Thursday, June 9, 2022

Walking the Cliff – Ten Years After

 


Onsite at the Cliff Location, temporary signage with a helpful arrow on it read, "You are here."



Except that day ten years ago, at my shoulder these wild roses were a more vibrant, less nostalgic clue as to what might once have existed there, pretty much in the middle of nowhere:



Did that riot begin life tamed? Were those roses regularly pruned by the woman of a house next to that dark pool added to the historic image for our convenience, where the sign says you are?



In other words, stuck at the rude end of history's perennial...



Fact is, the human imprint that still exists at the Cliff Location on the ancient Keweenawan Rift lies beyond all that noise.

It's found on the hill. In the trees. And by all appearances, is made of stone.



I mean, they did name the place Cliff. The town and the people who lived there proved a transient affair.



It's on and in that cliff the real story lies. The kind of narrative that counts and keeps counting, even as it sleeps.



What a world.



Beneath parts of the cliff, remnants of an old world still exist. Please read the how and why of that here.



Noxious chemical properties of the great pile of stamp sands the Cliff Location eventually got buried under retard natural decomposition. Scrape the surface and even wood survives, roughly mummified.



This Cliff resembles some minor tomb lost in blank Egypt. Except these sands don't much shift unless prodded by seekers asking questions not readily answered by obscurity.



In the meantime, a new wilderness eats.