The Palouse

Anna told me she had never had a guest who left her home planning to visit the Palouse of Eastern Washington, a little known farmland.  That first guest planning to do just that would be me. 

I tried to explain how the Internet has opened up off-beat tourist destinations and I have seen lots of photographs on Instagram of this place called The Palouse. It’s an area of very rich farmland between Interstate 90 to the north and the Snake River to the south.

As Layne pointed out it’s not like Iowa, it has its own landscape here, the breadbasket of North America where they grow wheat on sloping geometric fields  that make patterns cameras seem designed to record. 

On Instagram you’ll find the Palouse recorded in glorious color, in four seasons, by drones, under snow, at dawn or at dusk. We drove to Pullman in one sunny afternoon on Washington Highway 26.  

As much as I wanted to see the Palouse in person I don’t think it would be much of a motorcycle ride on dead straight roads to the horizon. The van excels at this. 

The origins of the word “Palouse” are a bit jumbled. The Palus tribe lived here.  The French came to trade. Pelouse in French meant short grass which has evolved into the modern meaning of lawn. The question is: did the French name the Indians or did the traders adapt the native word palus to their pelouse and no one knows exactly which way it went. It was one or the other or possibly neither. 

We were there at the end of harvest so the wheat fields were yellow, the ones that weren’t plowed and those were a dusty brown. In Moscow, Idaho, at the far eastern edge of The Palouse I found some shades of green as we drove to our campsite outside the city. 

We left Anna and Ian’s place near Olympia Washington on Sunday morning and at the last minute Layne thought better of taking the ferry from Port Townsend  a sailing town I wanted to see. Too many people in high season on a summer Sunday. We took the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and joined I-90 toward Spokane to clear the urban congestion. We did that and got into the Cascade Mountains. 

We pulled off the highway for a break and lacking anything better we happened upon a winter resort, closed for want of snow possibly, so we had lunch and I walked Rusty. 

Apparently you can ski or ride a snowmobile or even plod around in snowshoes at the appropriate time of year if you park here.

You don’t see places like this in Florida so I read the instructions very carefully about not walking on groomed trails. They are very fussy about that when there’s snow on the ground.  Layne made hot savory oatmeal and tea. 

After that, things went downhill rather rapidly. There was a massive back up on the freeway 15 minutes from the curiously named town of Cle Elum. We pulled off and figured a nap would give them time to clear the highway. Dueling impatient 18 wheelers made a pause in the proceedings sound like a good idea. 

I set Google maps to “avoid highways” - lo and behold we had a blue line up to Roslyn, a village above Cle Elum.  Jolly good. Off we went. Only it wasn’t so great and after a couple of miles we nearly got run down by some wild off road motorcyclists just before the road dissolved into a goat track. I reversed a very long way and managed not to kill us. Thanks Google.  

Well, we had given it the old college try and decided it still wasn’t worth joining the interstate funeral procession to Cle Elum (where do they find these names?) and as we drive our home for a living, we parked it for the night and ate sausages and watched an English murder mystery.

Not a bad spot. Even with a bit of traffic noise from the free flowing west bound lanes of the Interstate. 

In the morning the freeway was clear of course with just one maintenance worker groping around on the shoulder looking for who knows what bits left over from the day before. We stopped at Safeway in Cle Elum where Layne shopped and Rusty and I walked. Layne had found thanks to Google, a candy dispenser filled with meat displayed across town so we drove there. 

Layne got sucked into the store by friendly owners and ended up buying sausages and so forth. Rusty and I … walked of course! After which he rested. 

And we came back to Bear Claws and coffee. What a life. No job to think about either. No office politics, no stress. 

A pretty town but I skipped the ammunition. We travel armed only with my wit. So far so good. 

25 years ago Layne and I were in Seattle for a wedding and we rented a car to visit the setting of the only television show I have ever got wrapped up in. Northern Exposure had just ended so I was ready to check out the town where it was filmed. I don’t like to know where fiction is filmed as I prefer to willingly suspend my disbelief. After the show was over I was happy to see the setting after the flood of TV tourists had moved on. 

Twenty five years on and Roslyn is a prosperous and pretty little town without any help from the TV show. 

It was a show set in Alaska in a small town owned by a wealthy former astronaut who fools a newly qualified doctor into signing up to serve his town. The story is how the doctor coped with the isolation and the weird residents. That’s all. No murder, violence, sex or nudity. I loved it. 

