THIS is where I was doing fieldwork, yesterday
afternoon. We’re looking South upstream, in the great
Snake River Canyon, about 20 or 30 k upstream from
the famous Hells Canyon, the deepest in North America.
I come here often. When I’m not up in the still deep
winter Wallowas North of here, only but 20 k as the crow
flies, or doing hour after hour of digital darkroom
and webwork at my little Office in Eagle Valley, I bike
up here to get away from this highly questionable 24/7
timespace of the web and the long and dirty tail
of internet non-stop commerce and self-promotion.
Here, in a space that the culture of the EuroAmerican has
not been able to deal with very well, time moves very
much more slowly. And it is at 1200 m., but the second
or third week of fresh and wonderful canyon spring.
The Lomatiums are out. The Bunchgrasses are greening up.
The Phloxes are at their prime. The Balsamroot leaves are
just appearing, flower buds still tightly closed.
This is country with immense silence and breadth of spirit.
There’s nothing like it, as far as I know, in Europe. (And
I do know and love the European mountains. I in some ways
feel very much more at home there with the indigenous
Mountain Farmers and their highly adapted and rugged
alpine lifestyle.)
This, it seems to me, is why the European mind, when
it was confronted with the greatness of the spirit of
this space, did not know what to do with it. Except dam it.
Tying the river up in knot after knot. All 1600 k of it,
longer than the Rhein, and yet a part of the greater Columbia
Watershed. And putting up barbed-wire fences that follow
the most insane and arbitrary and fragmented of lines.
This is why I refuse to call it the Snake River.
It is for me the MUTED SNAKE, but an echo of its real
self. Like playing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring half tempo
under a blanket of damp wool. Like comparing the fierce
rhetoric of a Socrates or Martin King to the contemporary
disingenuous political oratory of thinly-vieled corporate
obfuscation and self-interest.
On the way back down to my Office, running a bit near
out of control on mile after mile of steep, rough. loose
gravel, I nearly ran over a small rattle snake square in
the middle of the road. They move slow, very slow this
time of year. Lucky for me. And for him. Just missed it.
I love this country. My prayer is only that we
my change course as a culture, and give up the ways
of force and violence which shape and condition all
of our relationships, whether between ourselves, or with
the living Earth. It is, after all, a change
which has the natural energy of logical necessity
behind it.
And well:—There’s no way in Hell you can build a dam
around that!
South Wallowas, Oregon / Idaho Border . . .
http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/muted-snake_4-23-11.html