Episodit
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And now we return to our soundwalk series on quiet spots in the city. This is part two of two. But before we get to that, I’d just like to take a minute to reflect on my journey to get here.
On April 29, 2022 I released Chapman Beach Soundwalk. It was both extremely simple and, to me, experimental. It was in a nutshell a natural soundscape with musical soundtrack. I had no basis to believe that the idea would commercially viable, and to be honest, while it has shown promise, it hasn’t really caught on in a big way either. Still, I persuaded myself to keep doing it, as a practice. And so, here we are, two and a half years on, and we’ve come to soundwalk #50. Let me tell you, it is possible to be both proud and embarrassed at the same time. Proud because, well, fifty! Embarrassed because, well, you know—fifty. A string of 50 non-hits, if you will. At a good clip, too!
So, for #50, we are rediscovering Reed Canyon, another “hidden” natural area near downtown Portland, Oregon. Type it into a mapping app, and it won’t know where to go. This is because is not a nature park and is not public land. It’s on the Reed College campus, and thankfully, the campus welcomes neighbors, near and far, who enjoy walking the trails that wind around the canyon’s lake shore and through a wetland environment on its east end. The canyon was formed by Crystal Springs, which erupts from the broad plane of inner SE Portland next to huddle of buildings forming the Reed College Campus. According to a historical overview, surveys indicate Reed Lake is the oldest naturally occurring lake in Portland. That’s not saying an awful lot, as Portland topography isn’t especially dotted with lakes. It also depends on where you draw the city limits, of course. If anything, the city has filled in most of the lakes it once had, alongside the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.
Let’s go ahead and name those lakes, and when they were filled in, for posterity. I’d estimate Portland lost more than 75% of its total lake surface area in the last century.
Historical Lakes of Portland, Oregon
* Guild’s Lake c. 1913-1926
* Kittridge & Doane Lakes c. 1930
* Mud Lake c. 1930
* Switzler’s Lake & Columbia Slough unnamed lakes c.1930
* Ramsey Lake c. 1964
* Mock’s Bottom c. 1980
So, being able to walk around a natural lake in Portland anymore is a rare thing! And just to be clear, while the basin is natural, the Reed Lake water level has been maintained by a small dam built in 1929.
This walk takes place on a drizzly leap year day—February 29th—of this past year. Winter and Spring are perhaps my favorite seasons here. Waterfowl motor around. Mallards, Buffleheads, Hooded Mergansers, Wigeon, Gadwall, and Canada Geese are all common visitors. Huge flocks of geese sometimes wheel overhead, attracted to the all-you-can-eat lawn buffet the campus provides just over the canyon rim. Songbirds sound so sweet here in this intimate and reverberant canyon; you can easily forget that there’s a city all around you.
My composition features almost all solo performances of piano, unplugged Wurlitzer electric piano, a “soft clarinet” synth pad, and a “bottle” synth sound that I think sounds like droplets. Oh, and zither. All performed unrehearsed, warts and all. Why? Well, because, for now, it conveys what I want to convey; some alchemical expression forged in the naïveté—the grasping.
Part of me thinks I’ll eventually work myself out of a job here. Meaning, my music will become by degrees more spare and quiet and adrift that eventually all the will be left is the natural soundscape.
It reminds me of a trope of architecture writers that goes something like, “The design sought to blend seamlessly with the landscape.” It seems like four out off five articles in Dwell magazine used parade that one out. Meanwhile, walls of glass and rectilinear volumes were de rigueur. There’s a limit to the blending that can occur with that design language, and it’s far from “seamless”.
When you boil it down, I think it’s pretty common to try and convince other people you are doing something thoughtfully, when really we’re all just kind of clunky. Nothing is seamless. So why try and convince? Embrace Your Clunkiness! I say.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope you can spend some quiet time with Reed Canyon Soundwalk. Or better, head on over there in real life, if you can. It’s nice. You’ll like it.
Reed Canyon Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, September 20th.
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Welcome back. It’s a new season of Soundwalk, the album series / podcast / newsletter that transports you to sound-rich natural places via roving binaural audio field recordings paired to a melodic, ambient score. In this short two-part season we are discovering serene soundscapes within the city of Portland, Oregon. Thank you for tuning in!
See that dark green canyon in the foreground? That’s where we’re going to escape the sound of the city, within the city.
Every Portlander knows about Forest Park, the forested hillside roughly eight miles long and one mile wide, northwest of the city. Most Portlanders have visited it. In contrast, my guess is less than one in ten would be able to point to Marquam Nature Park on a map, and even less have visited.
Marquam is the “secret” nature park mere minutes from downtown. I’ve posted field recordings from here before, but this is the first soundwalk I’ve shared. What’s most noteworthy about this place to me is how quickly the canyon spirits you away from the hum of the city as you venture in. It’s really quite amazing. The city throbs at full volume just over the hill, and here—provided leaf blowers aren’t in use on residential properties along the bluff— you’ll find serene quiet; the twitter of birds, the murmur of streams.
At the park’s main gateway the visitor is greeted by a tile mosaic that forms an amphitheater. Inscribed in its depiction of park flora and fauna is this message:
Tranquility reminds us that we are a small part of nature in a place where listening and looking inspire us.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve become a bit extreme about sound. That is, I wonder if I’m peculiarly bothered by city noise or unusually thirsty for quiet refuges. This message hints to me that I’m not alone. “Tranquility” and “listening” strike me as potent and deliberate word choices. Unlike the new Forest Park entrance north of town, this one embraces the visitor and conveys them quickly to a natural, tranquil setting.
Thus, on our soundwalk from Mar 8th of this year, we encounter the sounds of Dark-eyed Junco, Chestnut-backed Chickadee, Pacific Wren, American Robin, Golden-crowned Kinglet and others all rising above the many creeks, streams and seeps we pass by on foot. At the 25 minute mark we come to a trail culvert spitting out water in a rhythm. It’s an unusual and entrancing sound, worth lingering on. A Pacific Wren sings in the distance. Junco trills percolate through the canyon. Synthesizers pulse and sweep in response. It’s a recipe for a reverie, if you’re open to it.
The instrumentation is comprised of piano, zither, and electric piano—all played solo—with occasional woodwind (clarinet & bass clarinet) and synth pad accompaniment. As always, it errs on the side of minimalism.
Marquam Nature Park Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, September 6th.
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Puuttuva jakso?
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Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
When I turned twenty-one in 1994, I embarked on a 500 mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail across the state of Washington. The Tread of My Soul is a memoir-meets-travelogue written from the trail. Originally self published and shared with only a handful of family and friends, I recently dusted off the manuscript with the intention of sharing it with a new generation, on the 30th anniversary of its completion. Among black bears, ravens and Indian paintbrush, I grappled with the meaning of life while traversing the spine of the Cascade range with a handful of pocket edition classics in tow. Quotes from sacred texts, poets, and naturalists punctuate a coming of age tale contemplated in the wilderness.
What follows is Part 1 of the book, squared off into four long Substack posts.
For this first post, I’m also exclusively including Pacific Crest Trail Soundwalk, featuring a binaural field recording captured while hiking the first few miles on the Pacific Crest Trail up out of the Columbia Gorge in Washington. (If you haven’t already, feel free to tap that play button at the top of the post.) The 26-minute composition cycles a triad of parts inspired by the letters PCT: part one in Phrygian mode (in E), part two in the key of C, and part three with Tritone substitutions. The instrumentation is outlined with Pianet electric piano, and colored in with synthesizer and intriguing pads built with a vaguely Appalachian mood in mind. It’s on the quieter side, in terms of wildlife, but all in all, I think it compliments the reading. It concludes with a pretty frog chorus so, like the book, I’m making it unrestricted, in the hope of enticing some readers to stick with it to the end.
If you prefer, you can find The Tread of My Soul in ebook format available for free right now on Apple Books or Amazon Kindle Store (free with Kindle Unlimited, points, or $2.99). If you read it and like it, please feel free to leave a review to help others find it. Thank you.
So, without further ado, here we go:
The Tread of My Soul
Coming of Age on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Chad Crouch
ACT 1
(AT RISE we see TEACHER and STUDENTS in an art studio. It is fall term; the sun is just beginning to set when class begins. Warm light washes the profiles of eight classmates. The wood floors are splashed with technicolor constellations of paint.)
TEACHER
Hello. Welcome to class. I find role taking a tiresome practice so we'll skip over that and get to the assignment. Here I have a two-inch square of paper for you. I would like you to put your soul on it. The assignment is due in five minutes. No further explanations will be given.
STUDENT #1
(makes eye contact with a STUDENT #4, a young woman. She wears a perplexed smile on her face.)
TEACHER
Here you go.
(hands out squares of paper.)
(People begin to work. Restlessness gives way to an almost reverence, except STUDENT #5 is scribbling to no end. The Students’ awareness of others fades imperceptibly inward. Five minutes pass quickly.)
TEACHER
Teacher: Are you ready? I'm interested to see what you've come up with.
(scuffle of some stools; the sound of a classroom reclaiming itself.)
TEACHER
What have you got there?
STUDENT #1
Well, I used half of the time just thinking. I was looking at my pencil and I thought…
(taps pencil on his knee, you see it is a mechanical model)
this will never do the trick. The idea of soul seemed too intense to be grasped with only graphite. So 1 poked a pin sized hole in the paper and wrote:
(reading voice)
“Hold paper up to sun, look into hole for soul.” That's all the further I got.
