Terrain of Salt

By Melvin Adams

These essays reflect the author's encounter with the numinous dimension found in nature as expressed in religious texts, poetry, modern and primitive art, and science. Many of these essays were influenced by his experience growing up on the semi-arid steppe of Oregon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Mar 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643672816

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Terrain of Salt

Copyright © 2019 by Melvin Adams. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, descriptions, entities, and incidents included in the story are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, and entities is entirely coincidental.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of URLink Print and Media.

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Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64367-282-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64367-281-6 (Digital)

Non-Fiction

22.02.19

I have been in a cold desert searching for rain. But in the end my heart was broken.

Macintosh HD:Users:melvinadams:Desktop:#1 Coleman lake.jpg

Coleman Lake in the Desert of Southeast Oregon

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my father Millard Adams. He gave me my love of the wild places.

Contents

The Sacred Barn by Mel Adams

The Meaning of the Western Deserts

Stoning the Porcupine

The Meaning of Salt

Eve and the Serpent

Shape Shifting Phantasmagoria

The Shield of Achilles

Harvesting Dew

Sparks: Everything is Burning

The Extremophiles of Lake Abert

Valley of Dry Bones

Diatoms: Crystals in a Universal Sea

Van Gogh: Elemental Energy Visualized

Cloud Hidden

Sacred Breath: Wind

Singing Trees

The Stones Cry Out

Gaia and the Anthropic Principle

Newton, Darwin, Einstein: From Cause and Effect to Entanglement

The Sacred Grove

The Tui Chub and the Hidden Face of God

Fluid Grace

The Circus: From Newton to Einstein

Song of Songs and Georgia O’Keefe: Nature as Lover

The Atomic Pond

The Stretched Man

Paradox and Grace

Bibliography

Photo Notes

The Sacred Barn

by Mel Adams

I have often wondered why God chose to come to earth in human form in a cold barn in the desert of the middle-east. For an answer I return in thoughts to my childhood on the high desert of eastern Oregon. I remember going out to our barn in winter to play in the straw pile and to hang out with the sheep, the cow, the horse and sparrows. It was a cold and quiet place in winter, but even though there was not a star overhead beaming a shaft of light to the barn like in Bethlehem, the Milky Way came down in the cold, clear night air—almost touchable over the barn.

Our barn was a sacred place. It was a habitat of warmth and life in a cold desert stretching hundreds of miles in every direction. It was like a metaphor for the universe that God created—a universe mostly made of dark matter and dark energy with scarce life. The barn was a simple place close to the earth and the focal point of a creative energy that is hard for me to explain. I think God chose a stable for Jesus because it was simple and unadorned, close to the light of a mysterious star and the home of animals.

In the spring our barn was used for a shearing shed for the flocks of sheep of the area. The sheep would go into the barn with dirty, black wool and after being sheared would come out pure white. The shearers were a diverse lot of Klamath Indians, Irishmen and gypsies. This also is a metaphor—for the resurrection and community of us all brought about by Jesus.

The barn today is still there, but it has fallen to become a long pile of weathered timbers. But like the birthplace of Jesus it still exudes a spiritual aura and holds a sacred place in my heart.

The Meaning of the Western Deserts

I am a child of the deserts of the American West. It is the great space of the West that defines my concepts of the valuable and the sacred—a terrain that inhabits me in the form of wild gods of beauty and terror.

I grew up in the West at a time before television when Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy defined heroism every Saturday at the movie matinee. On the prairies, grasslands and sage deserts of the open landscape of the West emerged the quintessential American hero, the cowboy. The cowboy contended with a landscape of range fires, flash floods, stampedes, blizzards, dust storms, and droughts as dangerous and unpredictable as Ahab’s rolling sea in Moby Dick. The voyagers on the western sea first encountered, and then almost eliminated, the herds of buffalo that to the Native American were deities not unlike Ahab’s white whale. The buffalo were supplanted by herds of cattle themselves creatures of the wild canyons and ranges of the western grass and sage sea. The mounts of the cowboy had to be broken, tamed, trained, and maintained in control by a technology of skill, saddle, lariat and bridle; tools not unlike in purpose the gear and lines of Ahab’s whaling vessel. To encounter and subdue the raw, untamed beasts of nature, the cowboy evolved a code involving courage and ritual not unlike the ritual on a whaling vessel. The code, the tack, the courage, the practice were necessary to cope with the ravaging forces all around in weather, terrain, and beast.

In the sculpture of Frederic Remington can the cowboy be seen fully defined, chiseled and distinguished from the elements of nature. The cowboy in Remington’s art looks like a Greek Apollo, the ideal form of maleness, power, control and technique. This male icon is about as far from the pagan, feminine earth and stone as it is possible to get. But in another sculpture, End of the Trail by James Fraser, can be seen the denouement of the encounter with the wild gods of the West. In the work an Indian brave leans over on his mount in a slumped state of exhaustion, his lance pointing toward and almost piercing the ground, his form slowly dissolving into the primordial soil from which he came.

The movie stereotype of the cowboy eschewing the attractions of the female who would have him remain in town close to family and home, the cowboy riding off into the sunset after kissing the girl, the restless cowboy in pursuit of the gods to be found in weather and beasts, was perhaps an image not too far from the truth. But like Ahab and Zeus, the cowboy seemed to be grasping for the mysterious feminine just over the next sensuous horizon, a presence he wanted to rope and brand never quite succeeding thereby condemning himself to endless wandering as if trying to reclaim the rib torn from him by God.

As a symbol of the encounter of the Wild West, nothing surpasses the rodeo. According to Elizabeth Lawrence, an anthropologist, the rodeo "…represents a dramatic expression of the values (of the cowboy)…the extension of culture over nature, the human