The Tri-City Herald puts its particular spin on the weather forecast. "Tomorrow, 94°. Almost hot."
Given that it was 102 ° by mid-afternoon the other day, the spin might exhibit a sense of relative accuracy. We are touring through eastern Washington, the dry and almost hot side of the state, and being captivated by the dry wheatland landscapes and the good food. I'm also on a quasi assignment, a pro bono gig for the Washington Old Time Fiddler's Association for volume two of Roses in Winter. These are old guys, mostly, who grew up "in the music," as the Irish would put it, and brought their fiddling styles from wherever to Washington State. The one I photographed today, Bruce Foster, grew up in North Dakota, and told me how, as a toddler, he snuggled up as close as he could under his dad's fiddle as he played. At 81 he lives in a remote part of the state, down a gravel road and miles from the nearest town, in a landscape not unlike central North Dakota.
Earlier we had been touring the Palouse, the willy-nilly hilly part of the state that gets the photo tours through it in June, when the wheatfields are soft and green and the curves can look as sensuous as a classic nude. Now is the time nobody comes to photograph the Palouse, as the wheat harvest is past and there is only stubble and tire tracks on the curvaceous landscape. Nonetheless I can't resist the siren call and get up before sunrise to try and capture the fleeting light upon the landscape.
The morning I actually did so I was thwarted by an overcast sky. Actually, it was sunny for 3 minutes, a spectacular fiery affair that looked great through a windshield at 70 mph up Rt. 27 trying to get to that spot I was at the day before that I knew would probably be great. Thwarted, I went instead to the Rose Creek Nature Conservancy Preserve, which was a great place to be under an overcast sky. It was a densely textured place of riparian habitat that is all but extirpated in the area, hawthorns and cow parsnip and a bit of grassland on the hills, and with great birds, which has been the other object of acquisition on this trip, an impressive bird list. Here I saw MacGillivery's Warblers and Common Yellowthroats and Yellow-Rumps and House Wrens and Chipping and White-crown Sparrows. It was the birdiest spot on the trip, and I suffered a bifurcated call for attention between my viewfinder and my binos. Mostly though I moved through this patch of bramble and hillside very, very slowly, sometimes just sitting and looking at the world through a haze of grass stalks. It took me 2 hours to hike a quarter mile trail.
The best meal on the trip was not in Walla Walla, home of expensive, gourmet wine infused cuisine, but in the college town of Pullman, at Swilly's (the mnemonic is "I'm going to go have some swill"), where I had a pork tenderloin with a fig and vanilla sauce, that has vaulted into the top 30 meals of my life. If you're in the area, don't miss this place. Mostly people go to southeast Washington to tour the wineries, but I'm just not a committed enough drinker to want to make alcohol the center of a trip. Two glasses of wine at dinner, if I make it that far, and I hand over the car keys.
Tomorrow home. I'm almost done processing the wedding photos from the weekend before, and almost done editing the sound I also captured, as I want to produce an audio slideshow of the event. I'm finding that sound editing is an even bigger time sink than photo editing, and I'll have more to say about all that later.
Wow 102! and I thought we were having hot weather here in the SF Bay Area. I'm looking forward to your next audio slide show.
Posted by: Jeff Henderson | September 01, 2007 at 10:28 PM