Low Hill | Toppenish, WA | 2018
My few minutes of pondering this stark landscape was interrupted by a huge trailer truck squeezing onto the gravel shoulder next to my car. The driver, a small man with a big belly, climbed down from the cab carrying a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies. “Want one?” he asked. He fished one out for himself, leaned against the hood of my car, and stared at the clouds gathering above the bare rise. “When I was growing up, these hills were nothing to us,” he said, using his cookie as a pointer. “All around us were bigger mountains, bigger skies. Who’d even notice this li’l bump?” But after a couple of years driving truck, he came to realize that this low-slung wedge of land marked entry to home, the place he grew up, where memories were stored. I’m extrapolating his feelings, of course. What he said out loud was, “It’s bigger to me now. I give it a nod every time I drive by.”
IrwinFoto 