The Dalles Mountain Ranch

The wind was what drove them crazy on the prairies, and on this mountaintop I can see why – the very air you’re about to inhale whipped away before you can breathe.

Up here, nothing is static; grass bent flat, giant oak treetops in crazy dance, flocks of blackbirds exploding from thickets, clouds and jet trails torn to shreds. Strands of barbed wire try to hold the wind in, or at least snag a gust, but they can’t.

The roar is constant.

Painters try to capture the landscape but their hats blow off, their easels blow over, the paint blows off their pieces of canvas. It lands wherever it’s supposed to go; the gold onto the peach-round fields, streaks of rust to the metal roofs, purple slashes to the distant hills, blocks of orange on the tilted plateaus.

Fences and buildings stay planted for now, the roof still on the barn, but the fields are empty, the cattle apparently blown to the east. I’m guessing by now they’re in Idaho.

Katy McKinney lives and works in Trout Lake, Washington. Locally she is better known for her worm composting than her poetry, despite having had poems published in The Sun, Manzanita Quarterly, Lucid Rhythms, Pacific Magazine, Perigee, Rain Magazine and Windfall, as well as in several anthologies.