Power of a Mountain

 

(Birch Mountain, right, March 2026)

 

When I was still a young man, I saw Birch Mountain in a dream. It said to me:
"You will always be well and strong. Nothing can hurt you and you will live to an old age." After this Birch Mountain came and spoke to me whenever I was in trouble and told me that I would be all right. That is why nothing has happened to me and why I am so old now. —Jack Stewart

 

In 1926-27, in Owens Valley, anthropologist Julian Steward listened to and recorded the life story of Jack Stewart, an elderly Paiute man. His Indian name: Hoavadunuki’.  Jack Stewart born in his mother’s village, tovowahamatui, now Big Pine, and lived there at the time Steward heard his story, noting, “The data presented in Jack's life demonstrate primarily this importance of the vision. he is evidently of a mind predisposed to hallucinations, interpreted as supernatural communications.”

 

Julian Steward continues: 
Although the irrepressible dreamer had many visions, this one which brought him his "power" was the most important. Birch mountain, pa'o'karanwa (pa'o, rocky, karanwa, boulder) or sunuyüsi’, is one of the most magnificent of the Sierra Nevada peaks as seen from Big Pine, rising to more than 14,000 feet, or more than 10,000 feet above the valley. Success in hunting, fighting, traveling, and even in gambling are assured him by his power, Birch Mountain. 

 

 

This petroglyph, a loose drawn style on a sloping crevice on a rock rim facing Birch Mountain.  A rim with dozens of other petroglyphs. Follow along with the possibilities as I speculate.

 

I see a spirit figure. Below two upright ears, which shape a head, two arms extend. One downward emitting or contacting supernatural power through the hand.  The other arm loops down entwining body-like. Upper left, a vaporous cloud of energy animates or is animated by the figure. This is not a logical event. A vision; this description is imaginative representing, I suggest, a quest for contact, or indeed power’s actual arrival.

I do not suggest there's any direct relationship between Jack Stewart's dream of Birch Mountain and this petroglyph. His story provides no account of petroglyphs.  It is an alignment of geography that provokes an alignment of action and belief.  A way of turning toward.       

 

Photos: Inyo County, California, southeast of Big Pine, facing Birch Mountain.

March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

 

The thin snowpack of the eastern Sierras continues to melt away this pivotal year of global heating.

Carbon in the atmosphere is the highest since 30 million years ago. 

Time, Opaque

And so the days go by here, without incident.
    Even the occasional memorable event is soon erased without a trace under time’s huge, opaque mass. 
    —Han Kang

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations," Mary Austin wrote, "deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars ... wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls.” ...

 ... To be like the lean coyote is a comfort beneath a sky that is full of fog or full of sunlight and either way impenetrable. Such comfort is not a reason for carelessness. Precisely because you might not know everything — because the night answers but not with words you can understand, and the stars swing above you, moving, as Austin tells us, as if "on some stately service not needful to declare,“ you must accept certain responsibilities — among them the task of taking care.
    —Kendra Atleework

 Click photo, zoom in for detail

What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may? In the darkest night, there is language that asks what we are made of, that insists on imagining into the first person perspectives of the people and living beings that inhabit this planet; language that connects us to one another. 

 

Literature that deals in this language inevitably holds a kind of body heat. Just as inevitably, the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life. I would like to share the meaning of this award, which is for literature, with you – standing here in opposition to violence together. 
    —Han Kang from her Nobel Prize speech (December 2024, translated from Korean by Maya West)

NOTES
—Han Kang, top: Greek Lessons: A Novel (2023). Han Kang awarded the Nobel in Literature, 2024
—Kendra Atleework, Miracle Country: A Memoir (2020)
—Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)
Both write of the country east of the Sierras, the Owens Valley, Inyo County, California
—Photos:  Inyo County, California, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

 

ASTROLITHICS

Galaxies originate from quantum fluctuations in the primordial universe, imprinted as traces in the cosmic background radiation. The tiny ripples of matter, which were stretched to enormous dimensions during the inflation, were the seeds of the subsequent formation of astronomical structures, shaped by gravitational attraction.
—Ersilia Vaudo

It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.
—Raymond Chandler

It is the rock where tranquil must adduce
Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined

By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night’s hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.
—Wallace Stevens

NOTES
—Ersilia Vaudo in The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions (2025, trans Italian)
—Raymond Chandler in "The Simple Art of Murder" (1944)
—Wallace Stevens from the poem "The Rock" (1954)

—Photos: Douglas Beauchamp, Lassen County CA
—Below:  Wallace Stevens from the poem  “Prologues To What Is Possible” (1954)
 

The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was compared

Was beyond his recognizing. By this he knew that likeness of him extended

Only a little way, and not beyond, unless between himself
 

And things beyond resemblance there was this and that intended to be recognized,

The this and that in the enclosures of hypotheses

On which men speculated in summer when they were half asleep.

Grotto Trio

 

Three figures. Painted on the limestone wall of Grotto Canyon with several other faded, glazed figures. Small, discrete, focused. Spirit beings. Glazed by a sheen of a translucent silicate deposit. Enhanced here via DStretch.

This physical veiling enhances the mystery and speculation of the origin of these figures.  Elements of Columbia plateau motifs, with distinct figures suggesting origins in the southwestern US. Including (not pictured here) a possible hunched flute-player, or more popularly supposed: a Kokopelli.  The possibilities sprinkled over the decades by several technical studies, casual observation, far-ranging wonderments.  Now, AI queries generalize the question of origins.

Do an Internet search for Grotto Canyon pictographs and enter the realm. Or better, when you find the leisure, or are compelled, journey to Alberta and enter Grotto Canyon. Varies by season, as do all things.

Upper figure:  a DStretch version of the photo below by Douglas Beauchamp.
Note: DStretch developed by Jon Harman:  https://dstretch.com/

Two Boulders, Seeming So

It is possible that to seem—it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.

The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun
Or like a seeming of the moon or night 

Or sleep.

— Wallace Stevens

ABOVE: An old-style boulder moved from the edge of the lower Columbia River, as Bonneville Dam was constructed, to a plaza in front of the county courthouse at Stevenson WA.  

So it seems:  The Garrison Eddy Petroglyph Boulder

...

There might be, too, a change immenser than
A poet’s metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of music where
Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content,
In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

That we do not need to understand, complete
Without secret arrangements of it in the mind.

—Wallace Stevens

...

BELOW:  Near a road winding east in Mendocino County to the Elk River, with over a dozen concentric circles carved in bas relief, this boulder considered an example of the some of the oldest rock art in the Northwest.

So it seems:  The Spyrock Petroglyph Boulder

Hundreds of miles apart, these two boulders bearing carvings which appear to be related traditions. I speculate early peoples traveled along the coast and explored up rivers. Perhaps settling, or moving on, maybe disappearing. But in these attentive instances, they left their marks.

These concentric circular motifs seem to speak of water.  Perhaps of cycles, of seasons, in memory. A bringing forth from and with stone. As invocation. We cannot know.

All photos: Douglas Beauchamp

In flat appearance we should be and be, 

Except for delicate clinkings not explained.

These are the actual seemings that we see,
Hear, feel and know. We feel and know them so.

—Wallace Stevens

(All Stevens excerpts from the poem Description Without Place)

It is a sense

To which we refer experience, a knowledge
Incognito, the column in the desert,

On which the dove alights. Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.

It is an expectation, a desire,
A palm that rises up beyond the sea,

A little different from reality:
The difference that we make in what we see

And our memorials of that difference,
Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky.

The future is description without place,
The categorical predicate, the arc.

—Wallace Stevens