Green Lake did not strike me as particularly green, or at least not when we were there. Perhaps earlier in the year green graces the lake’s banks and waters, yet for us it was in mourning of summer’s passing. White mud stretching ice-like all across the dry bed. Unmistakably a lake, yet the oddest sight to behold. Our group walked for about a mile through the dry scablands, sun warming our heads. When we first arrived, we rest on a hill overlooking the white flat plain.  After much pulling grasses out of our socks, we went down to investigate.

The Lake’s surface seemed covered in powered sugar. I could see the tall yellow grasses surrounding and decorating the lake. The grass near the lake was green and as it receded, the color turned from a bright green to a beautiful golden yellow. When observing the lake I couldn’t help but feel like an explorer. Like I had discovered something important past compare.

Beyond the lake are cliffs, boulders piled halfway up its base, massive, majestic, more than a hundred feet tall. I could not capture all three sides in one tiny photograph as much as I tried, and it is the cliffs that make this place as much as the lake itself. Jagged shapes appear on the cliff face, the rock is too brittle to climb yet I cannot help but imagine doing so. I would stand at the top and shout. Voice echoing out across the wide winding plain, and down below absorbed as if by felt. It is quiet on the floor of the lake. I find my instincts piqued, my ear expectant of some danger in silence such as this.

I ended up exploring the lake with my feet. Barefoot I could feel the soft first  layer, white as snow yet warmer than what lay beneath. As I stepped down I could feel the moist gushy mud molding around my foot, squeezing through the small cracks between my toes. Mud almost up to my knee, I could now feel my feet getting the warmth sucked out from them, and the cold darkness started to creep in. Wanting to keep going forward I pulled my leg out of the abyss and back to the surface. Walking on the surface of that lake was fascinating. The only thing comparable to it is a giant ice cream cake.

There was a chill in the air as the snake came out of a hole on the saddle.  The blood of the snake as cold as the earth beneath it.  The creature moved with a slowness that seemed as if the only thing moving it forward was the incline of the saddle.

The snake licked the air, searching for food or warmth, but warmth was hard to come by on the saddle, the season changing.  The snake found a shrub to twirl around, lifting its triangular head it lowered its body off the cliff of Umatilla.  It licked again furiously for some small taste of something, but no such luck.

A break in the ice, A rush of water too great to fathom, and now I share this place with a snake, slowing from the cold.  It is impossible, but it’s not.  I know something happened here that shaped this land in an outstanding way, but I can’t see it.  I see the snake, and the towering sides of the saddle, with their cracked surfaces. Umatilla rock built high above our camp and the lakes. These old brick like stones laid on top of each other, built too high to even make sense.

Slowly, almost infinitesimally, the snake slid in between the butte’s cracked rocks.  Disappearing under a cracked boulder that looked as if it had crushed itself under its own incredible weight.  The snake’s tail only rattled once as it hit a dried branch before it disappeared entirely from sight.

It is difficult to not be consumed by the vast and seemingly endless space out here at Dry Falls. I find myself searching for anything that will give me comfort: A pair of trusting and safe eyes or a friendly hello that echoes its way to my ears, but there is only thick silence. The air is dense with insects; each breath is protein-filled and uncomfortable. This factor makes the search for familiarity urgent. A pair of deer eyes find mine, observing my every move with a heightened sense of awareness and curiosity. The desire to find another human being is replaced with the excitement of life in any form acknowledging my existence. This interaction is short but satisfying, for it proves that if I can remove my urban-dwellers lens, I can see t his place as it is. It was then that I realized I was at a Spring in the middle of a desert/ex-mega-flood, staring intimately into the eyes of a deer. The lens that had kept me from experiencing the present moment began to flee. As I sat down in attempts to put this space into words, I wondered if this place had anything to say for itself. I wondered if this place could speak, what would it say?

“I am a home, to the quail and the deer and the basalt and the scab. I am a subjective land open for observation. I am a mystery, but only to the human eye. ”    

This mesa is very similar to the one East of the cabins that we explored the day before.  The plant life is similar and the ground is covered in the same basalt rock chunks and pale brown soil.  This one however is covered in longitudinal grooves that include there own slightly different ecosystems.  In the small valleys that these grooves form there are huge sage brushes and game trails winding through the relatively dense vegetation.  There are cattle hoof prints made when the soil was muddy, they are deep and offer shelter for spiders to build there webs in.  I feel exposed here and yearn for the safe secluded feeling I get in the valley.  Although the view is absolutely gorgeous I feel somewhat out of place as I see cars roaring down the highway.

Sunlight.  There is sun here.  I descend to the largest rock, giant and glowing in it.  Rocks of all sizes, twisting squares in layers neither random nor predictable, accrete protectively around this small home, bringing water here, ringing this curious sky.  I leave my rock to look under one of the larger bushes, finding some small seeds among the roots, blown here by the wind.  I smell the place where there is water.  I scurry up to the edge of this place in the mornings, watching others come and go, scattering their cans and poison and taking their fish and thoughts.  At night I curl into my safe, warm place in the dark rock, nestle my nose into my breastfur, and dream.

