Drought and Unknowing

Boat ramp. Reservoir full pool elevation 3235'. Ramp extends down to 3210'. Level last week 3158'.  Vertical drop 48'. 

Tree cut down for reservoir; underwater since 1961.

All photos and data week of Sep 19-23 2021; click to enlarge.

Prineville Reservoir, Crook County, Oregon, impounds Upper Crooked River. Looking east from the dam. 21% full.

Spillway from dam. 

Ochoco Irrigation District operates the dam and Prineville reservoir, owned by the US Bureau of Reclamation, primarily for irrigation. OID, which set October 1 as the end of the 2021 water season, also operates the older and smaller Ochoco Reservoir, currently 12% full, inflow zero.

Past-Present-Future envisioned as Now.

A hazy Unknowing: changes in the watershed in the last 60 years: clear cutting, fires, diversions, expanded cattle grazing, plantings, etc. Unknown patterns will determine water availability and uses as we move deeper into the 21st century.

John Berger distinguishes between the unsaid and the unsayable.  Following him, we distinguish between unknown and unknowable. What is unknown can be known over time and within parameters yet to be determined.  What is unknowable cannot be known. We wonder, what times these in this prickly thicket of precarious negotiation?

How will Future emerge bearing a tenuous Present and a weighted Past? How similar; how differ? In this light, the expanse of a watershed and the life of a river becomes emblematic.

Crook County, in the center of Oregon, mapped as Exceptional Drought: Exceptional and widespread crop/pasture losses; Shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells creating water emergencies. Assessment derives from: Drought severity, soil moisture, streamflow, and precipitation, with estimated short term and long term durations.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/AbouttheData/DroughtClassification.aspx

Equinox: Same Moment Round the World

Fleeting balance. Fleeing balance. Yet one moment all are equal under the Sun and below the Moon. Equinox.

Petroglyph, basalt outcrop facing east, date unknown.

Near Three Corners: Place of convergence of the imaginary borderlines of Oregon California Nevada  --  Northern Great Basin, part of the traditional country of the Northern Paiute.

During the equinox, the Sun crosses what we call the “celestial equator”—an imaginary extension of Earth’s equator line into space. The equinox occurs precisely when the Sun’s center passes through this line.
https://www.almanac.com/content/first-day-fall-autumnal-equinox

HISTORY: Paths in the Fog

Ghostly intervention facing east appeared several years ago, old shed west of  I-5 in Oregon between MP154 & MP159, Creeks Elk & Anlauf.

Our desire for simplicity is understandable. We like our stories to have plots, for life’s messiness to form a neat arc. In reality, we don’t get to start at the beginning. We’re thrown into the middle of things, into the chaos of history. Hari Kunzru

Embi:  Whether the world has been created or is still in the process of being created, must we not, since we are here, whistle at one another in that strange dissonance called human speech? Or should we be silent?
Pastor Jón:  History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction. The greater the care with which you explain a fact, the more nonsensical a fable you fish our of chaos. The same applies to the history of the world. The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it;  the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth. Halldór Laxness

With his conception of history In War and Peace, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move.  Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they "involuntarily" participate in events whose meaning is "concealed from them"), they proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react.
Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.  Milan Kundera

Poetry,

        suspension bridge between history and truth,

is not a path toward this or that: 

                            it is to see 

the stillness in motion, 

                                the change 

in stillness.
                History is the path: 

it goes nowhere, 

                    we all walk it, 

truth is to walk it.

                        We neither go nor come:

we are in the hands of time. 

Octavio Paz

HISTORY: Behind the Seen/Scene

In distance: Historic Interstate 5, following Historic Highway 99, following the Siskiyou Trail, following an older network of Native American footpaths connecting the Pacific Northwest with California's Central Valley, following...

BUT WAIT.   California artist Ed Ruscha has something to say: I had a notion to make pictures by using words and presenting them in some way and it seemed like a mountain was an archetypal stage set. It was a perfect foil for whatever was happening in the foreground.

HISTORY KIDS, 2013, lithograph 29”x28”, from the Mountain series

NOTES

Hari Kunzru, from Complexity, Harper’s Magazine, January 2021

Octavio Paz, from Vuelta (Return, 1969-1975. Eliot Weinberger, trans.

Milan Kundera. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, 1995, Linda Asher, trans. 

Halldór Laxness. Under the Glacier, 1968 in Icelandic, trans 1972.

Ed Ruscha  https://edruscha.com/works/

https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2016/ed-ruscha-mountain-prints/

CODA

History. Inscription. Revision. Version.  Translation.  Interpretation. Memory. Story. Myth. Legend, Fragmentation. Obscurity. Erasure. Disappearance. ...