Bluestem Benediction
Somewhere between, but nearer the rising like a rough-hewn psalm from the basalt and pine of the Inland Northwest city of Spokane with its pulse tethered to the steel arteries of its kingpin railroads and the born of saw and sawdust city that clings to the edge of the world like a dream half-remembered named Seattle, each rail-rooted jewel christened in native echos, there, here, lies Bluestem, a name whispered more often by the ever present wind than man, local or otherwise, flimsily nestled on the bleached edge of the Palouse, where the gentle grainlands yield to the grim, gouged scars of the channeled scablands; where the land itself seems suspended between muted memory and merciless modernity, more myth than map.
This is not the heart of the Palouse, but its periphery, its forgotten vestibule, a threshold between fertility and desolation, between history remembered and history swept away.
In the hush of this brewing, belligerent boreal, a galvanized-steel-sheathed automotive train snakes westward like a half-remembered hymn, three orange BNSF units moving made-in-the-Midwest automobiles across the widening lonesome, where the rails resonate louder than the immigrant voices that once dared call this place home. The engines, descendants of Hill's empire, do not merely pass through, they proclaim, in strength and steel, the continued pulse of commerce along a corridor carved in defiance of topography and time.
These rails, this railroad, were driven not just through mounds of slackwater sediments and jumping that obstinate 163-mile-long intermittent trickle aptly called Crab Creek, but through history itself, terra incognita tamed by the tenacious reach of the Great Northern, an empire pressed westward with ambition equal parts arrogance and audacity, leaving behind a trail of towns like Bluestem, whose futures failed to flourish, leaving only wraiths drifting in the grain-scented wind.
The land here is brutalist by divine design, scoured by cataclysm, not sculpted by time, for it was the great Missoula floods that thundered through this region millennia ago, tearing soil from stone and leaving behind a labyrinth of coulees and erratics that cradle Bluestem like a half-closed, calloused hand.
Frost feathers the sagebrush and sod, painting the high plains-esque scene with a patina of pallor, while derelict dwellings droop with quiet indignity, their skeletal structures stubborn against time's relentless erasure, their frames still speak highly of the labor of those who once dared to give root to divine immortality in the presence of mortality.
In deed alone the hardy survived, ein Volk of Lutheran grit and sun-seared skin, skilled farmers of wheat, of bread-baking, grain-as-grace German settlers, who raised barns and sang Baptist hymns beneath skies and stars that rarely softened, and whose harvests came only to those who outlasted the wind eternal.
Indeed, though their bones may have been returned to the earth over which they prayed and sweat and bled, they, those Gott unser Herr-fearing brethren, Amerikafahrer, sowed permanence into the wind-swept impermanence of their adopted, Promised Land.
And there, that collapsed grain crib crumpling like forgotten scripture beneath a smoldering sky, while the elevator, solemn, stolid, and monolithic, casts its silent shadow, a sundial for the dead, marking hours no longer counted and seasons no longer sown, at least, not by hand, nor by hymn. The wheat still rises here, obedient to mechanized choreography, but the fields are orphaned. The men who once sowed them, sweat-soaked in sacred rhythm are gone, and with them, their stories.
Everything here is on the cusp of collapse or consecration, for what remains, of Bluestem, may rot, but it may also rise in reverence, contingent on the eyes that still see and the stories that stoically survive.
Vergänglich, Germans say, transient, yes, but this landscape does not merely vanish; it varnishes into myth, its marrow merging with memory, and its silence speaking louder than sirens, slogans, even sorrow. Each image made here is an act of remembrance and a quiet act of resistance, a resuscitation against the tyranny of forgetting, resurgam.
This image is not flippantly borne of selfish, indifferent expectations, but with reverence rising, for the forsaken, the frostbitten, and the forlorn specters of Bluestem, of those revenants whose hands built what history forgot, and whose footprints faded too fast, whose presence still lingers like St. Helen's ashes. Here, amidst sage and silence, the rails still sing, if not for you, then for those who remember what the rest of the world never knew.
Yes, Bluestem still feeds, but it no longer remembers.
(26Nov19 ©)