We have explored this place.  In the morning we set out on a long walk, snaking over bluffs and valleys, allowing our landscapes of thought and place to merge. Passing over, under, and through a barbed wire fence we wander up a grassy ravine toward a cliff. Droplets fall on our dirty heads and birds cry.

We take refuge from the storm under an outcropping, allowing ourselves to fall deeper into the trance. As the space between droplets increases we venture from the cave opening, pulled by the landscape up the cliff, over ridges and along the curving swales and ripples of the land. We come together quietly in an open circle of pebbles, taking our places to listen, beginning to feel our surroundings as we unclench our thinking minds and allow our senses to guide our perceptions.

Everything is round, flowing channels twisting and circulating, expanding and contracting.  It is easy to see the movement of water here. The rock escarpments break in tessellations, spreading and scattering. Sagebrush, grasses, bushes at edges of elevations, reeds and forbs in the potholes.

Everything grows in rings and patches.  We sit in a similar manner and are here.

Grasses in the wind

Land. It has seen 10,000 years of our past and has lived through more than we can know completely. Each rock tells its own story, carved with patterns of geologic lineage. In the valley below, boulders open to a barren, white circle. It is the residue of Green Lake, which has all but dried. Another ring of wet, this one nearly filled with cattails and tall grass: red alkali lake.

We set out in a circuitous path, a large group from the camp with our reality bunched up around us and slowly, as we walk over the land, through the air and plants, the bunches divide like cells and we begin to feel the place. To feel the desolation, to hear the solitary bee hum by. Rocks, grasses, dry flowers, knobby worried foreheads of giant stones buried in the soil. As we walk into the remains of green lake, cracked, alkali crusted earth swallows our boots and the fecund, complex scent of mud fills our senses. We sink in the mud, or try to balance on top of it, and it ripples beneath our weight: we feel the place.

Finding our own patterns in this place, we spread out. Some of us follow a path, some circle into a point, some scatter. We all find a place. We sit in a cave, high above the arid ground, perched like the golden eagle that peers down at us. Alkali lake is below, newly furnished with our footprints. Positive energy surrounds and fills us as we gaze out on the canyon below. Turning and looking into the cave, it is quite shallow, about 4 feet across. There is evidence of life here, and we too feel our place.

We explore the patterns further, encountering rocks, plants, tracks in the soil, growth spiraling into the center of red alkali lake. Inside the thicket, reeds fall on one another, following the evaporation rings of the lake, becoming thicker and thicker until they form an upside-down, giant woven basket. Clambering onto the basket, gently at first in a wobbly unsteadiness, we look to see the protective semicircle of the giant inner channel cataract.  Becoming quadruped, seeing the water circle to the center, we feel in place.

As we come back together and sit, the cells of our knowledge regroup, forming an organism of being: a living system of knowledge.

– Colin.

We walk along a seemingly endless road, with smiles on hand until we come upon Deep Lake. The lake is the ultimate symbolism of life itself; a green tint shows thriving algae and the reflection of Autumn’s deciduous trees are crystal clear in the water. As I walk to the end of the dock, I spot a cave about a half-mile away in the side of cliff and decide to pursue. The walk there is a bitch; wet sand crawls into my socks and a spider web tickles me every other step – I fucking hate spiders. Upon reaching the cave, we realize we were mistaken. What we thought was a cave is actually a tunnel that slips all the way through to the other side of this massive rock. For whatever reason, no one immediately checks what lies ahead, and everyone sits down, free-writing simultaneously. I notice this group of classmates barely knows one another, yet has an ability to silently communicate. Silence – a perfect time to convey thoughts, especially when the only pretty flower for miles sits next to you and is rooted inside a god damn rock of all places.  With rumps sore from writing on jagged rocks, we move on, into this mysterious tunnel. On the other side lays a pothole, no water, but plant life flourishes here. The place I thought this would be was a place I didn’t want to visit – another boring stretch of eastern, WA terrain. Yet, to all of our dismay, a roughly 75ft diameter pothole rests, the only green tree for quite a wander sleeps here, small caves probably sheltering slithering serpents are scattered throughout. Climbing the pothole to the peak, an absolutely vivid photo is branded into our heads – Deep Lake at its best. The reflection is even sharper than before, so perfect that we almost believe a cliff and trees are lying underwater. As if things couldn’t get better, the sun begins to seep through the atmospheric sheets and I feel comfortable in every sense of the word, and the instant I feel too warm, a light drizzle kisses me. Inside my notebook, words flow like the very breeze that grasps me.  Now, meditation, without proclamation. A place so unfamiliar to me, making me feel so wanted. The breeze, the sun, the rain, birds chirping… This place… It gives me permission to leave my body, permission to become one with it… This place… This place is my place.

I can fly…