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.

Shadowing Weetwood

Pastor Jón: Sometimes I feel it's too early to use words until the world has been created.

Embi:  Hasn't the world been created, then?

Pastor Jón: I thought the Creation was still going on. Have you heard that it’s been completed?  

— Halldór Laxness

STREAMS

Consider an image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality. … the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions.  

— Gaston Bachelard

If disaster were to break apart the Earth during Yona's trip, her camera was the tool that would make the shattered pieces around her feel real. The moment the camera shutter clicked, the image in front of it was no longer a subject or landscape to photograph. It was a blank space in time. Sometimes short intervals of nothingness affected people more than long periods of actual life. 

— Yun Ko-Eun

As if nothingness contained a métier,
A vital assumption, an impermanence
In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired

That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,
That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,
Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,

In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk
Were being alive, an incessant being alive,
A particular being, that gross universe.

— Wallace Stevens

COMMENTARY

The photos and the texts each stand on their own as markers along the way.  Here, this juxtaposition of these disparate texts with images of Neolithic rock-art carvings in a greenwood aims to open a third-space — reverberation — a process I learn from, how to see, a challenging engagement I enjoy.  Recognizing, as Wallace Stevens further writes in the poem cited above:  “Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain. The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.” 

NOTES

— Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier, 1968/Icelandic; trans. Magnus Magnusson. Laxness (1902-1998); born/died in Iceland; in 1955 awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958/French, trans Maria Jolas

— Yun Ko-Eun, The Disaster Tourist:  A Novel, 2020/Korean trans. Lizzie Buehler

— Wallace Stevens from the poem The Rock in The Collected Poems, 1954.

— Ange Mlinko from the poem Naiad Math in Marvelous Things Overheard, 2013.

Weetwood Moor I explored hill-walking in north-central Northumbria, east of Wooler, near the Scottish border, several years ago. A well-documented place, this landscape — and this stone — change dramatically and continually over the thousands of years.  And the future? … “I thought the Creation was still going on. Have you heard that it’s been completed?”

There's solace in the horizon: the nothingness above 

divided by this teemingness below 

makes room, by which we come to figure. 

— Ange Mlinko

Evanescence

Above:   1. Canyon wall, Warner Basin Uplands.  2. Original photo.  3&4. To reveal detail of this very faded rock painting, two enhanced versions (DStretch) with further modifications in Photos editor.

Observations & speculations. The shape of the stone commands attention, evokes a certain power essential to the placement of the painting's figure. Hands or paws may have been painted on this ghost-like figure in a different pigment, now disappeared. Or, perhaps the intent is approximately as we see in the enhanced images. The horizontal strokes may be ribs, or perhaps they represent cut marks. Whether the painting is gendered or sexualized, is a warning or invocation, is a spirit presence, all suggestive yet remain unknown ... in the fading...

 

CODA

The song that sang itself
had no time
knew no season
it sounded with the power of the end
— Suzan Shown Harjo from The Song Called "White Antelope’s Chant”

Blessed
are those who listen
when no one is left to speak.
— Linda Hogan from the poem Blessings

Both poets included in When The Light Of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020), Joy Harjo, editor

Night Diamond

There are few smiles in this universe.
 

He who moves through it has an infinite
 

number of encounters that wounded him.
 

However, you don't die in it.
 

If you die everything starts all over again.

 
— Henri Michaux

...

There are two nights. The second one comes behind the night that everybody sees. This second night is under the darkness. It tells the shaman where the pain is and what caused the sickness. When the second night comes it makes the shaman feel that he is a doctor. The power is in him to doctor. Only shamans can see this second night. The people can only see the darkness. They cannot see the night under it.
— Joe Green, Pyramid Lake

NOTES
— Henri Michaux (French 1899-1984) from the poem Night of Inconveniences in The Night Moves (La Nuit Remue 1935 Gallimard), trans David Ball.
— Joe Green, speaking in English of the spirit of the night as the source of power, recorded by Willard Z Park, in Shamanism in Western North America: A Study in Cultural Relationships. (1938 Northwestern U)
— This presentation of the image of this northern Great Basin petroglyph boulder with the juxtapositions of disparate poetic insights does not imply any cross-interpretation or attribution. I do so with the greatest respect for each.  So, why do so?  To open space for absence, losses, solitary gestures — a fourth dimension, perhaps. On this planet today millions on the move, hope for shelter, for food, for safety — one more night, one night at a time.  Some never find it. The wounding, the healing, a hoping.

