I have suffered awhile with bloggers block . Not sure why. PTSD (Post-Trumpian Shyster Distress?) Perhaps. Maybe my withdrawal from boards has sunk in,
leaving me rootless with nothing but junk clogging my e-inbox. More likely because the world’s problems,
which I have already and ably solved so many times, have proved stubbornly
resistant. I think of Mark Twain protesting that stopping
smoking was easy: “I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
A humbled blogger speaks softly – if at all.
A reset was in order.
Best to get out of my space and learn something. Friend Frank proposed the Larry Flock Memorial Road Trip -- just the thing! In mid-November, four of us headed out into eastern Washington in memory of a friend who loved
his road trips. Best to think about
Larry on the road, riding in his old Caddie with Joyce, than to take our leave
in a formal memorial service.
The foray through rural and small town Washington was
enlightening — another small step of confronting Fletch with the vastness of
what he doesn’t know. I’ve lived here in
Cascadia for 32 years, longer by far than anywhere else. But rural and small town Washington is alien
to me, much of it lying east of the Cascades – a vast territory through which I
have sped on I-90 or I-82 on my ways to afar, unaware of what drama lay outside the
white striped channel of highway.
We crossed the Columbia near Vantage. First stop: David Govedare’s Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies,
his public art gift for the 1989 centenary of Washington's statehood.
And then on up into the Grand Coulee -- through
Ephrata, Soap Lake, Electric City to the fabled dam at Coulee City. Bill explained how the Grand Coulee was carved at the end of the
Ice Age by gargantuan floods released from Lake Missoula as its successive ice
dams broke up. The raging waters scoured
through layers of basalt lava and poured over what is now Dry Falls, then the
largest waterfall in the world; now she’s just biding her time, waiting to see
what the next great climate turn will bring.
Until you stand by it, you can’t grasp the enormity of Grand
Coulee Dam. Ann and I have been re-reading
Kearns, Caro and Dallek on LBJ. Caro
vividly portrays the dreary toil of farm life before electrification, cruelly
hard on farm wives. Grand Coulee Dam brought
reprieve to countless families in Eastern Washington, and enabled the waters of
the Columbia to make the desert bloom.
The dam was built in five years (!); today, projects a third the size
take us three times longer.
 |
| Rectangular; precursor of the cylindrical |
In the 19th C, if they could irrigate the desert, it was turned into wheat
fields. Elevators mushroomed up. And railroads came. Towns sprang into being – and then the railroads merged, failed, left. So Lind stands idled, boarded up save for a dingy bar and run-down movie house, hanging on to the 21
st C by its fingernails. So with Dayton and Thorpe, Washtucna and Waitsburg – Waitsburg which briefly boasted more millionaire residents per capita than any other Washington town – and countless others, by-passed not just by railroads and Interstates but
by the American Dream. Rick briefed us on each in turn. Those patriots who stay look
back in longing for what once was.
 |
| Lind: mid-day, mid-week, nothing moving |
Palouse Falls, the Washington State Waterfall thanks to the
enthusiasm of grades 3 – 6 at Washtucna Elementary School (so there’s life
there, after all); the best waterfall, said Frank, he'd ever seen, including
those in Alaska. And one of the best
kept secrets of Washington; don’t come near without diverting to see.
 |
| The fertile Palouse: rolling hills of top soil 40' deep |
By contrast with those emptying towns, Walla Walla thrives,
a community girded by a fine college and promoted by the burgeoning Washington
wine industry. The 21
st C can
be welcomed if one looks forward instead of longingly back.
Finally, Richland and Hanford – the towns that beat the
Germans to the bomb. The first and only test
bomb, Trinity, was fueled with plutonium
from the Hanford B reactor, as was poor Nagasaki’s bomb (an “alternative”
target; what fateful vagaries of weather did wrought.) Those scientists’ and engineers’ efforts, and subsequently
my Dad’s, may have saved three million Japanese and American lives and held in
abeyance a third World War, but also left us a legacy which Oppenheimer foresaw
at Alamogordo: from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become
Death, the destroyer of worlds."
It took five years to bring Grand Coulee on line; thirty-five
years and still counting to clean up our Hanford mess. No Washingtonian should miss touring the B
Reactor for it is our state’s enduring legacy of honor and dishonor.
The Missoula floods, wheat, Grand Coulee, elevators and railroads, atomic physics and wine making, towns sadly hanging on, Lewis and Clark and trans-continental railroads -- The Larry Flock Memorial Road Trip was a trip of discovery and of great fellowship – a much needed reset. Thank you, Bill, and Frank, and Rick – and Larry.
In the 19th C, if they could irrigate the desert, it was turned into wheat
fields. Elevators mushroomed up. And railroads came. Towns sprang into being – and then the railroads merged, failed, left. So Lind stands idled, boarded up save for a dingy bar and run-down movie house, hanging on to the 21st C by its fingernails. So with Dayton and Thorpe, Washtucna and Waitsburg – Waitsburg which briefly boasted more millionaire residents per capita than any other Washington town – and countless others, by-passed not just by railroads and Interstates but
by the American Dream. Rick briefed us on each in turn. Those patriots who stay look
back in longing for what once was.
