The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [71]
“Have you got Lucy?” Louise called out as the cab came to pick us up.
“In her basket,” I shouted. “On my arm. Hurry along or we’ll miss the train.” Having the cat on this trip wasn’t my idea, but I accommodated.
Louise waddled out, one hand holding her hat, the other my curling iron. “You forgot to pack this,” she said, breathless. “It was still on the stove.”
“Clara wouldn’t want to be without that,” Olea said. “She can’t keep her hat on the entire trip.”
“That I can’t,” I said.
They knew me well. I guess in time we reveal our most intimate selves even to assumed family members, whether we realize it or not.
We headed west, the train rumbling through little towns with names like Reardan and Wilbur, wheat-farming communities. I had time to think. The one thing I knew for sure is that I didn’t want to undertake an investment scheme without safeguards in place. I wouldn’t repeat my mother’s mistake in not renegotiating the terms when things went sour with my ankle, then continuing to take side trips that delayed us further. Maybe she really did believe we could make it in time; maybe she trusted that, like Jonah and the whale, all things were possible.
What I needed to do was gather sound information and then honestly assess it and my own capabilities. I would look at the world through the eyes of an investor, not a flighty woman caught up in emotional demands of rescuing a farm. I wouldn’t let that kind of emotion shade my thinking.
At Coulee City, a town about fifty miles west of Spokane, we spent the night at the Grand Hotel. In the morning, we hired a cab to visit the local attractions. The landscape was unlike any I’d ever seen, with high bare ridges. Beyond these were pools of water, shiny lakes really, reflecting white clouds in their mirrored surfaces. A local soul told us the lakes and landscape were the result of a huge prehistoric flood that gouged out this wide coulee. Olea scoffed at that and said there was no evidence of such an event. I didn’t really care. I found the landscape exotic.
A single road worked its way east and west across the coulee, which ran from the Canadian provinces almost to Oregon. Through it, cattle were driven to high country pastures in the summer, then returned to winter in the wide, flat plain that looked to me like a riverbed. The railroad followed the same opening. Looking over the side of the high ridges reminded me of the Dale Creek trestle, though this canyon was much wider and deeper. I still had the dizzy feeling as I looked down.
“Isn’t this an amazing sight?” Louise said.
“Such ruggedness only a few hours from the rolling Palouse Hills. You wouldn’t even think they were in the same country, let alone the same state,” I said.
I liked the dry heat of this coulee and thought the land would be rich and fertile with enough rainfall each year. It felt like a good place to me, but there weren’t many people here, and most who were served the local ranchers. What was there to invest in?
The central part of the state cast a vast view of things. Fewer wooded areas flew past the train windows, and on the slow uphill grades, we watched vistas of deer and even elk herds disappear down deep ravines that bled into plateaus. Here, enterprising pioneers planted orchards. Farming. That’s what people did in Washington State from east to west. It was likely my best bet.
I wanted to treat this trip as strictly business, but I found myself watching Olea and Louise as we traveled. Both seemed to enjoy meeting new people. Louise especially began conversations with strangers no matter where we were. I could have traveled the entire state without meeting anyone, my nose in a book or daydreaming through the windows or watching people from the corners of my eyes without presenting myself as interested in their doings. Louise, however, had other plans. It seemed she’d talk