Fall Furrows

It seemed to this urban-dwelling sporadic observer that the wheat came in a little late this year. So it was under an Autumnally enlightened sunset that Route 2 treated me to a beautiful furrow show. Some people hear and speak a mass, others light something or other at a temple, and rumors hint at a thousand other rituals fearsome or enticing. My own thousand rituals include this: shooting straight as an atlatl dart across loessy plains, following the sun homeward as it's last rays summon every modest rise and dip, relieving the land of its be-dulled flatness and waking colors whose brevity and intensity capture a beauty hidden by the rays of the livelong day. 

Lest only my prose be purple, I add this photo.

The flow from day-yellow through all the flame-pallete licks of orange-red and purplescence to night-blue, this refusal to sit still or reduce itself to on/off digitized dichotomy, reminds me that the world's hard margins are illusory. At the edge of day and night, dark and light dance, sitting still only in the snapshot, not the reality. The penumbral Cascades spill across the Plateau, light kisses one side of a furrow as the other yawns toward slumber, the observer is hard pressed to pin down a pivot point. The wind often slackens, there may be an instant of weightlessness as the boundary is transcended, but to look for the apex of the curve or that tick of the clock that switches from day to night is to kill the ritual. The odd photons Brownian bouncing through the dark cast the strongest light, even if they are hardest to see. 

The sidewise gaze of light late in the day and year catches the ripples that hide under mid-day sun. Waves appear, embodying the songs of the landscape, from the basso profundo of Tahoma and the full symphony of Cascadian peaks to the lilting riffs of loess. And then, atop it all on the loessy lands either side of Moses Coulee, the furrows plowed by man like grooves in an old vinyl record in numbers sufficient to go platinum on the charts, top of (and feeder of) the pops. Some of it bland and straight as formula Top 40 can be, but othertimes looping hills and meandering dales, whorling like the fingerprint of Coltrane or Hendrix.

Watercolor Spring

Excuse me, while I brush the sky

Seasons echo themselves. Not just from one year to the next, but deep in the -ness. Spring unfurls, hurls echoes of itself as the blooming of flowers, of leaves and  fronds, of eggs bearing Spring chickens and flower-scented air spurring mating season. At the fat fractal base, a reaching of life out onto the huddled greyscape of a temperate Winter.  Spring is Open(ing) Season.


As such, psychedaelians appreciate it, perhaps none more than here in the Northwest, where sunshine daydreamy days induce long blissful sighs from fabulous fuzzy mammals pleased to be free of wintry darkness and the dankness of wet season. Last week, I heard an echo of this on Grateful Dead & Friends, a show on KBOO radio.


Often as not, peoples' minds bend toward California when they think of hippies, and the Dead are at the Bay Area epicenter of this perceptual vortex . No arguing that. But furthur north than Northern California, in the Oregon of Kesey and the Washington of Hendrix, psychedaelia blossoms as well. 


Especially in Spring, to echo myself. From the southernmost tip of Washington, I drove up out of the Columbia valley with a Help-Slipknot-Franklin's prechoing out of the speakers. [That hyphenated thing is Deadhead shorthand for a three-song medley, in case you've not conversed with this tribe. Deadheads are also into encyclopaedic knowledge of their priestly class and lore, as evidenced this day in the DJ's question--the answerer of which would score tickets to a Furthur (ie, post Garcia) concert!--which was "What's unique about this Help-Slip-Franklin's?" I think the answer was that whatever show he was playing was the first time the Dead had played that particular combination, although the guy was open to there being other answers, 'cause competitive encyclopaedism doesn't have to devolve into fascism, man. But I digress.]


So as it slips into the middle of the medley, I settle into interstate pace on my instrastate drive, and the landscape flows by. Against the dark evergreen background, maples and alders and cottonwoods have appeared into the scene, watercolor reds yellows greens and in-betweens where a couple months before they'd been retreated into grey invisibility. Leaves and sheathes may not fit the saturated vivids we associate with the psychedaelic pallete, but ephemerality and life force are not to be dismissed as color flavorings. Splashed here and there on this quiet tableau, occasionally inexplicable daffodil patches and explosions of cherry blossoms make sure all is not subtle. Meanwhile, sunbeams and liquid clouds dance and share the sky, and the white stripes underfly my red Ford hood. 

By now, they're into Franklin's Tower, the last song. "Roll away the dew" refrains again and again on the recording, and you can hear the crowd. If you are experienced, your body feels the memory of that moment when unison converged on these few words of hope and emergence. Being peripheral to deadheadery at the time I heard this chorus in concert (if I even heard it at all, this  could be false memory talking), I think  I thought the words were "Roll away the doom," which works as an echo for sound and meaning, I guess. Better, even, if you like your watercolor with  some morning dew.

Oh Mylar

Washington boasts more geologic, biologic, and cultural diversity than most states. But like all states and throughout itself, there is the commonality of trash.

