In the Owls' Lee

According to today's Washington Post, Owlsley (I cannot help pronouncing it that way) just died. He was the guy who manufactured vast quantities of acid, kick-starting whatever it was that roiled up in late-1960s America. Although this was not one of their featured stories (in fact, I could not find it on the home page), it was among the Top 5 Most Popular stories. Nearly 50 years later, the psychedaelic flashtershocks can crest where you least expect them.

I was not part of that. LSD is too powerful for mind like mine. But for Owsley fans few photos of Mount Baker from the southwest tip of the peninsula that is the northwest tip of the Lower 48. You can rest assured that within the frame of each shot, there are hundreds of owls and probably quite a few Lees.

Or, how about realizing that as you gaze at the mountain, this is right behind you?

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.