DAY THREE:

Thursday, 11:03 a.m.
Kahlotus Cemetery, Kahlotus

Nic has been having recurring encounters with the name Kahlotus. He's pretty vague about it, but I don't want to press him. He's been on the road a lot the past month, and I'm as superstitious as the next vagabond. I think, if a name calls out to you, you ought to follow it.

His friends Kim and Scott, who put us up in Richland the night before, told us there are caves in the hills here where Chinese railroad workers once lived.

Today, there are lots of trucks coming in and out of town. Junked cars lie spent in several yards, and two beautiful horses keep silent company in a field of scrub. The weeds grow taller in Kahlotus.

We ask directions at a tiny building bearing the hand-painted words "The Local Stop," and get suspicious looks from the locals inside.

Except for the unique entrance, fashioned in the horseshoe shape of a ranch gate adorned with bending metal tulips, Kahlotus Cemetery is a plain grassy hill with flat markers. Nearly half are marked UNKNOWN.

Wheat is a common motif on these stones. On one grave rests a glass jar filled with kernels, like an offering.

The air is rich with the smoke of autumn burning and the scent of sage. A green irrigated field is vibrant against the otherwise dry landscape, and then the terrain goes to reds, oranges, browns. Despite the raw natural beauty, Kahlotus has seen hard times (like the failed Palouse Irrigation Project) and seems to want to be left alone.

As we descend along the gravel path, the sound of chirping birds is everywhere, and a tomcat eyes us from the golden rabbitbrush outside the gate.

Noon
Frischknecht, Paradise Flats

On the recommendation of a friend, we make a quick stop at this tiny graveyard. A spot used by the Krugs and Dillings from 1917 till the present, it contains fewer than 25 markers, with most inscriptions in German.

Three white metal crosses mark the site, one for Arthur J. Krug, who lived until 1920, and two for his young children who died in 1917 and 1918. One stone proclaims the German hymn, "I Know That My Redeemer Lives": Ich Weiss Dass mein erloser lebt und er wird mich hernach aus der erde erwecken es ist noch eineruhe vorhanden dem volke gottes. A coffee can containing flowers is marked "Happy Easter."

Once again, we are greeted by a neighbor dog, not fully grown, doing all the things puppies should learn not to do, like jumping up, licking and generally getting much too excited about Nic's taking his picture.

As a farewell gesture, he lifts his leg at the truck's right front tire.

3:20 p.m.
Pioneer Graveyard, Union Gap

Established in 1865, and restored in 1939 by the Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington, these well-maintained grounds are the nicest part of Union Gap, a suburb of Yakima that appears to be wall-to-wall parking lots and chain-store outlets.

Within the stone wall and black iron gate are preserved many pillars, as well as some beautiful engravings and poetry. The quietude is broken by the highway's roar beyond the wall.

It's a change to encounter these refined expressions of grief through art and poetry. Several marble tombstones began very tall and have since cracked. The pieces have been put back together and embedded in a flat of concrete beside the standing shards for easy reading.

In addition to much rhyming verse, there are beautiful flowers etched into stone: ferns, wheat, pansies, thistle, lily of the valley. The number of young children and infants buried here is sobering. A common inscription reads, "Little bud, for earth too fair, has gone to heaven to blossom there."

We are not too keen on confronting death, especially during this century, and especially in the West, where individualists tried to shake off the strictures of the East and to find immortality in riches or in legend. We tend to put death behind us quickly, to move on without mourning, to forget with intention. A hundred years ago, death was harder to ignore. It touched young and old, hardy and frail more swiftly and tragically than now.

Margaret Macabré, born in Scotland 1800 and living out the last of her 84 years in Yakima, has the earliest birthday among her fellow pioneers. Toward the base of the triangular yard, a marble obelisk commemorates the lives of "the last two people to be killed by Indians in Yakima county": Blanche and Lorenzo Perkins, who died at Rattlesnake Springs, July 10, 1878. Their deaths were vengeance for a gunboat attack by whites on a Umatilla fishing camp, although this is not mentioned at the site. "Who were the last Indians killed by whites in Yakima County?" Nic wonders aloud.

6:14 p.m.
Selah Pioneer Cemetery, Selah

We've driven past the gate before I realize those are grave markers poking up from that vacant lot, not the white fence posts that dot the horse pastures around Selah.

The sign above the Selah Pioneer Cemetery says it was restored in 1972. Sandwiched between an apple-packing plant and a Quaker church, it is clinging to life as the highway and strip malls multiply around it.

Will this suburban sprawl eventually mar all the beauty we've seen on this trip? I think of the pioneers buried here, and those at Union Gap. Is this the legacy they would have wanted to leave their descendants? It seems miraculous their silent presence here is still preserved.

The ground is weedy, but mowed. Most of markers are wooden and, therefore, illegible. The few stone markers date to the 1900s. Six quail flees the protection of thick sagebrush as Nic strides like a surveyor, tripod balanced across one shoulder.

As the sun sets over an industrial storage locker, the clouds go pink with hints of gold and violet. I gather a bouquet of sage and stalks of heather from magenta to rust, and arrange it within the wrought-iron crib that encloses a broken stone jutting up from teh earth like a baby's tooth.

The sky goes dim and I reach for the warmth of my pockets, my hands as dry as the air around us.
Nic and I speak little during the drive west toward Seattle. As we retrace our route through Cle Elum and reach Snoqualmie Pass, it begins to rain, and the pines rise up on either side of us.
Have we connected to the past? Yes, and more surprisingly, to the present. Our re-entry into the living, populated world will be a culture shock, but we have completed another course in that university of being human. We have let our reach exceed our grasp, and then returned from our journey with a few souvenirs, the most sacred of which might be the sense that what was here before might be forgotten, but certainly is not gone; and neither will we be.

The glinting lights across Lake Washington promise our journey's end and perhaps a little more - something akin to a homecoming.

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