The lot of us are camped in a small community of tie dye and shade tapestries at the Gorge Ampitheatre Campgrounds - a circular labyrinth - between Quincy and George. There's a Pivot in the center for vendors and food trucks. A general store of dystopian character: a concrete warehouse flooded in medical light, a few shelves sparse with old, overpriced gas station snacks, simple toiletries, and a wall of ice for $8/bag that melts money on the return walk, forearms lengthened in the weighted pull.
The Gorge Ampitheatre (previously Champs de Brionne Music Theatre) is now owned by Live Nation, which operates in this plutocratic monopoly, charging $18 a beer and $39 a cocktail. Just weeks before, the Gorge experienced its first mass shooting, and thereafter safety protocols inflated. It felt frivolous and insensitive to be there so soon after.
The amphitheatre campground can disorient. It's a planair maze of abnormal topology, of heavy-lidded half beings holding one finger raised, abandoned yard games and green smoke. The intimacy of the braless brushing their teeth at a concrete sink. The tents xerox, until one takes flight, and you stop to watch in awe akin to hot air balloon or eagle, which further befuddles one's bearings. Eventually you find your camp, and, sometimes, thereafter, you'll have developed an enhanced assimilation to the ever-evolving landscape.
Over the years we'd come for "camping." We'd come for Petty. For DMB. And now, we'd come for the Dead.
At the Dead & Co show we anted up on Premier Camping. It held more space, offered free showers, private restrooms, a shuttle bus to and from the venue - accommodations to quell a runner in the scablands of central Washington. Exempt of bitterness from either party - in my having or wanting to run, and in both of our waiting - them on me, me on me - I ran, they slept. The group would sleep in and I'd try to wake early enough to run to not miss:
- a morning review of the set list
- a michelada
- cachinnations, the merry chortling
- a thing
Most times that late traipse back to camp, the few hours of sleep, the unfolding of limbs into a morning ready-made tepid, the subsequent run, day drinking, body and mind in damp fatigue, the multi-hour concert and into the late traipse back repeating is only so romantic, and I am no longer young.
The history of this "humorous homage" George, Washington in the Columbia River Basin region, whereby the Ampitheatre rests, is somewhat playful. In the early 1950's, the need for a town to further develop local agriculture grew manifest. Grant County (after Ulysses S) land wasn't in any sense "tame" until the first decade of the 1900's, when irrigation attempts were made and where the promise of an "agricultural Shangri-La" was sold. Still, development wouldn't really take off until irrigation could service large scale farming with the completion of the Grand Coulee in 1942. There followed the 1950's, where the Bureau of Land Management offered to sell 339 acres to establish a town in the area. There was a sole bid - the bidder a local Pharmacist named Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown decided to name the town after the OG GW. The citizens named their streets after varieties of cherries native to the area, like Bing and Royal Anne and Montmorency. The town was officially incorporated on July 4, 1957, where there was a 1,000-pound cherry pie, and annually since, this prodigious pie returns.
In the years we'd been coming to the Gorge at George, I'd run the same out-and-back on Rd 1 NW. It might have been that the simplicity helped balance the stimulus, or that it felt safer not to turn. On a favorable day there might be a blue-green rush in the ditches lining the vineyards, orchard tracts and fields of hay (often swathed or bailed at night), the fugitive dust kicked up by a tractor with bale spear, or upon return, the smell of grill-meat or the cherry-bubblegum masking scent in the vacuuming of the porta-potties. Other times, it's just one long dry-mouthed, yellow-muddled memory, the bottoms of your feet baking. One thing was always promised: Monotony.
It was at Dead & Co that someone at camp asked if I'd seen the Ancient Lakes. In all those years I hadn't even been down to the Columbia. Someone in our camp woke early each morning to hike down to the river to soak their legs; I was envious of their ritual, of their self-possession. Ancient Lakes? Has my curiosity gone? The next morning, I'd look for them, try a Left off Rd 1 NW.
From the tent into the soft bakelite of the eastern fielded morning, a cotton-mouthed revive. The heat wasn't bright or pointing but sweatered. From the Amphitheatre Campground - left onto Rd 1, left on Rd U, left on Rd 2, curving right onto Rd U 1, which became Rd U, becoming Rd 2.5. In the tenderness synonymous of a no-wake-zone, farm trucks passed with a respect the city lacks. Sweat tickled in its trailing, the only reprieve the breeze made in movement.
I accessed the Ancient Lakes from the Evergreen Reservoir in WDFW's Quincy Wildlife Area, where a few warmwater fishermen sought bass, Walleye, Black Crappie or Tiger Musky. The irrigation runoff is not safe to drink even after filter or boil. It was apparent that a runner there was atypical. Tucked into a little carrel of a long-reeded sandbar that hung like a cliff over a deep pool of water I cupped handfuls onto my face and wrists, resisting the urge to jump in. To do so would have felt wild and vulnerable, accessories I wish hadn't tamed in aging. Once cooled, I careened waterways led by intuition and views of the Columbia Basin, the flat-bottomed canyon coulee floor flanked by steep 300-foot basalt cliffs.
Millions of years ago, lava flows filled what we know as the Columbia Basin. There followed Ice Age floods which carved the spectacular recessional cataracts called Crater, Potholes & Frenchman Coulee; Coulee from the French "couler," meaning "to flow." These deep gulches host dry, braided channels formed by the glacial drainage. What stands so scenic feels artificial with its cataract-lined arms and alcoves clutching basalt ribs.
Around a network of trails that weave around Burke, Quincy, Stan Coffin and H Lakes, the sun reflected off the water and onto the rocks, magnifying the heat. Rabbits, rattlesnakes, coyotes, deer, loons, duck, sparrows, quail - all of these creatures known to inhabit, but, eerily, not a reed moved, nor a footprint or slither track impressed the sandy trail.
Here and there a vault toilet, that barren concrete and pebble brushed bathroom with a port to the deep bowels; no toilet paper, and the warm wind necessary to carry the stench.
In turning back towards the Gorge, the faraway vistas of the Kittitas County Wildhorse Wind Farm windmills replaced the canyons, their turbines perched on the high open shrub-steppe ridge tops of Whiskey Dick Mountain. Covered in sweat, fatigued from the heat, but fulfilled in that bowl in the soul that fills with experiencing wild country, with feeling small against the contours of cliffs.
Back the way I'd come, back down Rd 1 NW, soused, dehydrated, back into the Ampitheatre campground and into camp. He said, Did you find it?
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