TEACHER
(looking at student #2)
And you?
STUDENT #2
(smiles)
Um, I didn't know what to do so all I have is a few specks where I was tapping my pen while I was thinking. This one…
(she points to a dot)
is all, um, all fuzzy because I was ready to draw something and I hesitated so the ink just ran…
(Students nod sympathetically. Attention goes to STUDENT #3)
STUDENT #3
I couldn’t deal with just one little blank square.
(holds paper up and flaps it around, listlessly)
So I started dividing.
(steadies and turns paper to reveal a graph.)
Now, I have lots of squares in which to put my soul in. I think of a soul as being multifaceted.
TEACHER
Okay. Thank you. Next…
(looking at student #4)
STUDENT #4
(without hesitation)
I just stepped on it.
(holds paper up to reveal the tread of a shoe sole in a multicolor print.)
The tread of my soul.
• • •
The writing that follows seems to have many of the same attributes as the students' responses to the problem posed in the preceding scene. While I have a lot more paper to work with, the problem remains the same: how do I express myself? How do I express the intangible and essential part of me that people call a soul? What is it wrapped up in? What doctrines, ideologies and memories help give it a shape?
I guess I identify mostly with Student #4. Her shoe-print “Tread of My Soul” alludes to my own process: walking over 500 miles on The Pacific Crest Trail from Oregon To Canada in the Cascade Mountain Range in Washington. In trying to describe my soul I found that useful to be literal. Where my narrative dips into memoir or philosophy I tried not to hesitate or overthink things. I tried to lay it all out.
Student #1's solution was evident in my own problem solving in how I constantly had to look elsewhere; into nature, into literature, and into symbology to even begin to bring out the depth of what I was thinking and feeling. Often the words of spiritual classics and of poetry are seen through my writing as if looking through a hole. I can only claim originality in where I poke the holes.
As for Student #2, I am afraid that my own problem solving doesn't evoke enough of her charm. For as much as I wanted to be thoughtful, I wanted also to be open and unstudied, tapping my pen. What I see has emerged, however, is at times argumentative. In retrospect I see that I had no recourse, really. My thoughts on God and Jesus were molded in a throng of letters, dialogues, experiences, and personal studies prior to writing this.
Finally, in the winter of my twenty-first year, as I set down to transcribe this book, I realize how necessary it was to hike. Student #3 had the same problem. The soul is complex and cannot fit into a box. Hiking gave me a cadence to begin to answer the question what is my soul? The trail made me mindful. There was the unceasing metaphor of the journey: I could only reach my goal incrementally. This tamed my writing sometimes. It wandered sometimes and I was at ease to let it. I had more than five minutes and a scrap of paper. I had each step.
• • •
The Bridge of the Gods looks like a behemoth Erector set project over the Columbia River spanning the natural border of Washington and Oregon. My question: what sort of Gods use Erector sets? Its name derives from an event in space and time; a landslide. The regional natives likely witnessed, in the last millennium, a landslide that temporarily dammed the Columbia effectually creating a bridge—The Bridge of the Gods. I just finished reading about why geologists think landslides are frequent in the gorge. Didn't say anything about Gods. How we name things, as humankind, has something to do with space and time doesn't it? Where once we call something The Bridge of the Gods it has been contemporarily reduced to landslide. We have new Gods now, and they compel us to do the work with erector sets. Or perhaps I mistook the name: It doesn't necessarily mean Gods made it. Perhaps Gods dwell there or frequent it. Or maybe it is a passageway that goes where the Gods go. It seems to me that if the Gods wanted to migrate from, say, Mt. Rainier in Washington to Mt. Hood in Oregon, they would probably follow the Cascade Ridge down to the Bridge of the Gods and cross there.
If so, I think I should like to see one, or maybe a whole herd of them like the caribou I saw in Alaska earlier this summer, strewn across the snow field like mahogany tables. Gods, I tend to think are more likely to be seen in the high places or thereabouts, after all,
The patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament behold the Lord face to face in the high places. For Moses it was Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo; in the New Testament it is the Mount of Olives and Golgotha. I went so far as to discover this ancient symbol of the mountain in the pyramid constructions of Egypt and Chaldea. Turning to the Aryans, I recalled those obscure legends of the Vedas in which the Soma—the 'nectar' that is in the 'seed of immortality' is said to reside in its luminous and subtle form 'within the mountain.' In India the Himalayas are the dwelling place of the Siva, of his spouse 'the Daughter of the Mountain,' and the 'Mothers' of all worlds, just as in Greece the king of the gods held court on Mt Olympus.
- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue
These days Gods don't go around making landslides every time they want to cross a river, much less perform a Jesus walking on the water miracle. That would be far too suspicious. Gods like to conceal themselves. A popular saying is "God helps those who help themselves." I think if Moses were alive today, Jehovah would have him build a bridge rather than part the waters.
Someone said, "Miracles take a lot of hard work." This is true.
• • •
Day 1.
Bridge of the Gods.
Exhausted, I pitch my tent on the side of the trail in the hot afternoon and crawl into to take a nap to avoid the annoying bugs.
My sweat leaves a dead person stamp on the taffeta floor.
Heavy pack. A vertical climb of 3200 ft.
Twelve miles. I heaved dry tears and wanted to vomit.
Dinner and camp on a saddle.
Food hard to stomach.
View of Adams and gorge.
Perhaps I am a naive pilgrim as I cross over this bridge, embarking on what I suppose will be a forty day and night journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, with the terminus in Canada. My mother gave me a box of animal crackers before my departure so I could leave “a trail of crumbs to return by.” The familiar classic Barnum’s red, yellow and blue box dangles from a carabineer of my expedition backpack
As I cross over the bridge I feel small, the pack bearing down on my hips, legs, knees, feet. I look past my feet, beyond the steel grid decking of the bridge, at the water below. Its green surface swirls. I wonder how many gallons are framed in each metal square and how many flow by in the instant I look?
How does the sea become the king of all streams?
Because it is lower than they!
Hence it is the king of all streams.
-Lao-tzu, Tao Teh Ching
On the Bridge of the Gods I begin my quest, gazing at my feet superimposed on the Columbia’s waters flowing toward the ocean. Our paths are divergent. Why is it that the water knows without a doubt where to go; to its humble Ocean King that embraces our planet in blue? I know no such path of least resistance to and feel at one with humankind. To the contrary, when we follow our paths of least resistance—following our family trees of religion, learning cultural norms—we end up worshipping different Gods. It is much easier for an Indian to revere Brahman than it is for I. It is much easier for me to worship Christ than it is for an Indian. These paths are determined geographically and socially.
It’s not without trepidation that I begin my journey. I want to turn from society and turn to what I believe to be impartial: the sweeping landscape.
With me I bring a small collection of pocket books representing different ideas of the soul. (Dhammapada, Duino Elegies, Tao Teh Ching, Song of Myself, Walden, Mount Analogue, and the Bible.) It isn’t that I want to renounce my faith. I turn to the wilderness, to see if I can’t make sense of it all.
I hike north. This is a fitting metaphor. The sun rises in the east and arcs over the south to the west. To the north is darkness. To the north my shadow is cast. Instinctively I want to probe this.
• • •
Day 2.
Hiked fourteen miles.
Three miles on a ridge and five descending brought me to Rock Creek.
I bathed in the pool. Shelves of fern on a wet rock wall.
Swaths of sunlight penetrating the leafy canopy.
Met one person.
Read and wrote and slept on a bed of moss.
Little appetite.
Began another ascent.
Fatigued, I cried and cursed out at the forest.
I saw a black bear descending through the brush
Before reaching a dark campsite.
I am setting records of fatigue for myself. I am a novice at hiking. Here is the situation: I have 150 miles to walk. Simple arithmetic agrees that if I average 15 miles a day it will take me 10 days to get to the post office in White Pass where I have mailed myself more food. I think I am carrying a sufficient amount of food to sustain my journey, although I’m uncertain because I have never backpacked for more than three consecutive days. The greatest contingency, it seems, is my strength: can I actually walk 15 miles a day with 60 pounds on my back in the mountains? Moreover, can I continue to rise and fall as much as I have? I have climbed a vertical distance of over 6000 feet in the first two days.
I begin to quantify my movement in terms of Sears Towers. I reason that if the Sears Tower is 1000 feet, I walked the stairs of it, up and down, six times. I am developing a language of abstract symbols to articulate my pain.
I dwell on my condition. I ask myself, are these thoughts intensified by my weakness or am I feeding my weakness with my thoughts?
I begin to think about God. Many saints believed by impoverishing their physical self, often by fasting, their spiritual self would increase as a result. Will my spirit awake as my body suffers?
I feet the lactic acid burning my muscle tissue. I begin to moan aloud. I do this for some time until, like a thunderclap, I unleash voice in the forest.
I say, "I CAN'T do this,” and "I CAN do this," in turn. I curse and call out "Where are you God? I've come to find you." Then I see the futility of my words. Scanning the forest: all is lush, verdant, solemn, still. My complaint is not registered here.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
I unstrap my pack and collapse into heap on the trail floor, curled up. I want to be still like the forest.
The forest makes a noise: Crack, crack, crack.
I think a deer must be traversing through the brush. I turn slowly to look in the direction of the sound. It’s close. Not twenty yards off judging from the noise.
