`Keeping Our Wits Warm'

On a library shelf devoted to books about Washington – true crime, cookbooks, travel guides – I noticed an oversized paperback with a black-and-white photograph of a tree on the cover. It was austere enough to attract my attention, and reminded me of old New Directions covers. The title was Palouse Country, which meant nothing to me (France?), and the author was George Bedirian, which also meant nothing. Inside are 130 beautiful duotone images of the prairies of eastern Washington and north central Idaho – a stark landscape of rolling hills, big sky and abandoned barns and other buildings. Many structures have since been demolished so the world Bedirian documents is gone or going. In their straightforward elegance, his photographs recall the work of Walker Evans, Wright Morris, Russell Lee and Dorthea Lange – the classic, no-nonsense, often elegiac tradition of American photography.

The first edition of Palouse Country was published in 1987 by the Whitman County (named after Marcus, not Walt) Historical Society. The expanded second edition, the one I found, came out in 2002 and is published by Washington State University Press. Bedirian’s images are so rich, so classically balanced, I’ve been studying them as one studies a memorable poem or passage of prose. The cover photo, the one that caught my eye, is labeled “Apple tree, Steptoe Butte, Whitman County, Washington,” and can be viewed here. Bedirian includes a note about the picture on the copyright page. It’s the only image in the book singled out for commentary. He writes:

“…the butte offers riches of its own to those who take the time to find them. Such is the case with this apple tree, one of many scattered across the butte’s lower slopes. My discovery of the tree one autumn afternoon was part of a convergence in which the tree, the season, the weather, and the hour conspired to produce a moment of ineffable beauty…I value this photograph for two reasons. First, it stands in my mind as the perfect representation of `Palouseness’: that combination of light, air, and landscape that can only be found in the Palouse. Second, it speaks to me of the efficacy of `being there’; of keeping our wits warm, to paraphrase the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, to the things that are; of truly seeing the world around us.”

I share Bedirian’s love of the visually stark and commonplace. Prairies and deserts are more pleasing to look at than mountains, which tend to seem rather melodramatic. This suggests one of those primal taxonomic divides among humans – mountain people and plains people.
The first two-thirds of Bedirian’s book, I’m surprised to find, is devoted to human habitations – schools, churches, houses and businesses in town or former towns with names like Farmington, Endicott, Starbuck and Oakesdale. Only the final third, the part that touched me most when I first opened the book, is uninhabited landscape. Trees are rare and precious in Bedirian’s work, as they are in the Palouse region and in the work of the writer who most often comes to mind as I look at these photographs – Willa Cather, a poet of trees, though she grew up in Nebraska and set her best novels on its sparsely wooded prairies. In O Pioneers! (1913) is a sentence Bedirian might have used in his book:

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”
And in the first chapter of My Ántonia (1918):

“There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

Cather’s prose is limpid and seems effortless, and never calls attention to itself, so its poetry is time-released. Later in My Ántonia she writes:

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.

“In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

The measured rhythm and plainness of that final paragraph sound the way George Bedirian’s photographs of Palouse Country look.