Fabulation at Devils Lake

How can Devils Lake not be fable?  A recent lava flow from the active South Sister, 2000 ybp, congealed, sheeny.  A body of water, shallow, alive, reflecting.  A half-spirit red on dark stone, magical, alluring.

Click to enlarge

To USGS it’s contouring topographies and living rifts.  To ODOT a National Scenic Byway closed in winter.  To the USFS an access and conservation challenge.   To an American Astronaut the source of the only rock placed on the moon, 1971.  To Geo-Names Boards a cautionary dilemma of pioneers encountering satanic landscapes and indigenous peoples’ stories of skookum power.

To an Oregonian staff writer traveling in Central Oregon in 1920: “Devil's lake, where the water and its undertow cast a peculiar dread over the Indian.  Even yet, in dyes that would be the height of attainment of any manufacturer of commercial colors, on a rock beside the lake remains the red warning, a line of picture writing, undoubtedly a dread message to the red man telling him not to bathe after sundown.” [1]

Most of the bright chips on the central figure are recent, July 2021, not present on my last visit, 2014. This figure, about 18 inches, is one of several along this lava flow. See Loring & Loring 1982 Site 81 

To a design-artist, one Jennifer Lake, based lower in the watershed in Bend, an item in the fungible global dazzle: “Devils Lake Pictograph” fabric by the yard.[2]

To this writer, a palimpsest of places —Devils Chain, Talapus Butte, Devil Hill, Katsuk Pond, Kaleetan — and tumultuous re-rememberings — red rock paintings facing the rising sun.[3]

Drawing from Luther Cressman, Petroglyphs in Oregon, 1937. 

Cressman did not visit the site; drawing from a photo provided by the editor of the Bend-Bulletin.

NOTES

About Devils Chain and South Sister:

https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/three-sisters/future-eruptions-around-three-sisters

https://volcano.si.edu/gallery/ShowImage.cfm?photo=GVP-03093

Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Laboratory, which uses the most distinct and notable image as its logo, provides a summary of the geology:

http://www.obsidianlab.com/domeart.html

[1] Lucille F. Saunders, Sunday Oregonian, July 25 1920.

[2] https://www.zazzle.com/devils_lake_pictograph_red_fabric-256010813198478509

[3] In Chinook jargon, the trade language of the Columbia Plateau, Talapus=Coyote.  Kaleetan=Arrow, Katsuk=The center of anything, between, crossing…

Among the density of two centuries of study and writing about Chinook jargon, David Douglas Robertson presents on an extraordinary website:  https://chinookjargon.com/

CODA

As is true of most places, in Oregon country who does the mapping does the naming. Those names have a staying power.  When unraveling the markers and messages in old maps, language studies, journalings, and USGS surveys, a constant temptation: erase boundaries. This is not simply one of topography; it’s profoundly one of memory transforming itself.

As Octavio Paz wrote: Un archipiélago de signos/An archipelago of signs … and further in Blanco (1966):

I lose my shadow, 

I walk

 through intangible forests,

sudden sculptures of the wind, 

endless things, 

sharpened paths,

I walk

my steps 

dissolving 

in a space that evaporates

into thoughts I don't think