Sun-Speared Fields
I’m missing home fiercely today. Solstice will be here soon and no place on earth can compete with an Alaskan summer. Why am I in Washington State now?? Arghhhh. Alright, I need to fix this, stat.
I booked a BnB in Alaska for later this month.
I’m not sure how I’ll get up there since Canada border services might not let me pass with Covid protocols in effect. Maybe I’ll fly? Hmmm, I’d have to leave some of my stuff down here but I’m sure I could find a storage unit to stuff it in temporarily. We drove into Spokane to find a storage unit, but then I changed my mind on the way. I’m going to just fly up there and let my friend here use the Ford until she’s ready to bring it up, whenever that is. Maybe I’ll get a motorcycle or something to get me around until she arrives. I’m sure it’ll be fine - she’s pretty solid, and the only surprise I’ve had from her was when she took her dreads off when she came to bed. I didn’t realize they’re like a hat. Had an amazing pizza at the Flying Goat and used their WiFi to buy a ticket to Fairbanks for Monday.
For golden hour I found myself driving south of the city. I had been on the fence about heading to the Palouse again. The last trip out I had come upon a guy, Ken, that was stopped in the middle of the road. His black Volkswagen convertible had stalled when he was trying to pull it around and we couldn't push-start it, so I gave him a ride down the road and he explained how the German automobile had sat idle for 7 years after the chick that owned it didn't fix it and was asking too much for it. I dropped him off and he said to come by anytime for a beer. That had been a sunny day, but now the forecast predicted a system of heavy bullshit moving into the area and meanwhile I had been damn comfy in the armchair. Sometimes the hardest part about landscape photography is just finding the initiative to get out there. I’m constantly at war against that person within me that wants to live comfortably. After a healthy dose of internal debate I was able to marshal the gumption to hit the road. We made it back to Steptoe Butte , the anomaly of a mountain in the middle of the rolling hills of the Palouse.
The foretold clouds choked the sky as we made our way up the strange mountain that juts dramatically out of rolling hills. A sullen and morose landscape extended outwards under the clouds, the landscape a casket holding my now-dead aspirations of photography greatness. What a damn tease for sunlight to travel vast distances over solar fields, blocked by a thin layer of clouds in the final stride. There are about a dozen other photographers up here, and I’m sure they’re all thinking the same thing.
“Fuck.”
I let out a long sigh past dry lips. After six months on the coast my lips are now chapped at the elevation of 2,000 feet. But then a ray of light appears! The clouds hadn’t fully saturated the sky, and as they traveled with the wind small gaps would sometimes form behind the trailing end of one cloud and in front of another. Spears of sunlight would pierce between the shifting clouds, fleecing verdant agrarian fields of their shaded moods and lighting up rolling green hills and tawny fields of wheat. As the sunlight shot through clouds as it set we’d follow the twisting road to the top, pausing alongside other photographers at the guardrails as we chased the light. It was like an old theater - the sun the spotlight, the photographers the audience, the Palouse the actors on stage. Watching these incremental changes in clouds and light was like breathing for me.
Not one of us landscape guys will ever be as famous as Charles O'rear, the fella that shot the Windows XP background of rolling green hills off California Highway 12 outside Sonoma. But I’m still happy with what I got, even if Microsoft doesn’t buy it.
Outside the spotlight, the shaded fields were shamrock and emerald and sea green, intermittently punctuated by sallow fields lying sere, saved for another season perhaps as part of a crop rotation scheme. But these areas were few, and the vast farmscape below us was full of lush crops of different characters.
Where shade stretched across hills it instilled a sense of neglect and longing in the hills - I imagined if they were people, were they uncouth castaways? How they paled in comparison to such verdant pastures kissed by light nearby! Did these favored parts judge the dark areas around them? As the hills curved, were they shrugging uncomfortably in the presence of the sunlight’s less-desirable? It’s hard to separate the thought from my mind’s eye, though this was such a place where one looks out onto the world and ponders the nature of… everything.
After spending hours on the butte the clouds started to depart from the horizon at sunset. Cloud-bursted colors stained the evening sky as cars left, while we savored the show to the last.