I pick myself up to view the creature, and look breathlessly. It’s just below me in the ravine. Its shadowy black body dilates subtly as it breathes. What light falls on it seems to be soaked up, like a hole cut in the forest in the shape of an animal. It turns and looks at me with glassy eyes. It claims all my senses—I see, hear, feel, smell, taste nothing else--as I focus on the bear.
And so I hold myself back to swallow the call note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans and already the knowing animals are aware that we are really not at home in our interpreted world.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
Remembering what I read to do when encountering a bear, I raise my arms, making myself bigger. "Hello bear," I say, "Go away!"
With the rhythm of cracking branches, it does.
• • •
Day 3.
Hiked thirteen miles.
Descended to Trout Creek, thirsty.
Met a couple en route to Lake Tahoe.
Bathed in Panther Creek.
Saw the wind brushing the lower canopy of leaves on a hillside.
A fly landed on the hairs of my forearm and I,
Complacent,
Dreamt.
I awake in an unusual bed: a stream bed. A trickle of clear water ran over stones beneath me, down my center, as if to bisect me. And yet I was not wet. What, I wonder, is the significance of this dream?
The August sun had been relentless thus far on my journey. The heat combined with the effort involved in getting from one source of water to the next makes an arrival quite thrilling. If the water is deep enough for my body, even more so:
I undress... hurry me out of sight of land, cushion me soft... rock me in billowy drowse Dash me with amorous wet...
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
There is something electrifying and intensely renewing about swimming naked in a cold creek pool or mountain lake.
I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect; "renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again and forever again."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Is bathing, then, a spiritual exercise?
When I was baptized on June 15, 1985 in the tiled pool of our chapel in the Portland suburbs, I thought surely as I was submerged something extraordinary would happen, such as the face of Jesus would appear to me in the water. And I did do it—I opened my eyes under water— but saw only the blur of my pastor's white torso and the hanging ferns that framed the pool. I wondered: shouldn't a ceremony as significant as this feel more than just wet? I’m guessing that most children with exposure to religion often keep their eyes open for some sort of spectacular encounter with God, be it to punish or affirm them. (As a child, I remember sitting in front of the television thinking God could put a commercial on for heaven if he wanted to.)
Now, only ten years after I was baptized, I still keep my eyes open for God, though not contextually the same, not within a religion, not literally.
And when I swim in a clear creek pool, I feel communion, pure and alive. The small rounded stones are reminders of the ceaseless touch of water. Their blurry shapes embrace me in a way that the symbols and rites of the church fail to.
I hear and behold God in every object
Yet I understand God not in the least.
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
And unlike the doctrines and precepts of organized religion, I have never doubted my intrinsic bond to water.
And more-
For greater than all the joys
Of heaven and earth
Greater still than dominion
Over all worlds,
Is the joy of reaching the stream.
- Dhammapada, Sayings of the Buddha
• • •
Day 4.
Hiked fourteen miles. Climbed to a beautiful ridge.
Signs, yellow and black posted every 50 feet: "Experimental Forest"
Wound down to a campground where I met three people
As I stopped for lunch.
"Where does this trail go to?" he says. "Mexico," I say.
"Ha Ha," says he.
Camped at small Green Lake.
My body continues to evolve. My hair and fingernails grow and grow, and right now I've got four new teeth trying to find a seat in my mouth.
I turned twenty-one on August sixth. On August sixth, 1945 a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The world lost more people than it made that day. When I was born, I suspect we gained a few.
I'm an adult now, and I’m not sure where it happened or why. I wonder if someone had to stamp something somewhere because of it? A big red stamp that says "ADULT". It was a blind passage for me—just like those persons who evaporated at ground zero on August sixth, 49 years ago.
I do feel like I just evaporated into adulthood. I am aware of the traditional ceremony of turning twenty-one. Drinking. Contemporary society commemorates becoming an adult with this token privilege. Do you have any idea how fast alcohol evaporates? I am suggesting this: One’s response to this rite rarely affords any resolution or insight into growth. Our society commemorates the passage from child to adult with a fermented beverage.
I wanted to more deliberate about becoming an adult. Hence the second reason (behind a spiritual search) for this sojourn into the wilderness. I took my lead from the scriptures:
And he was in the desert forty days... He was with the wild animals and the angels attended him.
- Mark 1:13
Something about those forty days prepared Jesus for what we know of his adult life.
I also took my lead from Native Americans. Their rite of passage is called a vision quest, wherein the youth goes alone into the depth of nature for a few days to receive some sort of insight into being.
I look around me. I am alone here in the woods a few days after my birthday. Why? To discover those parts of me that want to be liberated. To draw the fragrant air into my lungs. To feel my place in nature.
…beneath each footfall with resolution.
I want to own every atom of myself in the present and be able to say:
Look I am living. On what? Neither
Childhood nor future grows any smaller....
Superabundant being wells up in my heart.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
• • •
Day 5.
Hiked to Bear Lake and swam.
Saw over a dozen people. Eighteen miles.
Watched raven fly from tree and listened.
Found frogs as little as my thumbnail.
Left Indian Heaven.
Surprise. My body is becoming acclimated to long distance hiking. I know because when I rest it is a luxury rather than a necessity.
The light is warmer and comes through the forest canopy at an acute angle from the west, illuminating the trunks of this relatively sparse old growth stand. I am laying on my back watching a raven at his common perch aloft in a dead Douglas fir.
It leaps into its court and flap its wings slowly, effortlessly navigating through the old wood pillars. The most spectacular sense of this, however, is the sound: a loud, slow, hollow thrum: Whoosh whoosh, whoosh.... It’s as if the interstices between each pulse are too long, too vacant to keep the creature airborne. Unlike its kind, this raven does not speak: there are no loud guttural croaks to be heard.
Northwest coastal tribes such as the Kwakiutl thought the croaks of a raven were prophetic and whoever could interpret them was a seer. Indeed, the mythic perception of ravens to be invested with knowledge and power is somewhat universal.
My raven is silent. And this is apt, for I tend to think the most authentic prophecies are silent, or near to it.
Great sound is silent.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
The contour of that sound and silence leaves a sublime impression on me.
• • •
Day 6.
Hiked twelve miles.
Many uphill, but not most.
Met several people.
One group looked like they were enjoying themselves—two families.
I spent the afternoon reading my natural history book on a bridge.
Voles (forest mice) relentlessly made efforts to infiltrate my food bag during the night.
I am reading about how to call a tree a “Pacific Silver Fir” or an “Engelmann Spruce” or “Western Larch” and so on. If something arouses my curiosity on my walk, I look in my natural history book to see if it has anything to say.
Jung said, "Sometimes a tree can teach you more than a book can."
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha was enlightened beneath a fig tree.
I read that a 316-year-old Ponderosa Pine east of Mt. Jefferson bears scars from 18 forest fires. Surely that tree taught us one thing a book couldn't. All things are clues. Everything is part of a complex tapestry of causality.
The grand design behind these mountains has something to do with plate tectonics. Beneath me the oceanic plate is diving beneath the continental at twenty to sixty degrees putting it well under the coastline to where it partially melts and forms magma. This has been happening for millions of years. Every once and a while this magma channels its way up to the surface, cools and turns into igneous rock. Again and again, this happens. Again and again, and yet again until a mountain is made; a stratovolcano.
Meanwhile, on top, water, glaciers, wind, and sun are trying to carry the mountains away grain by grain. Geologic time is as incomprehensible as it would be to imagine someone's life by looking at his or her gravestone. These mountains are gravestones.
Plants fight to keep the hillsides together. Plants and trees do. But every summer some of those trees, somewhere, are going to burn. Nature will not tolerate too much fuel. New trees will grow to replace those lost. Again and again. Eighteen times over and there we find our tree, a scarred Ponderosa Pine in the tapestry.
And every summer the flowers will bloom. The bees will come to pollinate them and cross-pollinate them: next year a new color will emerge.
And every summer the mammals named homo-sapiens-sapiens will come to the mountains to cut down trees, hike trails, and to put up yellow and black signs that read Boundary Experimental Forest U.S.F.S. placed evenly 100 yards apart so hikers are kept excessively informed about boundaries.
Here I am in the midst of this slow-motion interplay of nature. I walk by thousands of trees daily. Sometimes I see just one, sometimes the blur of thousands. It is not so much that a tree teaches me more than a book; rather it conjures up in me the copious leagues of books unwritten. And, I know somewhere inside that I participate. What more hope could a tree offer? What more hope could you find in a gravestone?
• • •
Day 7.
Hiked twenty miles in Alpine country near Mt Adams.
More flowers—fields of them. Saw owl. Saw elk.
Wrote near cascading creek.
Enjoyed walking. Appetite is robust.
Camped at Lave Spring.
Saw six to ten folks.
Didn't talk too much.
Before I was baptized, during the announcements, there was a tremendous screech culminating in a loud cumbf! This is a sound which can be translated here as metal and glass crumpling and shattering in an instant to absorb the forces of automobiles colliding.
In the subsequent prayer, the pastor made mention of the crash, which happened on the very same corner of the chapel, and prayed to God that He might spare those people of injury.
As it turns the peculiarly memorable sound was that of our family automobile folding into itself, and it was either through prayer or her seat belt that no harm came to my sister who was driving it.
Poor thing. She just was going to get some donuts. Do you know why? Because I missed my appointment with baptism. There is time in most church services when people go to the front to (1.) confess their sin, (2.) confess their faith in Christ as their only personal savior, and (3.) to receive Him. This is what is known as the “Altar Call”. To the embarrassment of my parents (for I recall the plan was for one of them to escort me to the front) the Alter Call cue—a specific prayer and hymn—was missed and I sat expectant till the service end. The solution was to attend the subsequent service and try harder.
