Basalt Faces

& photos of the gorge

Wind carried the scent of damp soil, pine resin, and sweet moss down a sweeping corridor of soft light. Unrelenting rain floated weightlessly across the valley, gathering in shallow pools at our ears and raising the path beneath our feet. We moved against a thin layer of pebbles and flowing water as we climbed a serpentine trail, dark green branches stirred in their clay shadows, it was mid day but the light was encumbered by dense mist. The mountains looked North while rivers cut into their hunched backs uncovering basalt wounds and moss scars.

As we stepped further into the gorge the view became so clouded that the terrain appeared only close, lost otherwise against the decorated faces of the ravine. You were so afraid it was going to flood, but what was clear is that the flood had already come to merge with the land and stoke the rivers and streams. It was as if we were following along arteries toward some beating heart that could lay around every subsequent corner.

I’ll admit I too felt a tinge of fear, that of rocks careening down from places I couldn’t see, of animals seeking shelter within shadows, even more than that I feared the presence of strangers along the path, you can never know a strangers intentions. This fear carried me however, in a heightened state, further into the realm of the living. And soon I began to feel deeply in my core an ineffable sensation that we were both the rain and the river and there was no reason to be afraid.

As we continued further the path became more obscured by the hanging mist, in the hearth of alpine firs the shadows deepened. I remembered I might have been looking for something, there was supposed to be a waterfall, a delicate one, at a break in the river if we wandered far enough in. You were beginning to drag behind, I was moving ahead like an excited child trying to escape the limits of my small world. Just a little further I said, and you began to doubt me.

You were ready to turn back, but time had yet to run thin, I could still see the hands spinning beneath the thumb of the sawing river. And as we rounded another corner I could hear a faint roar growing with my every step, but what we encountered there was not the delicate falls I had expected, it was a violent, almost formless display against the moss covered walls of basalt, like a thousand syncopated hammers striking the river, thunderously ringing out into the gorge. As I stood at the foot of it for several minutes breathing the damp air, I felt the mountains looking over my shoulders.

Columbia River Gorge, Oregon ‘25