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War and Geology at the Coyote Wall

Sick of watching, reading and writing about yet another war, Lola and I took off  for one of my favorite retreats in the Pacific Northwest, variously called the Maze, the Syncline, or the Labyrinth, depending on who you first heard about it from. For me, it will always be known as the Coyote Wall, getting that name from my late friend Chuck Williams, who said the weird geology could only have been designed by the Great Trickster.

The Coyote Wall is situated near the exact point where the Columbia Gorge almost instantly transitions from temperate rainforest to high desert; as such, the landscape was a “power spot”, as Chuck put it, for the Columbia River tribes. (Chuck was a descendant of Chief Tumulth of the Cascades (Watlala) tribe.) There are vision pits and pictographs and petroglyphs all over this unique, wildly sloping part of the Gorge.

The weather was in the 40s with a whipping wind (it always howls here) and steady drizzle, but the high desert, with Black basalt formations extruding from the earth like the spines of a Stegosaurus, the rocks riven by slot canyons and hidden waterfalls, was already in bloom with grass widows, smooth prairie stars, desert parsley and white saxifrage.

A prairie falcon surveyed the scene below from a crag on the cliff, where condors, the great Thunderbirds of the Northwest, once perched and may yet again. The bird’s gaze was fixed on the Columbia and Memaloose Island, a burial ground for the River tribes, after the unrelenting plagues began killing their people starting in the 17th century, each successive wave of European diseases wiping out 60 to 90 percent of their populations.

But even here in this contemplative place, where there should only be the cry of the falcon, the laughter of coyotes and the wind whistling through the canyons, guns were going off around us–the unceasing assault on wildlife being the original forever war. As the photographer John Beaver told me the other day, we seem intent on blowing ourselves up and only geology will remain…

The trail into the Labyrinth.

Smooth Prairie Stars in bloom.

Lola at the edge of Hidden Canyon Falls.

Lola in Hidden Canyon.

Grass widows in bloom.

The terminus of the Coyote Wall.

Lola on the cliff above the Columbia River.

Shield and spiral pictographs, red ochre.

Yakima star petroglyph.

Lola in the Labyrinth.

Lola in the Labyrinth.

White saxifrage clinging to a basalt cliff.

Exiting the Labyrinth.

Spent condoms and stickers adorn a sign at the base of the Coyote Wall, warning that we’re all potential targets.

All photos by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

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