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.

Watercolor Spring

Excuse me, while I brush the sky

Seasons echo themselves. Not just from one year to the next, but deep in the -ness. Spring unfurls, hurls echoes of itself as the blooming of flowers, of leaves and  fronds, of eggs bearing Spring chickens and flower-scented air spurring mating season. At the fat fractal base, a reaching of life out onto the huddled greyscape of a temperate Winter.  Spring is Open(ing) Season.


As such, psychedaelians appreciate it, perhaps none more than here in the Northwest, where sunshine daydreamy days induce long blissful sighs from fabulous fuzzy mammals pleased to be free of wintry darkness and the dankness of wet season. Last week, I heard an echo of this on Grateful Dead & Friends, a show on KBOO radio.


Often as not, peoples' minds bend toward California when they think of hippies, and the Dead are at the Bay Area epicenter of this perceptual vortex . No arguing that. But furthur north than Northern California, in the Oregon of Kesey and the Washington of Hendrix, psychedaelia blossoms as well. 


Especially in Spring, to echo myself. From the southernmost tip of Washington, I drove up out of the Columbia valley with a Help-Slipknot-Franklin's prechoing out of the speakers. [That hyphenated thing is Deadhead shorthand for a three-song medley, in case you've not conversed with this tribe. Deadheads are also into encyclopaedic knowledge of their priestly class and lore, as evidenced this day in the DJ's question--the answerer of which would score tickets to a Furthur (ie, post Garcia) concert!--which was "What's unique about this Help-Slip-Franklin's?" I think the answer was that whatever show he was playing was the first time the Dead had played that particular combination, although the guy was open to there being other answers, 'cause competitive encyclopaedism doesn't have to devolve into fascism, man. But I digress.]


So as it slips into the middle of the medley, I settle into interstate pace on my instrastate drive, and the landscape flows by. Against the dark evergreen background, maples and alders and cottonwoods have appeared into the scene, watercolor reds yellows greens and in-betweens where a couple months before they'd been retreated into grey invisibility. Leaves and sheathes may not fit the saturated vivids we associate with the psychedaelic pallete, but ephemerality and life force are not to be dismissed as color flavorings. Splashed here and there on this quiet tableau, occasionally inexplicable daffodil patches and explosions of cherry blossoms make sure all is not subtle. Meanwhile, sunbeams and liquid clouds dance and share the sky, and the white stripes underfly my red Ford hood. 

By now, they're into Franklin's Tower, the last song. "Roll away the dew" refrains again and again on the recording, and you can hear the crowd. If you are experienced, your body feels the memory of that moment when unison converged on these few words of hope and emergence. Being peripheral to deadheadery at the time I heard this chorus in concert (if I even heard it at all, this  could be false memory talking), I think  I thought the words were "Roll away the doom," which works as an echo for sound and meaning, I guess. Better, even, if you like your watercolor with  some morning dew.