The Deep now 1

Hypnotized
Cruising along at 70 mph, down the highway and between craggy outcropping, scruffy brush, tortured trees, and deep canyons, sheltered in a white sedan, I’m tolerating an earworm from pop music long past. We are sojourning west from the green Willamette Valley of Oregon, up over the cool Cascade Mountain range, back down to dry Eastern Oregon, and over desert to the area surrounding the John Day Fossil Beds, where all manner of prehistory—flora, fauna, rock, earth and ash—dwell in plain view, for all to see. A place where time itself is on display. The song in my head concerns time travel, apropos of the journey. But it’s little more than chintzy commentary from the subconscious. And it’s kind of ruining the scenery. 

    
The road signs are likewise budget reminders that Anna and I are on a journey through time. Repeating all along Highway 26, these state sponsored signs burn the idea into my head, not unlike the repeating chorus in a pop song. Or an earworm. 

    

      “To remember is to resist the silence that history imposes on the voiceless.”
      
    

    
The landscape itself, however, is more than enough to ensnare and hypnotize. Each time the highway drops below the surface terrain and cuts deep into the earth, our vehicle skirts between the canyon walls of deep time, a geologist’s erotic dream and a pretty fascinating way to see the world. Ultimately, there’s no such thing as just rocks. 

    
    

      
      
The Sunday. Photograph by Ingrid Solberg.
    

    
Geologic history, thought to be 4.6 billion years in arrears, might well be branded heavy time, for all the implications of a vast expanse of bygone events. Contemplations of which obliterate the day-to-day human reality in an unfurling incomprehension at all that has come before. If a human life seems short, consider the centuries these boulders have weathered, and life gets downright brusque.

Meanwhile, we’re simply sailing down the highway. I say nothing of the ear affliction to my traveling companion, Anna. She is watching the panorama gliding by, thrilled with the scenery, untortured. Friendships are built on such courtesies. 

    
the illustrated cow
A half hour earlier, coming off the last leg of the mountain pass, we spied yellow road signs illustrated with a solitary black cow. The signs were wordless; the cow was the message. An odd sight amongst the evergreen forest and snow markers and brooding sky. And no cows. Or so it seemed, until, a short time later, the highway exited the mountain pass, leveled out flat, and rolled onto the high desert. This was cow country. And in no uncertain terms. We began to pass through fields after field, vast in size, of grazing black beasts, a place where dairy is eschewed, along with most brown cows, and in its place burgers and steaks are sired. 
The illustrated cow was starting to make sense. But this is just the beginning.

    
    

      
      
      
    
    
Click any image to view the gallery.

    
MYSTHIC ROAD SHOW

Two days later, we are driving a highway that snakes through a deep valley. It’s night. Night in the middle of nowhere. The highway is unlit and the surrounding hills are saturnine silhouettes against the moonlight ghosting over the ridgeline. We’ve seen no other car for the last half hour of darkness. The sole light in the entire valley is from us, two headlight beams. The beams illuminate the road ahead for some fifty feet. All else is night. 

    
The road darts this way and that before us, the turns appearing just in time, as if some illuminated magic show. The two of us are chatting, when appearing abruptly in the beams is a two legged and headless monster. It’s smack dab in the middle of the road, standing astride the centerline. At fifty mph, objects come up fast and automobiles stop slowly. But, after a protracted feeling of inertia pulling at the sedan, we stop in time, before colliding with the creature. The car idles in the dark, lights shining on the colossus. 

    

      “Memory is not solitary. It is choral.”
      
    

    
ts form was indistinct but struck me as belonging to a brown bear. Which was disconcerting, given the ease with which a disgruntled bear of this size can peel back the roof of your car, a moment in my imagination akin to a pull-tab coming off a beer can. And there was more disturbing news. Another brown monster lingered in the shadows, immediately left. And close.
“What is it?”
Anna did not answer. She stared out the front window, puzzled, unknowing. 

    
Hand on the gearshift, I prepared to reverse into the void behind. But boy was it dark that direction, another kind of danger. If only I could get a bead on the creature’s identity. It was only few seconds of time, but, honestly, I was becoming frantic. We are, after all, in the middle of road, in the middle of nowhere. You don’t get saved just in time in a place like this. 
I hesitated.
“Is it a bear?” I asked Anna, again, seeking confirmation, my voice breaking. 
Anna said nothing. Her head bent at angle, she continued to peer out the window, trying to get a fix on the creature.

    
Just then, from around the far side of the brown body in the road came a head, swinging toward us in a fluid motion. A gigantic cow’s head. The biggest I’d ever seen. And it glowered at us. 
“It’s a cow,” said Anna.

    
I could now see that we had been facing down the rear end and two hind legs of a massive dairy cow. This was good news, of course. Though, we still were required to get past the thing.
Relieved yet still apprehensive, I engaged the clutch, and we rolled toward the creature. It did not move, remaining staunchly rooted, owning not just the centerline but the highway. I steered far right, giving the creature the widest berth possible on the narrow strip of pavement. As we passed, the great head swung all the way the other way round toward us. Lit spookily by the peripheral car light, the cow head glared into our window, a reproach for trespassers, a vexing stare. Intimately close. 
And I accelerated into the night. 
The moral of this story is this. Out here, the more absurd the road sign, the more serious the warning. On this particular stretch of road, we had passed a road sign that repeated every so often, over and over, dotting the highway, a variation on the sign from the mountain pass. This one displayed a lazy cow and a solitary warning. livestock. 


midstream frankenstein
There was more to that moment than just a cow in the road and an illustrated sign. What we see is often shaped by what we expect to see. Before our encounter with the cow in the road, Anna and I had spent the previous two days soaking up a world full of fossils, dioramas, and renderings of ancient animals in an ancient landscape, often Frankenstein mishmashes of things familiar and foreign. Sheep-horse. Painted-hill. Sabre-tooth house cat. Palisade-cliff. Dog-bear.
This is a mythic place where hybrid creatures, part goat and part horse, actually once roamed a fantastic horizon of abstract earth and epic sunrises. Mythic and real. A kind of ancient Egypt in the rough, absent the people. No wonder the two of us were confused by the beast in the road. In that moment of urgency, instead of indexing things familiar and topical, our minds were rifling through a catalogue of the world long past and the one to come. 
I’m getting ahead of the story, however. Before we even begin our exploration of the ancient, we must finish getting there by car. And on the way, we've got to pit stop for food and gas. In spite of deep time, life is still made up of the countless daily due. And, while stopped, we find ourselves among something curious: the world ongoing, overrun by humans. 
Deep time in midstream.

(Stay tuned. This is only part 1 of The Deep Now.)