modern -- but i think is a city of beauty in a place where people -- look behind me, you see that river and the falls? things are constantly evolving for the better. all in all, we are talking about spokane and it's a beautiful place and i would call it washington is kept best secret. >> standing in front of the bridge and spoke in washington. as we continue our look into the city literary scene will hear a collection of stories about people and the relationship to the landscape to the pacific northwest. >> this is the spokane river. it's coming in from the east. it's down a ways because the snow melt because it is warming up and you can see how at the end of the last ice age about 1,420,000 years ago there were huge floods came from this

direction and laid down these slopes here and lay down these gravels that are great fords for salmon and trout. there's about 8000 years of archaeology from this area right here. it has fine implements from different kinds of brookstone that comes from a ways away and fishbowls and mammal both in a general, good scene that lasted here for traitors to the 1800s. the name of this book is ancient places. when i was trying to do is write a book about changes. were right here at hagemann creek where the strangest place. around the cultural, big scale or little skill change and the one that works for this area

right here happens around 1900 to 1910 where a kid comes was a minor to this area and they were flooding into the area from all over the place he was canadian. he's got talent in math and becomes the surveyor up in stevens county which is the county north of here. there's always minds going in and he surveys of mine wrote in from the spokane indian reservation and it goes through the home of this respected leader named william tremont the younger and his wife maddie the mountains. he becomes buddies with them on some level and gets a pair of beautiful moccasins that maddie made and he gets described at his bow that he had inherited from his father three mountains the elder and this guys name is

manny, he collects artifacts. he is just getting soft and started doing his surveys for what he does not know and makes the story, for me, is that william three mountains and the younger's father, will william three mountains the elder is a legendary figure who had the head men's of abandoned lived in the hangman's creek in spokane river and the fact that these plans are still here that he picked and that his family would've picked for the service varies from food and there's something about that that is both severe change, cataclysmic change but also a constant. it's the kind of story that i'm trying to tell in this agent places book. that is a small changes. the world that i live in that i'm trying to write about is the world between the rocky mountains in the cascades which is a big area.

spokane is right in the area and they form a triangle as you go into the british columbia and get into the great basin. the intermountain west is my game. there is lots of large geological events and in the place where we are 15-20 million years ago is huge flows of basalt came up from the south from these events in the south, thousands of feet thick eventually and created these cliffs in palisades that i'm sure some member of your crew was out filming right now and they stopped and 15000 years these floods came in and worked the edges of them. there's older metamorphic rock to the north on the other side of the river and the salt volcanic rock to the south. the flood waters worked those and open them up and make these great geological features to look at. that's a huge visual event and

if you go to the intermountain west that's what we see. you can't talk about the stories and the time that i'm talking about without having the flood wash through every story but if you can crank it back in there's an inland ocean here and the reason this happened is where the edge of an inland sea and the edge of the continent much longer time ago. we can't understand five generations ago. tribal people can't and most of them can understand five or ten generations and maintaining their families out of kinship but you go 10000 years ago and no one can understand that. you go 10 million years ago and hundred million years ago and it's impossible. that is why there is a meteorite story in here that gets a lot of attention because it links people out. they can't comprehend that large scale a time and that's what i'm trying to do. try to erase any kind of time perspective.

the first story in the book there's a leadoff story of david thompson who is in the 1780s, quite a long time ago, as a young man out in the north country on his way here is way far north in the winter and its start and he sees what he thanks is a meteorite and is some kind of visual phenomenon and he cannot figure it out but he's a scientifically minded guy. he thanks about it and he gives a fabulous description of what we think is probably swamp gas bubbling out of this marsh where he is but the physics of that time don't give him the words to understand the scale so he keeps trying to pull with what it is and how it works and then does the same thing with northern lights which are the railyard borealis and it works for another time of scale and he's always thinking about how has

this been shaped and how is the earth made then he goes and asks trial people. how did you come here? how is your country made? what happens when you die david thompson is great for asking those large-scale questions and the tribes have these great answers. so for the aurora borealis which was here last week and i'm sorry you missed it -- he tries to deal with the physics of that time which doesn't do a good job of explaining it. he talks to his wife who is pre- and the cree elder tell that they're dancing to the free spirits of the universe. he doesn't ride enough anymore about it and think that's good enough. scale is what you make of it in your head and explaining the world is how you make it in your head. that's a big part of the stories that i'm trying to tell is i focus on some person who thanks they have it figured out and

they don't have it figured out because there's always a scale larger than they understand. there always will be again, in these ancient places stories they don't come to meet endings. to ask how the tribes responded they are devastated and traumatized and they still are in there trying to come out of it. a lot of them are astonishingly recent people and i had been meant for it around by some several of them who i've been friends with for a long time and they are constantly telling me, but -- look, you don't understand. you don't have any say in this and you're doing a terrible job but if you're going to do it you better do a better job and you better stick with it and do it and you can't quit now. they have these mixed messages but in total it makes sense. i can't quit. i have to to understand it and try to live with it and understand it. they've been a huge help in answering the unanswerable question. many of the stories i have sold

with overtime i would talk to someone and i go back interview there kid in i've never been satisfied with them. i've never done a good enough work is one way to say it. i didn't feel like i done well enough so i let them set for five, ten or 15 years and then went back on them and they fit together in a way that i can see that i couldn't see before because i understand scale better now that i did when i was 20 years younger. again, it's where you are had that particular time. the most interesting thing was at the time i wrote the book the pieces were together by themselves and in order that made it make sense to me but what i realize now is that there are new elements in the social dynamic and often their spanish and russian. those are the slavic people that the biggest majority in spokane. the last essay in the book is i'm out ice-skating on a pond

with a pretty big lake in zero debris leather and the wind is blowing and there's a russian out there icefishing and i can't talk to him. it happened but i can talk to him because he didn't speak english but i liked what i got out of it. i know he didn't get anything out of it but i liked where it leads me to go next. when we talked to a lot of people in town how can we incorporate latinos and how can we incorporate the slavic minority into this world that is going to be in the next two centuries that will be here. how do we deal with it and how do we bring them in because they have these real strong cultures on their own. that is what happened in the fur trade. you maintain an identity with that strong culture and it helps in the long run. when you are a writer is for me anyway i don't have much control over what comes out and i figure it out after i wrote it and after talking with people and

it's been out a while and for this is in places book which has been out now and i'll have to go to paperback and i realized i was drawn to these places and they pulled me in by the power and the nature of what they are and how they have worked overtime and all i want to do is keep going back to them over and over and listen to them and see what i can get from them and the lesson is that everyone gets something different from the same person get something different from them if they are listening and paying attention each time they go back. it is endless with the story and it keeps changing as you circle back around. these are nonfiction essays or stories but they literally had more into the story world and their funny and fun. the people in them senses of humor and you can never predict where the action is going. nonfiction is just as wacky as fiction is and i like