Stonehenge Memorial, July 2013

So here's an old photoset I'd lost track of at the bottom of my drafts folder. For any non-local readers, this is the Columbia Gorge's somewhat low-fidelity Stonehenge replica, built in 1918 as Klickitat County's World War I memorial. It was widely believed at the time that the original Stonehenge was built for human sacrifices, and I gather the memorial was meant as a sort of bitter comment that humanity hasn't progressed in the last few thousand years. Though the fact that they had the archeology all wrong kind of muddles the intended message. In any case, it's quite a scenic location and not at all depressing in person, and I thought some of my photos turned out ok, so here they are.

maryhill / stonehenge, infrared

Stonehenge (III) : Mt. Hood

Mt. Hood as seen from Stonehenge. Hence the title.

Stonehenge (II) : B+W

More Stonhenge pics, this time in glorious black-n-white. It's a good place to look for interesting shadows, and when you're doing that, color is not an asset.

(Okayyy, fine, before anybody gets all pedantic about it, I do realize that a b+w photo from a digital camera is actually a desaturated color photo, using a Bayer filter and interpolation and all that fun stuff. Sheesh. Get a life.)

Stonehenge (I)

A few photos from Stonehenge, way out in the east end of the Columbia Gorge near the Maryhill Museum. I took these way back in June, right around the summer solstice, so I was kind of expecting there'd be hippies or something. No luck with that, just a few random yokels and obese tourists.

This Stonehenge was built as a World War I memorial. I'd heard that all the time, but I never understood the connection until recently. Sam Hill, the guy who built the thing, was a Quaker and a pacifist. At the time, some archaeologists claimed the original Stonehenge had been a place of human sacrifice, so Hill created this replica to point out that "humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war." Fair enough, except that the archaeologists were wrong, or at least contemporary archeologists don't believe the place was used that way. Which kind of invalidates the entire premise of the memorial. Oops. Still, the guy's heart was in the right place... I think. On the "sacrificial altar" there's a plaque which reads:

"To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country ... in the hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench."

Yikes! That doesn't sound very pacifistic, if you ask me, unless it's meant in the Stephen Colbert sense. And I tend to doubt that. The rural Northwesterners of 1931 weren't known for their subtle sense of irony. So I imagine the plaque was either a misfire, or it was someone else's idea.