They still have the KBHR (“kay-bear”) radio studio intact, the heart of the Maurice Minifield broadcasting empire looking out on the capital of the future Alaskan Riviera, Maurice’s dream.  

I like a little nostalgia but Roslyn is doing fine, I have the series on DVD  in my storage locker and the world moves on. 

I-90 in Washington State is a royal pain in the backside. Literally because these rumble strips in the slow lane feel like cobblestones. Why the hell  they are there I don’t know. I was glad to get onto State Highway 26 and the Palouse. 

We followed the red line more or less from the Interstate:

I was glad to see this lawn-like farmland. I’d like to come by myself and get lost photographing the moods and shades in different light and so forth but I got to see it and enjoy it and that was good enough on this whirlwind tour. It was grand as my Irish grandfather might have said. 

Clamming Up

Our first night with Anna and Ian they treated us to a straight forward dinner of salmon and asparagus.

And yet it was the best salmon either of us had eaten, there was no fancy sauce but the fish was flaky and delicious. I looked out the window at the inlet’s furiously rushing tide and thought this was the perfect metaphor for the Pacific Northwest, fish on a plate and for trees and salt water running like a river. But it wasn’t going to stop there. 

I have no idea where we are, Layne followed Google’s blue line and we bought gas for about four forty a gallon, the cheapest we’d seen in Washington State. We made turns and drove through avenues of fir trees and eventually…

…we drove up a driveway through the forest to a house overlooking a tidal inlet, where they are storing a friend’s van as a favor, typical of them, both generous to a fault, always.

We met Anna and Ian in 1998 in Zihuatanejo as we all prepared to leave Mexico and sail south to Central America. It was a friendship that stuck hard even as we traveled apart and met up in isolated anchorages all along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. 

After forty years of marriage he and Anna are firmly rooted in Puget Sound where their family lives. They love the outdoors and hike and camp and travel madly for their jobs in television field production. If you have watched world class sports from golf to the Olympics to soccer or football, chances are Ian worked on the television signal and Anna managed the production. 

They keep coffee tables full of now decorative passes and pins of their various journeys. They have Emmy statues on their bookshelf. But they always come home to these mad tidal waters and endless miles of forest. After a while you can see why.

When they suggested we go clamming I wondered what we might be getting into. I had visions of wading in sticky tidal mud and reeking seaweed covered rocks. They are tough and think nothing of riding eight knot currents on paddle boards or walking the Great Wall of China till teatime. Not me.  

I need not have worried. Anna showed us how to scrape clams from just under the surface while Ian casually picked oysters off the drying tidal dirt. 

And presto - dinner got ducked in clean water and washed and set aside to expel the dirt the shells inhale into their lungs out into a bucket of clean seawater. 

As we walked Ian showed us the crabs struggling to hide as the tide flowed out of the kelp beds. 

A kelp crab in Anna’s grasp. 

Rusty braving tidal waters. 

A starfish stranded just waiting for Anna to put it into deeper water. 

Iridescent kelp. Another wonder of the tidal waters. 

The colors of low tide.  

It was all too much…

In six hours the salt water would be lapping at the front gardens and a tub would be pushing a couple of barges laden with gravel right through here. 

Then we took off to see the Olympic National Park, a small slice of it as we plan to drive around the place after we leave this Garden of Eden of Ian and Anna. 

It’s a National Park so Rusty is barely tolerated as usual. 

A warm 82 degrees and a chance to soak up the sun. 

Our walking and talking is full of reminiscences and memories, sailors we knew and places we miss. 

The natural world here is extraordinary and largely untouched. 

We retreated from the park and took a logging road in the forest to accommodate Rusty who wore himself out. 

We had fish and chips on the patio where Rusty was banned. 

But he got lots of attention where he lay recovering from his hike. 
Jumping rock:



The Evergreen State. 

I was delegated to shuck the oysters…

…Layne covered them in butter cheese and garlic…

Ian grilled them…

And then, like the walrus and the carpenter we ate them. 

And the clams. 

And the chocolate zucchini bundt cake delivered by a baking neighbor. 

A perfect evening with the worlds most generous of friends. As though we hadn’t been wiser for 24 years. 

And after I won Mexican Train dominoes for the third night in a row we went to bed. 

Rusty was still hoping the local deer would put in one last visit. He was quite refreshed after an evening sober snoring on our friends’ couch and he sleeps in the van on his bed with the door open. Always vigilant. Our friends deserve the best guard dog in this silent peaceful neighborhood.