlorinated, run it through a Brita pitcher first. If it's very hard, you may want to buy commercial spring water. (Which is actually just distilled or filtered municipal water in many cases; the whole industry's a giant scam.) Other tea-fancier strategies – rainwater, melted snow – are less effective this time of year, though when I lived in Québec I could count on a ten-minute late-afternoon deluge most days that gave me enough tea water to supply the town.

But the real difference between acceptable and fantastic sun tea is a large shock of some herb. Judging by how rarely I see any in others' jars, and the surprised delight of friends, this fact isn't yet common knowledge. So I'm blowing the lid off it: there is no comparison between unenhanced tea and that made with mint.

And mint is the best herb for the job: it has a clean, sweet tingle; grows like kudzu this time of year; and actually triggers the cooling receptors in your body. With enough of this in your mix you'll feel the frost all the way down, and even up in your eyeballs.

Spearmint, the pointed, green-stemmed stuff that tastes like chewing gum, is notably better than peppermint, the round-leaved, purple-stemmed sibling that grows wild here on the North Coast, but the latter is plenty good if it's what you've got. Pennyroyal, another wild mint that grows along lakeshores here, is also fine, and so is catnip, an almost-mint I've often found wild on the Gold Side and in Québec. Both have a lemon thing going on that is most welcome.

To use, cut a good big fistful, fold it up so it'll fit in your jar, and crush and roll it briefly in your hands to liberate the volatile oils. (The jar in the photo only has about a quarter of the mint [catnip here] I prefer.) Then stuff the sheaf in the jar, fill it with water, and put the teabags in last; otherwise it will be hard to fish them out. At day's end, after removing the bags, reach into the jar and manhandle the sheaf again in the tea a few good times. (You may have to remove a few glasses first, to make room for your hand.) Then refrigerate the jar with the mint still in.

I've also used other herbs: lemon slices; raspberry and blackberry leaves; the berries themselves (lightly bruised); rosemary; Melissa; Monarda; even grand fir. (I was going for a well-chilled retsina effect. Not bad, actually; c.f. lemoniness.) In my opinion none have bested the mints, but they’re worthy in their own right, and better than nothing.

A few notes for readers outside of North America:

You may be wondering, "What the hell is this guy talking about?" Yes, we drink iced tea here. The specifics vary from region to region – if you order it in Canada or the American South, be sure to specify unsweetened, or you may be served a paste of sugar – but it's generally an incredibly refreshing way to confront the dog days. Really. Trust me on this one. (North Americans can grasp the revulsion many outlanders feel at the idea by picturing themselves enjoying a nice bowl of iced soup. Another summer staple in many nations.)

Sunshine tea is in fact so popular on this continent that they sell special jars for it (see photo), basically an ordinary gallon jar with a spigot punched in the bottom, saving the user lifting the whole heavy thing to pour. But any glass or clear plastic jar will do. Plastic is actually the more effective, owing to superior heat transfer.

Also, as I implied above, North Americans are divided on the sugar issue. I prefer my iced tea utterly clean; this goes double if it's minted. Most here on the North Coast agree, or sweeten their tea very lightly, often with fruit juice. Other regions partake fully in the New World conviction that sugar is a vegetable, a spice, a vitamin, a source of fibre, and part of this complete breakfast. Listen, just make your own, eh? Disregard the contemptuous sneer of your neighbours when you set the pot out, and play around with post-production till you find a formula that works for you. Who knows? You might found an entire national sun tea sensibility of your own.

Good Movie: Smoke Signals

"There are some children who aren't really children at all; they're just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them. Victor and me, we were children of flame and ash."

With an opener like that, you'd be forgiven for assuming this all-Native production is a heavy social justice film.

Psych!

Sherman Alexie's Smoke Signals is a modest miracle. Written by a Native, directed by a Native, starring Natives, it takes place in the present, a place where Natives are pointedly not welcome. (Take it from a Scot: The Man likes his tribals historical.) Yet for a' tha' it's a very sweet movie, wherein innocence is not so much lost, as worked into whatever comes next.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire (allegory intended) and Victor are frenemies from Idaho's Cœur d'Alêne reserve. Their destinies, like their pasts, are intricately intertwined, though they appear diametric opposites. Thomas is perennial odd man out: a fumbling nerd who seems to live in a world that's not there. Maybe he's a shaman. Maybe he's autistic. Could be he's both; each one of director Chris Eyre's scenes encode about twelve concurrent realities, any one of which is liable to surface at any time. And Thomas is his translator. He's the seer in Coke bottle glasses; the good son without parents; the helpless hero.

