You Can Take a Boy Out of the Country

I haven't lived on a wheat 'ranch' among the vast rolling hills of the Palouse Country for fifty years, but the spirit of the place will live in me till I die--and maybe afterwards, who knows? So what is this immortal 'Spirit of the Palouse'? It is in the first place a feeling of being centered and alone in the midst of benign and nurturing immensity. The size of the average family's ranch in the Palouse is two or three thousand acres; not tens of thousands of acres as in Texas, but. when you consider that there are 640 acres in a square mile, that means that 'neighbours' in the Palouse are usually two or three miles apart. Ordinarily when you go into the fields to do the business of dry-land wheat farming--pulling harrows or plows with your caterpillar tractor, or driving combines or wheat-trucks--you don't meet with another soul, and you don't see a single other human being. It's just you and the land, the thousand-foot tall hills of wind-blown loess, unchanged for thirty million years.