Coulee Climbs and Straightaways: Backroad Route 174, 17, and 2

It's been way too long since a backroads post. Now, as then, my route is anything but a back road to the locals, and I apologize for any offense they might take (and remind them that I am avoiding telling the general public about the really good backroads). It covers a fair stretch of Route 2, only a backroad compared to I-90, but to get right down to it, 90 probably does have 100 cars to every 1 on 2.

But let me back up a sec. Route 2 was the third leg of this trip. The joints of these legs: curving grades making their -scents (de- or a-) as the westward course confronted coulees and a river. Between the joints, longbones straight and narrow; straighter than the crow flies, lies the engineer's centerline. The surveyor runs due south, mile after mile, and Route 17 is born; turning 90 degrees west, he draws Route 2 to Waterville. Up north, Route 174 does bend a bit more, flexing to the landscape and paths discovered by creatures and the people that hunted them ever since the end of the Ice Age. 

Taking off out of Grand Coulee on 174 begins with a climb, and you cross under one of the primary electric umbilicals of the Power Grid. The towers march off on their line, and174 takes off through some pretty country, especially late on a warm Spring day.

Coulee climb #1: Outta Grand Coulee (or is that Coulee City?)

The 174 - 17 junction is a fork no matter how you approach it, and there are yield signs, but the only vehicles I've encountered there are truckers pulled over for a rest. I usually do the same for a few minutes to rearrange the growing midden in my truck and stretch my legs with a walk through the empty intersection.

There's the mildest switchback ever ascending to the next plateau, and then straightest of  shots beyond. The road only makes sense if your concept of land is a grid. Until the last century, everyone traveled up and down the coulee (you know, where there's food and water), and you can still do it on RT 155, but once the land is cut into sections and quarters, and you need to get grain to market, a road straight through the fields makes sense. It's modern agriculture's umbilicus to markets for petrochemicals in and food out, laid down on the Cartesian Grid.

Tanks (for fuel? fertilizer?) and Elevators (for output) on Route 2.

After miles of wheat and linearity, 17 descends back into the coulee, not near the Grand Coulee the city, but the city of Coulee City, all of which may just be towns when it comes down to it. There are more power lines, although this is the lower end of Banks Lake, which is an irrigation reservoir than a hydroelectric project; they both depend on Grand Coulee the dam. Banks Lake and the canals flowing from it are the umbilical waters flowing onto the farms partitioned along the Township Grid.

Monotonously straight as much of this route may be, there are a few breaks that take my breath away. Like entering Moses Coulee.

Looking across the sage at golden cliff walls with cocoa talus skirts, I am in love with this place every time I see it. Luckily (and with some attention to timing), I have been through here many times in the fading afternoon, and every time, it is a blessing.

This last trip, on that big coulee-climb up from Moses, I shot out onto the top and into a straightaway pointing right into the setting sun. Beautiful, too, but also difficult driving. Glare in the face, windshield lit with dozens of bugsplats, each a tiny firework of captured sun in my eyes, scratch refractions, a haze of dust alight across it all, shiny tarlines on the road reflecting even more sun from the ground up.

Luckily, there was nearly no traffic, and what little there is is visible from miles away. Because I guess even Route 2, mightiest of the 174-->17-->2 run, is a backroad in the interstate age. Lonely straightaways where driving is as simple as it gets and you can take in the country, which is flat and clear enough that it passes at a stately pace, not much in the foreground to whip by in a blur. I'm pretty sure I was out of cell range for most of the trip, which also felt good, getting off the Communications Grid (even if I was confined to the road engineer's east-west north-south orientation).

Fall Furrows

It seemed to this urban-dwelling sporadic observer that the wheat came in a little late this year. So it was under an Autumnally enlightened sunset that Route 2 treated me to a beautiful furrow show. Some people hear and speak a mass, others light something or other at a temple, and rumors hint at a thousand other rituals fearsome or enticing. My own thousand rituals include this: shooting straight as an atlatl dart across loessy plains, following the sun homeward as it's last rays summon every modest rise and dip, relieving the land of its be-dulled flatness and waking colors whose brevity and intensity capture a beauty hidden by the rays of the livelong day. 

