Columbia River gorge (journal entry)

On Wednesday [July 15] Eleanor Ritter and I drove ninety miles along the Columbia River, through a densely forested gorge and then on into high desert, where the basaltic rock formations and the upland vineyards, orchards, and ranches replace the dark forests that seem both eternal and fertile. From the top of Horsethief Butte you can see miles of the river in both directions and also Mt. Hood, which rises thousands of feet above the treeline into glacier and snow and which reminded me of the spiritual promise of a Mt. Fujiyama or Kilimanjaro.

In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest one sees astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many with tiny blossoms of white or pink. This plant life is sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way seems more precious, a bolder assertion of 'the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world' (Thoreau) in places that seem, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves do not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggests a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.

This idea (that spirit is immanent in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus. The variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one--are these presences all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence.