Erractics: Three Puget Sound Petroglyph Boulders

… pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired. —Jeanette Winterson

 

Thinking of rocks as verbs is like seeing a painting, not merely as an object that is, but as the manifestation of the motions that led to its creation. —Marcia Bjornerud

The three most significant petroglyph boulders in southern Puget Sound are tidal, today at sea level. All three are glacial erratics, boulders moving hundreds of miles on ice sheets, arriving on these shores millennia before the carvers marked them. Two are granite erratics; another (Agate Point) is fine-grained gray-green sandstone.

Surging tides, flowing water, wave action, and, in one case the physical relocation of the boulder, continue to reshape the markings and how they are seen and imagined.  Researchers have also affected physical change through rubbings, castings, and removal of barnacles - indeed, barnacles for decades have encrusted the Agate Point boulder (below) to near obscurity. (First photo: backside looking toward the sound)

 

(Above: T-shirt images carvings known from earlier studies.) 

 

The Suquamish and Squaxin Island tribes have more recently taken strong public interest in the cultural importance of the boulders.
Below, one of three boulders, originally from Harstine Island, called the Love Rock by the tribe, is now a centerpiece of the Squaxin Island Tribe’s Veterans Memorial near Shelton.

And now my thought roams far
beyond my hear; my mind
flows out to the water,
soars above the whale’s path
to the wide world’s corners
and returns with keen desire;
the lone bird, flying, shrieks
and leads the willing soul
to the whale-road, and over
the tumbling of the waves.
— The Seafarer (Anglo-Saxon)

NOTES
— Photos: DB, several years ago during tidal explorations. Defined by tides through time:, the clarity and power of these faces and eyes and other forms convey a compelling presence – … living as they ever did.
— Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (1997)

— Marcia Bjornerud, in Wrinkled Time: The persistence of past worlds on earth from Emergence Magazine, V.5 (2024)

— Further: Marian Smith (1946), Edward Meade (1971), Beth Hill and Ray Hill (1974), Richard McClure (1978), Klaus Wellman (1979), and Daniel Leen (1981) have published photos or drawings of the petroglyphs; Leen’s overview in particular is a considered and comprehensive summary.  
 

CODA
Erratic Boulder.
What an extraordinary place
to settle on,
on a ledge, poised
on the brink.
Don't you value your own success?
— Olav H Hauge (Norwegian)

HART :: FIRE

INCIWEB file photo

Fire and heat provide modes of explanation in the most varied domains, because they have been for us the occasion for unforgettable memories, for simple and decisive personal experiences. 

Fire is thus a privileged phenomenon which can explain anything. If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. 

Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. —Gaston Bachelard

In August the Warner Peak Fire swept over Hart Mountain burning across 66,000 acres of Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge.

All significant concentrations of rock art on the Refuge were outside the fire zone. 186,000 acres of the Refuge were protected from the fire.

These photos show examples from some of the several concentrations of rock art on the Refuge.

Above, three bear paw glyphs.

The fire resulted in the closure of 82,000 acres of the Refuge until June 2025. Details:
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/hart-mountain-national-antelope

 
https://www.fws.gov/press-release/2024-08/wildfire-damage-forces-parts-oregon-refuge-remain-closed

Map shows extent of the fire. 

NOTES
—Gaston Bachelard, from Chapter One: Fire and Respect in The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938, French)
—Fire effects on rock images and similar cultural resources (2012). US Forest Service Report available as a PDF: https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/40430
 

What Lizard Forgot

You look ahead, up ahead is fate. 

—Anzhelina Polonskaya

 

Lizard does recall!  The Great Remembering. The Vast Cycles.

“… global warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end … faces as much as 3.1C (5.6F) of warming … prevent a cascade of dangerous … hottest in recorded … 57.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide … collectively a cut of 42 … 57 percent by 2035 for any hope … 20 largest economies…” —From news agencies per UN October 2024

Time measured in the counting.
The stories they don’t tell.
The brilliant bones.
Scattered shards of light.
 —DB

We suddenly discovered the sun, and we were vouchedsafed white stones and a dusky and wild body. —Anzhelina Polonskaya

Yes, we are envoys of a flat earth, our only vocabulary is antonyms. —Ostap Slyvynsky

Who needs TV drama? This is life in the volcano. This is as cold as it gets. —Meg Kearney

NOTES
—Anzhelina Polonskaya: You look… from the poem Calculator; We suddenly… from the poem Saga, both in A Voice: Selected Poems 2004. (trans from Russian by Andrew Wachtel). Anzhelina Polonskaya lives in Germany; her poems are prohibited in Russia.
—Meg Kearney from the poem Living in the Volcano in her collection Home By Now 2009.
—Kateryna Kalytko and Ostap Slyvynsky excerpts from the anthology In the Hour Of War:  Poetry from Ukraine 2023, tr. by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

PHOTOS Oregon’s Northern Great Basin, October 2024. Click to enlarge

CODA
Who knew? Everyone knew.
Inevitability spreads like nuclear radiation,
breaking down words …
It's easier, now, that the war has started. Easier, after all
now. How clear is our past, with its mistakes of tone,
its sincerity, its
air.
—Kateryna Kalytko

 

FIRE : Murderers Creek

Murderers Creek, a tributary to the wild and scenic South Fork of the John Day River, lies  at the heart of the Rail Ridge Fire: 175,000 acres September/October this year and not fully contained as of this writing.

