Time thins. Memory serves the mirage.
A cliff wall of tuff. Volcanic cone erupted underwater 250,000 or so years ago under the ancient endorheic basin now known as Tule Lake. Terminus of the expansive watershed nourishing Lost River. In turn, nourishing the Modocs in their ancestral territories for thousands of years.
This tumultuous country now sliced by an unwavering geopolitical line, the Oregon-California boundary. In the 19th century this line demarcated a transgressive often violent zone of difference. The Modoc peoples subjugated, displaced, often killed. Gold-seekers, militia, US Army, Wasco scouts hired from Warm Springs reservation, and would be railroaders-turned-ranchers-turned judge and boss. 
How
do these thousands of rock cut markings gazed at by the modern drive-up viewer align with colonial claiming and naming? What can we ask that comes close to empathy and release?
Petroglyphs carved through several millennia now easily accessed and viewed in a protected section of the Lava Beds National Monument: Petroglyph Point.
CODA
… Forgotten now forgetting, no
more the absent-minded in full preoccupation
with the ten thousand things, each separate,
each needing its own space and unique memory.
Years seem to have gone by in this forgetting.
Do thousand lives have to be wasted now
to sharpen this one life? But all the lives
return again into the picture as sun wills me
to wither down to a last flare of love.
—Nathanial Tarn from the poem Recollection of Being
… Forgotten now forgetting, no
more the absent-minded in full preoccupation
with the ten thousand things, each separate,
each needing its own space and unique memory.
Years seem to have gone by in this forgetting.
Do thousand lives have to be wasted now
to sharpen this one life? But all the lives
return again into the picture as sun wills me
to wither down to a last flare of love.
—Nathanial Tarn from the poem Recollection of Being
