The first shot comes not from Whitehead Crossing but Ashville, where I hiked around about 2 weeks ago. I won’t say exactly where — oh yes, I do have a fake name for the hill I trekked up and down. It’s called Hemp Hill, a potential center for an Ashville mythology. I’ll have more on this knob soon enough; just didn’t want to lose track of the particular photo of it below in the meantime. More on Ashville in this blog here. And I haven’t written about it in so long I forgot *its* true fake name, which is Middletown. Maybe a talk with Carrcassonnee about Middletown is in order. I seemed to have summarized my interactions with it through the Embarras collage series of Jan/Feb *last* year (can’t believe it’s 2016 already!), which contains many images from that city.
Back to Whitehead Crossing, which I visited both Thursday (12/31) and Friday (1/1) for several hours apiece. And I might even return today and Sun. Of course, this particular area is heavily documented in both the present blog and the old Baker Blinker Blog, starting back in 2010 when I first explored it in general. There is little in the present pictures that hasn’t been documented before in terms of just photographing objects. But it seems when I go back I see things from a different angle, or, better, things *change*, almost of their own volition.
The first photo comes from the Korean Channel just south of Whitehead Crossing proper, depicting some bulbous weeds I thought interesting.
Then we move to the two giant, dead hemlock trees that mark a sort of gateway into the area, acting like Boaz and Jachin pillars in their dark and light coloring respectively, and positioned on opposite sides of The Crossing’s central Green Stream. This would be in the middle of about a 100 foot straight run of the stream I call, simply enough, The Straightway, which traditionally begins and ends with two islands (Rocky I. and Cresent I.). I say “traditionally” here because the composition, shape, and even locations of the islands can change over time.
The depression below Crocodile Rock is filled with water. It’s rained quite heavily in Blue Mountain at times during the past week. But often when I visit Whitehead Crossing, it’s dry around this rock.
Another shot of the dark and light hemlock trees surrounding Green Stream.
The Welcome Matt stone, which acts as a set with Crocodile Rock, along with another stone bordering Green Stream called Eagle Rock (I think). All 3 are about equal in terms of surface size, and also lie on the same general line approximately equidistant from each other. I’ll have to remember to take a measuring tape out there sometime to find exact distances.
We step up from Welcome Matt, and what’s called Matland in general at the top of the Korean Channel, to revisit Whitehead Crossing’s stick teepee next, something built by the hands of unknown others just this past June. I don’t think the structure been used for much of anything since it was constructed, and certainly it was never weatherproofed. I initially feared that someone, perhaps a student at the local collage, would simply move in the teepee for the summer and perhaps longer. But it never happened, and now we just have a useless shell of a thing. I’ve even contemplated knocking the teepee down, but that might bring some kind of bad karma. You have to be careful about altering the nature of the area. The *builders* of the teepee might have “sinned”, but I didn’t want to compound their errors by making judgements of my own.
Second Life’s Spongeberg Resident, crazily enough, claims to have lived in this teepee for a period of time as well. In fact, I think he might still believe he stays there. Is it true? Again I’ll have to ask Carrcassonnee the next time we speak, perhaps later on tonight. She’s back from her trip to Nautilus City, as I understand.
If Spongeberg in fact lives there, this would be his view across Matland from just outside the teepee. The 3 rocks mentioned before are basically in line with each other in this view, with Welcome Matt at the bottom of the photo, Crocodile Rock beneath the small, dead hemlock near the picture’s center, and Eagle Rock unseen beneath a stream bank in the background. I suppose this could be called Three Rock Line or The Line of Three Rocks, then.
Stepping up from Matland and Welcome Matt into the teepee and Whitehead Crossing proper would symbolically be very similar to Elton John stepping up into the yellow brick road on the cover of his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album.
Sunklands 