The Narrative Image

Mt. Adams from Goldendale Everyone is a time traveler. The trick to time travel is figuring out how to change direction. Light that set out 36.7 years ago from the red-giant star, Arcturus, finally shows up in the big telescope at the Goldendale observatory. The image I see is a view of a past that existed when I was 12. It’s one way to look back in time. Descending into the gorge at Maryhill, a massive basalt layer cake tells a hard to believe story of a lava covered Oregon – a glimpse into deep geologic time. Mt. Hood in the distance Here and there on the canvas of eroding basalt, people from the past drew images and symbols that turned out to be concurrent in time with the unexpected collision of European and native cultures (both micro and macro). I was able to find this gallery of images by carefully scrutinizing the information available in an Oregon Archaeological Society Press Publication called Visions in the Mist: The Rock Art of Celilo Falls, ...

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...