DAY TWO:

Wednesday, 10:00 a.m.
Peone Cemetery, Peone Prairie

After a good night's shut-eye, we face a cold bright morning. The farming community is hard at work. Peone Cemetery sits atop a hill overlooking the prairie farms northeast of Spokane. Its red barns and blue mountains are what would-be immigrants might envision when they think "America." Some graves date back to the mid-1800s.

Leaves cascade from the protective trees that line the fence over the many infants' graves. The living are as present here as the dead. These plots are well tended by the families, who have not allowed remembrance to be defined for them. There are pinwheels of all shapes and sizes, and even a windsock. Two baseball caps lie before one stone. Another stone keeps company with a gaudy cherub lying in the grass. Yet another is embedded with an Alpha Romeo emblem.

The love of a husband long gone remains in one delicate marble marker:

A sharp contrast to last night's austerity, Peone rises like one green wave among the swells and troughs of a wheaten ocean. I have not been this close to the good earth in a while. The kernel from a stray stalk is a sweet reminder of the source of our sustenance.

After half an hour, Nic is still kneeling at the gate, lens inclined toward a pair of aqua-colored plaster cherubim.

When we head back down the road, we are feeling hearty and rejuvenated. Seattle seems quite a distance from us, and as I savor the rich air, I wonder if transformation is a possibility after all.

12:30 p.m.
St. Anne's Catholic Cemetery, Medical Lake

For a guy, Nic isn't shy about asking directions. He wants to stop as soon as we reach Medical Lake. I convince him to drive around a bit. I'm starting to get a knack for sensing where the graves are.

As we approach the lake itself, I sense we're getting close, but then the road loops back toward where we started and we find ourselves on the campus of a mental hospital that includes a primate research facility. I agree to stop at city hall and ask directions.

We are truly strangers here, I realize. These channeled scablands are as foreign to us as they were to the early pioneers. This is a terrain where Native Americans migrated according to the seasons of the land and where pioneers changed the land with irrigation and plows.

The land, in turn, changed the people who survived it.

We express our interest in St. Anne's Cemetery with a measured professionalism, but that doesn't make us any less suspicious. We are city people who live west of the Cascades, after all. We are seeking the elusive intersection of past and present in a terrain where competition - for land, water, railroads - was unavoidable and cooperation a necessity.

As we head north on Brooks Road, across the railroad tracks, I spot a cross standing proudly in a field of the same wheat-colored stalks we saw in Coulee City. Nic turns onto the rutted road and we both sit in the truck a minute, awed by the dejected beauty of the spot. These are mostly the graves of inmates of Lakeland Village.

The ground is lumpy and sage-covered. Many markers, like that of Patrick Flood (1897) are toppled chess pieces, each unique and intricate in its design. The founder of the town, Andrew LeFevre (1824-1900) lies here, on the land donated by his family. "Repose en paix," reads the French inscription. Beside LeFevre's stone cross is a white marble cross inscribed for his 17-year-old son Andrew, who died Nov. 16, 1880.

Most markers are covered with brush or have sunk beneath the earth, or been ground down and virtually rubbed wordless. Sage-green lichen is growing into the chiseled letters that remain. If nature doesn't want these souls disturbed, I take it as a form of grace.

4:00 p.m.
Pitt Cemetery, 3 miles south of Kamiak Butte

The sensuous hills of the Palouse are the most pleasant surprise of the day. Grange buildings are a common sight in Whitman County, and they get me thinking about the mix of self-sufficiency and symbiosis that must be achieved to succeed as a farmer here.

A city person can always find her way without asking directions. In an urban environment, to make contact with people is often riskier than being lost. Here it's the reverse. Not to make contact can be fatal.

Once we round Kamiak Butte, we reach our cemetery hill by an unmarked dirt road we never would have noticed without the detailed directions of a friendly young woman tending sunflowers down the road apiece. The cemetery itself is unmarked and surrounded by shrubs and tall pines. After the washed out yellows and tans of the last two days, we drink in the luscious colors of the surrounding hills. They are wheaten and blond, chartreuse and orange. Magenta stalks of red glasswort line the north fence, and flush against it someone's wheat field is all cut down. The foliage boast deep maroons and reds and rusts. Here, there is a heavenly sense of being away from any harm or discomfort.

While Nic photographs a stone angel emerging from the verdant foliage, the sky transforms itself around us. Above us are clouds like doves' wings, and purple deepens in the east. To the west the light is creamy, barely golden, while a violet watercolor bleed promises rain in the south. For several moments, Eden has manifested itself in Eastern Washington.

There are recent footprints all around us, and someone cared enough to erect modern-style gravestones for several graves from the 1800s. As I finished a rubbing from the stone of one Mary Rainwater, age 24, a blustery shower urges us back to the truck. We stop at the closest house to ask the cemetery's name.

"Oh, who are you visiting up there?" the woman asks.

I used to think cemeteries and funerals served as a reflection of the dead for the sake of the living. But I think they may be more reflective of the living and how a culture views death.

Most Americans can watch endless violence on a movie screen, but can't abide the solitude of a cemetery. Perhaps we should judge a community by how it cares for its graveyards.

As we dip into the steep ravines of the Snake River Canyon, the moon rises high above the pines, and all the sky darkens into blue.

 Go on to Day Three