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Coming into Place

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Coming Into Place, Moses Coulee-Beezley Hills

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Coming Into Place, Moses Coulee-Beezley Hills, Douglas and Grant counties

By Nancy Warner 

Most of us who live in North Central Washington came from someplace else. Except for tribal members whose roots go back hundreds and hundreds of years, the rest of us either came from families who immigrated from other states and countries or we came here on our own, sometimes at the urging of friends.   

Regardless of when and how we arrived, most of us were drawn here by an enticing mix of opportunities, hopes, and dreams. In the late 1800s, it may have been the chance to homestead and own your own farm. By the 1930s it might have been the prospect of finding work in the orchards and building a better life for your family that spurred your move. More recent stories include those about people moving here from bigger cities to improve the quality of their daily lives – to enjoy a slower pace in beautiful space.   

Collectively, when we immigrated here – from as far away as Germany or as close as Seattle – we brought values, traditions, knowledge, and skills that have helped shape this place. That’s something we all have in common. As immigrants, we’ve also all experienced the need to find help along the way – help in getting oriented to a new landscape and community, help starting a new job and making new friends – help making this place feel like home, a place where we belong.     

For me, it was the chance to contribute to the conservation of the wide-open sagebrush country – or shrub-steppe – that prompted my family to move here from Colorado in 2000. My husband Chuck and I had been working as program managers for The Nature Conservancy since the 1980s, an international non-profit organization dedicated to conserving plants, animals and natural systems. We enjoyed the challenge of trying to balance conservation with farming, ranching, and the maintenance of strong, rural communities. We liked the process of really getting to know a place and the people and working with them to find ways to make nature and people thrive.   

So we were excited to have the chance to start a new program for the Conservancy that would focus on working with other private and public landowners in the Moses Coulee-Beezley Hills area of Douglas and Grant counties. We were fired up about conserving the shrub lands, wildflowers, and wildlife that together represent the most ecologically diverse and threatened habitat type in Washington. To succeed we would have to understand the needs of the plants and animals – from pygmy rabbits to Indian tobacco – as well as those of neighboring farmers, ranchers, and public land managing agencies. We needed to be able to think like a whole community, human and non-human alike.

As lifelong westerners, we quickly felt at ease in the landscapes here where residents with the deepest roots of all, such as sagebrush and ponderosa pine, were old friends we knew from other places. Their presence, along with that of many other familiar plants and animals quickly made us feel at home here. I still remember how thrilling and comforting it was to see sandhill cranes soaring above the cliffs of Moses Coulee that first spring we were here. Talk about indicators of a good place to live!

But other things were new to us particularly basalt, the dark molten rock that dominates and defines the shrub steppe in the Columbia Basin. The significantly shorter winter and longer summer days of the Northwest also claimed our attention at first. And while I’ve always loved apples, we had never lived in a place where there were so many orchards – apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, and apples – presenting wave after wave of blooms through the spring. We had also known some pretty big rivers in other parts of the West, but nothing like the Columbia and the hydroelectric dams that still and channel its flow.   

So our eyes and ears were wide open as we began learning about the shrub-steppe and human communities of our new home. We spent a good deal of time in the field doing the typical start-up things for our line of work – exploring the landscape and helping with field surveys as well as reading reports, attending meetings, and developing the network of contacts that could help us frame effective land management and restoration decisions. 

While we had a great circle of researchers and land managers to work with, many of them having had years of experience in this landscape, it quickly became clear that we needed more information about past human use of the Moses Coulee-Beezley Hills area to effectively think like a community and consider the roles of grazing, hunting, farming, traditional gathering, and wetland and upland restoration in the management of the Conservancy’s lands. As it turned out, many of our neighbors and longtime residents were willing to help us fill in some of those information gaps by allowing us to record their stories.  

This practice of gathering oral histories, ground-tested knowledge earned by the people who had lived in a place for a long time, was one of the interests and skills I brought with me to this region. I’d reached out to local residents for help in better understanding a landscape before, gathering oral histories in other places we’d lived including Cache Valley in Utah, the Carrizo Plain in California and the San Luis Valley in Colorado. In all of these places I’d found people anxious to help me get my bearings in a new home – to help me understand how a given landscape or community works by sharing their memories and insights – their experiences, what they’ve seen and learned over the years, and what they appreciate about their place. 

People also shared photographs, documents, equipment and other things along with their stories. In the process they helped me feel more welcome and at home – helped me populate an unfamiliar landscape with meaningful stories that I could build upon over time. And, without the formal structure of a service club, these interviewees and neighbors also helped me expand my network by recommending and introducing me to other people who could help me broaden and deepen my education about this place.   