Murderers Creek, a 19th century naming of a valley in traditional Northern Paiute country. The Northern Paiute arriving several centuries before Euro-American incursion, conflicts, and displacements began 200 years ago. The Creek’s name holds diverse tellings of origins.  What is to be believed?

Indigenous Peoples’ Day, recognized on October 14 in Oregon, offers a time to reflect on dramatic changes in the lifeways of the Northern Paiute beginning with the Hudson Bay fur traders in the 1820-1830s.  Murderers Creek figures prominently, yet elusively, in the 1850-1870s — an era of movement, mining, fighting, tracking, killing, capturing, and claiming in Oregon. Including the infamous and devastating Paiute War, 1864-1868. Well-documented, by Anglos — military, newspapers, settlers reports, histories, etc. — in various ways and styles.

Another kind of document:  I speculate that some of the many rock paintings in places of movement and conflict in Central and SE Oregon were made during that era, 1840s-1870s.  This may apply to some of Murderers Creek’s complex of rock paintings by indigenous people. 

Unusual image combines incising and abrading, appears to intentionally connect with the visible power of the natural stone.

Black grid/net: origin and intent unknown

NOTES
— Rail Ridge Fire Sep-Oct 2024 LINK with maps and updates
— Aurora Borealis over the Rail Ridge Fire and other photos LINK
— Photos above May 2018. Click to enlarge. Feel free to inquire. Most of these images, in Grant County, documented by the intrepid Lorings in the 1960s.

— Murderers Creek also imaged and discussed July 20 2023: https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2023/07/beneath-us-other-order-already-moves.html

 

CODA

        The Valley of Birds

We'll lock the door
and head for the valley of birds.
Hold on,
while I douse the fire
to ensure that no one
can block our path.

Sit down for a minute and rest
by the tree where the doves sing.
And if I don't appear,
don't turn around,
don't let out a scream.
Let the silence protect you.

If I don't appear
it means the fire is unquenchable.
But a swift is flying circles
above you!
Lift your head up
and watch it.
        — Anzhelina Polonskaya

ROCK CREEK NV

AIR AND WATER IN DARKNESS
— Juan Ramón Jiménez  

Pure tenuous streams
run in the darkness
— on the blue a mesh of silver—,
bringing me flowers . . .

— Ah, the eternal water
through the black ground;
the infinite breeze
through the cold shadow! —

. . . Bringing me stars;
and I am in the darkness
like a phantom tree
nourished with worlds.

Rock Creek Nevada at one time considered a public access for viewing petroglyphs as a stop on the Barrel Springs Backcountry Loop. Surprise Valley BLM dropped Rock Creek from its promotion a few years back. The Loop connects from Fort Bidwell, east via Mosquito Lake, down Long Valley to Vya, back west to Surprise Valley and Cedarville. Clearly the petroglyphs (here a loose sampling, click to enlarge) stay their own way as they have for some thousands of years.

A rough hike in shallow canyon goes on forever as Rock Creek drains north to Oregon; eventually these Nevada waters flow via the dynamic borderline stream 12-Mile Creek into the terminal Warner Basin, the sunken expanse west of Warner Peak and Hart Mountain, which tilts to the north - Coleman Lake, Crump Lake, Hart Lake and on...

Indeed Captain Warner the namesake for so much in this Tri-Corners country, a US Army surveyor, was killed in 1849 a few miles from here by Paiutes guarding their home country. To compress a complex story. DB above (B&W) and Bob in technicolor, simply following old trails.

Eerie parallelings of Rock Creek. A couple hundred yards to the east: two power corridors. Bonneville Power Authority (BPA) powerline towers conveying Direct Current from the Columbia River's The Dalles Dam to Los Angeles. Crossing at 12 mile Creek as "it" leaves Oregon going south through Nevada then turning toward LA. Side-by-side for these few miles: The Ruby Pipeline conveys compressed gas in buried 8' pipes from Wyoming to Malin Oregon, where it ties in with the north-south trans- Canada pipeline and PG&E then pressures the gas south, powering California.

Let us confine ourselves to the limited circle of each instant, and let us pass from instant to instant, as if from world to world.
— Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spanish, 1881-1958), awarded the Nobel in Literature in 1956.