The Channeled Scablands

October 2022

Chesaw Road is a paved, 2-lane thoroughfare that connects east to west across the Okanogan highlands. It is named after a Chinese man named Chee Saw, whose story is lost to the mists of time and history. He apparently was married to a Native American woman, and had children. I wonder if there were subsequent generations, and where they are now?

I like stopping at every placard. The historical snippets remind me that, not so long ago, people lived entire lives, had entire sets of human problems, and passed essentially unremembered into history.

The geology of North Central Washington reinforces this sentiment of impermanence. Ice Age glaciers and floods created miles of grasslands and sagebrush stretching between Spokane in the east and the Columbia River to the west, the Kettle Range mountains and Okanogan highlands in the north, a vast expanse of land broken by canyons and random huge boulders dropped in the middle of nowhere by gigantic floods of a prehistoric age. The name of this landscape, the Channeled Scablands, befits the scarred land. And while the River’s course may have changed, and ancient lakes are now vast canyons, the land continues on.

People come and go. Every little town in the Channeled Scablands has a similar story. Caucasian settlers arrived in search of gold or adventure in the late 1800s, and coexisted, and sometimes intermixed, with the native peoples that lived here for 10,000 years. The settlements sprouted, seemingly overnight, and sometimes disappeared into nothing, with each boom and bust. We hiked old wagon trails, found forgotten ferry landings, marveled at old concrete posts and wooden structures, signs of prior human life, abandoned to the land, and rapidly giving way to the entropy of nature.

Eventually, with FDR and the New Deal, the Grand Coulee dam was built to irrigate the arid land, and harness the power of the Columbia River. Many small towns were flooded away, and people relocated to new places above the high water line. When the dam was finished in 1950, the entire Columbia basin was open to agriculture. Old orchard-growing Wenatchee families date their original homesteads to this time, and in a roundabout indirect way, this is what brought me and Won to the Apple Capital of the World.

One hundred years from now, there probably won’t be much of a blurb to remember me, and that’s just fine. It’s like lying awake at night, looking at the pinpoints of light in the sky, and understanding that each represents other worlds, entire galaxies. In the vastness of time and space, my individual life is an improbable moment, here now, gone tomorrow. I am actually immensely comforted, knowing that I only have this moment to fret about, to be grateful for, to enjoy. People come and go. The land remains. For now.

October 16, 2022