Picking up on my old journals:
A month of rain: 2½ inches in December: snow, then melt. Our view of Rattlesnake Hills (rising behind our shack) washed out in fog. Ground soggy, making up for drought.
Vol. 50, 11:II:78
(first trip to Portland, a city that would become our alternative to Seattle, though we never got to know it as well)
longhorn steer on Satus Pass Highway
a longhorn?
Yakama Reservation
Quaker meetinghouse in an old storefront
Service Committee on one side
First-day school upstairs
or a Friends’ apartment? (caretakers
overwhelmed by the Native display at the art museum but not the rest of the collection
- Tlingt Cannibal Society dancers, long-beaked masks opened by strings
- (bird that eats human brains, serpents that swallow whalers)
- mountain sheep horns turned into spoons
- halibut fish hooks with intricately carved animal-peoples as bait
- or a life-size cormorant, hook sewn on with sea lion gut
Portland-town, calm as Philadelphia
Asian and Native
with an Anglo overlay
afternoon, clouds cleared
revealing Hood, proud and pink over all
– Rainier and St. Helens in the soup
but where, oh where was Adams?
Still so ignorant regarding this land
- Haven’t yet seen rattlesnakes beside the rocks
- Survived avalanches
- Fished for salmon, ridden a horse, felled Douglas fir or hemlock
- Sailed out from the coastline
- Crossed wrinkled glacier
- Stood atop Rainier, Adams, Hood, or Baker
Much of the Columbia River runs through desert before getting to the lush greenery in the Cascades and on westward to the Pacific. Much of the route forms the border between Oregon and Washington state, Here’s a taste of the eastern Columbia River Gorge downstream from the Dalles, Oregon, looking into the “Evergreen State,” photo by Chris Light via Wikimdedia Commons.
As for the more common impression, consider this photo by Lena Chang/USFWS, also via Wikimedia Commons.
~*~
14:V
Climbing Clemens in fog and rain, encountered my first rattlesnake, dead in the logging road; five rattles. They gain a new one every time the shed their skin, usually three times a year.
Old-timers saying this is greenest, mostly intensely flowered spring they can recall.
17 june
Slept till 9, met Whiz and drove from the Nile to Tieton ranger station, then out, in six-foot snow pack to the Timberwolf Lookout — the forest fire watch building is gone but great panorama of Adams, Goat Rocks, Rainier, the Stuarts — Mount Glacier clear, a ghost of Baker, and crown of St. Helens. Plus Aix, Bismarck, Nelson, Butte, Shellrock, Ironstone, and others.
Kitty, off to Seattle with Michael. Platonic, she insists.
Stratocone volcanic mountains poking through clouds are Mount Rainer, center, Mount Adams, left, with a very tiny Mount Hood appearing halfway between if you zoom in; St. Helens rises to the right.. Photo by Dllu at Wikimedia Commons. A distinctive feature of the Cascade Range is stratocones about 50 miles apart from Lassen Peak in California to Mount Baker near the Canadian border.
~*~
20 Aug, Sunday
Entries lately: weekend to weekend
Sweet smell of conifers in the passes — rain at White Pass
everything clouded in
U.S. 12 still showing washout debris
wrecked guard railing
and other signs of last winter’s thawing and rains
4 Sept, Labor Day
Ginko Petrified Forest (at Vantage, where Interstate 90 crosses the Columbia)
Once, 10 or 15 million years ago, 200 species of trees grew here … the Cascade Range, not yet up, left ocean rains to come far inland (mahogany, maple, magnolia, Douglas fir, spruce, elm, ginko, box elder, beech, butternut among the common examples)
When the lava flows rolled over all, only the waterlogged trees didn’t burn … thus forming this site, one of seven major ones in US, and the one with the most species.
Wanapum tribe, peaceful, never declared war on USA and thus no treaty: and thus, alas, no reservation, no land = seems to sum up too much of Amerikan political and economic system, including judicial-legal mysterium frateritas …
~*~
Sometimes — no, too often — I feel or am wrongfully identified in a situation, perhaps because I do not submerge myself solely in a field — so that within a convention of journalists I may seem to be too ethereal, artsy, not politically-addicted enough, a health-food addict, whatever — yet among poets not hip enough, too square, too wealthy (!) or whatever: even too success oriented.
[Success? Guess that rules out poetry.]
A drive today, up into the Horse Heaven Hills … no irrigation system in sight, a few trees by the gully …
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
