In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau

Genius Loci

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SublimingtheSystem The days close to winter Rough with strong sound. We hear the sea and the forest. —Louise Bogan T o shovel is to shove when it comes to snow. We try to heap snow until it melts. We want to keep from packing it hard with our shoes or tires. We try to keep from turning it to ice. One night last winter, heavy snow began falling at dusk and no one in our household had the spunk to get outside and shove it. All our best intentions went to bed and the snow fell in heaps—on the steps, on the driveway, in the yard, and on the street. I set an alarm to rise before dawn and set about the job of grunting down the driveway with a deep snow shovel. Sometime in the middle of the night a wind kicked up. It woke me first. Karen lay curled beside me with her hands between her knees. Wind ravaged the pines and tossed around odd objects on porches and decks. Finally it woke her. We listened from the bed, her hand caught carefully inside mine. The wind toppled the garbage can and the recycle bins. It scattered cardboard and tin cans. Newspapers flapped across the yard like bats. It sounded as if a full-tilt blizzard had blown in. Several weeks earlier, a neighbor’s tree had crashed through the roof of his house, a story that made us fret about our own home, surrounded by gigantic ponderosa pines. Surely the snow was piling up. Surely we would wake to a heavy mantle so common in our northerly home. The next morning we looked out to find that new snow gone. Maybe the wind had been powerful enough to drift the flakes against a fence, down the hill, across the street. But no: when I went to gather the trash and puzzle past the mystery, the snow was gone. A warm Subliming the System 83 wind was blowing; the winter felt like spring. A Chinook wind had sublimed the snow—turned it to a gas without liquefying it. The wind gasified the snow and lifted it to the clouds. All week I tried to reconcile that meteorological event with the concept of the sublime as nineteenth-century American painters used and knew it. Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Moran, and Albert Bierstadt made canvases so illuminated by awe they seem to be depicting heaven. Those Hudson River School painters created scenery imbued with “a greatness with which nothing else may be compared,” or so one of their commentators said. Those landscape paintings—lavish with shafts of golden light, purple mountains, hooded clouds, and human lookers stunned to silence—inscribe the presence of God. Taking shorthand for divinity , the painters aimed to translate sacred landscapes for lay viewers. Self-ordained, they mediated between the lord, the land, and the laity. No sooner had our late evening snow fallen than it was gone. So, too, moments of divine insight had to be captured fast when devout painters witnessed them firsthand. A prudent deity never allows His finest works to turn to liquid before subsuming them back to the sky; making this mortal coil too appealing would be wrong. The planet Earth is meant to be comprehended less as a place for making pleasure in the here-and-now than as a replica of heaven, a kiss and a promise to be consummated only in the afterlife. Grand Coulee Dam, built by the Bureau of Reclamation during World War II, outstrips every other concrete structure in North America for its massive scale. It also thwarts migrating native salmon from hundreds of miles of ideal spawning grounds upstream. The tribal people who relied on those fish lost a legacy they still feel today. In the 1960s the U.S. federal government played god by enlisting painters to celebrate its altered landscapes. It hired painters to glorify dammed lands. So many citizens had begun to criticize dams the fed had built—so much precious PR had been lost—the bureaucrats reasoned art should be drafted to ride in to the rescue. It had worked decades earlier when singer Woody Guthrie signed a contract to write songs about dams. Such stirring tunes as “Roll On, Columbia” had celebrated plugged-up western rivers as if they still were running free. It was a minor miracle the father of Arlo Guthrie managed to discover inspiration enough in federal dams to write a song...