How reading became the silver lining to a Christmas crisis
Four years ago, we learned something weird was going on with my son’s right leg. We’d gone to a clinic thinking he might have a small break after a fall at school, but then learned it was a condition we’d never even heard of, something called osteochrondritis dissecans. A small section of bone at the bottom of Devin’s femur, at the knee, was dying from a lack of blood flow. A delicate surgery and months of re-hab followed. For a year or so we had to give up father-son outings involving hiking, football and ultimate frisbee.
The scablands offer a succession of geologic double-takes, and Deep Creek’s enchanting scar is one of them.
I first encountered Deep Creek the way I suspect most people do—in a car. As U.S. Highway 2 makes a bee-line west out of Spokane it passes the main gate to Fairchild Air Force Base. Then, in about the time it takes to write this sentence, your speeding vehicle takes an abrupt dip into a ravine, crosses a bridge, and takes you past a sign announcing that you’re passing through the small community of Deep Creek.
As for the creek itself, there is barely any water in Deep Creek at this crossing. This is a noteworthy riddle. The discernible headwaters for the stream are only a few miles away, in a maze of wetlands west of Four Lakes. Although the creek will sometimes flood during a rain on snow event in late winter, it’s too small and ephemeral to attract kayaks or canoes. So it is curious as to how such a trickle of water could create such an extraordinary crease in the earth. Continue reading Tracking a Jailbreak Flood→
A conversation with writer Donald Cutler about his morally vigilant exploration of Col. George Wright’s 1858 campaign, and how to reckon with its dark and complex legacy.
In Donald Cutlers’s new book, “Hang Them All,”George Wright and the Plateau Indian War, we first meet two men and a lie at the end of a crumbling ribbon of asphalt in Four Lakes, Washington. The first is George Wright, the once-exalted military hero, and the one whose name is etched in the ten foot high granite monument surrounded by gopher holes and broken glass. Wright died in 1865. The other man is Cutler himself, who has come to the site of this historic battlefield out of curiosity for what happened here a century and a half ago, and leaves with two questions: Who was George Wright? And what do Native Americans think of this monument which was heralded, at the time, as a peace memorial?
As he describes in the preface to his book, the falsehood etched upon the monument—that the 700 soldiers under Wright’s command defeated a force of “5,000 allied Indians”—is a clue to a larger truth. It is the victors that get to write history in stone, and the gross exaggeration of the size of the Indian force (Cutler’s research finds there were, at most, 1,000 opposing warriors) serves only to embellish Wright’s image among the “pioneers” as a peacemaker. It does not address his cruelties and, in that way, it is the crumbling asphalt and shards of glass that, in Cutler’s scene, are the more revealing details.
Donald Cutler, “Hang Them All,” Part I
Don Cutler on “Hang Them All,” Part II
This is not history that is easily swallowed, nor easily written.
Earlier this year a survey by the Pew Research Centers reaffirmed an unspoken boundary in American politics: being an atheist essentially disqualifies you from being elected President of the United States.
However unfair this is for atheists, the barrier rests upon a deep-seated expectation that those seeking the nation’s highest offices ought to embrace virtues deeper than a hunger for power. And to enjoy the benefit of the doubts, he or she must at least publicly identify with a church and a deity. To admit to being godless is tantamount to political suicide.
So how is it that the same nation that effectively disqualifies atheists for high positions of public trust just elected a habitual liar and provocateur? How is it that we’ll soon inaugurate an unapologetic racist who ranks and treats women as sex objects, mocks people with disabilities, refuses to apologize for anything, and spends an inordinate amount of energy excoriating and seeking revenge upon his critics? This is no mild case of cognitive dissonance. It’s a deeply disturbing reflection of our nation’s moral deflation. Continue reading How My Country Lost its Mind→
Stories, dreams, and landscapes from the Inland Northwest
