PARANOIA on the TRIPLE FALLS TRAIL

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 as a sign that, while tested, our friendship had not yet been damaged beyond repair.

Fortunately, a colleague at work expressed an interest in learning how better to use her camera and it worked out that she and her husband met me at the Triple Falls Trailhead early Saturday morning.

Upper Horsetail Falls

f/3.5 1/100th ISO 1600 -------- f/3.5 1/13th ISO 200 -------f/22 2.5 sec. ISO 200

It was kind of an awkward situation for me since Monkey-cam takes most of the pictures for the Blog, but I tried to remember all the things he had taught me and pass them on as if I were the photography expert.

“See this end with the round circular tube on it?” I asked, pointing toward what I supposed was my camera’s lens, “That’s the side you want to point at the thing you want to take a picture of.”

My colleague and her husband had never seen Triple Falls before, and didn’t know quite what to expect. They were fixated on the ‘Triple’ part of Triple Falls’ name. Since we had passed Horsetail Falls at the Trailhead, and Upper Horsetail Falls shortly afterwards, they assumed that we would soon come across a third waterfall to consummate their expectations for a triple.

“Is this the third falls?” They would speculate.

View from the bridge overlooking Oneonta Creek

Eventually, we reached this viewpoint where it became evident that Triple Falls was a single waterfall split (or segmented) into three. The graphic depiction of a single entity splitting into three immediately reminded me of the puzzle of the threefold nature of God which some faith traditions address in doctrines of ‘The Trinity’.






In my Lutheran tradition, The Trinity (The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit) is often symbolically represented by a triangle, its three points all equal in importance yet all part of one object.






Variations of the symbolic triangle attempt to emphasize the distinctness of each component of the trinity while at the same time showing their unity.






Long before the First Council of Nicaea (long before the status of the divinity of Christ was hammered out by early Christians) other more arcane symbols predominated in the religious landscape…but I digress.





We split up and explored the area above Triple Falls. I stood alone high atop the falls trying to unlock the key to capturing a sense of vertigo in a two dimensional image (a goal that continues to elude me). Peering through my viewfinder on that precarious perch, my legs involuntarily trembling, I suddenly felt an icy chill in the air and the hairs on the back of my neck snapped to attention. I whirled around to see if perhaps my colleague or her husband were sneaking up on me…but nobody was there. I would have chalked it up to my paranoid imagination except for one fact. The birds had stopped chirping and all was quiet save for the dull roar of the falling water.
Not frightened exactly, I determined to rejoin my hiking party.



I rejoined my colleague and her husband further up the trail. They stood perplexed before a curious sign. “What’s an endotherm?” I asked after reading the sign.

“Essentially,” my colleague began, “we are.” She had considerable biological expertise.

I stood with my blank expression and waited for more.

“Endotherms are warm-blooded animals able to maintain a constant body temperature regardless of the temperature of the environment.” She added.

The sign didn’t make any sense, so we ignored it and continued walking along the trail





Here and there in the shade were still considerable accumulations of snow.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon that occurred where-ever snow-clods (or perhaps pine-cones) fell out of trees onto snow slopes of a particular steepness. In snow of just the right consistency, the clods would roll down-slope gathering more mass and speed, becoming ever larger, ultimately spontaneously generating into large snow-wheels.






I wondered what other forms might be capable of spontaneous generation.






And then suddenly in a garden of rocks, I experienced another confrontation with mystery.

“It’s a non-indigenous carrot.” My colleague noted.

Like I said, she had considerable biological expertise.




Of course none of us were scared by a misplaced carrot. Even so, the touch of the shade of the surrounding, towering trees began to feel like a brush with claustrophobia. Maybe we should not have disregarded the cautionary sign. While not retreating exactly, I have to admit we felt much relieved to break out into the open again on our way out of the wilderness.



As we passed the mouth of Oneonta gorge, I noticed this graphic warning sign adapted from a photo of me that Monkey-cam took that time last year when I tried to wade up Oneonta Creek in the neoprene bib overalls that I borrowed from Bob.




I wondered what lost world lay hidden behind the formidable log jam at the mouth of the gorge.







The old Oneonta tunnel makes a convenient place to deposit excess snow form snow plow operations. Evidently, state workers with a sense of humor decorated this pile of melting snow to resemble a snowman in prison.

“That’s curious,” said my colleague, “This gate locks from the inside.”

WILSON RIVER MYSTERY: Footbridge Trailhead

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 signs that the amount of water in the riverbed had recently been much higher.

The Wilson River Trail might more appropriately be called the High Coast Range Trail That Never Affords a Glimpse of the Wilson River Unless It’s the Middle of Winter and There Aren’t Any Leaves on the Trees.

Eventually, I left the trail in order to get close to the river.

The direct sunlight was surprisingly warm. I sat on a rock next to the water and opened a beer. I was content to watch an underwater snail travel an inch or two. Some people had to settle for NASCAR

Later I found a tiny diagonally flowing waterfall.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

I noticed a strange carving in a rock along the trail. I wondered what people had populated this land in earlier times.

