Category: Landscape
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High Meadow | Entiat, WA | May 2020 A beam of sunshine on a lofty ridge highlights its wonders: A boulder pile shaped like a face, a perfect oval of forest, a field of flowers glowing yellow. Later in a taqueria, a young woman’s eyes brighten with
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Midrib | East Wenatchee, WA | May 2020 Patterns of big to little and little to big fulfill a natural order. Leaves: Branch, stem, midrib, veins. Traffic: Freeways, state routes, county roads, driveways. Water: Springs, creeks, rivers, seas. They’re sorting maps we follow subconsciously — glacier > waterfall > stream — through most of our…
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Rock Piles | Mansfield, WA | May 2020 I survey the wind-downed pine cones littering our lawn and shake my head at the drudgery of raking. Just imagine tackling the removal of thousands of sofa-sized boulders from 200 acres of potential wheat field. “We’re gonna need a bigger wagon,” homesteaders must have said. Clearing a…
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Rapeseed | Mansfield, WA | May 2020 I’m no farmer (barely even a backyard gardener) but I’d like to heartily endorse rapeseed as an alternative crop for wheat on the Waterville Plateau. My enthusiasm has little to do with the crop’s usual byproducts — biofuel, cooking oil, livestock feed, soil enhancement — and more to…
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Weed | East Wenatchee, WA | May 2020 The world’s busyness has paused while we care for the sick, dying and billions wanting to stay healthy. Thankfully our underpinnings remain solid — sun sizzles, gravity grips, molecules merge — so that 99 percent of what’s around us, of what makes life real, prevails. Notably, this…
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Cone Cluster | Twisp, WA | May 2020 I’m no evergreen botanist — or cone head — so I’m not exactly sure what this mess of alien intestines really is. My own deep research (two Google searches) reveals that these could be young male pollen cones struttin’ their stuff for the more prickly female seed…
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Tower | Mansfield, WA | May 2020 I won’t attempt to bluff my way through identifying this structure or its purpose. The tower has a door and window for Mr. and Mrs. Farmer, electricity for lights and machinery, and height for … well, not sure what. Fuel depot? Pumping station? Fancy-schmancy outhouse? I skipped going…
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The Lookout | Entiat, WA | May 2020 Urban animals offer life lessons we’d all be wise to follow. From our dog: Nap with passion. From backyard birds: Eat now, poop lots. From raccoons: Always wear your “Who, me?” face. Geese with families also offer valuable
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Rusty Railcar | Entiat, WA | May 2020 “Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is
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Grazing Horse | East Wenatchee, WA | April 2020 Horse lips are like the end of an elephant’s trunk — fleshy, specialized tools for grasping thin blades of grass. Watching them pluck, pluck, endlessly pluck, I realize that in recent weeks my own particular “tools” for living in lockdown have emerged. They include a new…
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