Recognizing the value of these stories and the process of gathering them, I began to work with a new organization, the Initiative for Rural Innovation & Stewardship (IRIS) to expand this practice starting in 2005. Since then, I’ve been working with IRIS and many partners to gather, share, and care for nearly 600 stories about successes in this region in formats that range from audio recordings and videos to photo collections and printed publications. See www.ncwcollections.org

Those of us with IRIS believe that the process of gathering and sharing success stories enhances a sense of belonging, inspires action and builds community – all conditions that lead to success. Together this collection of stories helps us learn more about the nature of this place – the natural landscape and the human community, informs actions about what works, and highlights core values that continue to shape the way we live in this place. We hope you enjoy sampling these stories. We invite you to share them with others and to add your own story of success that can help others come into this place.   

Lemoine-landscape

Coming Into Place -Lamoine, Douglas County

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By Lauren Paige Loebsack

A child born to a farming family is born into a world deeply connected with the seasons.  We are children growing up whose home lives ebb and flow with the changing demands of weather and growth cycles.  We are immersed in a world of observation and consideration of the sky.  We can recite the years of hard winters, drought and bounty.  I have watched again and again my world awaken in the spring, the bare earth revealed as the snow melts away, the shy green hue of the fragile first shoots of wheat turn into seas of green that fade to gold.  Then shorn, naked, exposed and patient for its winter rest and the cycle to unfold again, each one its own chapter in the story of this place.

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The farm is place and family.  The pictures on our walls capture the changes in both as they grow together with the larger world.  Children grow taller, mature, grandparents disappear.  Behind them, the backdrop of the farm does the same.  In one of oldest pictorial records of my family homestead, the new, simple square house sits singularly against the rolling hills of wheat, my great-grandfather, with his father and others, stands beside a mule drawn wagon topped with sacks of wheat, all cast in sepia tones.  Later, the picture now in color, my grandfather operates an open cab combine, his face lost behind a kerchief and sunglasses to protect from the dust and chaff.  

The house in the background has grown too, a large addition, an out building, the trees planted a generation before now tall and filled in.  Later, the combines have closed cabs and each sports a painted number, “1” through “4”.  Grandpa Lawrence was “Unit 1”, my great uncle Leland “Unit 2”, my father “Unit 3” and my cousin David “Unit 4”.  My father still uses “Unit 3” as his radio handle, though we have had only one combine for nearly two decades. A recent picture, now on social media, features the smiling face of my baby sister as she drives the combine, my niece sitting beside her.  They wave from the comfort of a sleek, air-conditioned cab atop a massive green machine.  

My great, great grandparents came out West with so many others during the Homestead Act, pausing in North Dakota long enough to catch their breath and scratch up some food.  The farm they would come to tend looked much like the idyllic image many Americans probably have of the family farm.  Children worked as they could, the youngest on simple tasks like gathering the eggs from the hen house, the older children taking on new tasks as their strength and dexterity allowed.  Farmers pushed their wide brimmed hats up over their weathered face to cool their brow for a moment, with work shirts tucked into slacks held up over wiry frames by suspenders.  The women wore skirts and gathered beans from the garden in their aprons. 

Quietly, less visibly, but like the equipment and the people, the ways we farm have changed.  Once the farm was Life, cut out from the earth.  We farmed to survive, to grow the food that literally sustained the family.  The farm then became a career, albeit a unique one, and industrialization changed the game to one of economic prosperity.  One could, if hard working and lucky enough, make a living, go on vacation, retire.

Now farms face a new world, one of sustainability.  From the soil, what many would call dirt, farmers coax out a plant that becomes food for many.  The machines and chemicals now available can outpace Mother Nature’s ability to respond.  This soil can be worked to death.  It takes a millennium for the sun and rain to weather rock into a skiff of top soil and all can be swept away by a single wind storm or rain event.  The farmer will watch with dread as the needed rain falls too hard, too fast and scours deep cuts into the carefully tended field.  Farmers now employ “no-till” farming methods, along with many other efforts that include GPS driven machinery and thorough meteorological research to protect our most precious partner: the land.

Loebsack-sister

I grew up in a little community once called Arup, but that I have always known as Lamoine.  The legend, if you can call such a story “legend”, goes that Arupp was founded ahead of the railroad, hoping to be that special place the trains would pass through.  When the post office was being secured, a new name was chosen by a Mr. Leonard Nathan Bragg who ran the general store at the time, naming it Lamoine after a brand of sardines he carried on his shelves.  Why the name was changed from Arupp is lost to time.  The house I called home, that I still think of as “home”, sits cozied up to Road G.  Just a few hundred feet to the east, in a field, still stands the remains of the old Lamoine school house.  We spent a lot of time there as children, chasing pigeons around the rafters and playing all manner of pretend, until the little building was deemed unsafe by our mothers.  The farmer who owns the land still plows around the little building, respectful, giving it enough room to stand against time.  A sign was installed beside it, on the north side so as to be visible from the highway.  The sign reads “Lamoine School 1915-1924”.

