Palouse
PALOUSE
If I have a favorite landscape it’s a field of wheat under a midsummer blue sky. Add a light breeze at the end of the day and you could have a scene from Terrence Malick’s film “Days of Heaven.” The wind blows the wheat in waves of undulating motion, and the first time I went to an area called the “Palouse” in southeastern Washington State, I knew I would be coming back. Unlike Kansas where the land is ruler flat, the rich topsoil in the Palouse is as much as a hundred feet deep under gently rolling hills, which makes it more difficult to plant and harvest. I’ve gone out there in May and as late as August, and it reminds me of another time and another America. There are few hotels, and even fewer restaurants between the college towns of Moscow, Idaho and Pullman, Washington. It’s a place where I feel at home and where I love to drive down the small dirt roads to places where I’ve never been. If you go in May the land is lush and green, but by late June the wheat is beginning to come up in some fields and by late July many of the fields are harvested and the air is thick with dust from the wheat chaff. I don’t have a favorite time to be there but if I did it would probably be late June, when the fields are lush with wheat.