Fallen Rocks.
It's a hard place, all of it, North Central Oregon. But the rocks that define the land, from delicate plant fossils to polished headstones, preserve the stories.
A section of “welded tuff,” a layer of rock deposited about 29 million years ago when an erupting volcano leveled the area with ash, hot gas and debris. Horizontal layers of ignimbrite, as it’s called, are visible throughout the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in North Central Oregon. This section sits atop Carroll Rim and looks down upon the Painted Hills, the monument’s best known unit.
I kept seeing those “Fallen Rocks” warning signs as we passed between stony cliffs and canyon walls on the way out to Fossil this time. To get there from Portland, as you might know, you go east on I-84 past The Dalles, South on 97 at Biggs Junction, southeast on OR-206 through Condon and then finally south on Highway 19 through what’s left of Mayville and on into Fossil. It takes about three hours, if you’re wondering about time. There’s never much traffic.
Anyway, I think ODOT changed the wording on those warning signs at some point, because they used to say “Falling Rocks.” I’m guessing somebody figured that was too alarming, and might cause motorists to get all swivel-headed in nervous anticipation of crashing boulders. Not that they don’t, on occasion. The boulders crashing, I mean.
But the more realistic danger is a rock that’s already fallen and is sitting in the roadway, waiting to take out your oil pan, knock a wheel out of alignment or send you swerving into a wheat truck.
If you don’t watch it, that’s the kind of idle thought that can bang the brain pan as you’re driving through Oregon’s big empty spaces.
I wrote a newspaper article years ago about the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, telling how the plant and animal fossils found in the layers of rock mark the earth’s evolutionary and climatic changes. The chief paleontologist working out there at the time, Ted Fremd, said it was like looking down a well of time 30 million years deep.
Fossils of plants buried by volcanic ash and preserved 5 to 25 million years ago are easily found on a hillside behind the high school in Fossil, Ore., the Wheeler County seat. It’s illegal to collect fossils within the national monument, but these are free for the taking. (1)Bits of stems and leaves. (2)Metasequoia, or Dawn Redwood, the Oregon state fossil. (3)An Alder leaf.
Ted Fremd’s remark was one of those quotes that stick with you, if you’re a journalist. A well of time.
Metaphors can be stretched too far, I suppose, but rocks mark our time, place and changes, too, don’t they?
Graves at the Mayville Cemetery south of Condon, Ore. (1)I doubt this arid region ever got enough rain to fill that bowl, but I appreciate the attempted grandeur. (2)Little Claudia only lived a month in the spring of 1913, and you can imagine her parents’ devastation reaching through the years. (3)“Poorly Born, Poorly Lived, Poorly Died, and no one cried.” Either the deceased had a great sense of humor, or his relatives hated him.
Rural Oregon is dotted with small cemeteries, many of them rustic and rundown. Some people believe cemeteries are sad and visiting them is morbid, but I never felt that way. Visiting is like looking down that well of time, isn’t it? See the changes, see the layers, see the ignimbrite laid down by eruptions of migration, war, pandemic and Depression.
Mayville Cemetery, in the photos above, was a new one for us, but we always make time to stop at the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Fossil, where our mom’s father and his parents are buried, and at Igo Cemetery up out of Condon, where our mom’s mother and many other aunts, uncles and cousins are buried.
Igo Cemetery is off the highway, down a country lane, past a ranch house. You wouldn’t know it was there unless somebody told you.
Igo holds people who were solid in Mom’s life.
I’ve written previously about Mom’s childhood, which was streaked with poverty, violence and loss. She Wanted Us to Know About It. Her mother, Elizabeth “Lizzy” Miller, protected her from her father, Charles Miller, a World War I vet who drove horse-drawn Army wagons at the front in France and Belgium and came back damaged by trauma or nerve gas. At the breaking point, he held a gun on his wife and daughter, most likely intending to kill them and himself. Mercifully, he did not pull the trigger. Elizabeth and our mom, Agnes, sought refuge with relatives.
Our mom’s Aunt Jennie and Uncle Ruff were particularly kind. They are buried together at Igo. Jennie was Elizabeth’s sister; Uncle Ruff’s given name was Ruff Ready Stanton, honest. He taught our mom how to fish, entered a local dance contest with her and won first prize, kept a squirrel in a cage at his country gas station and lived into his 100th year.
But the real rock in Mom’s life was her mother, Lizzie.
Lizzy Miller and our mom, Agnes, at Christmas time in 1938. Mom’s father, Charles Miller, had died the year before. Lizzy died in 1949, in only her 60th year, worn down by grief, worry and work. But she delivered Agnes to safety and saw her bloom in high school, marry and become a loving mom herself.
It took us a bit to find Lizzy Miller’s headstone at Igo Cemetery this time because it was half covered by dirt. I thought I knew for sure where it was and remembered it was a flat stone, but couldn’t find it until I made a second pass and brushed some of the dirt off her name. It gets windy up there — that’s why they have all those windmills —and it looked like the wind just shoved that dirt like it was waves and layered over the top of Elizabeth E. Miller. But there she was.
Lizzie was born a Palmer and her own mom was a Farrar, of which there are a bunch buried at Igo. Several of the women carried the name Elizabeth and there’s an Agnes, among them, too. The Gilliam County judge today is Elizabeth Farrar Campbell. I’ve warned her that we’re distant cousins.
We had a bucket with us for fossils but couldn’t find any water at the cemetery to wash the stone with. So my wife washed it with her coffee and a napkin, and I pushed some of the dirt waves back with a trowel we’d brought along.
My wife favors coffee that will wake the dead but that didn’t happen in this case. Lizzie Miller kept sleeping. She’s deserved to rest as long as she wants.
She’s a fallen rock that poses no danger. Just brushes the heart as you pass.
Best transition ever! I love reading and writing human interest stories the most. Best way to tell a story about someone you love -- a focus, an anecdote, concrete selective description, a quote or two.
Thank you. You soften the hard rock images with emotion.