In the wide-open spread of the Waterville plateau, we keep our landmarks for practical and personal purposes.  They dot the land, mileposts of the history of settlement and the changing interpretation of the American dream.  This practice of letting time, not man, determine the lifespan of these landmarks illuminates a deep truth: that the land, this place, is an enduring member of the family, growing with us all, shaped by deliberate action and natural courses, the matriarch that binds together the rest of the family.  She both rules and serves us, watches us grow and leave and return, embraces our husbands and wives and children, all with an innate wisdom to be what each generation needs.

Loebsack-Farm-Harvest-2021

Now, as a woman no longer bound to the cycles of the farm, sometimes what I need is just to visit, to feel the comfort of that enduring presence and the memories it has held for generations.  Like my father, I like to set out on a drive to “check on the wheat”, to see a particular hill and think of the times we’ve been there before and be inspired by the endurance of the earth and those who have worked it.  To remember that I sprouted from here, will become a seed that is dropped to awaken as the roots of the next crop, in the same earth as my fore fathers. 

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Coming Into Place

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Introduction

By Nancy Warner
Initiative for Rural Innovation & Stewardship

Most of us who make our home here in North Central Washington came from someplace else. Regardless of when and how we arrived, most of us were drawn here by an enticing mix of opportunities, hopes, and dreams. And when we came, we also brought values, traditions, knowledge, and skills with us – characteristics that have helped shape this region. 

That’s something we all have in common. We all have a story – stories that when shared can grow understanding not just about each other but also about our communities. 

Gathering those stories and sharing them in ways that can help people connect around success in the region has been the work of IRIS for the past 15 years. One of the more than 300 recorded stories IRIS has collected and archived with the North Central Washington Library is that of David Weber – a descendant of pioneer farmers whose story is one example of why Quincy sees itself as a place of “Opportunities Unlimited.”

Weber Ridge Farms in Grant County

David Weber – Harvest Time, 2017

“It’s a desert, pure and simple”, wrote Lieutenant Thomas Symons in the 1870’s after making a several year study of the Columbia Basin for the Army Corps of Engineers. It’s always been one of my favorite quotes, as it shows the difficulty of not only living here, but of making a living in agriculture as well. It makes you wonder, why would anyone choose to live in the Quincy Valley? Well, I choose to live here, and am still farming some of the same ground as my grandparents who chose to come here 115 years ago, despite the words of Thomas Symons.

My grandparents probably didn’t know any better. They were German Russians immigrants, who staked everything to come to America in 1902. With deteriorating conditions for German speaking people in Russia, they knew it was time to “get out”. One brother in the family, whom we call Uncle Adam, came first to America in the late 1800’s, thinking to follow many other Germans and settle in Nebraska or the Dakotas. But while on the train, he met a man, probably a developer or promoter of some sort, who told him he really needed to go to Walla Walla, Washington, as the whole region had Homestead Act land for the taking, the last of it in the United States. This meant an opportunity to acquire their own farm land much faster than in other areas. Uncle Adam followed this advice, possibly even taking a loan from the man. After being in Walla Walla for a while, this industrious and entrepreneurial man found land to buy in the Odessa and Ritzville areas, then Quincy. Other family began immigrating, and my grandparents and two small children came over through Ellis Island in 1902, taking the train west to Odessa and arriving in Quincy via horse and wagon.

What they must have thought when they arrived here, a place of only around 8 inches of precipitation a year, after leaving the beautiful Russian steppes of the Volga. There is a family story of how my grandmother cried into the pancake batter nearly every morning with the dust swirling around their first home, a tent. She had left her mother and father behind, never to see them again! They certainly didn’t gain an easier life by coming here, but the main difference was in the freedom to choose their own path. They embraced the hardships with a strong faith in God, a knowledge of farming, hard work ethic, extended family that all worked together and an ability to find fulfillment in the simple things of life. They never expected to become wealthy, but rather to work in harmony with the earth to sustain their family, as generations before them had done.

I now reap the benefits of that legacy and of the difficult decision to leave everything they knew behind, and start anew. From them, I carry the pioneer spirit on. This is the place I call home.

David Weber – Harvest Time, 2017