Bifurcation. No, It A Crew Fib.

Ah, homophony and loose spelling, you make palindromic(ish) titles possible.

But you cannot make them make sense. I do wanna talk about bifurcations, though. There's one in the photo above, which is in hills above the Columbia River at a couple thousand feet elevation, roughly. Fortuitous snowfall and gratuitous editing render this bifurcation as a Y on the hillside, a game trail splitting. The top one goes higher, and the other goes...


I don't really know where it goes. It passes an outcrop right about where hillside and horizon cross paths, and sometimes outcrops expose chert, which was useful for tools. But it probably heads into the draw, closer to cover and water. 


Anyway, the paths part ways. Archaeologists like myself and others who look at how humans and other animals use the land pay special attention to bifurcations in trails. Why does it split here? Do the two forks head to very different resources or destinations, does the point of separation show any signs of being a site, a spring, something else that would draw in beasties and bipeds? 


The forkal focal point is also a pivot. A bifurcation, viewed from the other direction, is a convergence. In the photo, two trails merge to one, headed to the Columbia. Heading up, the trails appear dendritic, branching to deer hide-outs and springs, root grounds and rock sources. Going down, they flow like tributaries, rivulets meeting to form creeks, streams, and rivers dumping into the big river at a village or fishing place. In the root season, trails headed out in various directions, allowing women to disperse to the many places they could dig. When the fish ran, the men could converge at the falls and pools where they were most easily plucked from the flow. 


Backing way off, getting the eagle's view, "bifurcation" looks too simple, and not just because of the palindromic perspective shifts. The parted ways may meet again. The paths up from the river do not simply branch and branch again. There are intersections, three and four-way splits, convergences and divergences of human and game routes. The bi- and trifurcations, once you are removed from their tangle, look more like nodes in a web, neurons in the collective animal brain. Each a dumb switch, maybe, but together a brilliant chaotic topology. The binary split/merge options of the trail-bound perspective become something more.


So, having branched off from my original tidy premise, I sputter to a halt. Trails do that sometimes.