CODA
Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth's greenings. Now, think.
— Hildegard von Bingen (German Benedictine abbess, c. 1098 – 1179)

 

Memories made of stone

In my dreams, I would always wonder if my body was made of hydrogen.
If so, then my memories must be made of stone.
— Bi Gan

Mysterious… when we know weight, when we confront an unknown. When a sentence or a title begins with mysterious, I become skeptical.  Yet it is the word that floats free when I discover these two images converging from separate threads of my explorations and research. 

How can this be, I wondered as I looked, studying the designs.
The upper: a sketch of sloping stone on the edge of a river gorge in Chandeshwar, central India, by JH Rivett-Carnac, Esq., an officer of Britain’s Bengal Civil Service. The drawing was one aspect of his investigations published in the 1877.  
The lower: a photograph recorded during a 4x4-and-canoe journey with friends in the Owyhee River canyon in eastern Oregon.

The rock slope in India has over 200 cup-marks, two of which have circles, arrayed in near vertical and slightly curving parallels.  The Owyhee boulder has similar number of cup-mark-pits, similarly arrayed. It has one cup-pit with a circle. Striking that these complex arrays are each uniquely distinctive from other design-clusters among the thousands I have viewed and studied.  

Yet they exhibit a powerful resonance. The mystery leads into the ageless question of synchronicity; its space/place equivalent. Who and why? enters the deeper expressive mind of the human, an abyss harkening to stellar origins.

Where? 

That which is not in stone,
not in the wall of stones and earth,
not even in trees,
that which forever trembles a little,

must, then, be in us.

— Eugène Guillevic

Images displayed here for visual-design comparison; the size of the expanse of the Chandeshwar rock slope and the Owyhee boulder differ significantly. Click to enlarge. Below, detail of the Owyhee boulder.

NOTES
— Bi Gan’s film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), voiceover of the main character, translated from Chinese.
— Eugène Guillevic (French 1907-1997), trans Denise Levertov, in Selected Poems (1969 New Directions)
— J.H. Rivette-Carnac, Esq. Archaeological notes on ancient sculpturings on rocks in Kumaon, India, 1879 (1877), The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta.
— Garrick Mallery. Picture-writing of the American Indians, 1893. Foreword by J. W. Powell. Tenth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington DC. Mallery, in his seminal and essential report, references Rivett-Carnac with a brief summary and a replica of his drawing.
— Vale District BLM in 2014 contracted consultants to use Portable X-Ray Flourescence (PRFX) to obtain relative chronology of petroglyphs at this site. (PRFX is experimental; absolute dating remains very difficult.) Also, to use this preliminary study to help interpret the area’s occupation and use history, and to assess possible conservation measures at this well-known place, though not easy to access except by river.
—Below, detail of another boulder. In all, fifty boulders with petroglyphs.

How many years were we to learn without understanding.
— Czeslaw Milosz in Caesarea, 1975

Looking into stone

Look closely into the lower half of this older figure.  A series of precise incisings -- horizontal, vertical, diagonal.  This type of linear marking-into-stone appears some places in the Northern Great Basin and in Owyhee country. 


Various rock surfaces show a rangeof petroglyph intentions and styles.  Look at the rock face upper left. Moving closer in the photo below. An elongated figure. Notable, incisings in the lower area.  Especially the intense repetitive cross-hatching, see close-up, following.


