Our eight-wheeled convoy skitters from the gulch and confidently negotiates a gossamer web of roads that evolved over time - shaped by topography, territory, and tepid human encroachment.
This instant in time - this fragile iteration of topsoil and flora tied to the sky and the distant oceans is even now responding to disparate fingers -
Water vapor flows - an atmospheric river streams in the sky
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This image was chosen for its analogous visual relationship to the next picture. Ramona Falls (pictured) is not actually in the Owyhee Canyonlands.
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Water falls - water flows - gravity is
Earth is a fitful sleeper. She tosses and turns. Her skin cracks and buckles. She bleeds magma and farts ashes that settle in layers through the epochs.
Rain turns the pages - shows us chapters of the past - reveals secrets of creation - and nightmares of extinction.
The earth murders whole worlds, and tries to bury the evidence. And we stumble onto fresh stages to strut and fret, as if the world was new...and signified everything.
Wind-driven, sandy, nutrient-poor soil accumulates on the latest mantle of basalt. Migrating seeds find purchase and sprout, then, with prickly fingers, comb more dust and silt out of the sky - compounding their interest.
Yet even as an ecosystem evolves in this interlude of benign geologic activity, decay, erosion, and entropy are poking and prodding and disassembling.We have passed from one drainage system into another. We can speculate that maybe, beneath our feet, the materials for some future Leslie Gulch lie assembled and ready to be carved. Yet, as we gain impressions of the canyon opening before us - as we look across broad valleys to the encompassing layer cake upon which the high plateaus lie, it is hard to attribute this sculpted landscape to the puny creek that trickles down its throat.
Mud and gravel fall.
Mud and gravel flow. Gravity is…(gravity is by far, the weakest of the four fundamental forces, so they say.)
A creek of succor pokes along the desert cliff
And octopus roots, like so many straws
Suck life into the trunks, the branches, the whispering leaves
To build a sheltering green lean-to against the sheer stone
A cool oasis that profits even those who are not trees
Nature’s beauty is undeniable
And I am among the first to celebrate
But I have been smashing fish unconscious with rocks
And inexpertly tearing fillets from their skeletons – that is
I have been a lucky tight-rope walker – luckier than some fish –
Reclining in today’s benevolence, yet feeling measured by
The gaze of trees
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Photo Credit: Kip
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In this picture, Kip accomplishes something rare. It appears that all of us are smiling mostly natural smiles. Part of the reason I’m smiling is because I’m sitting on a bench. This is the only furniture I’ve sat on so far besides the car seats because not only did I forget my sleeping bag, I also forgot my camp chair.
I set about preparing my bacon-wrapped, cheese-stuffed jalapenos. I was inspired to make these as a homage to the stuffed jalapenos I first tasted at Wanker’s Corner Saloon. Normally I grill these, but I lost my grill and my favorite hat when I flipped my kayak over by not negotiating a simple riffle on the Umpqua River. Pan frying turns out to be an acceptable alternative and, as a bonus, it doesn’t burn the toothpick tips off which results in fewer surprises and medical trauma down the road.
Then Rico broke out a bottle of a very fine bourbon he’d been saving for the occasion and I think we drank quite a lot of it, though my memory becomes imprecise at this point.
I rapidly lost the ability to conversationalate and found myself focusing on maybe a specific way a leaf was shimmying at the end of a twig, or the way a sunbeam illuminated an ice cube. I listened to the words coming out of Rico and Kip but it felt like a warm syrup and besides, I had no waffles. The shadows slowly changed their aspect, shifting across the canyon walls. Later, a whale came floating up the road past our camp. It smiled and gave me a subtle nod, like a cowboy would if he were wearing a hat, but it didn’t say anything. It just slowly drifted on by - making good eye contact with that huge eye. It was so graceful. It was also so unexpected. I turned to see if Rico or Kip had seen it but they were all like, haven’t you ever seen a whale before?Even later, a middle-aged man approached the camp. He appeared to be looking for something. He greeted us, rather shyly, and asked, “Have you seen my whale drift by here? I’ve lost it.” Rico and Kip both just pointed up the road.
Even later, I was disturbed by a tap, tap, tapping noise. A man and a woman with hammers and crowbars had climbed the scree slopes below the cliffs and were treating the rock surfaces as personal percussion instruments. When they finally came down they explained that they were collecting thunder eggs. The man spilled his knapsack to reveal an impressive haul of baseball-sized geodes.
My dreams were both vivid and hard to remember.
There was something about the hero’s journey (Hercules and the gross of juniper berries).
There was something about my own mortality - being one with the landscape - ashes to ashes
Something about the Earth being alive.
Later still, I tried once again to take a shot of the Milky Way, still longing to achieve a technically competent shot. Bats squeaked in the dark and made impossible turns before the light of the stars. It occurred to me that I might still be dreaming, perhaps in the same predicament as Chuang Tzu who dreamed he was a butterfly, or wondered in retrospect if maybe he wasn’t really a butterfly dreaming he was a man.So I asked, “Hey Kip, Rico,” pausing briefly to make sure I had their attention, “did you guys really see a whale?”
“Didn’t you?” they asked like a Greek chorus.
That bourbon was strong medicine.
To be continued…
The rest of this narrative can be accessed via these links:
PART 1: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part One)
PART 2: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Böglands (Part Two)
PART 3: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part Three)
PART 4: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part Four)
PART 5: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part Five)
PART 6: Hawaii, Owyhee...uh, Boglands (Part Six)
Nice
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