I don't recall my entire understanding of God and Jesus then, at age eleven, but I do remember arriving at a version of Pascal’s reductive decision tree that there are four possibilities regarding my death and salvation:
1. Jesus is truly the savior of mankind and I claim him and I go to heaven, or
2. Jesus is truly the savior of mankind and I don’t claim him and I end up in hell, or
3. Jesus isn't the savior of mankind and I die having lived a somewhat virtuous life in trying to model myself after him, or
4. Jesus isn't the savior of mankind and I didn't believe it anyhow.
My sister, fresh with an Oregon drivers license, thought one dose of church was enough for her and, being hungry, went out for donuts and failed to yield.
Cumbf!
Someone came into the chapel to inform us. We all went out to the accident. The cars were smashed and askew, and my sister was a bawling, rocking little lump on the side of the street. We attended to her, calmed her, and realized there was yet time for me to get baptized. We went into the church and waited patiently for the hymn we had mentally earmarked and then I was baptized.
I look back on the calamities of that day affectionately.
Prize calamities as your own body.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
Those events that surrounded the ritual decry a ceremony so commonplace one often misses the extraordinariness of it; of humanity; the embarrassment of my parents; the frustration and impetuous flight of my sister; and the sympathy and furrowed brow of our pastor. These events unwind in my head like a black and white silent film of Keystone Cops with a church organ revival hymn for the soundtrack. There was something almost slapstick about how that morning unfolded, and once the dust had settled and the family was relating the story to my grandmother later that day, we began to find the humor in it.
Hitting things and missing things and this is sacred. All of it.
Because our body is the very source of our calamities,
If we have no body, what calamities can we have?
- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
Most religions see the body as temporal and the soul as eternal. Hence, 13th century monks cloistered themselves up denying their bodies space and interaction that their souls might be enhanced.
I see it this way: No one denies their bodily existence, do they? Look, your own hand holds this book. Why do you exist? You exist right now, inherently, to hold a book, and to feel the manifold sensations of the moment.
If this isn't enough of a reason, adjust.
I've heard it said, "Stop living in the way of the world, live in the way of God."
My reply: "Before I was baptized, I heard a cumbf, and it was in the world and I couldn’t ignore it. I’m not convinced we would have a world if we weren't supposed to live in the way of it."
Thanks for reading Soundwalk! This is Part One of my 1994 travelogue-meets-memoir The Tread of My Soul. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Or find the eBook at Apple Books or Amazon Kindle Store.
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For our last soundwalk we are returning to the banks of Onion Creek, taking in McKinney Falls and its environs. It’s been a whirlwind four stop soundwalk tour of greater Austin, TX. Spring mornings in this part of the country are hard to beat!
McKinney Falls lies within a 641 acre state park where Onion Creek plunges over amphitheater-like limestone ledges. Our soundwalk route connects the upper and lower falls by way of a trail that leads through an overhanging rock shelter, and across a broad limestone plane.
Artifacts found in McKinney Falls State Park in Austin show Indigenous people inhabited the area starting 9,000 years ago. The names of the early groups are unknown, but it is believed the Tonkawa, among others, descended from them. (texashighways.com)
My instrumental arrangement for woodwinds, synthesizer, harp, zither, and celeste floats lazily along with the songs of Northern Cardinal, White-eyed Vireo, Red-breasted Woodpecker, and Black-crested Titmouse in the scenic canyon.
Thank you for listening and joining me on this chapter of Soundwalk in central Texas. For our next season, we return to Portland, Oregon in search of the quietest natural places in my home city.
McKinney Falls Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, August 16th.
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We have decamped from the inner rings of Austin to the suburb of Round Rock, TX. It’s April 7th, 2023.
When I’m scouting a map for a good place to record a soundwalk, I look for trails through natural areas that have some sort of buffer in the way topography or distance from highways and arterial roads. In Round Rock, one of those places is the Brushy Creek Regional Trail, and the buffer, as it turns out, is the enormous property on which was built the Kalahari Resort, presently America’s largest indoor water park.
How big? The resort compound boasts a total of 1.5 million square feet of indoor space. The water park is 223,000 sf with 30 water slides and 20 pools. The hotel has 975 rooms and suites. The site also boasts an 80,000 sf adventure park, a 200,000 sf convention center, a 10,000 sf shopping area, 20 dining outlets, and a spa & salon. It is a small encapsulated city.
Now, I’m not here to judge Kalahari Resort. Well, maybe a little. I mean it strikes me as kind of a landlocked cruise ship, recalling in some respects the Axiom Space Cruiser from the movie Wall-E, with its always-72˚ razzle-dazzle cocooned-ness, but I haven’t been there, and I happen to have fond memories of water parks.
When I was in the 6th grade I travelled with my dad to Orlando, Florida. It was the only flight I was took as a child. Disneyworld and EPCOT were fun, but Wet’n’Wild, one of the country’s first modern water parks, really excited me and captured my imagination.
Back to the soundwalk. I was strolling along the paved path, and I glanced over in the direction of the creek canyon. Under a flimsy wire fence, a stormwater spillway led down to smooth rocky basin that Brushy Creek meandered through. I skittered carefully down the slide and was transported to a magical place. The light glittered on the riffling water. A Snowy Egret stood sentinel. Cardinal song ricocheted off the stone walls. I couldn’t help but feel like I walked into a superior water park, admission-free. I mean it wasn’t a thrill ride, obviously, but it engaged my senses, and offered its own kind of thrills.
Now if I told you that clip was from a national park, would you question it? I mean c’mon. It’s glorious! It’s priceless! And it its hidden between the nation’s largest water park and a suburban development.
I love finding these overlooked spaces: undeveloped, sometimes difficult to access, tucked into the fabric of our civilizations. I encourage you to look at maps of your own region for quirky public spaces that might offer a sense of refuge and discovery in the midst of so much sprawl.
Lastly, a word about the music. The backbone of the arrangement is a wobbly, stylized Wurlitzer electric piano. Plucky (mandolin, zither, “Panjo”) and fuzzy (synthesizer) sounds are latched to this scaffolding in turns. Some parts are sparser than others. Generally speaking it’s all melodic, sometimes concretely, sometimes vaguely.
This was a very memorable walk and I’m happy to share it with you! Thanks for listening.
Brushy Creek Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, August 2nd.
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We are in Austin, TX again, at Onion Creek Metropolitan Park on a mild spring morning. It’s April 5, 2024.
Onion Creek Greenway Trail follows a large “S” curve along Onion Creek on the semi-suburban south side of Austin, Texas. Located about two miles from the closest strand of Austin’s web of highways, it is one of the more serene riparian destinations within the city limits.
It’s a popular place to walk dogs or go for a jog. The trailhead I arrived at even had a barista / food cart. Getting off the main trail will afford the visitor a quiet, intimate experience with the creek and wildlife. There’s a fair amount of human history here too if you know where to look, dating back thousands of years to the El Camino Real period and presence of Coahuiltecan Native Americans.
Onion Creek Metropolitan Park owes its existence to a more recent history of ill-fated development and flood events culminating in The Halloween Flood of 2013:
Austin received over 10 inches of rain during a single 24-hour period. Onion Creek rose by 11 feet in a mere 15 minutes and eventually hit an all-time high of 41 feet (topping a 1921 record by three feet). Water coursed through it at twice the velocity of Niagara Falls—enough to easily topple houses and trees, and move multi-ton objects like boulders and automobiles. The Halloween flood killed five people and damaged over 1,200 houses.
The houses that once stood in the area were demolished but a patchwork of “ghost streets” that once served them remain, offering visitors a view of the slow process of residential re-wilding (and/or recreational redevelopment).
Unlike the ghost towns of the previous century, which were built to extract one local resource, these ghost streets may offer a window into the future, where residential areas are abandoned after flood events owing to more frequent and intense storms, or erosion from sea level rise, or conversely, water scarcity making some places simply too impractical to inhabit.
It’s a reminder to live in the moment, to cultivate non-attatchment to things, and consider the adaptive strategies of wildlife.
Despite its origin near the site of a
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I couldn’t really do what I set out to do yesterday. It was too hot in the city, so I went for an afternoon walk in Forest Park. I was interested to hear what it sounded like when the thermometer hit triple digits; something it rarely used to do around here.
It was quiet. Did I say it was hot? Instinctively I wanted to be near water. I figured the wildlife did too. Many hillside streams were dry as a bone, but I eventually reached one with a trickling flow. I soaked in the ambience before heading back to civilization.
Summer might have been my favorite season as a child. Not any more. Heatwaves and forest fire smoke makes me anxious these days. Thankfully we’ve been spared the latter so far this season. Doing something with my hands offers some solace. Finding my way through a composition gave me something to focus on. Voila; a very hushed 20 minute soundwalk and a minimal keyboard mediation for hot days in a warming world.
My go-to (virtual instrument) keys have been the Hohner Pianet T lately, the least famous of the 60’s and 70’s electric pianos. I just Googled “songs with Pianet” and interestingly “Louie, Louie” by The Kingsmen topped the list; probably the most famous act to hail from Portland in the 60’s. I have to say the instrument doesn’t really stand out in that song though. It appears on several Beatles songs as well. I just like its mellow tones.