 

 A clear, minimal figuration, lightly marked. Looking closely, one imagines "eyes" in the "head" -- natural, shallow depressions -- intentionally embodied by the carver?  A looking-out and beyond... and through you, the transient viewer.

 

Lower right, another appearance of repetitive incisings.  Perhaps the performative act was of primary importance; the resulting image an artifact.  One wonders.

Below, three other rock faces at this place -- a baffling and intriguing variety of designs and elusive meanings.


 

Photos April 2024, Northern Great Basin, near the arbitrary political partitioning of Oregon, California and Nevada (42nd Parallel in 1819; 120th Meridian in 1849). These resident petroglyphs older and deeply responsive to seasons and terrain.

Swallowing II: A Singular Petroglyph Boulder

  

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes let out confused lyrics
Man passes through, across forests of symbols
Each one observing him with a familiar gaze

Like long echoes, from afar confounding
In a dark and profound unity
Vast like night and like clarity
Fragrance, color, and sound all resounding
    — Charles Baudelaire, 1857

1953. Five Mile Rapid, Swallowed in 1957

Near the lower end there are several dangerous rocks in the rapid, and at the foot large masses of rock divide it into different parts the main channel empties into a capacious, deep basin of rectangular shape, called Big Eddy.   

-- Captain. Chas. F. Powell, Corps of Engineers, 1882

1954. Boulder during evaluation by archaeologists

The investigation of the petroglyphs (in spring 1956) was made by Samuel C. Sargent, a Geologist with the Corps of Engineers, on The Dalles Dam project. Mr. Sargent called attention to petroglyphs existing on islands in Fivemile Rapids, which can be easily removed and are in an excellent state of preservation. These petroglyphs are located in areas 6 and 7. I would urge that these petroglyphs be salvaged, since they represent unique forms for this area. 

-- David L. Cole, University of Oregon, 1956

In attempting to raise the petroglyph from Area 7 (by the Corps of Engineer’s Derrick Barge “Cascade” after the formation of The Dalles Dam Pool), the connection to the lift line parted and the petroglyph and lift line were lost. In the near future, an attempt will be made to recover the petroglyph with the help of a diver.
-- Joseph F. Garback, Lt Colonel, Corps of Engineers, 1957

1956. Army Corps of Engineers assessment for relocation

Area 7 was on a small island at the lower end of Fivemile Rapids. One rock was to be removed from this island. This rock was approximately seven feet high, eight feet wide and eight feet deep, weighing approximately seventeen tons. It was lying loose on a level area. Jacks were used to lift the rock enough to slip the cables under … the petroglyph was … bound with a cable which was attached to a float. In the attempt to lift this petroglyph a cable clamp slipped and it fell back into the water. The last report received was that the Corps of Engineers planned to send a diver down after it.
-- David L. Cole, University of Oregon, 1958

The Columbia River today pooled by The Dalles Dam

It is unfortunate that the petroglyph from Area #7 was lost in the efforts to raise it from the bottom of the pool. Naturally, $1,000 to attempt to recover this petroglyph is out of line with the value of the petroglyph, and we feel that this petroglyph will have to be considered as lost.
-- Herbert Maier, National Park Service, 1958

Dislocated from one another, we are now flooded,
resting in place.
We suffocate in the backwater of decadence
and fractious contempt.
Purity of the ancient is the language without tongues.
The river elegantly marks swirls on its surface,
a spiral that tells of a place
that remains undisturbed.
— Elizabeth Woody 

NOTES
— Charles Baudelaire from the poem Correspondences in Les Fleurs du mal, 1857. Translated by Ariana Reines.
— Elizabeth Woody from her poem “Waterways Endeavor to Translate Silence from Currents” in Luminaries of the humble. U of Arizona Press, 1994.
— In 1956 a cast of this petroglyph was made by James Hansen for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in Portland. Also in 1956, a rubbing made by Sari Dienes is now in the archives of the Burke Museum in Seattle.
Other NOTES & References available on request