The Narrative Image

Just down river from here, there was a horseshoe structure of waterfalls where American Indians fished for over ten thousand years, establishing a trade center that stretched from Alaska to California. By the time Lewis and Clark sailed through here in dugout canoes, vast Indian populations had already been decimated by European diseases. If it wasn’t the end of the world, it was, at the very least, the end to their world. The sound of the falls was silenced by 1957 with the completion of The Dalles Dam. The water backed-up and rose and changed the shoreline of this island. The river itself became an artificial sequence of controlled lakes, put to work turning turbines and diverted into the desert to grow crops. Today, windmills creep westward down the sides of the gorge, even as far as this island. Time can be told not only by the position of the sun or moon, but by the regular passage of rumbling freight trains. But the passage of time is still marked here by the...

“…and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” Wilson River (Click on image for slightly larger version) Feb. 2008 At a bend in the Wilson River, under the footbridge trailhead, quick flowing water bottlenecks into a narrow rock gorge. The river’s character, once loud and boisterous immediately becomes subdued and sullen. Though popular proverbs suggest that deep waters run quiet, turbulence and turmoil are reflected in the river’s tortured face. In their Case Study: Water and Ice, Timothy A. Isgro, Marcos Sotomayor, and Eduardo Cruz-Chu admit that …the microscopic structure of liquid water is unknown… Figure 3: Views of the crystal structure of ice (a-c) and a view of liquid water (d). a) Along the c-axis of the lattice (showing the basal plane) with all 3 equivalent a-axes in the plane of the page and the c-axis coming out of the page, b) With an a-axis running left to right (showing ...