The Wallowas and Walla Walla

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August 5-8:
Oh beautiful, for spacious skies,
for amber waves of grain,
for purple mountains majesty,
above the fruited plain...

August in the foothills of the Wallowas is the realization of the song we learned in a tiny, crowded eastern seaboard town, where we had only the encouragement of our enthusiastic music teacher Miss O'Brien to try to imagine such a place. Fat cattle and sleek horses, huge tracts of buff-colored wheat ready for harvest, fields of corn and some potatoes, and what is that short dark green stuff? Acres and acres of it east of LaGrande. We couldn't identify it, I fought the urge to stop the van and pick a leaf...but the mystery was solved later that morning when we got to Wallowa and stopped at the Blonde Strawberry Cafe. It's MINT!! Acres and acres and acres of it—ever wondered where mint was grown?
Now generally I make favorable comments on campsites or good roads to take and sights to see, but this time I must tell you, for the best scones in the world (in my world so far anyway), make sure you stop for a coffee or a shake at the pink building on the right in the town of Wallowa, called both Jumpin' Java and The Blonde Strawberry. There's a cheerful young mother there who makes feather-light scones with fresh raspberries and dots of white chocolate on top (perhaps a gilded lily for Australian tastes) as well as scrumptious cinnamon rolls and muffins. She also has a mini-gallery of local art and craft and up the back are her two blond children, playing quietly with a good stock of toys and books.
Thanks to Gaila I had dreamt for a long time of getting to the Wallowas, a group of mountains in north east corner of Oregon, and even though it wasn't autumn, the time she'd recommended for going there, we tried our luck and enjoyed our stay. It was time for a rest day—we'd been on the road for 6 days, moving each day, and we decided to chill for a bit and just do whatever we felt like.
I guess we were the nerds of the campground. As family groups around us pulled out their scooters and rubber boats and head off to parasail or swim or fish or play ball, we got out our laptops! Ah well, to each their own.
I was pretty engrossed in “I Do Not Come to You be Chance” by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, which is a fictional look at the Nigerian email scams from a Nigerian perspective. Have any of you NOT been offered a few million dollars for helping someone get large sums of money out of Nigeria?? Want to know the behind-the-scenes?
Wallowa Lake State Park is a bit of Swiss scenery in Oregon — as long as you're looking south. The park is HUGE, as campsites go, but the spaces are smallish and close together. Oregon State Parks allows people to book ahead, and being midsummer, it was no surprise that the sites were booked out for the weekend. But we stayed there Thursday night and till midday Friday, then we moved to the picnic area by the river for lunch and a restful early afternoon. Eventually we headed out and happened upon the Lions Park in Wallowa, where camping is FREE.
I also discovered when I checked my address book that Wallowa is where Jenny Hawkins' family ranch is -- what a gorgeous area. But on our return visit to the Blonde Strawberry we found that Jenny had moved to Alaska!! I hope all is well with you Jenny. May we meet in Portland book group again one day.
Our next stop was Walla Walla, Washington, where our friends Bonnie and Les Griffith live. We hadn't been there long—a cuppa and a chat later—when Les and his son Justin returned victorious from the Snake River with a huge sturgeon that Justin had caught. Justin's into smoking fish, and we loved the taste we sampled of a previous effort.
Bonnie has left working at the bank and is devoting fulltime to her pastels and they're gorgeous—and winning prizes here and there. She had recently competed in a Quick Draw contest in eastern Montana, where artists had just 30 minutes to produce a work. See Bonnie's resulting picture below. Also: http://www.bonniegriffith.com/
We also got to visit Jerry and Machelle Hartman, who had co-presented two video workshops with me in Hong Kong this past April at the East-West Center's International Media Conference. It was fun to meet their 2 kids and see how their gardens grow (what rhubarb!!!) and hear about their progress on the documentary they're making with Indigenous peoples of Surinam in South America.

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