Meanwhile, Victor is too anchored in the physical, too distracted by hard-cold to understand how weak that can make you. To borrow Thomas's image, Victor is a pillar of fire, permanently glowering over iniquities by no means trivial, though compared to those of his congenitally happy companion they can seem so. Shackled together -- to Victor's enduring annoyance -- they will make a long, winding

journey, first through the lovingly-rendered homeland of their ancestors, and then the entire American West. (In a refreshing turnabout, the part of the Southwest is played by the Martian landscape of Washington's coulee country; just an hour and change west, it is in fact as different from the lush Palouse as Arizona.)

Throughout, rezgeist eddies and froths like the Spokane River. In the very first scene, a doomed couple hurl their newborn from a burning house, into the steady arms of a feckless drunk with the heart of a warrior. The power of that metaphor, and its accuracy, are breath-taking. And the beat goes on: basketball; frybread; mothers; fathers; automobiles; water; hair. The entire film crackles with aboriginal touchstones. You could write an MFA thesis on The Symbology of Sherman Alexie's "Smoke Signals". (Send me a link if you do.)

There's also a lot of (coincidental?) Zen in Eyres' world, where nothing is what it appears, yet everything is patently obvious if you can decide to see it. My favourite teaching: the boys voyage to the end of the earth with a jar of gold; come back with a jar of ashes. As Thomas points out, we all travel heavy with illusions.

But the greatest fun comes from the palpable glee with which director and writer lay waste to Hollywood "Indian" conventions. "Hey Victor!" says Thomas, "I'm sorry 'bout your dad." "How'd you hear about it?" Victor asks. "I heard it on the wind," says the spooky medicine-kid. "I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. And your mom was just in here cryin'."

Later, having hitched a ride off-rez with two backward-driving contraries (another overlapping wink at First Nations tradition and politics), they're asked if they've got their passports. "But it's the United States," Thomas protests. "Damn right it is," says the driver. "That's as foreign as it gets." Anyone who has lived in a bush community will appreciate the sentiment. In fact, my own village once had a bootstrap radio station that broadcast traffic reports identical to those on KREZ: "Big truck just went by. Now it's gone."

The boys fall further down the highway, Thomas's old-school braids and pronounced aboriginal accent underscoring the sense of spacewalking, until they arrive at last… on another reserve. One that is simultaneously completely different from and exactly the same as the one they just left. (Cough*zen*cough.)

Canadian viewers will be forgiven for assuming Smoke Signals is one of ours; it's about aboriginals, and the cast is almost entirely Canadian. I guess that's both the good and the bad news. Good, because Evan Adams (a straight-up doctor in real life), and the more familiar Adam Beach, Gary Farmer, and Tantoo Cardinal, all act like they're not acting. And bad, because apparently there aren't enough experienced Native actors in the States to pull off such a film by themselves. Here's hoping that changes.

Also terrific is Tom Skerritt, whose sixty-odd screen seconds, as a weary, competent Arizona sheriff, would qualify him for token white guy, if the moment weren't one of the movie's most memorable.

And then there's Irene Bédard. Sigh. What can be said about this grossly under-signed actress that won't jeopardise one's monastic street cred? How about this: I esteem Ms. Bédard for her effortless performance, her deft, sensitive handling of a pivotal role, and her ability to imbue any scene with grace and immediacy. Contrary to rumour, my admiration of this accomplished thespian has nothing to do with the fact that she's, like, virulently beautiful, pulling down six to eight thousand millihelens on a grey Tuesday. I would further like to deny categorically that I originally watched this film, or any other of the every single ones she's ever made, just because she was in it.

The soundtrack here jacks up the property values as well. Most of it is the raw, powerful Colville musician Jim Boyd, singing lyrics by Alexie. A few others are chucked in for symmetry, notably the multi-layered Ulali masterpiece, All My Relations.

It may be true, as Thomas says, that "the only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV", but this production goes a long way toward making the world a better place in the best possible way: by simply giving genius and insight a platform. I don't know if Alexie and Eyre knew this, but their movie isn't really about aboriginals at all. It's about humanity, all of us, as manifested in one of our ten thousand hoops. (And I was chaffin' you before; no way they didn't know.)

So in the end, the most moving thing about Smoke Signals is how aboriginal it's not. Alexie nails the thing in a final disclaimer at credits' end: "Any similarity to actual persons, living, dead, or indigenous, is purely coincidental."