Day 7, July 29

Smith has decided that we should concentrate on mid- and foreground features. There is the lake shore on the left of the picture, near the horses and what seems to be someone sitting looking over his shoulder on the edge of the hill. Then there is the edge of the hill itself, which has had all the vegetation trampled off of it since who knows how long. And what's more, since the Prince of Wales Hotel Hill is basically the terminal moraine of the last great glacier that sat in this valley, carving out a hole for the lake to sit in, it's plumb near impossible to guess how much geological slumpin' and erodin' 's been goin' on in the past hundred years. Every time I see a pointy rock on the edge of that hill, I think might be the one in the center-left of Riggall's original.

I thought that maybe Bert just got off his horse and sat on a nice flat sandstone sitting rock up there and took it, but that image later showed that that position is s too far back and/or too low. Smith then noticed the remnants of a horse trail leading to one of our camera positions off to the left a few meters; so maybe they rode up on that, got off and took it from there.

I feel like we're getting very close now, though! That's good since my time as Smith's field-assistant is about up. Tomorrow I'll be making the journey up to Calgary to resume my own work havin' to do with the metaphysics and epistemology of logical concepts. I know that I'm going to miss the rhythm of living in the field, and being out there in the dust and wind, with measuring tapes and levels. There's something glorious about standing up there on that hill at the end of that valley on the bottom edge of our country, with the wind and the light shooting right through you as if it's cleaning out your soul. Standing there sort of like a dishrag on a clothesline with your arms outstretched, and your eyes blurry, you can feel your body dissolve into light. And you can get a glimpse of a kind of timeless pure land that exists just beyond our ordinary powers of perception. A land still inhabited by the Blackfoot from 12 000 years ago, Riggall, his wife, and kids.