My office and kitchen are littered with stones.
On the sill behind my desk is the heaviest of them: a 20-pound lump of palagonite from the Deep Creek ravine west of Spokane. It is a dense, crystalized and discolored chunk of basalt—the result of the Grande Ronde lava flow interacting with water some 16 million years ago. The palagonite ranges in color from the glassy black of obsidian to a rough, yellowish-orange crust.
Next to the epic palagonite is a sparkling, fist-sized chunk of Swakane gneiss I gathered on a hike with my son. I collected it near where U.S. Highway 2 makes a sharp turn to the east, heading up a steep canyon to the Waterville plateau. It is more than 70 million years old and comes from a well-traveled formation of metamorphic rock that is thought to have formed in a deep subduction trench, more than ten miles beneath the ocean floor.
The collection has been growing over the years but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to appreciate why I tuck rocks into my pockets. I love good stories. A good photograph tells a story, or at least invites the imagination into one. A good rock tells a story too, and some of the stories are real mind-benders. There are places many of us visit—like the crests of Steptoe and Kamiak Buttes—where we step on rocks that are roughly a billion years old.
It’s easy to lose one’s self in the expansive math of all this. The landscape into which I carry cameras becomes the picture frame for what I’m trying to capture. The form of the hills, cliffs and palisades will be there for thousands of years after I pass, though not forever. And sometimes, in the present, the opportunity to properly photograph a lark, a pheasant, or a mule deer, in the right light, and in focus, is no longer than the blink of an eye. If everything goes well, the day becomes a poem or a song, and a rich memory I can store on a piece of silicon.
—Tim Connor
(You can click on the photos for details on location and/or other field notes. As always, high quality metal or hangable paper prints are available for order and delivery. Contact me at tjccamas@comcast.net for those details.)
