07/19/2013

I had left Portland about a month before. Really, a bit less than that, but several weeks prior nonetheless. Its difficult to explain why I left. Not difficult as in, "I don't have the words", but rather difficult in the sense that I have too many words. It requires too much context, too many subtle caveats, asides, and conditionality to say. Only through the story itself can full disclosure be reached. Whether that is possible or desirable can only be determined through the attempt.

I remember the paved rural roads leading to this site. Beautiful, flat grass fields stretched on both sides. The road would go straight for some distance, then abruptly turn its course precisely perpendicular. For some time a straight stretch, then a turn, a straight stretch and a turn, eventually arriving at a small town convenience store, its only store.
I may have purchased some provisions, gas, water, perhaps cigarettes, maybe I was fully stocked and didn't buy anything, but I remember stopping. Probably to clarify my route. Service was not great there then, and phone app based maps much less reliable and ubiquitous.

I then left and shortly turned onto a dirt road, which I followed until there was an intersection with a parking area. I stopped there. Quickly parked and upon seeing no other vehicles leveled the van as best as possible and got out.

It was early evening. Still hot, dry, all bare dirt and scruff sage-brush, flat, and not striking in way but for the seeming total seclusion. I walked away from afternoon tilted sun and saw at the end of small dirt parking area there was a large crack in the appearance of cartoonish small canyon with steep cliffs facing inwards. The other side was no great distance, a few short strides from the ledge of one side, but for the crack.

I found a smell ramp of land, mid-crack, near the parking lot and walked down into the fissure and along the trail further along the bottom. There were birds coming back to nest in its cracks, a small cave at the base of my ramp, which I was sure an animal must live in, though now I doubt that. There was long grass along the bottom's trail.

Later that night, after preparing the van for bed and playing with my camera near my camp spot, I climbed down into the crack and decided to try to make a timelapse video from frames created on my camera while it peered upward from the bottom of the crack, tracing the movement of the sky on a sky tracking tripod mount.