But I digress. To break it up, I sprinkled in some celeste and Korg Prototype 8 keys during the streamside passage. A solo performance throughout. Enjoy!
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I had scheduled this for the U.S. July 4th holiday tomorrow, but I’m second-guessing that now and pressing send with unrestricted access. Perhaps this can offer some counter-programming to the sometimes overbearing or militant sounds of fireworks, or be a balm to those who are traveling and might feel unsettled right now.
Why not make it a two-fer? I also just shared a spacious dawn chorus soundscape field recording I made recently at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
For the next four installments of Soundwalk we are traveling to Texas in the springtime. After several soundwalks with sparse birdsong, I’m ready for migration sounds. How about you?
Texas hill country in springtime is pretty great. The morning air is mild and sweet. The birdsong is exotic to my western North American ears. Flowers are in bloom. I get the draw. I wasn’t missing cold, rainy Oregon that morning.
Barton Creek Greenbelt is in the inner rings of southeast Austin, TX, but it feels like a world apart from the city. Sure there’s the hum of the highway that’s not far off, but it’s pretty easy to tune out, and in some reaches of the canyon, altogether missing.
I visited April 4th. There was no water in the creek bed due to ongoing drought conditions, but the shrubs and grasses were spring green amongst the canopy dominated by live Oak. The lack of water in the soundscape gave the bird and insect sounds more presence.
For a lot of songbirds in North America there are western and eastern analogues. Eastern Wood-Pewee: Western Wood Pewee, Carolina Chickadee: Black-capped Chickadee, Carolina Wren: Bewick’s Wren. What the west does not have is its own version of the Northern Cardinal. (We also don’t get Grackles and lots of other widespread eastern birds.) The Northern Cardinal is just such a superstar of the bird world. It’s a noteworthy absence. The closest thing we have to the Cardinal might be the Lazuli Bunting, a distant cousin in the cardinalae family. Like the Northern Cardinal, the male is painted vibrantly. Instead of crimson, it has a sky-blue hood that dazzles the eye. But it’s not really a backyard bird, so it’s observed less frequently. Furthermore, its repertoire of songs and calls is limited in comparison, and a bit busy-sounding.
There’s a lot going on in this soundscape, but the Northern Cardinal, I would say, is really the star of the show with its sweet cheer, cheer, cheer and birdie, birdie, birdie layering on from many coordinates.
My instrumental score is dominated by a Wurlitzer electric piano, leaving room for the avian frequencies throughout. Gauzy strings and synth layers sweep in and out with watercolor broad-strokes. Occasional glockenspiel and zither offer some filigree.
It’s a good introduction for what’s to come, and brings me joy to share it with you! Thanks for reading and listening!
Barton Creek Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, July 5th.
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If a spark bird is a gateway to an interest in birding, then a spark place, I’d posit, is a gateway to a connection with nature. These places sometimes inspire writers. Think Thoreau and Walden, Annie Dillard and Tinker Creek, Aldo Leopold and Sauk County. My spark place in the last decade was Oaks Bottom, and for me it inspired music.
It was an affair of convenience, to start. Conveniently located in central SE Portland, the 163-acre wildlife refuge and nature park was on the route to my child’s school. I’ve taken thousands of photos there. I’ve made hundreds of field recordings. I’ve observed and contemplated its changes through the seasons and years, for most of a decade.
So it was with a mix of complex emotions that I visited on the last day of school on the last year that my child will attend school nearby. I will continue to visit it of course, but it will be much less convenient to do so. Much less routine.
In the section of the field recording that I chose to use for this piece you hear me walking on the trail, then stopping by an area I call “the coves” alongside the large pond, to sit on a rock for about 15 minutes and soak it all in. This rock is right beside the trail, at the base of a bluff. A concrete eight-story Mausoleum looms above, standing next to a primary schoolyard. The 50’ tall, windowless wall of the mausoleum acts as sounding board reflecting the children’s voices down the embankment. In the foreground of the soundscape are the morning sounds of creatures who find what they need here. Song Sparrows, House Finches, Black-capped Chickadees, Spotted Towhees, Crows, Red-breasted Nuthatches, Cedar Waxwings, Great Blue Herons, and Mallards with softly twittering ducklings.
In a stylistic break, I chose not to interrupt the soundscape recording with musical accompaniment for the first five minutes. I guess I’m thinking of this interval as a deliberate acclimation phase for the musical accompaniment section. When the music does enter, I meander my way through a solo performance for Pianet electric piano consisting of 9 parts; one for each year I made the cross-town pilgrimage. The reverberant children’s voices struck me more deeply than they usually do, and I tried to convey that in the piano performance. What can I say about it? It’s performed in my way; which is to say it’s tender and naive, and just my fingers communicating something words can’t quite get at.
Thanks for listening, reading, and allowing me to share my story and music. I hope it brings you some enjoyment and reflection.
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Well friends, we’ve come to the end of another chapter in our Soundwalk journeys. For our final installment in the series on Mount Hood—Oregon’s tallest stratovolcano (at 11,249’)—we are taking in Larch Mountain.
While technically just outside the confines of the Mount Hood National Forest, Larch Mountain offers a gorgeous view of Wy’east, the Native American name for Mount Hood.
Right? Oh man, what a beauty!
It was an interesting confluence of events that drew me out to Larch Mountain on Oct 31, 2023. It was the last day to drive the road up there before it closed for the season. Also, I was peripherally aware that Grey-crowned Rosy Finches were spotted in the area; a rarity for the county. Mind you, I never heard of Grey-crowned Rosy Finches until a couple days prior, and I’m not usually a rare bird chaser, but the time and space opened up so I drove up there.
It was a beautiful partly-cloudy day. There were patches of snow on the ground; a crunch crunch under foot. So quiet!
Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Golden-crowned Kinglets and a Red-breasted Nuthatches meandered through the canopy. Chipmunks chattered. Red Crossbills called out in flight. I did see the Grey-crowned Rosy Finches far below me from Sherrard Point (where I took that photo of Mount Hood) but they never got close enough for a decent photo.
Larch Mountain was developed as a tourist attraction / forest service lookout in 1915 when the first tower and hiking trail were constructed. It was a hard-earned view. The 13.3 mile trail (out and back) climbed 4000 feet up from the iconic Multnomah Falls to the summit of Larch Mountain. At that time most visitors would have arrived by train to Multnomah Falls. The Historic Columbia River Highway opened to automobiles in the early 1920’s. Today, while the one mile trail up to the top Multnomah Falls is bustling, the rest of the hike up, following Multnomah Creek for the most part, is serene in contrast.
It was on the upper rim of this trail that I made this soundwalk. Like Timothy Lake Soundwalk, this is a very quiet soundscape. The same recommendation applies: For best results, listen with headphones, or in a quiet environment. Thanks for reading and listening. It brings me joy to share it with you!
Larch Mountain Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow, June 14th.
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Earlier this year I shared a soundscape field recording of an American Dipper singing on the Salmon River near Mount Hood at Wildwood Recreation Site. Wildwood Soundwalk is another recording that was made on that same day, Feb 20 of this year. It captures the sounds of walking over bridges and wetland boardwalks, languorously moving past springs, creeks and seeps trickling down rock walls, and strolling alongside the Salmon River.
If you like gentle water sounds, you’re in for a treat. There’s more water than wildlife sounds in this one.
These days when I edit my Soundwalk audio, I remove airplanes, automobiles and humans. I generally do this by digitally splicing the recording. Snip, snip. I also use selective EQ filters and a cut and paste technique to remove low frequency highway or aircraft noise. Overall though, I rarely crossfade clips or deviate from the linear timeline.
My hike that day took me up Boulder Ridge into the Salmon Huckleberry Wilderness. Though a couple signs warned of black bears in the area, and the scenery was lovely, this section of audio proved less interesting, so I swapped it out for the American Dipper song by the river. Here is a clip of it batting its white eyelids and doing its dip motion. Charmer!
I take my time at the base of the incline, lingering next to rivulets dripping over mossy rocks, crouching down to observe with my eyes and ears the little details of these watery vignettes.
Compositionally I’m delighting in the water, selecting bouncy synthesizer patches to play off the water sounds. Stitched throughout the instrumental score is, essentially, a duet for electric piano and clarinet. It’s all performed with an unrehearsed looseness, which I hope lends an unfussy, “wild” vibe. Woodwind arrangements, hushed celeste, and a variety of animated synth passages also add to the bouquet of sound. I hope you enjoy it!
Wildwood Soundwalk will be available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow May 31.
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Company Lake is a scrappy bit of woods and water on the banks of the Columbia River near Troutdale Oregon. Birds flock to it.
I was going through some old files yesterday and rediscovered this 10 minute piece. I don’t have any memories associated with the composition—a minimal suite for piano, bells and electric piano I found surprisingly well paced and strong in the coda—but I recall my visit to the place I recorded the soundscape just a year ago.
The soundscape is from the roughly 70 acre cottonwood grove near Company Lake, a small body of water near the former site of an Alcoa aluminum plant known for the last half of the previous century as Reynolds Metals. The area was named a superfund site by the EPA in 1994. In 2004 the aluminum plant that once used more electricity than the entire city of Portland (back in 1981) was demolished. After being cleaned up, the site was redeveloped as a FedEx distribution center.
