What Does Lizard Know? 2

"Lane County has an abundance of prehistoric artifacts. This example of pictographs have defied the elements for centuries. Writings can be see along Highway 395 near Lake Abert. County contains almost a fourth of the state’s Indian writings.”
— 1959: Caption of a featured photograph of a petroglyph boulder, Sunday Oregonian. [1]

“Indian Pictographs in Lake County. Such Indian picture writings are usually not very old, because the desert wind and sand tend to obliterate them in about two hundred years as a rule.”  
— 1964: Caption of a photograph of a petroglyph boulder published as the full-page frontispiece of The Oregon Desert (1964) [2] (Image above, adapted)

“The boulder was blasted by a maintenance crew about 1967, and the fragments graded into the ditch on the west side of the highway.”

— 1967: Noted by Malcolm and Louise Loring (1982) [3]

The identical petroglyph boulder is imaged and imagined in all three publications; The Oregonian and Oregon Desert photographs are almost identical.

Drawing adapted from the Lorings's sketch of the boulder’s face prior to the 1967 blasting, noting: "On one large lizard petroglyph the rock surface in the body was polished and painted with red pigment." [3]

Hwy 395 and Abert Rim these days: Lizard Boulder disappeared

Lone-Lizard sees it coming: Ancient-History in not ancient. Lone-Lizard sees it going: Ancient-History is not history as a rule.  Ancient-History sees Lone-Lizard not as Lizard, sees as dreamtime highway lake-shore fragmentings.

From slope above Hwy 396, view west over Lake Abert toward Winter Rim; rock wall an "historic" cattle fence.

NOTES
[1] "Pictographs, Petroglyphs Premium Lake County Attractions,” Sunday Oregonian, August 23, 1959, by Paul Laartz, The highlight of this feature story was a photograph of the boulder with petroglyphs on the southeast shore of Lake Abert. The story was part of series in partnership with the Oregon State Motor Assn to promote  tourism during Oregon’s centennial year —1959.  

Eerily, this 1959 article also included a second photograph: “Lakeview, well known as a center of lumbering, cattle raising, has recently added this uranium reduction mill to its list of contributors to a thriving Lake County economy.”  

With tabloid-ready names, Lucky Lass and White King, two 1950s uranium mines a few miles NW of Lakeview on Fremont Forest lands, were later designated Superfund sites. The “disposal” and “processing” sites were near town: Lakeview Uranium Mill operated 1958-1961. A 2017 fact-sheet: “The Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978. Title I processing site and disposal site near Lakeview, Oregon. This site is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management.” 

Legacy? Ask Lizard…  

[2] The Oregon Desert, 1964, by E R Jackman and Reub A. Long, Caxton Press (Idaho).  Chapter 11, titled  “Indians in the Desert,” offers folksy observation, opinion and hearsay, vague (mis)information, and condescending pronouncements typical of late 19th- and early 20th-century attitudes. This enduringly popular volume has been continuously in-print since 1964; distributed by University of Nebraska Press. The full-page frontispiece photograph is the petroglyph boulder destroyed in 1967.

[3] Malcolm and Louise Loring in 1967 visited the Lake Abert shore location of petroglyph boulder highlighted in the two photographs. In the description for Site 140 the Lorings reference the 1959 Oregonian story.  Loring, J. Malcolm, and Louise Loring. Pictographs & Petroglyphs of the Oregon Country, Parts I & II. (1982, corrected 1996) 

[4] Dreamtime Highway: not a completely original phrase. In Dreamtime Superhighway (2008), a superb book about the rock art of New South Wales, Australia, Jo McDonald proposes, “the rock art in the Sydney region functioned as a prehistoric information superhighway.”  ... Something to ponder as one traverses the (now desiccating) Lake Abert eastern shoreline along the snaking US Highway 395.

[5] MORE?! 2022:  “Oregon’s Lake Abert is ‘in deep trouble.’ The state shut down its effort to figure out why”  by Rob Davis, The Oregonian, Jan 16, 2022

Ever the... 2021: US Senators Merkley and Romney introduced legislation to protect long-term health of saline ecosystems. (Status unknown April 2022)

Abert Lake looking south -- 2016 a year with water!

Photos and Conjurings Douglas Beauchamp

What is this life if, full of care,

we have no time to stand and stare?

— W.H. Davies (English poet, 1871-1940)

On a plaque on his Cotswolds stone house

Dry Desiring

They say whisperings

Heart entangled

Plank bridging Crooked River

They say remember

They glaze fire

They say paradise

They make tracks

Say sky before time

In Great Yearning

They do not say

In rapt desiring

They make ties to bind

Irrigation Gate wall

They say collateral damage

Bones they said

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are fewer enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. 

— Barbara Kingsolver from High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995)

NOTE

Photos Crook County Oregon, late March 2022, a filling-the-sky country entangled in "Exceptional" Drought. I wonder, how in our gage of things unfolding as Exceptional exceeds Extreme?  I wonder, how when do Words collapse under the gravity of unknowing? -DB

CODA:  Poem by Jaime de Angulo ((1887–1950) in Coyote's Bones:

Coyote, ululating on the hill,

is it my fire that distresses you so?

