The Narrative Image

"Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods, and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt..." William Allingham Wind whipping up white-caps on the Columbia . Obstinate trees do what they can to hold on to their leaves. ...but the overall trend is obvious. Like a universe of stars rushing to universal heat death, leaves twinkle in the wind, blown away in chaos and disorder. I walk the banks of the Sandy river and capture a subset of a beautiful exodus. Leaves carried away in the current of a rain swollen river. Stems like bones, join rotting salmon in rich silt deposits, perhaps to become fossils...perhaps to see the sun again in some future epoch. Leaves performing one last dance ... ...in the water of life... ...in dappled fractured light of a waning sun... ...beaten against the rocks... ...to sink, to decompose, to cease to be a leaf

It all started with a story about how, when faced with the prospect of moving, a little girl reluctantly ventured out into her familiar yard to personally say goodbye to all the trees she had come to know. I wondered how you would say goodbye to a tree…did they have names? She (now peering from the eyeholes of an adult body) looked at me with incomprehension and laughing wonder, “No (of course not), they’re TREES.” She said as if that obviously explained it. Even so, I got the impression that she talked to them and maybe felt the texture of their bark and reminisced of lazy summer days stretched out hammock-like in the junction of larger branches, or recklessly hid from the world of semi-evil adults, high in the leafy canopy. Editor’s Note: Turns out she (the little girl who went to say goodbye to the trees) didn’t and doesn’t talk to trees. I’m guessing now that they merely shared quality time together in silent communion. It may also be possible that her imaginary friend Jennifer,...

A friend, wise in the ways of beer, convinced me to attend the Oregon Brewers Festival despite my intuition that however big the beer tents might be, they wouldn’t be big enough. Determined not to pay for parking, I spent nearly a billion dollars in gas searching for a free parking space which I never found. When I finally did find a place for the car, it was a stupid distance away from the festival. I saw many shiny buildings which I found impressive, I think, mainly because of their scale and mainly because of their un-natural order…and did I mention they were shiny? They also had reflections. I suppose reflections are a clever way to keep one from really seeing a building’s true facade. Without the reflections and the massive scale, it becomes more readily evident that buildings are clever complexes of stacked cubicles… …or cells. Some impressions from the Brewers Festival: The screaming bitter taste of hops Becoming a whore for wooden tokens Ideally beautiful girls dressed in tig...