The FedEx employee parking lot used to welcome birders to the Company Lake environs. Last year, however, I arrived to find a gated lot, fenced off with barbed wire. I’m going to hazard a guess that this has something to do with car prowls and houseless camping, but there’s no official word on that. To get to the wooded area today you have to walk a half mile on a bike path from the closest public road. All the more privacy for the birds, I suppose, but a change that left me feeling a little deflated at the time. In retrospect, not really a big deal.
I mean, let’s be honest, what can we expect from a place called “Company Lake”? It’s almost a cartoonish appellation; something you would expect in an episode of the Simpsons. Three-eyed fish and barrels of industrial waste, anyone?
Who named it Company Lake and why did it stick? Google couldn’t tell me, and Chat GPT (4.0) hallucinated with gusto: “The name "Company Lake,"originates from its historical association with the Union Pacific Railroad Company. The lake, along with several other lakes and ponds in the area, was created as a result of gravel extraction operations conducted by the railroad company.” Bla-bla-blah… No such thing occurred! The lake was likely created as a flood channel before becoming choked off. The name? Well it likely comes from the era of land ownership cited in newspapers as “Sundial Ranch Company” between 1910 and 1924, referring to the 2400 acre tract near Troutdale held by the Union Meat Company. In those days it was still a wild landscape, according to a 1941 reminiscence by Ben Hur Lampman in The Oregonian:
Yon was a great country before it was diked, in the times when the river refreshed it with regularity. With the wood ducks winging over the shining expanse of it, and a static excitement in the soft air, and the willows smelling like spiced varnish.
So in truth, “Company Lake” is a misnomer. The lake is on the “wild” side of the dike amongst the low-lying cottonwoods. It’s not a titan of industry cesspool. Company Lake today is like a moat to a no man’s land, cordoned off by industry and forgotten by most, re-wilding in obscurity.
I’ve decided not to restrict access to this recording. Thanks goes to my subscribers for supporting my work and making this possible. Thank you for your interest, and for being here.
Before I leave you, let’s just take a moment to contemplate the Lovers Oak, which once stood near Company Lake, another testament to the resilience of life.
The original tree was shaped by an 1876 Columbia River flood. The slender oak was forced over one log and under another, maturing into the shape of the letter "S" lying on its side. The lowest curve of the S-shaped tree formed a perfect bench where friends and lovers met on pleasant Sunday afternoons. Local residents began to call it the Lovers Oak.
During World War II when the government built the aluminum plant nearby, it was agreed to fence and protect the tree. The publicity resulting from that decision brought the tree to the attention of Ripley's "Believe it or Not," a nationally syndicated cartoon featuring unusual items throughout the world.
After the war, the tree was forgotten by most. It fell in the Columbus Day windstorm of 1962, but the image remained in memory as the logo of the Troutdale Historical Society. -troutdaleoregon.gov
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Castle Canyon is in The Mount Hood National Forest, a stone’s throw from the little hamlet of Rhododendron. It isn’t a what I’d call a canyon. It’s a wooded ridge with some striking volcanic rock formations rising out of it. Two steep creek canyons do cut troughs in the landscape on either side of this ridge, so it’s not devoid of canyons, but the “castle” bits don’t mix with the canyon bits in an obvious way. The short trail that leads up to these rock pinnacles is quite steep, utilizing just a few switchbacks to climb 800 feet in less than 3/4 of a mile.
The soundscape here is unique. I’d call it airy, reverberant and fuzzy. The sound of the distant tumbling creeks bounces up through the Douglas-fir and hemlock woods, mixing with the breeze playing off the leaves of alders and big-leaf maples, forming a bio-acoustic hum. Its frequency changes subtly as I climb the trail.
This is not a soundwalk I would recommend listening to in the car. Its features are nuanced and easily lost in a din. I mixed the soundscape more in the foreground than in the past, embracing all that fuzzy creek sound. It’s probably best experienced in headphones or a quiet environment.
I’ve also been utilizing more of the stereo sound stage lately: placing instruments in the mix solidly in the left or right channels. After all, this is how the birdsong registers. When you listen with headphones and close your eyes you can often picture the birds in imagined space.
Pacific Wrens can be heard singing and calling at different points, along with Golden-crowned Kinglets and Dark-eyed Junco. A distant Pilieated Woodpecker’s laugh is heard and in the opening minutes, and midway through a raven honks and vocalizes in “subsong” (birdsong that is softer and less well defined than the usual territorial song, sometimes heard only at close quarters).
My score is melodic, as always, but always rising through the scale, playing off the rising pitch and evolving timbre of the creek sounds on the climb. For the instrumentation I challenged myself to leave piano out this time. With small songbirds so prominent in the soundscape, I tend to gravitate to “smaller” sounding instrument voices: glockenspiel, circle bells, flute, wispy synths. A clarinet plays out a theme at several points. One interesting addition to the instrumentation is Joshua Meltzer’s “Panjo”, a clever virtual instrument hybrid playing either baritone banjo or pan drum sounds for each note from the phrases I play on the keys. Never the same twice. It sounds like a dreamy, twangy music box.
Just over a week ago I finished submitting the next dozen soundwalks to come after this one, cementing the biweekly release schedule up to December! So, I know well what is in the future for Soundwalk and I don’t think it spoils any surprises to say they more or less follow the trajectory set by Castle Canyon Soundwalk. What I don’t quite know is what I will create over the summer and fall, having freed up my schedule, but I’m hoping to experiment, take some risks, and branch out!
In that spirit, I’ll leave you with this short video of the trail to the pinnacles viewpoint at Castle Canyon. Thanks for being here. I hope you enjoy Castle Canyon Soundwalk. It will be available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow May 17.
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There’s nothing dramatic about the Still Creek trail. It’s basically an easy-breezy trail that heads out over a ridgeline saddle from a campground set among old-growth Douglas-fir trees and a creek in the foothills of Mount Hood. Just a walk in the woods.
The most dramatic part is the beginning. Winding through the stout tree pillars, we cross the surging Camp Creek. Hence, our walk begins with a piano and woodwind fanfare.
For the instrument palette I’m embracing solo clarinet and solo flute again after a years-long absence. Also glass marimba. As a performer my keyboarding style has always been loose, but on the glass marimba I go for an almost arhythmic, tumbledown effect, mirroring the creek waters.
The wildlife we hear along the way are the continent’s smallest songbirds: Golden-crowned Kinglets, Pacific Wrens, and Chestnut-backed Chickadees. Ironically, the little creek we hear half way through is an unnamed tributary, not Still Creek itself, which I do not lay eyes or ears on. The trail crosses over this little nameless creek in a pretty setting: crystal clear water pools against a decaying log, the waters slowly meandering through its crosscut. This interesting little scene is what is pictured on the cover. Generally speaking, I try to pair the cover image with the mood of the music. The bright orb of the sun refracting on the water, and the warm glow illuminating the submerged fir needles seemed to match the glimmering synth pads and dark, woody piano in the score.
I think the woodwinds add a romantic feel, and I have to say: it did feel romantic with the afternoon light filtering through the canopy. Not in a romance way, but in a, you know, a tender way. Just connecting with the space. Opening up to it. Feeling it.
This is a good primer for our next installment, Castle Canyon Soundwalk, which is even more soundscape-forward, featuring a more impressionistic, even experimental score. Very open.
For now, enjoy Still Creek Soundwalk. I love the name. (I chose this trail half just because I liked the name, and half because it wasn’t covered with snow.) Thanks again for reading, for listening, for coming along this journey.
Still Creek Soundwalk will be available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow next Friday, May 3. (Oops! I forgot to update my calendar after nudging the date.)
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Timberline Lodge is a historic alpine lodge constructed in the late 1930s as a project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), high on Mount Hood where the trees thin out and glaciers loom large.
Its lobby is dominated by a massive, soaring stone chimney which forms the central pillar of the hexagonal post and beam structure, rising some 40 feet overhead in the main lobby, 92 feet from base to crown.
Throughout the building are artworks and handcrafted details of a bygone era.
It’s a really special place to while away an hour or two. I went up there for lunch on March 19th after completing a hike lower on the mountain (soon to follow in another soundwalk). I captured a few minutes of audio by the fire and walking around inside the building with the thought that it might make an interesting addition to this Mount Hood series. The mezzanine hosts casual dining, so the ambience is similar to a cafe.
Just a couple days ago news broke that a fire broke out at Timberline Lodge. The lodge posted this bulletin:
On Thursday night, April 18th, at approximately 9:30pm a fire was reported at Timberline Lodge in the headhouse attic and its exterior roof area. First responders were on scene shortly thereafter, extinguishing the fire by approximately 11:00pm. There is an ongoing investigation as to the cause, but it is suspected fireplace embers ignited the roof.
Smoke and fire damage remains confined to the roof, but the extent of water damage isn’t clear. It is perhaps a good sign the Cascade Dining Hall, adjacent the main lobby, opened yesterday for brunch, April 21, 2024.
For this vignette-length soundwalk, I worked with an instrument palette I’ve been favoring for recent work with an overall intent to make the score less dominant, and more spacious. I also automated some sound design EQ sweeps to focus on the sound of the smoldering fire in two passages.
Thank you for being here. I hope you enjoy Timberline Lodge Soundwalk. I think it’s a charming little piece.
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Ramona Falls lies within the Mt. Hood National Wilderness, near the headwaters of the Sandy River.