Lest only my prose be purple, I add this photo.

The flow from day-yellow through all the flame-pallete licks of orange-red and purplescence to night-blue, this refusal to sit still or reduce itself to on/off digitized dichotomy, reminds me that the world's hard margins are illusory. At the edge of day and night, dark and light dance, sitting still only in the snapshot, not the reality. The penumbral Cascades spill across the Plateau, light kisses one side of a furrow as the other yawns toward slumber, the observer is hard pressed to pin down a pivot point. The wind often slackens, there may be an instant of weightlessness as the boundary is transcended, but to look for the apex of the curve or that tick of the clock that switches from day to night is to kill the ritual. The odd photons Brownian bouncing through the dark cast the strongest light, even if they are hardest to see. 

The sidewise gaze of light late in the day and year catches the ripples that hide under mid-day sun. Waves appear, embodying the songs of the landscape, from the basso profundo of Tahoma and the full symphony of Cascadian peaks to the lilting riffs of loess. And then, atop it all on the loessy lands either side of Moses Coulee, the furrows plowed by man like grooves in an old vinyl record in numbers sufficient to go platinum on the charts, top of (and feeder of) the pops. Some of it bland and straight as formula Top 40 can be, but othertimes looping hills and meandering dales, whorling like the fingerprint of Coltrane or Hendrix.

Moloka'i on the Columbia?

[Dredged from the Mojourner Truth archives, this was posted first as "Holy Bull" in 2008, back when Hawai'i events like the shutdown of Molokai Ranch orbited closer to my consciousness, and before I'd seen much of anything in the Northwest.]

 

Fear and loathing rains on Moloka`i. The Ranch just shut down, and 120 people lost jobs. Just like wiser people told me, that land trust ain't gonna happen. so neither is the subdivision. Read into that what you wish, for I'm only half-smart, a haole, and not even living Hawai`i nei anymore. I suppose you could count this as a victory for conservation, except that we have no guarantee that the next thing won't be far worse than 200 houses.

Far from there, this week I journeyed back east of the mountains for the first time since my Columbian descent in January. And when I got there, a guy who goes by my middle name took me site-seeing and surveying through a landscape that was Hawaiian-ish. Think Kaluako`i, Moloka`i, but sagebrush instead of kiawe and lantana, and sometimes the red silt is sand. But the same outcrops.

The first non-bovine photo here is also the first site I found in Washington. One of the 10 guys helping us survey cameup with the name "Lone Juniper," and you can see 1/3 from the left, halfway up, the lone juniper. The site is just to the right, and consisted of a couple hammerstones and some lithic debris. [NOTE: Hahahaha. The hammerstones turned out to be just a strange form of weathering. Analogy to Hawaiian artifact forms has limited value here.]

And it's not just the basaltic landscape and lithic scatters that seem familiar. Ahu happen here as well. One like a cupboard re-done to make a fowl-sniping blind, with old branches on top adding a height and cover. Another, closer to the river, has an amazing overview of what may have been the richest salmon river; it also has a nice split boulder, just like them Moloka`i shrines. Maybe us humans is all alike.

Anyhow, perched on one of the ahu was a basalt core (pictured). Fresh, as if some Hawaiian were still worshipping the adze god there. There is a certain clue to this un-altered photo that should tell you whether this is me in the frame.

The day before, we checked out some old farm sites on either side of a road through the plain. Then went up a soil-mantled talus to a little pali with four tiny c-shapes. Each big enough for a sniper, but nothing to stop the enemy from going around behind. not tall enough to be visible from far, or massive enough to support anything. each using outcrop for foundation, on brow above slope. Seen them on Moloka`i, too.

So far from Moloka`i, but still doing Molokine archaeology.