Smaller numbers mark Big Event
Smaller numbers mark Big Event
Speakers celebrate artistry of national scenic byway
SOAP LAKE — In spite of a smaller turnout, those in charge of the Big Event were feeling positive about it.
"I think generally over all, it went pretty good," Tim Alling, chairman of the Coulee Corridor Consortium, said of the consortium's fifth annual community outreach Big Event Saturday, which he noted had more displays and artists this year. "Our numbers were down some, I think. I don't know if it was weather or what. We changed a few things and so I'm not sure why it was, but overall, I feel the Big Event was very good. It's just, our numbers of people that come out for it (are) a little down, and it's hard to tell what that was, so …"
Still, those in attendance showed their support throughout the day-long event, this year themed "Art on the Byway." From noon to 7:30 p.m., Big Event partner and artist displays and sales lined the hallways of Soap Lake Middle/High School.
During the ceremony, a half-full gymnasium listened to author Jack Nisbet talk about historic artists along the byway in a slide show presentation that matched painting or photography with an observation of the area from an early explorer.
Nisbet remarked on several occasions about the poetical nature of some of the observations, some from people who were not poets by nature.
Of a painter, Nisbet observed, "He writes all these derogatory things about it, but he paints it so that it's beautiful, and so there's this great paradox in that that I think plays out today as well."
A surveyor observing "a vista like some grand old, ruined, roofless hall" was, Nisbet said, "getting poetic, which is something this guy never does. He's an Army officer making a survey, usually his writing's dull as dirt … That stands as good as any poetry today we can find. It's like the landscape taking over the writer and working on them in a way tribal people and storytellers could understand but that (the surveyor) certainly never thought of a landscape taking him over."
Following Nisbet, Dayton Edmonds, Native American storyteller of the Caddo Nation regaled the audience with stories of how the world was shaped, and stressed the importance of using one's artistic, right side of the brain in a society that has become more ordered and left-brained in nature.
"As we grow, we need to balance out both the right hemispheres and left hemispheres (of the brain) so that we might grow into our fullest potential," Edmonds told the audience.
"I would say that (people) come away with a little better understanding of what this byway is about and all the great resources that we have along it, whether it's art, the Ice Age flood story, watchable wildlife, recreation, whatever it is," Alling said. "That they come away with a little keener understanding for what's available on the byway."
Consortium secretary Rita Tuller also said the Big Event went well, with "great" partner displays and exposure to artists from the Coulee Corridor as well as others.
"The Coulee Corridor allows a lot of aspects of the heritage of our history, including the Indians and Ice Age flood theory, and just the natural habitat, the beauty of our corridor and the education of bringing it all together and the people, the connections that we're making with each other," Tuller said. "Instead of everybody being kind of secluded within their own community, we're more aware of getting to know people within the whole corridor."
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