Volcanic eruptions on Mt. Hood in 1780 created a mudflow. This event inspired the name of the Sandy river, as Lewis and Clark called it [in 1805], "Quicksand River." The name was later changed to the "Sandy River." The Ramona Falls was apparently named by US Forest Service worker John E. Mills in 1933. He named the falls after his late wife, Ramona. -worldatlas
The trail is a roughly seven mile out-and-back or loop option. The northernmost section, trail #797, closely follows Ramona Creek and is in my opinion the prettier and more musical option. You’ll hear my feet scuffling on the coarse sand trail approaching the Sandy River crossing. I cut out the portion of audio crossing the Sandy River because—and this is not intuitive to most people—larger, fast-moving rivers are not intrinsically pleasing to listen to. They’re not bad, but they tend to sound like walls of white noise, often masking wildlife sounds and the acoustics of place. They sound meh. Loud and featureless.
Interestingly, because it’s a wilderness area, The Forest Service doesn’t maintain a bridge across The Sandy. The logic is a little convoluted, given they used to have a modular “seasonal bridge”, and there are numerous footbridges crossing Ramona Creek. It may have something to do with a tragic accident in 2014 when a hiker was swept away crossing the seasonal bridge in a flash flood event. His body was found a mile downstream. Was that bridge deemed a safety liability? I can only remember combinations of leaps and shimmying on downed logs to cross it.
It must have been 2015 when I made the trip up there with my dad. He told me a story about coming upon a hiking group in distress on the trail above the falls many years before. One of their party had died on from an allergic reaction to a bee sting, of all things. I recall he spoke of spending quite a few hours helping them. I looked for a historical news article for details. I couldn’t find one.
The hike to Ramona Falls may be statistically safer than walking on a city street, but something about the remoteness of wilderness frames a wider existential perspective on life and death. Mountains do that. They take you out of yourself for a spell.
I will always associate Ramona Falls with the last time I did a day hike with my dad. I distinctly remember the vivid colors of the moss and lichen that day. The clouds were very low and misty, diffusing the low-hanging autumn sun. It was dreamlike. Liminal.
This particular day was similar. The clouds lingered, offering occasional showers, but were less prismatic in their density. Red Crossbills winged by overhead. Dark-eyed Juncos foraged on the ground and low in the canopy. Once again, I had a sustained moment with a raven. I love crossing paths with ravens.
The focal point of the soundscape is largely Ramona Creek, culminating in an approach to the spectacular falls:
What makes it so striking? It’s not tall or awesomely powerful. It’s approachable, decorated with emerald-hued moss, and often dramatically lit from rays of sun filtering through the fir trees. It’s strikingly symmetrical, roughly diamond shaped, and finely textured. Its song is more music than thunder. It’s just a one-of-a-kind waterfall to lay eyes and ears on, and I’m pleased to share it with you!
Ramona Falls Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow Apr. 12.
Lastly, if you didn’t catch them, I recently posted Soundscape podcast episodes of the Total Solar Eclipse (in a stereo image featuring wildlife on the left and humans on the right), and a nice long relaxing recording I made at Pacific Beach, WA a couple weeks ago.
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It would be interesting to parse out what we call “lakes” from what are in reality reservoirs. Most of the lakes around here that come to mind are actually reservoirs. After all, natural lakes are just meadow construction sites; their inlet rivers and streams eventually convey enough sediment to fill in the lake beds. Almost all natural lakes are, in this way, ephemeral.
In the years shortly before the Timothy Lake reservoir was created by damming the Oak Grove Fork Clackamas River, shepherds seeded the native mix of meadow plants in the area with Timothy Grass. Timothy Meadows became Timothy Lake, and that probably explains the circular shape of the reservoir. Most reservoirs are long and riverine, whereas Timothy is relatively round, suggesting there was a (smaller) lake basin here in the not-too-distant past.
Built in the post-war era (completed in 1956) when dam building in the western United States was at a fever pitch, the Timothy Lake Dam (as part of Portland General Electric’s Clackamas River Project) made all the hydro promises: renewable energy, flood control, drinking water, recreation. On the latter it delivered in spades: as the largest body of water in the Mt. Hood Wilderness, its four campgrounds and dispersed camping areas are packed to the gills come summertime. Of course there are downsides of messing with rivers, but I’m not going to get into that now, lest I become labelled a Debbie Downer.
This Soundwalk captures Timothy Lake on a crisp October day, when the campgrounds were all closed and only a handful of people were inclined to visit its shores for the day. I had the lakeside trail that leads out to Meditation Point all to myself. On the water I saw Western Grebes, Common Mergansers, and I heard Common Loons in the distance. In the canopy I heard Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Red-breasted Nuthatches, Brown Creepers, Golden-crowned Kinglets, and Varied Thrushes, among others. A Raven had something to say to me about half way through, rather insistently it seemed. Above all, a pronounced and spacious quiet reigned.
My score focuses on that sense of solitude and tranquility with softly played piano, bell tones, string plucks, woodwinds, and whispering synthesizers. It’s certainly the reigning champ for quietest Chad Crouch soundwalk, for now.
As per usual Timothy Lake Soundwalk is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow Mar 29th.
Thank you for your support. Thank you for being here. Enjoy!
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Wow. Spring seems to have sprung here in the Pacific Northwest! The birds are singing. The sun is out. And while I wasn’t sure how this first soundwalk in a new series would land—given it was recorded last fall—it now seems quite timely!
So, let’s start with the series: Over the next ten weeks, maybe more, we will be listening to different locations in the Mt. Hood National Forest, starting with this one along the wild and scenic Salmon River, on the Old Salmon River Trail.
Like me, you might ask why is it the Old Salmon River trail? Maybe Tom Kloster has the best explanation at oregonhikers.com:
During the height of the post-World War II logging heyday, the Salmon River Road was built along the lower river, bypassing several miles of the old trail that once provided sole access to the upper canyon of the Salmon River. Somehow, the old section of trail paralleling the new road survived the logging era, along with some of the best old growth forests within easy reach of Portland. The trail has since been rediscovered, and once again maintained by the Forest Service for hikers looking for an easy, stream-side ramble.”
Now, let me tell you why it seems timely. Firstly, just yesterday Salmon Wars, a new podcast series from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica, launched with the first two episodes (featuring original music by friends Kele Goodwin and Sean Ogilvie). Secondly, In just a couple of weeks Spring Chinook salmon will return to the lower Columbia River, as they have done for millions of years.
For the soundscape recording, I do what I have done a few times in the past, mixing the ambient binaural recording (made with my recording hat) with a “zoomed in” perspective made by dangling mics close to the water and cross-fading between them to suit the sonic narrative and points of interest. (The audio in the following clips is what my phone captured.)
Toward the end you can clearly hear the splashing of the salmon as they dance closer to the culmination their lifecycle. This is what that looked like:
For the score I’m still digging into synth pads and drones that sound “shimmery” like the water, and warm-hued like the spawning salmon. And I’m still just working in my naive way on the piano. For the quiet “Salmon Spawning Rhapsody” passage I’m using a technique recommended to me by my friend Nick Jaina: basically parking my left hand on one or two root notes in the key while while letting the right cycle hand through a chord progression. Did he call it whole tones? Did I even understand him? Whatever the case, I like what I played. You can hear the salmon splashing for a long stretch in the last third of the soundwalk.
A Cornerstone Species
The Spring Chinook will travel into their home rivers and streams in the fall, the Salmon River being one of them. There they will spawn and die; their carcasses will be consumed and broken down into the ecosystem. This transfer of nutrients from the ocean to the forests is what gives salmon the distinction of being a cornerstone species. Not to put too fine a point on it, but “cornerstone” seems to be an operative and accurate description. Without salmon, natural systems break down and we all suffer. All beings.
The 2024 Spring Chinook run is forecast at 121,000 fish, 80-some percent of last year’s run. There are four primary salmon types in the Columbia: Chinook, Coho, Sockeye and Steelhead. I won’t get too far into the weeds, but this page offers some facts and historical perspective on the basin, and here’s a video on their lifecycle.
The big picture view is that before Euro-Americans arrived, the Columbia River basin produced between 10 and 16 million salmon annually. The total salmon forecast for 2024 is 800,000. Putting that into perspective this chart seems to indicate that number is about average for the past 100 years or so (but worryingly, only 25% of the 2014 return). It would also suggest commercial fishing in the late 19th and early 20th century decimated Columbia River salmon!
And so here we are. I’m looking forward to learning more about the subject on Salmon Wars, but even more I’m looking forward to the next time I can be out in the woods, close to these majestic creatures.
I hope you enjoy Old Salmon River Trail Soundwalk, which in addition to the Soundwalk podcast for premium subscribers, will be released in its entirety to all platforms tomorrow, Mar 15th.
Thank you for being here. Just one more thing: If you like what I do, please tell just one person about it, so I can continue to make connections and keep doing what I’m doing.
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The conclusion to the five-part Lower Columbia River soundwalk series brings us back to the Washington shoreline, three miles upriver from where we last visited, at a place called Frenchman’s Bar. Though it takes an hour by car to drive from Willow Bar to Frenchman’s Bar, they are literally just around the corner from each other on the water. And of course, this is how the birds experience it. Sandhill Cranes, Snow Geese, Canada Geese and others often overnight on Sauvie’s Island and forage by day across the river in The Vancouver Lowlands.