Or the memories of long ago

when you were a man roaming the hills.

what will they know

Through fractured terrain patterns of movement. 

Namings Dry River Crooked River Eons.

Basalting lava congealing yielding.

Marking red melding cracking stone.

Smoothing.

These days uncertain calculatings.

Drought.

Rains once waters again scour and heave. 

Shape gravity waves.

Seethe.

Find salt seas inland and ocean. 

Minerals remembering push through veins.

Red crystalline blood desiring.

Who will feel what will they know.

Photos: Dry River, Crook County, Oregon. Circa 21st c. CE

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

Ghosting Pronghorn

Petroglyph, Northern Great Basin

Pia wantsipe toowenene’ iten
Pia wantsipe toowenene’ iten

Pennan tapai tatawento toowenene’ ite

The big antelope buck-pe slowly grazing while standing

The big antelope buck-pe slowly grazing while standing

Sun beams flashing, hitting him while he stands and grazes.

    --Antelope Song, a Western Shoshone round dance song

Gaming, shooting. This year's hunt for pronghorn in Oregon began in August and continues until late September in various “Hunt Units.” The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) manages “Big Game” hunting permits (tags); this year permitting the shooting of over 2000 pronghorn, about 10% of the estimated Oregon population. (70 tags provided for Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge.)  “Open Season” dates vary among weaponry:  archery, muzzleloaders, “youth only,” and rifles.  With all hunting east of the Cascades, wildfire, smoke, and access restrictions are always wild cards.  And: Water.   

Watering, waiting. Water needs and patterns of pronghorn have been studied and documented for decades. Generally, some spring-season food sources may by sufficient, with many variables. However, in late summer and early fall, pronghorn need to drink water daily, usually mornings. Hunters in Oregon know this. “Blinds” are set up near the few water places. In this year of extreme and exceptional drought, access to limited water sources is crucial. Drought is unforgiving for most wildlife, feral horses, and compels ranchers to herd-in cattle early from “open range,” usually public lands grazing allotments. If and when maintained, stock watering troughs may be helpful to wildlife. Or the water-hole-catchments where BLM -- primarily for livestock -- has bermed streams or backhoed playas in SE Oregon. Hundreds now bone dry.

Above: Rifle blind on desiccated playa; Map Oregon east of the Cascades, August 24 2021: Fresh Red=Extreme Drought, Congealed Purple=Exceptional Drought (highest on scale, a dubious honor); A bow-hunter's "disguised" hut near BLM waterhole (Lake County OR); she was kind but noted that me hiking by meant pronghorns would not now approach -- the hut was a complete surprise to me. 

Imagining, fantasizing. Pronghorn, hunted to near extinction by the early 20th century, from millions two centuries ago to a few thousand.  Since the 1920s, policies and protections have augmented a robust return of the “Prairie Ghost” with populations sufficient to permit hunting. And to become an icon for running "wild."

Above: Game Stamp for the 50th anniversary of the Order of the Pronghorn (Lake County OR) with art by Tom Beecham; Logo for the now-closed Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot (Boardman OR); Illustration promoting High Desert Museum's fundraiser August 28, 2021 (Bend OR);  Petroglyph (detail) Lake County OR. 

Is there a way to be logical about this? I am not sure. I do know pronghorn have been pursued and killed for food by humans for thousands of years in western North America. Indigenous peoples hunted and killed pronghorn for at least 10,000 years as testified by the remains in some archaeological excavations. “Procuring” has been documented from the early Holocene in SE Oregon. Evidence in the Northern Great Basin shows communal hunts, usually with traps at drive sites with barriers/fences of stone, juniper, or brush, was an important method of capture and killing. Countless methods, strategies, and devices are evidenced among hundreds of archaeological studies, ethnographic reports,19th-century journals of Euro-americans, eco-bio studies, and Native American stories.  

Above: Drive wall, 2 photos; (Petroglyph All Northern Great Basin)

NOTES

All Photos by this Blog's author; click to enlarge.

Another blind: September 2020 post: SIMULACRA: A la playa

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2020/09/simulacra-la-playa.html

Antelope Song transcribed and translated by Beverly Crum, ca. 1975. Cited by Steven J. Crum in Julian Steward’s Vision of the Great Basin (1999).

In 1915 in the western US about 13,000 remained of the estimated 35 million roaming a century earlier.  Some experts were resigned to the species’ eventual extinction due to killing, grazing, and partitioning of open lands.

Drought.  Uncounted thousands of acres of Juniper trees have been clear-cut in Oregon in recent years sanctioned and funded by federal agencies and the State of Oregon. This devastation, studied and strangely rationalized, doesn't cause drought directly.  Global heating, air currents, damming and draining, are among many complex factors.

Over a hundred hunting features and kill locales are now documented in Nevada and Eastern California.  For example, the archaeological research and ethnographic studies in the Great Basin by Brooke S. Arkush, Brian Hockett, and Patrick M. Lubinski.

An interesting article, undated without documentation: “What is the cultural significance of pronghorns to native americans?” https://www.aaanativearts.com/what-is-the-cultural-significance-of-pronghorns-to-native-americans

Recommended: Prairie Ghost: Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America

Richard E. McCabe, Henry M. Reeves, Bart W. O’Gara. 2010.