September 7: Walla Walla to Dayton

After a fun breakfast and morning with Lydia and her visiting friend Stassia and their kids, I had a relatively short ride about 30 miles through rolling wheat field hills to Waitsburg and then on to Dayton, the Columbia County seat. It was a new type of landscape to pass through, quite different from the agricultural lands of the Columbia basin I’d been travelling through since Beverly. Because the wheat harvest already occurred there was minimal farm traffic on the roads, also quite a contrast from the previous few days, with many agricultural workers and farm trucks on the road, especially between Othello and Tri-cities.

Dayton and Waitsburg are small, old, incorporated cities. Dayton had a population of about two and a half thousand; Waitsburg just over one thousand. After a delicious dinner my host, Genie, mother of my friend Lydia who I stayed with in Walla Walla, walked with me over to the gas station to see if I could find a phone charger cable (success!). Genie is a well-traveled, very knowledgeable person and formerly served as a Port Commissioner here. We talked about how the town has declined noticeably even over the past decade. It still has a charming, attractive main street, a handful of solid local businesses, but the empty storefronts are multiplying. It’s hard to come up with a long-term strategy, or even a tactical retreat for tiny, remote cities like this. As a consultant I could talk the happy talk about some kind of revitalization. But, being honest now, there are just so many forces pushing people, jobs, businesses, services towards larger cities. It’s hard. Genie recognizes it, says she’s been racking her brain for some way to bring life back to the town.

Other things I noticed today:

road cuts with no bedrock visible, just dozens of feet of topsoil (Lydia mentioned this to me the other day)
a sweet memorial poem by a bench on the multi-use path by Hwy 12 in Walla Walla
quiet, calm low-flowing Touchet (“two-she”) River accessed from the Lewis & Clark Trail State Park
beautiful large dead owl by the side of the highway