Detailed image of rock carving.

It was cold in the shade, and here and there were the tell-tale signs of winter – patches of snow hiding from the sun. I weaved my way through the woods and underbrush and broke into a hidden clearing.

Detailed image of clearing.

I’ve seen some strange things on my hiking trips this past year – or at least thought I saw strange things (Naked Picasso comes to mind) – but I was hard pressed to come up with a theory that would explain the presence of a barbell loaded with 400 pounds of weight in the middle of an empty clearing…

…and a carrot lying amongst a handful of rocks.

Revelation @ Laurelhurst Park

Traffic on I-205

Coast
Stop
Coast – roll – roll
STOP FAST
Sit
Wait…

(crap!)

Bumper Cars at Oaks Park

Why don’t they make real cars more like bumper cars? The daily commute would become the highlight of the day and auto insurance companies would quickly go out of business.

I tell the Monkey-cam, “It’s a universal intuition. There must be something more to life than driving to and from work.”

Old tree at Laurelhurst Park

“That’s why on weekends, we go hiking to discover the tell-tale brushstrokes of some transcendent artist.” I added.

Trees at Laurelhurst Park

Monkey-cam agreed that there were many times when the world seems like a beautiful masterpiece.

Bench at East end of duck pond - Laurelhurst Park

“Still,” he pantomimed, “isn’t it enough that we’re alive and we can eat bananas and meet girls?”

“Well,” I replied, “the culture I was born into thinks it’s important how you do those things. For instance, we’re supposed to meet girls, not so much for fun, but (within the confines of holy matrimony) to reproduce and create more consumers to keep the economy growing.”

Monkey-cam looked incredulous.

“No, really,” I tried to explain, “a majority of Americans actually claim to have a personal relationship with Jesus (who turns out to have equal ranking with God) and they say they try to live their lives according to his will.”

“How do they talk to him?” Monkey-cam asked. “How do they know what his will is?”

“Well, most of them say they speak to him in prayer. But they also say that he speaks to them through his ‘word’, which turns out to be a collection of loose histories, poems, songs, stories, gospels and letters that Jewish people and, later, Christians collected over thousands of years.

“So he doesn’t really talk to them in any sense of the word ‘talk’?”

Scene from Lewis and Clark State Park

“Honestly, no.” I admitted. “It’s more convoluted than that. They have to interpret ‘the word’ and apply it to their lives. For instance, there’s a story that explains how rainbows are a promise from God that he won’t kill everybody again in another worldwide flood.”

T-Rex stalking old man in off-leash area of Laurelhurst Park

Monkey-cam was obviously uncomfortable. “That’s not much of a promise,” Monkey-cam signaled, “since someone/something as inventive and creative as God can undoubtedly find plenty of novel solutions to the task of worldwide genocide.”

“Would you like a piece of apple? Monkey-cam asked.

“Sure!” I said. “Let me stop at the store and I’ll get a sack full.”

Monkey-cam stretched out his hand with a wedge of apple in it. “No.” he gestured, “Just take this piece in my hand.”

We looked at each other for a moment, me with a somber look of sadness, Monkey-cam with the sudden realization that he was imaginary.

We sat in silence. It seemed like a long time.

“Look,” I said, trying to cheer Monkey-cam up, “you may not be as real as Real Jesus, but you’re every bit as real as Imaginary Jesus.”

I saw a little tear collect in the corner of Monkey-cam’s eye. He motioned that he wanted to go talk to his friend, Naked Picasso. “Naked Picasso understands me,” he signed.

Later, I saw Monkey-cam and Naked Picasso on a park bench at Laurelhurst Park, contemplating their situation.

I approached them quietly and was about to say hi, but they disappeared as if they had never been there.

Path through Laurelhurst Park

It left me alone to ponder my path. I wondered what I would do the next time I found myself in a dangerous photography situation without my longtime hiking companions. I had always felt certain, that when it came down to it, Monkey-cam would give his life for me.

Ember paths - traced from Jason and Julie's 'firepit'

Like sparks from a fire pit, we travel routes that, at least on the surface, seem like they ought to be easy to pre-determine within a natural framework, but because our understanding and capacity for observation are limited, the routes turn out to be unusual, unique and highly improbable. Evidently, given enough matter, rules, time and variables, properties emerge and dirt talks.

Overlooking Portland from the top of Mt. Tabor

We do the work of communication with a symbolic language that lends itself to metaphor. We speak from the ‘heart’ though we understand its primary function is as a pump.

From a bridge in Leavenworth Washington

Without any evidence, we postulate a soul – some essential essence of ourselves distinct from our physical bodies – that might bridge the chasm of physical death.

We write that words – ideas - are mightier than swords.

Bench at the top of the unleashed area - Laurelhurst Park

We populate the world with ghosts - from the depths of our inspired imaginations springs the Holy Spirit.

Imaginary Jesus and Monkey-cam at Laurelhurst duck pond

If only we could get the story right - maybe we could change the world.