To this compunction of humans, none more than Americans, to this trail of lost things, abandoned stuff, and outright garbage, to these leavings I owe my livelihood. Even older, wiser cultures left traces, heaps of it in places where they congregated with more than immediate relatives and stayed awhile. We've come a ways since bottoming out on the burning Cuyahoga, but even in 2012, a great many under the spell of Mayan and Christian Apocalypse hucksters, we create trash day in and day out.

It used to be, garbage pretty much stayed around the house. Standard practice in Euro-America was to just toss stuff into the yard. Whatever didn't feed sow, fowl, or microbia got kicked around until disappearing into the brush and eventually the soil (because the microbia will get their way, nearly always). My grandparents were born on farms that dealt with trash by burning it, tossing it in an old cellar, or hauling it off to the swamp-edge of the field. I don't know this for a fact, but in between just throwing stuff out the back door and having it hauled or barged off to god knows where, it's a pretty safe bet that refuse didn't travel too far.

Over the 20th Century, urbanizing America took to hauling rubbish to landfills in some place without clout.  Garbage went global. Not for everyone, but post-WWII American cities extrude waste streams unequaled, eventually across international borders and into the deep blue sea.

And ever since about half past Reagan, into the deep blue sky. In the form of mylar balloons that travel the winds and land far from the crying kids who loosed them. Before mylar, there were rubber ones, but they lose the helium faster and disintegrate a lot faster once they come to ground.


I've seen the flash of a Barney balloon in sagebrush and deep in the woods. Mylar emblazoned with princesses and "Happy Birthday" and "Get Well Soon" and "I Bought You Something That Will Soon Be Trash" turns up everywhere. Most of the state is more or less downwind of the population centers, but I don't know that they all come from Pugetopolis. One day, it would be nice to find one from Japan, I guess. 


As long as future archaeologists are able to identify these as helium balloons, they shouldn't be too confused. Except maybe to wonder what sort of ritual or status display led people to release so many tacky balloons into the winds. If mylar proves to be durable over the long run, it may be another chronological marker of our post-Classic period, before crazy excess went back to being rare. 

There may be a fairly sharp end date for mylar balloons, since helium is bound to become more expensive. That's at least partly because alleged Democrat Bill Clinton signed a 1996 law privatizing the industry and forcing the US Government to sell it's stockpile by 2015. But don't worry, with Texans controlling the reserves and corporations running the show, what could go wrong?

  

Moloka'i on the Columbia?

[Dredged from the Mojourner Truth archives, this was posted first as "Holy Bull" in 2008, back when Hawai'i events like the shutdown of Molokai Ranch orbited closer to my consciousness, and before I'd seen much of anything in the Northwest.]

 

Fear and loathing rains on Moloka`i. The Ranch just shut down, and 120 people lost jobs. Just like wiser people told me, that land trust ain't gonna happen. so neither is the subdivision. Read into that what you wish, for I'm only half-smart, a haole, and not even living Hawai`i nei anymore. I suppose you could count this as a victory for conservation, except that we have no guarantee that the next thing won't be far worse than 200 houses.

Far from there, this week I journeyed back east of the mountains for the first time since my Columbian descent in January. And when I got there, a guy who goes by my middle name took me site-seeing and surveying through a landscape that was Hawaiian-ish. Think Kaluako`i, Moloka`i, but sagebrush instead of kiawe and lantana, and sometimes the red silt is sand. But the same outcrops.

The first non-bovine photo here is also the first site I found in Washington. One of the 10 guys helping us survey cameup with the name "Lone Juniper," and you can see 1/3 from the left, halfway up, the lone juniper. The site is just to the right, and consisted of a couple hammerstones and some lithic debris. [NOTE: Hahahaha. The hammerstones turned out to be just a strange form of weathering. Analogy to Hawaiian artifact forms has limited value here.]

And it's not just the basaltic landscape and lithic scatters that seem familiar. Ahu happen here as well. One like a cupboard re-done to make a fowl-sniping blind, with old branches on top adding a height and cover. Another, closer to the river, has an amazing overview of what may have been the richest salmon river; it also has a nice split boulder, just like them Moloka`i shrines. Maybe us humans is all alike.

Anyhow, perched on one of the ahu was a basalt core (pictured). Fresh, as if some Hawaiian were still worshipping the adze god there. There is a certain clue to this un-altered photo that should tell you whether this is me in the frame.

The day before, we checked out some old farm sites on either side of a road through the plain. Then went up a soil-mantled talus to a little pali with four tiny c-shapes. Each big enough for a sniper, but nothing to stop the enemy from going around behind. not tall enough to be visible from far, or massive enough to support anything. each using outcrop for foundation, on brow above slope. Seen them on Moloka`i, too.

So far from Moloka`i, but still doing Molokine archaeology.