The Narrative Image

Ever since I trespassed into a mysterious hidden clearing on the Wilson River Trail, I’ve experienced the eerie feeling of being watched, or perhaps even of being followed. It’s the same kind of feeling I had when I crossed the renegade cows on the Bird Creek Meadow Trail near Mt. Adams. I shared my uneasiness with Monkey-cam and hinted that I could really use some company on the Triple Falls Trail in the Columbia River gorge, but he was still miffed about being treated like an imaginary friend. “Why don’t you hang out with your corporeal friends?” he pantomimed, knowing full well that I don’t really have any. I guess he must have seen some transient expression of pain flicker across my inexpert poker face and he relented a little bit. He indicated that he wouldn’t be hiking with me this week, but he reassured me that he would begin negotiations with the cows to see if he could work out some kind of truce for the upcoming spring hiking season. I interpreted his goodwill gesture a...

Some of my colleagues headed out to fish on the Wilson River last Saturday. I thought it might be a good photo opportunity and planned to meet them somewhere between Lee’s Camp and the Footbridge Trailhead, but I forgot how early fishermen like to get up on weekends and I’m pretty sure they had gutted and cleaned their fish before I was even conscious that morning. It didn’t escape my attention that a trailhead implies access to a trail. Soon, I found myself exploring a short section of the Wilson River Trail. View from the footbridge – looking downriver The river flows pretty quickly around a corner and into a kind of narrow rock throat that results in a variety of flow ratio phenomena like whirlpools and eddies and something that almost looks like boiling water. Knowledgeable fisher-people say things like, “Yeah, there’s a good ole’ hole there.” It is sometimes difficult to determine when fisher-people transition from talking about fishing to talking about sex. There were...