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...

How it looked Saturday Morning Midweek, I saw a picture of Multnomah Falls in the Oregonian (Portland’s big daily newspaper) that showed the giant waterfall as a kind of hybrid water/ice sculpture and decided I’d try to see it for myself if daily temperatures would agree to stay close to the freezing range until the weekend. Multnomah Falls is situated toward the west end of the Columbia River Gorge, an eighty mile long canyon that stretches east through the Cascade Range. This high walled ‘funnel’ turns out to be an excellent conduit for frigid arctic winds that seek an avenue to the Portland Metropolitan area. Anticipating ice, I stopped at REI Friday night and picked up some traction devices that are supposed to allow a person to walk on ice. There were three options, but the two in my price range were All Purpose Traction Aids by Due North and the Yaktrax Walker. I chose to try the Due North offering since I couldn’t see how the little metal bands on the Yaktrax wouldn’t slip on ...

I sometimes think I can remember back to High School. Every classroom had a uniform, institutional-style clock about the diameter of a large pizza high on the wall. At certain stressful moments, say Mr. Rubin’s oral Algebra quizzes, my attention would be transfixed on the clock’s minute hand, all my powers of will focused in a hopeless telekinesis experiment to accelerate time and perhaps escape the grand inquisitor’s sarcastic wrath as he methodically and relentlessly worked his way from victim to victim on his master seating chart. I don’t think I ever saw the minute hand go faster, but I’m fairly convinced I saw it stop a few times just long enough to grant my classmates a smug sense of superiority as I proffered another ridiculous answer. Depending on the clock, you may or may not be able to see the minute hand move. Sometimes minute hands click to the next minute-mark increment once the second hand completes a circuit, but I don’t think you can really see it move while you’re watc...