The Narrative Image

"Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods, and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt..." William Allingham Wind whipping up white-caps on the Columbia . Obstinate trees do what they can to hold on to their leaves. ...but the overall trend is obvious. Like a universe of stars rushing to universal heat death, leaves twinkle in the wind, blown away in chaos and disorder. I walk the banks of the Sandy river and capture a subset of a beautiful exodus. Leaves carried away in the current of a rain swollen river. Stems like bones, join rotting salmon in rich silt deposits, perhaps to become fossils...perhaps to see the sun again in some future epoch. Leaves performing one last dance ... ...in the water of life... ...in dappled fractured light of a waning sun... ...beaten against the rocks... ...to sink, to decompose, to cease to be a leaf

"Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse;" -Romans 1:20 "I'm not so sure about that, but whether or not we all make it through these rapids alive, I'm confident the grading criteria will be fair." -  Scott "Get ready to explore your world without boundaries." -  Wilderness Systems Owners Manual Sunrise found us on the outskirts of Wasco, high on the Columbia Plateau, our 3 vehicle convoy speeding through golden fields of wheat on toward Condon and then West to a 7:30 AM meeting with a rancher who would provide us a private launch site to the John Day river and also execute our car shuttle.   Startling verdant fields, free of the vestiges of irrigation, belied narratives of drought that punctuated the news. The fresh born morning, still cool to the senses, felt like the fledgling hours of a