Footprints, California Coast, circa 1995, b&w Tri-X film, Canon EOS Rebel SLR
film camera, © 1995-2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Water pools
on an aging bluff—
webbed footprints
deposit a longing
for things that never were.
_________________________________________________________________
bluff
A bluff—a high bank above a river, a headland of precipitous cliffs—is created when elements of Earth go to battle. In nearly all Earth’s processes, one element is pitted against another, and the weaker is washed away, swept off, compressed. What is weakly held together breaks down easily. Bluffs come from such processes. Such bluffs were susceptible to prevailing winds, others to movements within the Earth, others to scouring ice. Some are layered up with the sand of a long-ago sea or the pebbles of a former stream or with the fossils of animals. Many bluffs come to life when water cuts down through seams of Earth layers, creating slippage and collapse. The ocean, the ever-ongoing movement of waves against the shore, carves other bluffs, as at the edge of Puget Sound and along the California coast. Rattlesnake Mountain in Nebraska was shaped by upward sweeping winds. Nana Wyah, the sacred Chickasaw Bluffs in Oklahoma, were renamed after the Trail of Tears. Mount Rushmore, carved into Lakota sacred land, is a granite bluff. And Bluff is a little town on the banks of the San Juan River in Utah, ringed by its namesake landform. In Islands in the Stream, Hemingway writes: “The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It has lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream.”
–Linda Hogan, from Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape
-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, May 28th, 2013
QM, I love your brief, but poignant poem! Here in WY, there are pinnacles or spires of a hard rock that stand alone, due to the elements that are described in “bluff.” They are called “hoodoos,” usually red in color. (Have to look up the origin of the word.)
LikeLike
oliverowl, thank you! I will look up the hoodoos in Home Ground. I know exactly what you are talking about. I was looking at some of the formations in this b&w photo and thinking they look a little like hoodoos (before you made your comment), but not the right landscape architecture. This photo was probably taken from a bluff. But some of the formations I am looking at through the lens are probably something different. Back in a second.
LikeLike
hoodoo
Hoodoos are fantastically shaped stone pillars in deserts and badlands of the North American West. Classic hoodoo groupings, such as those in Bryce Canyon National Park and Goblin Valley State Park in Southern Utah, form by sporadic, intensive rainfall erosion of steeply sloped but horizontally layered sedimentary rock, leaving freestanding pinnacles, each with an overhanging cap of resistant stone. They abound on the Colorado Plateau, where smaller specimens are sometimes called goblins, but occur also north through the Rockies and have been reported on Baffin Island in the Arctic. The term dates back at least to the mid-nineteenth century. Walt Whitman, in Specimen Days, regrets that he never saw “the ‘hoodoo’ or goblin land” of the Yellowstone country. That these arresting features should have been tagged with a variant of voodoo seems almost inevitable. Their suggestively spirited forms, whether taken as malign, whimsical, or transcendently elusive, exert spells to which many humans are susceptible.
—John Daniel from Home Ground: Language for the American Landscape
LikeLike
This is beautiful, QM. It’s so flat here that I’m not sure there are bluffs on the Eastern Shore.
LikeLike
Thank you, Robin. It’s kind of rolling hills here in Minnesota. Some days I miss being able to walk out on the edge of a precipice and look out over the world. Like the hawk, it’s sometimes good to be able to see the whole picture. You do a beautiful job of chronicling the lowlands in words and photographs. There is beauty in everything. So appreciate you stopping by!
LikeLike