Our local NPR station, KUOW, is blessed with an associated journalist who lives in Richland Washington (the capital of Manhattan-Project-Land) and who covers a territory east of the Cascades substantially larger than the Holy Roman Empire.
It lies east of the Cascade Mountains and goes on to the horizon.
I first started paying attention to Anna when she did some stories about a fairly large crack that had appeared in Wanapum Dam.
Having read Cadillac Desert several years previous to the crack, I was acutely aware of what one of the Columbia River dams breaking and disgorging its water downstream would look like from the standpoint of people living in Portland, so she had my attention from the outset.
But Anna doesn't merely report news items; she weaves poems and parables out of the people, places, smells, sounds and whatever else she happens to notice about what's going on around the bare facts of the story she wants to tell us.
That was how it was with the Great Wanapum Crack story.
It was way more interesting than the bare facts.
Since then I have heard her do that again and again.
In fact, I have heard her upon occasion, wax nothing short of epically poetic while telling us about how the desert in spring suddenly becomes an endless mass of color where things that no one knew were there burst into riotous bloom; and how it feels to ride your horse pell-mell across and through the springtime desert.
To the horizon.
Recently Anna has outdone even herself.
A couple of years ago it developed that one of the baronial agriculture families in Anna's neck of the woods had been selling non existing beef cattle to Tyson Foods.
After a surprisingly long time - and an aggregate sale of about a quarter million nonexistent cows - Tyson got wise and a great regional hoorah ensued.
Anna has been digging into the hoorah brilliantly since it first went public.
That coverage has culminated in a six-part podcast: Ghost Herd.
Anyone who is interested in scrupulously accurate news wrapped in history, spiced by sociology, and leavened occasionally with poetry will find Ghost Herd worth the time they spend listening.
I got it from Apple Podcasts, but I guess it's on all the major podcast purveyors.
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