After the OSU course, I ride north—Corvallis to Portland, Portland to Seattle. I was last here eight years ago, with teenage angst and a stupid earring. That was the summer I did construction work (i.e., cleaned up after construction workers), and wrote a fantasy novel at 826 Seattle (now known as the Bureau of Fearless Ideas). That novel, whatever it was called, may still exist on a laptop in my parents’ basement, but I’m fairly certain it was shit, so I’m not going looking.
I stay with my aunt and cousins; my mother and grandmother fly in for the week. Everyone agrees I look better without the earring. I’m trying to forget I ever wore an earring, but family is eager to remind me otherwise.
At the end of the week, my cousin Laura and I drive to East Wenatchee, home to one of the top apple nurseries in the nation, where I’m doing some research for a client interested in planting orchards back in Michigan.
The drive takes us from the temperate rainforest of Puget Sound into the Cascade Range, its tallest peaks still topped with snow in August. Fires in 2015 burned bare many of these slopes; forests of snags stand stiff and black like spent matches. We come down from the Cascades into the Columbia Basin—the Eastern Washington desert, where red hills rise from pentagonal columns of basalt, a fiery bedrock spat forth sixteen million years ago from the same hotspot which now resides beneath Yellowstone.
Peach, pear, and apple orchards abound along either side of the Columbia River. Those growers who can obtain water rights from the government do well here. Those without irrigation have already dried up, died out, moved away. “The story of the West is a story of water,” says Pete Van Well, who takes the day to show us his nursery. We discuss the craft of grafting, the site-specific pest and climate requirements of particular rootstocks and scions, all the nitty-gritty details of growing apples.
The story of the West, this story of water, it’s not a story I know, not the story to which I was born. But it’s a story that intrigues me—a story that compels me to return.
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