Several months ago, Out There Outdoors published a call for short prose pieces for an outdoor/environmental writing contest hosted by Get Lit, Out There, and The Spokesman-Review. For a week or so I thought about what I would write if I were to write a piece for the contest, then decided to write it—researching facts, cramming them into a 750-word limit, polishing, and submitting the finished product. Several weeks later, Get Lit informed me I’d won the contest, and on August 11 the piece appeared in the Sunday Spokesman-Review. Titled “The Vanishing Lake,” it can be read through the following link: S-R outdoor writing contest winner. Here’s how the piece came about:
Pacific Lake
A necklace of lakes
Coffeepot Lake
In 2016, friends told me about a nice kayaking lake in the channeled scablands west of Spokane. The name – Coffeepot – intrigued me, and my husband and I drove out there in late spring. Found off Highway 2, the lake is one of numerous mirage-like bodies of water, remnants of Ice Age floods, that have settled in the curves of basalt cliffs in arid east-central Washington. Coffeepot itself forms part of a necklace of small lakes, northeast of the town of Odessa, that are fed by a creek which is in turn fed by winter run-off. The Coffeepot recreational area has a boat ramp, vault toilet, and picnic tables, and my husband and I enjoyed a warm sunny day of kayaking. A year later we opted to try Twin Lakes, northeastern neighbor of Coffeepot and set in the same dry canyon. Back-to-back shallow slivers of water give these two lakes their name.
One door closes
Coffeepot Lake
As we drove down a rough road to the lakes’ recreational area on a sunny day in May, a number of people were setting up for what looked like a large picnic gathering. A man approached us and explained that within a couple of hours the area would be buzzing with people from several Native American tribes participating in a ceremonial gathering of biscuitroot, followed by a barbecue lunch. We were welcome to stay, the man told us, but perhaps it would not be the quiet day we’d envisioned …
What is biscuitroot?
Cous biscuitroot, courtesy Paul Slichter
Biscuitroot is a plant native to the hardscrabble dry land of western North America. Perfectly adapted to harsh conditions, it grows primarily in the relatively wet spring months, then seeds and dries up, lying dormant until water returns the following spring. There are numerous species of biscuitroot, many of which are difficult to differentiate: the most common in the area of Twin Lakes is Canby’s biscuitroot (Lomatium canbyi) with small ball-shaped roots. Also known as cous, the roots have been gathered by Native Americans for centuries and prepared as a bread-like staple in their diet. The nineteenth-century explorers Lewis and Clark acquired a taste for the cous flat cakes they called chapellel. The explorers did not gather the roots themselves because another local plant with a similar appearance is highly poisonous; instead, they depended on the superior skills of tribal women foragers. These and other interesting facts about biscuitroot can be found in the chapter “A Taste for Roots” in Jack Nisbet’s book, Ancient Places.
Another door opens
The vanishing lake: back again
We talked with the man at Twin Lakes for a bit, and he asked if we’d heard about Pacific Lake. Responding to our blank faces, he told us of a lake to the southwest, another jewel in the local necklace, just north of Odessa. For some fifteen years it had been a dry bed of cracked earth, weeds, and occasional crops, but after the heavy snows of the previous winter, the basalt amphitheater had refilled. A lake that had died had come back to life. A true renascence.
We thanked the man for the news and took off to see for ourselves this miracle of nature.