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Geological Poetry
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J Harlen Bretz--the geologist who theorized in the 1920s that a huge flood had carved eastern Washington's scabland region--wrote many scientific papers in his life. These papers generally described his research for the benefit of other geologists.
But, unlike many scientists of his time, Bretz wrote with a certain poetry in his use of words and the visual images he painted in his descriptive passages. Perhaps his best paper on the scablands was written in 1928.
Eloquently composed, this research paper provided readers with their clearest picture ever of the scablands. This might have been due to the fact that it was his tenth paper on the subject and he had by now refined his “literary style” to the point where he could almost take his readers on an imaginary trip to the region he was describing. Given that so few of his readers, especially his detractors, had ever stepped foot in the scablands, Bretz may have felt it was his responsibility to give them what would—for many—be their only detailed picture of the place.
And it was a vibrant word picture indeed; here is just a small portion of Bretz’s introduction to this 32-page paper:
“No one with an eye for landforms can cross eastern Washington in daylight without encountering and being impressed by the ‘scabland.’ Like great scars marring the otherwise fair face of the plateau are these elongated tracts of bare, or nearly bare, black rock carved into mazes of buttes and canyons. Everybody on the plateau knows scabland. It interrupts the wheat lands, parceling them out into hill tracts less than 40 acres to more than 40 square miles in extent. One can neither reach them nor depart from them without crossing some part of the ramifying scabland. Aside from affording a scanty pasturage, scabland is almost without value. The popular name is an expressive metaphor. The scablands are wounds only partially healed—great wounds in the epidermis of soil with which Nature protects the underlying rock."
"With eyes only a few feet above the ground the observer today must travel back and forth repeatedly and must record his observations mentally, photographically, by sketch and by map before he can form anything approaching a complete picture. Yet long before the paper bearing these words has yellowed, the average observer, looking down from the air as he crosses the region, will see almost at a glance the picture here drawn by piecing together the ground-level observations of months of work. The region is unique: let the observer take the wings of the morning to the uttermost parts of the earth; he will nowhere find its likeness.”
It was almost as if Bretz was foretelling the future as he wrote the preceding words; regular air passengers between Seattle and Spokane—if they are willing to put down their in-flight magazines and look out the windows—will clearly see the braided channels below them, the huge gashes of Moses and Grand Coulees, the cataracts of Dry Falls, and the northern reaches of the Telford-Crab Creek scabland tract, an erratic landscape where rich loess hills are segregated by elongated tracts of rocky ground incised by channels and dotted with rock basins, many filled with dark water lakes.
We are blessed in eastern Washington to have such a remarkable landscape to visit any time we want!
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