Palouse Falls was made by a wounded beaver and other stories of cooperation
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Teachers on the Palouse
Then a high school teacher dared to question the scientific dogma of his day.
One teacher, a poet from Massachusetts, another teacher from Seattle, and one that teaches today on the Palouse share heart, vision and hope for the future.
Formed by megafloods, this place fooled scientists for decades
Geologists couldn’t account for the strange landforms of eastern Washington State. Then a high school teacher dared to question the scientific dogma of his day.
GLENN HODGES PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL MELFORD
PUBLISHED MARCH 8, 2017
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/channeled-scablands
“Perhaps it’s just as well that he didn’t. That sort of neat resolution might obscure what’s arguably the most important lesson of the scablands’ story — the caution that “nature has the answers, not us.” Just when we think we’ve got nature figured out, we find that among her many powers is the power to confound us, again and again and again.”
Filling the Silo on the Palouse
One grain of wheat. One field. One plant. One head of grain.
Multiply by hundreds of grains, thousands of acres,
Millions plants Bizillion heads of grain
Filling silos for storage,shipping,processing and cooking
This process is completed by people of faith. Faith in the seed, the field, the plant, the heads of grain. Growing in the deep soil set there about 15,000 years ago, sun and rain fed.
The creation of the Palouse, envisioned by a high school teacher, the mystery of the Palouse, encapsulated by an Elementary teacher’s poem, and the prophetic future of the Palouse, embodied in a teacher in Pullman.
Faith of cooperation. People who watch the weather, sit at tables and the hardware store and talk about wheat. They may not agree about policy and politics, but when I see the cooperation of this entire process I join in the faith and the song written by Katherine Lee Bates in 1895
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Melissa Ann Pew Mayer 2023 teacher at Pullman High School
