For Amber Waves of Grain, For Dennis Palmer

August 6th, 2023: Colfax, Washington – Golden hour in Palouse Country during harvest season. I love everything about this time and place.

Solo travel tip #1: When you're in a town so small, it has one grocery store, and its nearest restaurant is… up the road a ways and in another zip code, you've found the perfect pitstop. If that town's so small and sweet that the locals leave their windows rolled down and their keys in the ignition, smile at the people you see. And when a kind stranger invites you to check out the town's museum even though it's closed for Independence Day, take him up on his offer. You never know—he just may be the mayor, and he just might end up being your friend for life.

I'll never stop telling the story of July 4th, 2019, when I met Dennis Palmer, Mayor of Oakesdale, Washington, in one of America's prettiest places. You can read it again or for the first time on my blog in a post titled: That Time I Met the Mayor.

I'm sure I've shared before that Denny Palmer and I have remained great friends over the years. We exchange birthday cards, call to check in on each other, and catch up here and there. Despite being generations apart and living at opposite ends of America, Denny and I bonded over our country love and love for Palouse Country.

Palouse Country is one of the most beautiful places I've ever explored that most people have never heard of. It just might be the Pacific Northwest's best-kept secret. When you think of Washington State, your mind probably conjures up imagery of towering pines, wall-to-wall greenery, dense forests, and mirrored lakes. Western Washington's got all that in spades, but Eastern Washington is the Washington you don't hear about so much. And that's the Washington I rave about most.

Palouse Country is where wide-open spaces meet bunched-up-blanket hills that go from green and yellow in the summer to beige and brown in the fall. Every season brings a fresh color spectrum to the Palouse's unique landscape. June and July tend to be the favorites of the few who know the magnificence of this region. It's the bright greens and yellows and the way they pop under blue skies that is the hallmark of this region. Yup, that's classic Palouse Country—a photographer's paradise.

But, if something in your soul yearns to be surrounded by amber waves of grain the way mine does, venture into the Palouse in August like I did this summer. It was as mesmerizing as I imagined it would be. And getting to explore the expanses and tiny towns with my pal Dennis Palmer was the treat of a lifetime for both of us. The area may seem empty, but I assure you it's so full. Driving through Oakesdale, Rosalia, Malden, St. John, Endicott, Diamond, and Colfax, we pulled over wherever the scenery called me so I could snap photos and marvel over my surroundings.

August is harvest season, and your chances of seeing combines combing the fields of gold are high if the rain holds off. And whether you see them hard at work, churning pounds of grain or not, if you visit in August, you're sure to witness the tracks that trail behind that million-dollar machinery. 

By mid-month, those tracks have made patterns out of harvested patches of land. A warm, wood-toned tapestry drapes over the tumbling hills, weaving a mesmerizing mosaic landscape that almost looks like it was intentionally designed as opposed to being the incidental remnants of agriculture. 

Somehow, that makes it even more remarkable to me—that this art by agriculture happens by chance. It's the natural curves in the topography of this land and the rogue trees that sprout out in the least convenient, but most picturesque places that force the combines to comb the way they do.

Having grown up surrounded by greenery I often took for granted, I'm most enchanted when nature paints with a more diverse palette. Golds, browns, reds, aqua blues, and purple hues enchant me more than the greens can because they feel so foreign to me when they appear in landscape form. For some reason, the color of wheat is one of the most dazzling to me. Standing in a sprawling sea of it like that of Palouse Country almost feels exotic—it's just so unfamiliar, so remote, so far from the norm of my Hudson Valley roots, I can't help but be swept away by it.

Whitman County (the heart of Palouse Country) is the nation's leading wheat-producing county—it says so on their welcome sign. This gateway to grain silos is much more than rural farmland. Sure, you'll spot a bunch of barns—some new, some collapsing and John Deere equipment—some antiques, some still hard at work. But this place has a kind of magic to it that some can't see and others can't help but feel.

Of course, beyond the natural wonder of this lesser-known gem, there's Mayor Dennis Palmer, who adds to the magic with his welcoming ways, his kind spirit, his thoughtful nature, and his decades of contributions to his heavenly hometown. 

As if it wasn't sweet enough that he's kept in touch with me all this time, Dennis also dedicated a binder to me in the museum he curated—the McCoy Valley Museum. In this binder with my name printed on the cover, Denny has collected the birthday cards I've sent him over the years, photos I've taken in the Palouse and around America, and printouts of articles and blog posts I've written. I could cry just thinking about it.

I brought Denny a bunch of NYC souvenirs on my last trip. He plans to put them all in a shadow box to display in the museum. Another precious museum addition Denny put together is his Honor Flight binder. That's right, folks, you can thank my dear friend for his service in the United States Marine Corps. Our country thanked him by flying him and his daughter to Washington, D.C., to honor and celebrate him for serving our country. Denny said that next to the days his two children were born, this was the most incredible experience of his life.

One of the most fortuitous finds to come from one of my solo adventures is my dear friend Dennis Palmer. I love you, Denny. Thank you for making both of my visits so memorable and for being my friend for life.