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).

Bifurcation. No, It A Crew Fib.

Ah, homophony and loose spelling, you make palindromic(ish) titles possible.

But you cannot make them make sense. I do wanna talk about bifurcations, though. There's one in the photo above, which is in hills above the Columbia River at a couple thousand feet elevation, roughly. Fortuitous snowfall and gratuitous editing render this bifurcation as a Y on the hillside, a game trail splitting. The top one goes higher, and the other goes...


I don't really know where it goes. It passes an outcrop right about where hillside and horizon cross paths, and sometimes outcrops expose chert, which was useful for tools. But it probably heads into the draw, closer to cover and water. 


Anyway, the paths part ways. Archaeologists like myself and others who look at how humans and other animals use the land pay special attention to bifurcations in trails. Why does it split here? Do the two forks head to very different resources or destinations, does the point of separation show any signs of being a site, a spring, something else that would draw in beasties and bipeds? 


The forkal focal point is also a pivot. A bifurcation, viewed from the other direction, is a convergence. In the photo, two trails merge to one, headed to the Columbia. Heading up, the trails appear dendritic, branching to deer hide-outs and springs, root grounds and rock sources. Going down, they flow like tributaries, rivulets meeting to form creeks, streams, and rivers dumping into the big river at a village or fishing place. In the root season, trails headed out in various directions, allowing women to disperse to the many places they could dig. When the fish ran, the men could converge at the falls and pools where they were most easily plucked from the flow. 


Backing way off, getting the eagle's view, "bifurcation" looks too simple, and not just because of the palindromic perspective shifts. The parted ways may meet again. The paths up from the river do not simply branch and branch again. There are intersections, three and four-way splits, convergences and divergences of human and game routes. The bi- and trifurcations, once you are removed from their tangle, look more like nodes in a web, neurons in the collective animal brain. Each a dumb switch, maybe, but together a brilliant chaotic topology. The binary split/merge options of the trail-bound perspective become something more.


So, having branched off from my original tidy premise, I sputter to a halt. Trails do that sometimes.