Vortex Portal

Vortex Labyrinth in view of Wallula Gap

Like water in a whirlpool, I am drawn into the “vortex labyrinth” perched on a basalt bluff overlooking the Columbia River. On bare feet, I walk toward the center and out again to the rim of the labyrinth, meandering clockwise until I have journeyed nearly full circle. At this juncture, I curve inward once more and spiral into the core of this labyrinth. Arriving in the center, I stand in the still point, gazing upon the majesty before me. I marvel the vista with its towering palisades that stretch as far as the eye can see along each bank of the river. I contemplate the Ice Age floodwaters that repeatedly gushed through this narrow gap in the river channel, creating a bottleneck that impeded the catastrophic flow of water, causing a temporary lake nearly a thousand feet deep to form in the basin upriver. Many thousands of years later, the semi-arid basin that remains is my home. This epic story of the land is written in the hills and cliffs shaped and eroded by many forces, including floods, and in river rocks and boulders transported here in chunks of glacial ice from hundreds of miles away. My existence is but an infinitesimal fragment of an immense and magnificent ongoing reality. With this in mind, I meander my way back to the beginning, having traveled backward and forward in time, simultaneously.

For all that is,