There are plenty of opportunities to capture fly-bys and fly-overs in field recordings here, but there is also plenty of competition in the soundscape from industrial sources. In addition to the planes, trains, and autos, you’ll often hear hulking cargo ships chugging by. If you listen closely you’ll hear a crew pounding on the hull of one such ship in the distance, close to the end of our soundwalk. I left it in, half because it was an interesting sound, and half because there’s only so much noise one can get rid of without messing it up. Incidentally, I also left in the subtle sound of me setting up a stationary recording rig. I’ll share that field recording next week on Soundscape, the companion podcast to Soundwalk, all linked up with this Substack newsletter. I visualize it like an H2O atom!
And maybe now is a good time to catch you up, since I don’t send emails as often as I’m posting. Recently I shared A Brief History of Soundwalks, taking a look at a couple examples of soundwalks, new and old, and arriving at a tentative answer to the question what is a soundwalk? (In the words of Christopher Robin, "It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear and not bothering.”) Also, I shared a soundwalk through the Black Artists of Oregon Exhibit at Portland Art Museum and field recordings of the charming American Dipper at Wildwood and some Trumpeter Swans and allies at Ridgefield NWR. Subscribers enjoy 5 min excerpts while premium subscribers get the complete recordings (10-90 min). Available in your podcast app and here.
For the Frenchman’s Bar Soundwalk score I used a lot of the same voices that we’ve been hearing in this batch. In particular, I try to follow the swells of sound from the abundant geese and cranes with synth pads and vibrating drones. This time I swap out the electric pianos for the intimacy and warmth of an acoustic piano and celeste. It’s both quiet and loud; a dynamic outing!
Frenchman’s Bar was named by Donald and David Scherruble who grew up in the area, heirs to the 120 acre farm that would become Frenchman’s Bar Park in the late 1990’s. The Scherrubles listened to their colorful "Old Frenchman" neighbor speak of his adventures when they were kids on the farm. Don Hamilton penned this story with an ear for the brothers’ lively storytelling for The Oregonian September 9, 1985:
Frenchman's Bar really has a French connection. That connection is the late Paul Haury, a Frenchman who once deserted a doomed ship,
Well before the turn of the century Haury, then 15, was an apprentice river pilot in France hoping to make his living on the sea. He signed on as a cabin boy on a wooden saling ship bound for Vancouver, British Columbia, via Cape Horn. It was to pick up a load of lumber and take it to the Sandwich Islands, now known as Hawaii. But the cabin boy who hoped to make his life sailng was treated poorly.
"He jumped ship, he did," David Scherruble said. "He used to come to the house and tell my mom and dad about how there was this big old hollow cedar tree and he hid in it while the searchers (from the ship) looked for him. They walked right past him, they did, and didn't even see him. That's the story he told."
After about three days the searchers gave up the hunt for their cabin boy and set off for Hawaii. In mid-Pacific the ship hit a fierce storm and went down with all hands.
For five years Haury's parents in France believed he was dead. By the time he wrote to tell them he hadn’t perished, he had made his way north from Vancouver and was working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska.
In 1915 Haury bought five or six acres along the Columbia and moved to the Vancouver area…
Interestingly, Haury, who died in 1937 while in his 70s, never saw the stretch of beach named for him. The bar was created by dredge spoils when the Columbia River channel was deepened by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the late 1940s.
It might also be worth mentioning that Frenchman’s Bar is about a mile upriver from Tena Bar, which in 1980 provided a break in the infamous D.B. Cooper skyjacking mystery. A kid found $5800 in bundles of decomposing cash in the sand. Serial numbers on the bills matched those in the $200,000 ransom. (Funny how that seems like not so much today.) How did these bundles end up buried in the sand at Tena Bar? The FBI put a lot of energy into trying to answer that question but apparently few definitive conclusions could be drawn. There is absolutely no shortage of conjecture online. In 2020, a scientist ruled out quite a few timeline scenarios by testing the bills for diatoms. “Because the bills only had one season of diatoms on them, and did not have diatoms that bloom in the winter, Kaye theorizes that the money came out of the water and landed on the bank of Tena Bar after only a few weeks or months.”
Today the Tena Bar area, bound by a sand and gravel company, has No Trespassing signs posted every 10 meters.
Well, I guess that’s about it for this one. Thanks for being here with me.
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Our five-part experience on the Columbia resumes on the shoreline. We are still on Sauvie Island, walking along the beach of a wooded peninsula called Willow Bar Beach. It’s a cool late October morning. The wave action is the wake of small, medium and large ocean-going ships, their lumbering mechanical sounds out of earshot on the far side of the river where the channel runs deep. The wildlife is distant so there is more room for my musical score. Consequently, almost the whole way through there are synthesizer drones that just kind of glow and oscillate slowly like embers in a fire, like the rising and falling of the water, the breaking and ebbing waves.
The soundscape in our soundwalk is edited to effect a pre-industrial, quieter time. I’m very curious about that long-gone history, those old ways.
A Culture Nearly Washed Away
Last time I wrote about how Sauvie Island was once a cradle of indiginous civilization, perhaps more densely populated than any other Native American site on the continent. Archeologists speculate that the Portland Basin could have once been the home of 30-40,000 Native Americans in the 1700’s. When Lewis and Clark came back up the river in 1806 they estimated the Sauvie Island population of some 2400 persons, and described Multnomah as the “remains of a large nation”. This was over decade after the introduction of small pox to the region from the first white traders on the west coast. Within 30 years the island was almost entirely depopulated following waves of malaria. Nevertheless the Chinookan culture survived, and though their tribe is not federally recognized, the diaspora are alive and well with tribe members living in Bay Center, Chinook and Ilwaco in Washington state, and Astoria and Grande Ronde in Oregon, among other places.
Willow Bar has only recently joined the mass of Sauvie Island. It was an island group in in the early 1900’s Clan-nah-quah was the name given to a village on the south end of the channel separating Willow Bar, about a mile north of Multnomah (máɬnumax̣), the largest village on Sauvie Island.
In their “Estimate of the Western Indians”, Lewis and Clark observed: “Mult-no-mah Tribe reside on Wap-pa-tow Island [Sauvie Island] in the mouth of the Multnomah [Willamette River], the remains of a large nation, 6 houses, probable number of souls, 800. Clan-nah-quah’s tribe of Multnomah’s on Wappato Island below the Multnomars, 4 houses, probable number of souls, 130.” The Clan-nah-quah site is now nearly all washed away, only a bank of broken camp rock on the river shore marks the place. Stone Age of The Columbia (1959)
Camp rock, AKA fire-cracked rock, FCR, fire-affected rock, or FAR, is not conspicuous to most folks. It looks like ordinary rock to me. Archeologists spot it on many a Columbia River shoreline as a vestigial reminder of native peoples’ inhabitation. These cracked stones and fragments are the result of years of being heated in a fire by humans for cooking and providing a longer lasting heat source.
Maps seem to suggest accretion along the shoreline, not erosion, The lumpy sandy landscape near Willow Bar suggests the channel was plugged with dredge spoils sometime in the last 50 years. [Around 1960, actually.] I’m no archeologist but I’m curious to know more. I read a 2021 doctoral student’s 300 page thesis project regarding Sauvie Islands’ western shore, wherein the author discovered 8 unrecorded archeological sites, 3 of which were determined to have “high archeological value”.
I think it’s probably important to clarify here that high archeological value means in a nutshell is that the site may contain a multi-decade, or even multi-century refuse pile called a midden. When excavated carefully, a midden can tell a layer-by-layer story of the human habitation. It does not in all likelihood mean that there is a beautiful stone sculpture slumbering away in the soil. Still, Sauvie’s Island has a record of artifact discovery that conjures the imagination. The Portland Art Museum mounted a show in 1952 entitled Prehistoric Stone Sculpture of the Pacific Northwest. More recently, in 2005, an even bigger collection was assembled for the People of The River exhibition. (The show produced a sizable book.) It’s more or less a once in a generation event to see these sculptures in one room. Hence, the story of the Native American artists of Sauvie Island, and more generally the Chinookan tribes of the Lower Columbia is not well known.
Of course, in piecing together the story, it doesn’t help that early settlers and relic hunters plundered sites, hoarding and selling artifacts to private collectors before laws prohibited such activity on public lands. Assembling enough pieces from institutional and private collections to mount an exhibition is a daunting task.
An interesting story, which reads like lore, comes from amateur archeologist Emory Strong:
There is an interesting and well authenticated story about one of the collections made on Sauvies Island. One of the early settlers built his home on the deserted site of one of the larger villages. In clearing the land numerous artifacts were found, and the wash from passing steam-boats and the yearly flood eroded more from the banks.
This man picked up and saved the best of them and eventually accumulated a large collection of exceptionally fine stone and bone carvings and chipped pieces. Growing old and not wanting his collection to become dispersed, and as there was then no local museum to donate it to, he buried it in one of his fields. There it yet lies, the best single private collection of Indian work in the west. Some day it may again erode from the bank. Stone Age of The Columbia (1959)
Hmm. Not sure how much stock to put into that.
On a somewhat related note, though, just a couple days ago I saw this stone bowl on display at the Grande Ronde Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center:
There were several very old baskets and woven pieces, three small possibly pre-contact carvings on display, but this was the only larger stone sculpture piece on display. I asked the woman at the front desk about it. She said it was found at a dump. Huh? She didn’t have any other details to offer. But as I thought more about it, there was a village site on the Columbia Slough near the old St. Johns Landfill in north Portland (now capped with a prairie habitat). Could that be the dump in this story? Or perhaps it was a variation on the old an it fell off the back of a truck line accompanying repatriation of an illegally collected relic? A mystery…
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