The Right to Signs

A well regulated landscape, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to post and bear Signs, shall not be infringed.  —An Amendment

Our own 

dialect was abstract, 

we wished to understand 

not how things were

but what spectacle we might 

make of them.

—Meghan O’Rourke

Below:  Along the tracks in Crescent, Klamath County.  A crossing-place for millennia between the Columbia Plateau and Klamath River basin.  As the sign below notes, Ogden passed through in 1826, as did Fremont in 1843. Two centuries of tumultuous change followed, and continues. As the signs -above- indicate...

If you pay attention to every detail,

they will be become our alibi for not arriving on time.

or for never arriving at all

wherever we had set out to go. 

—Luljeta Lleshanaku

Above:  Note from the manager of the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge posted at the (closed) Refuge HQ, October 6, 2025, the sixth day of the US Government shutdown.

Below:  A marker on Rock Creek, the primary drainage of the northeast slope of Hart Mountain.  A survey marker, mining claim, burial?

NOTES

—Oscar Wilde:  ”The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

—Meghan O’Rourke from the poem My Life As A Subject in Once (2011)

—Luljeta Lleshanaku from the poem Small-town Stations (trans Albanian)

—All photos by Douglas Beauchamp, Klamath & Lake Counties (Oregon), October 2025 (except as noted below.)

CODA

The gravesite of Modoc leader Kintpuash, aka Captain Jack, at Fort Klamath, Oregon. (Photo October 2025, courtesy Bryan Andresen) 

Captain Jack was hung by the US Army with three other Modocs in 1873. An effort is ongoing to exhume and conduct a traditional ceremony and burial on Modoc traditional lands, now northern California’s Modoc and Siskiyou Counties.