The Wheat Hills of the Palouse

The road up Steptoe Butte is one lane in places, and it climbs the old hill in tight turns that slow a car to a crawl. The hill is quartzite, older than the soil, and it stands clear of the surrounding country the way an island stands clear of the sea. From the top, the Palouse is spread out like a map that has been crumpled and smoothed again.

The hills roll away in every direction. They are not mountains. They are the shape water makes when it stops moving — long swells and round shoulders and an occasional steep face where a creek has cut in. There is no flat ground on the horizon. The fields bend over the hills in bands that follow the contours, and from above they have the grain of a plank of oak, or the stripes on a tiger's back. A farmhouse sits in a draw with a grove of locust trees around it, and the grain elevators of the little towns stand up like ships.

On a clear day the mountains of Idaho stand hard and blue to the east. On a hazy day the hills fade from gold to paler gold to nothing, the way the sea fades into weather.

From the west, the country announces itself slowly. The sagebrush flats of the Columbia Basin run for miles, flat and brown. Then the land begins to roll — a swell, then a bigger one — and within a few miles there is not a flat acre in sight. The railroad tracks bend along the side of a hill. The telephone poles march up and over. The dust in the fence rows is the same pale soil that built everything.

The Dust That Built the Hills

The Palouse is a country built out of wind. In the ice-age centuries, floods scoured the land to the west and left wide flats of silt. The wind did the rest, picking the silt up and piling it in dunes against the hills, the way snow drifts against a fence. The dunes froze into place, grass grew over them, and ten thousand years of rain rounded them into the long soft shapes the farmers found.

There is no bedrock under most of this country, or none that a plow will ever touch. A road cut shows dust all the way down. A creek running off a field cuts its little canyon in the same dust. Soil scientists mapped it and named it the Palouse series, after the country, which took its name from the people who were here first — the Palus, who gathered camas bulbs in the wet meadows and rode the bunchgrass hills that had not yet been turned.

In spring, before the wheat, the meadows bloomed blue with camas, and the bulbs were dug and pit-roasted. The people were here for thousands of years. Then, in a few generations at the end of the nineteenth century, the country changed. The railroad came over the hills. The homesteaders took the sod. The bunchgrass went under for wheat.

The first farmers plowed the way flat land is plowed, straight up and down the slopes. Then came a spring rain. Rain falls hard in the Palouse, and the topsoil is loose, and a single storm could cut a gully taller than a man. The hills began to wash into the creeks, and the creeks ran brown with the country itself. The farmers learned to farm on the contour — following the curves of the land, planting strips of wheat and fallow side by side, leaving stubble to break the wind. The terraces they built still wrap the steepest slopes, and the field patterns from the air have a logic that looks like a fingerprint. The land has been held in place by those curves for the better part of a century.

Gold and Grain

In the last weeks of July the wheat turns. It does not turn all at once. The low fields go gold first, then the south-facing slopes, then the hilltops, and each day the color moves up the hills like a tide. By the first of August the whole country is a pale, bright gold.

The combines move through it day and night. They are enormous machines, and they work the slopes in long sweeps that follow the contours, leaving stubble behind them in clean curves. Dust rises off the hills in the evening, and the lights of the machines come on at dusk. They go off again when the dew sets in, because dew-damp wheat will not thresh. From a distance, on a dark night, those lights move slow, like ships at sea.

Every town in the Palouse is a grain town. Colfax, the county seat, sits in the fold of the hills with its white courthouse above the main street. The elevators stand beside the railroad tracks — ranks of tall concrete silos with the proportions of cathedrals. In Endicott, in LaCrosse, in Oakesdale and Tekoa, they are the first things visible over the tops of the hills, well before the town limits. The wheat is weighed, cleaned, stored, and moved on — by train and river barge down the Snake and the Columbia, to the Pacific and the other side of it.

This is soft white wheat, the low-protein grain that makes cake flour and pastries, and much of it is sold across that ocean. The Palouse also grows lentils and garbanzo beans and dry peas, the rotation that gives the wheat a rest.

Pullman is the one town with a different skyline. Washington State University began there as the state's agricultural college, the school built to serve this wheat country, and it still does. The wheat breeders put new varieties in the ground, the soil scientists test the dust, and the farmers keep the old bargain with the weather.

Turn and Return

The Palouse keeps time by the crop, not the calendar. In March the winter wheat is the first green thing in a gray country. By April the hills are a soft velvet that changes shade with every cloud. By May the crop is knee-high, and the wind runs over it in waves, the way it runs over water. The head fills through June, the green bleaching a little more each day. Then July, and the gold. Then August, and the harvest. Then the stubble, the fall plowing that lays the dark soil out in long ribbons to catch the low sun, the planting, and the first snow.

A snowfall on these hills is a thing to see. The stubble pokes through at first, and then the snow smooths everything, and the Palouse becomes white curves against a gray sky — no fields at all, only the shape of the land, which was there all along.

Strangers come for the light. On a summer evening the back roads are lined with photographers, and a good part of them have flown across an ocean for this. In Japan the Palouse has a kind of legend: the rolling gold hills, the lonely farmhouse, the low western sun. The farmers wave. The light does the rest.

Water is the whole game. For the most part, this is dryland country — no irrigation, no green circles. The wheat drinks the rain that falls between autumn and spring, and if the rain does not come, the crop fails. The farmers will tell you it is just dirt and work, and they mean it, and then they will stand at the door of the feed store and look at the same view they have looked at all their lives.

The Palouse is what happens when wind, weather, and human stubbornness come to an arrangement. It is a steep country and a fragile one, held in place one season at a time, one contour at a time. The hills are the sea that the wind made. Each year's wheat is the proof.

Photos: Robert Ashworth (CC BY 2.0); Lynn Suckow (CC BY-SA 2.0)