Road to Delamar

There is a better way, a truer way, the old way — the proud highway, the rolling road. —Paul Theroux

The desert and the hourglass.  —Albert Camus

 

The highway from Willamette Valley Oregon to Lincoln County Nevada runs about 800 miles. That's if you go by Tulelake, Honey Lake, the reservation of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, the US Army’s Hawthorne Ammo Depot, on to summit at Tonopah. Soak at an abandoned hot spring pool then straightaway down The Extraterrestrial Highway to find yourself — and a few others — in Rachel, Nevada. Some say you've arrived. Others, you are simply beginning.

Natural perspective reestablishes when across sand and dust and out with the boulders, listening to the voices of the petroglyphs. Slowly, turning to witness the silent desert, the hum of duration.

All my life, I’ve lived above the ground,
    car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through concrete,
and still I’ve not understood the reel of this life’s purpose.

— Ada Limón 

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

— Henry David Thoreau

NOTES

—Paul Theroux, from Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads (2013)

—Albert Camus, from Notebook VII, 1951-1954, in Notebooks 1951-1959, trans Ryan Bloom

—Ada Limón, from Notes on the Below in The Carrying (2018)

Tracking

 

  

  

Rim: Upper left, track (detail below); Lower right, one/two tracks.

Seeking, imprinting gesture on stone.  In these pictures of petroglyphs only stone. Tracks reveal a presence, the before sense of arriving.  The beyond sense of departing.  Movement through transitory moments.

Caution advised.

 

How to place side-by-side our hope, desire, caring, with what we know happens daily?  An existential question: Over eight billion humans now on the planet. Multiple billions of caged, farmed, slaughtered animals. The thinning herds and flocks and solitaries, the adapting and yearning natural animals. Grizzily extinct from Oregon. The Wolf.  Where to, how now, in the tracking? In the old stories what were they telling?

 

This side of now, the nowhere of the 2020s. The image: Machining the earth. Gleaming extraction demands compacting deposition. Landfilling waste. Seeping, streaming. Filtering odorless tasteless into living streams. River steams. Blood streams. Streaming bombs shatter and splatter screams. 

 

These tracks here, quietly of stone, weathering, testifying, reminding -- simply of what-is in the curve of seasons, as we wonder.  As we all go forth along the way.

 

...

Three pictures, to return to the beginning. To an ending. The basalt rim. Cleaved. Lichened. Patinated. Sky depthless. 

Lower edge, approaching shadow: Track! eluding.

 

Moving closer, tracking track. The sag of basalt, stone flow, mineral yielding.  Lightly marked dots. How do we know anything?

This track, the first track, the last track. A returning cycle? A timeline to infinity?

Solstice : Emerging

 

Season of their loss

A poem by James Welch

Thanksgiving at Snake Butte

In time we rode that trail
up the Butte, as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top. Antelope scattered

through the rocks before us, clattered
unseen down the easy slope to the west.
Our horses balked, stiff legged,
their nostrils flared at something unseen
gliding smoothly through the brush away.

On top, our horses broke, loped through
a small stand of stunted pine, then jolted
to a nervous walk. Before us lay
the smooth stones our ancestors, the fish,
the lizard, snake and bent-kneed

bowman – – etched by something crude,
by a wandering race, driven by their names
for time: its winds, its rain, its snow
and the cold moon tugging at the crude figures
in this, the season of their loss.  

..........................................................................

Lauren Bridgeman and Maria Zedeno describe Snake Butte as "a sacred landscape, home to powerful traditional snake medicine, religious areas for fasting, environmental resources for collecting, and cultural features that convey the living and remembered traditions of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine peoples."

James Welch (1940-2002) as a child attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations. Snake Butte is located within the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, homeland to the Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) Tribes. Welch became famous as a western regional and Native American writer beginning with Winter in the Blood, 1974.  Previously, in 1971, he published his only collection of poetry: Riding the Earthboy 40, which includes the poem Thanksgiving at Snake Butte. 

Upon reflection we consider again (and again) the answer to our time. An echo in the season of loss.  We may recall how the some of the rock mass of Snake Butte was mined in the 1930s for the massive Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River.  A tangible loss also fractures spirit.  This continues at full thrust on and in many sacred lands and places.  Where will wisdom sit?

The neocapitalist crush and craze for all things that can be extracted -- Lithium, for example -- continues unabated. Thacker Pass, a sacred landscape on federal lands in northern Nevada near the Oregon border, is on the brink of devastation. 

To follow the evolving situation at Thacker Pass, in the McDermitt Caldera lapping into Oregon, check these links and sources:  — Protect Thacker Pass https://www.protectthackerpass.org/blog/
On December 5th, 2023, In Reno NV, following a federal judge’s dismissal of their latest lawsuit, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony (RSIC) will hold a press conference on their court cases against the Thacker Pass lithium mine.
— Judge again rules against tribes’ effort to stop lithium mine
November 21, 2023  https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2023/11/21/judge-again-rules-against-tribes-effort-to-stop-lithium-mine/
— Previously on RockArtOregon
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/03/center-of-earth.html
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/06/center-of-earth-2.html

Red

In the face of the unknown, humans have always left their mark: handprints on cave walls, painted suns on rocks, flute solos to the stars. Sometimes words are inadequate for communication. Elements must be transformed. Mineral pigments into paint. Sound into song. Fire into smoke.
— Anita Endrezze, from Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon

 

 Red sees us seeing
wavelengthening
the vibrating heart

blackening stone

fear wavering
sharpened tension 

ignites desire
congealing fire
staining shadow

 
a fine willing cry
wonder of blue sky

how many passed

this way before
now
after
blood spilled
spilling still

Photos:  Autumn 2023, a Cascades tributary to the Deschutes River flowing north to the Columbia River then to the Pacific, finding peace.
To honor in this one world the peoples bloodied, bound and displaced by the machines of war, then and now. May they also find peace.