The Narrative Image

Almost six weeks ago, fire danced across 513 acres of the eastern end of Miller Island . If you compose a picture carefully enough, you can make it look like a surreal image of destruction. But mostly, the biggest difference on the island is that there are more ashes blowing around and it smells like your clothes after you sit in front of a campfire for a weekend. East end of Miller Island as it appeared in May of 2009 East end of Miller Island as it appeared 08-24-13 The fire's path of destruction seems kind of random at first, but then you begin to notice geography and elevation and the gorge's trademark gusting winds, and some things begin to make sense... patterns become recognizable. It isn't always clear why some things are spared. Deer retrace their trails into the singed earth. The sound of brittle grass crunching heralds the approach of bounding deer long before they become visible. The bark on tree t

Back in May of 2011, I shared some of the details of my search for Loring site 15. http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2011/05/sound-of-one-hand-clapping-loring-site.html By Loring site I mean one of the rock art sites documented in J. Malcolm and Louise Loring's two volume monograph called Pictographs and Petroglyphs of the Oregon Country.   In that post, I noted that, " Many of the paintings seem worse for wear when compared to the Loring drawings…to the degree that my identifications are not always certain." Since that trip, D. Russel Micnhimer, of Oregon Rock Art ( http://www.oregonrockart.com/index.html ), has introduced me to a specialized bit of software called DStretch by Jon Harman ( http://www.dstretch.com/ ). As Micnhimer said to me in a Facebook message, " It's the closest thing I know of to absolute magic; (it) will make the invisible appear." So what follows is a series of my pictures from Loring site 15 that