Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Harvest watcher
Arthur Stone of North Plainfield, N.J., watches the fields Aug. 15.
On a dusty road in the foreground of Kamiak Butte, a rental car sat parked, its silver trunk open in the sun.
Just off the front bumper, a man sat in a fold-out camp chair.
He looked into the distance at wheat fields and a section of a garbanzo field, listening for the sound of combines.
He flew 2,100 miles for the experience.
Arthur Stone of North Plainfield, N.J., came to the Palouse Aug. 14 for the second time to view harvest. Arriving in Portland two days earlier, he visited friends first before driving to the Palouse.
“I can't believe this area,” said Stone, who first learned of the Palouse from a bicycling magazine in the '90s. “There's no place in the country that looks like this, that I'm aware of. It's just so stunning.”
He had been in Pullman the evening before to buy the camp chair.
“That was the most beautiful view I've ever seen from a Wal-Mart parking lot,” Stone said.
The trip was part of a series he has taken that follow a certain theme.
“All these trips have pretty much an agriculture component, trains and a city component,” Stone said.
He has watched potato harvests in Colorado, wheat cutting in Kansas, fracking southeast of San Antonio, and drove the path of the Mississippi River, through Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana.
“There are so many interesting places in the U.S., you just have to pick a theme,” he said.
This spring, Stone called the USDA office in Spokane to find out the best time to come out here.
He hit it right about the halfway point of harvest, taking a few phone pictures, but otherwise, no.
“It's not like I'm a photographer,” he said.
Stone does two such trips a year. His grown son lives in Washington, D.C.
His wife, Geri, takes her own trips.
“Our vacation style is very different,” he said.
It became evident while they raised their son.
“I wanted to drive, she'd want to spend more time in a single location,” Stone said.
Now back in his native New Jersey, he has returned to his real estate group.
“People at work love hearing the stories,” Stone said.
He grew up in Bergen County, N.J., in a stretch of suburban towns. His was Riverdale. His father was a chemical engineer who traveled around the country selling petro-chemical machinery. He would bring back local newspapers.
“I've always loved geography,” Stone said, a secular member of Judaism, with no farming in the known family tree.
“There is something in me that really responds to the idea of harvest,” he said.
One Jewish holiday that is always observed in the Stone household is Sukkot – which takes place a week after Yom Kippur and holds a tradition in which people build a sukkah – representing harvest and the biblical 40-year period of wandering by the Israelites, living in temporary shelters. The Stones' sukkot is 10x8, built of wood and burlap, with a straw floor and a corn-stalk lattice roof. Each year on the holiday, they set it up in the backyard.
Stone's next trip is set for Denver with a train trip to Salt Lake City.
How did this Palouse venture compare to his others?
“Very good, it was a top-tier trip,” said Stone, who majored in history at Ramapo College of New Jersey in Mahwah.
As for the new camp chair, he left it at a motel in Spokane where he stayed before flying out, in an area that guest construction workers use.
So if a gravel farm road at the base of Kamiak Butte is a good place to see the Palouse, what is the equivalent if someone from here flew to New Jersey and sat in a camp chair to view it?
“Oh man,” Stone said. “What parking lot would I sit in?”
Thinking further, he answered.
“For New Jersey industrial, Lynden, New Jersey, a road beside the Bayway Refinery,” he said. “That would be where you count the cars on the New Jersey turnpike.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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