Tuesday, June 09, 2015

Older Photos from Under the Power Lines

That's the image I was looking for, this photo above from 12/11/2007, taken up on a sort of exposed bedrock out crop beneath these two wooden pylons that support the older power lines that cross the Nonnewaug Floodplain and Nonnewaug's Hill. It's the row of stones that ring the western edge of the outcrop that winds a bit around the northern edge as well, before becoming lost in a tangle of Mountain Laurels. 
Below is an enhancement of a bing bird's eye image where I've put in some not quite true to life stones, just to give you an idea of what it used to look like before the beginning of June 2015 when I'm guessing a private contractor to the local power company came in and changed it:
Maybe some of you reading this have seen something similar in other places like this - other outcrops enhanced by rows of stones. Maybe some of you reading this have pondered if this could be a shamanistic row of stones, perhaps mirroring the veiled Spirit World, a Great Serpent representation linking the Sky World and the Under World on a Sacred Cultural Landscape that evolved and was ceremonially created by Indigenous People over thousands of years, perhaps accompanied by songs and stories once remembered, now forgotten like perhaps the name of this big bald of stone, renewal fires set on one side or the other according to someone's vision.
This is what it looks like now, looking northeast from the last improvement of the last few years {Been Busy}, a crushed gravel access road that wiped out many other stone features - features already comprimised by snow mobiles {http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2008/01/stone-rows-in-snow.html}, ATV's and other things {See: Waking Up search "power lines"}:
Peter, Norman and I once walked right by this in 1998. I might have pointed out some of the stone features, the enhancement of rows of stones, the standing stones and big boulders, and my conjecture about blueberry fields separated by zigzag rows of stones, on our way to a place where multiple rows of stones with quite an abundance of quartz surround what's now a swamp where I showed the two some stone mound - and Norman suggested that a certain row of stones seemed to resemble a serpent in form...
(Above is a 1965 aerial photo, below a bing capture, showing some of the rows of stones etc.
On the ground you glimpse so much more, remnants under the laurels and small trees, the tangles of both Indigenous and invasive plants...)
(Above, an enhancement, below still existing blueberries that hint of the Indigenous management scheme of burning over a particular patch of ground every four years or so to renew it and promote growth, fires contained by fuel breaks of found or enhanced stones recalling the "expedient imagery" of turtles, bears, deer and  other animals, protecting these horticultural fields, the rows themselves petroform serpents - Great Serpents, Horned Serpents - beings that controlled the weather and spoke in a voice of thunder. Below, a good capture, maybe one of my best, of a zigzag row of stones and blueberry leaves turning red in autumn...)


(Above: One of several mounds, this one a collection of cobbles on a boulder, found inside a stone border, to the right in the drawing below, that could function still as a fuel break, that low intensity fire keeping the area of the mounds brush free...)

Above: a small detail of a "point stone" of a zigzag row of stones, perhaps a quartz representation of a serpents head (suggesting perhaps that the rows of stones are sometimes multiple serpents rather than just a single one?), another possibly zoomorphic stone resting on that one, next to that a form I often encounter on mounds and in rows of stones that I call a single stone turtle with an enclusion of quartz/quartzite representing a head, a close up below...)
There's just so much to see up there, so much that could be studied further but it's the Connecticut equivalent of road contractors in Belize crushing up ancient Maya structures to build roadways, "deplorable and unforgivable" as described in this CNN story:

I'm slowly building up a Flickr album, a Powerline Features Collection here:

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