I took this on Donner Summit near Truckee, California while there in June 2006. There’s something peaceful about this little alpine lake even if it is right off the I-80 access road.
Photography is all selection. I get in the moment, frame the shot, and everything outside the frame falls away. Usually forever.
When I return to a familiar site, those unshot surroundings are always a surprise, unknown and alien.
I shot this as I was cruising up 610 towards the 290 exit in Houston this afternoon.
It’s a nothing shot, a throwaway of a sign, but it’s a sign I love to see.
Whether it’s coming home from an errand to Houston as today or returning from a longer trip, seeing the Austin sign makes me happy.
There’s just nothing like a sign that points to home.
While we were in Orange, I kept seeing this fellow standing in a ditch by the road hunting crawfish. Finally, I stopped to take a picture so I could ID him. He’s a yellow-crowned night heron.
I love the name night heron. It’s such an evocative name, one that fires the imagination. Not quite as good as the Latin version of the black-crowned night heron (nycticorax nycticorax), which translates to night raven, though.
The picture here doesn’t really do him justice as his crown appears more white than the pale yellow it should be. Blame the photographer. The bird himself was living up to his name, which he claimed was actually Moe.
I also added another bird to my life list: the fish crow. I heard what sounded like a nasal quawking, but the birds flying over looked like crows, but the sound was definitely not the hard caw-caw. I listened to some recordings online and consulted many a tome to learn that I had seen fish crows, a fairly common coastal bird.
We did not wash away in the floods, though I’m still trying to collect two of every greyhound for the ark I’ve been building. Unfortunately, they are each individuals, so I’m only able to find one of each.
Mainly, I hadn’t blogged because I wanted to finish my book. I didn’t want to sit at the computer writing and not be writing that, so blog went by the wayside to meet my self-imposed end of June deadline. I made it with a few days to spare.
The manuscript came in at 249 pages or 66,ooo words. A short novel, called A Short Time to Be There, at least for now. When I went back and looked at the early pages written before I really knew the characters or the pace of the story, I found a few chapters and some scenes that I didn’t really need, so I found myself going with Stephen King’s dictum: 2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%. When that 10% comes from the front end, things start to move better. Redundancies disappear.
I finished the book last week. The next day R’s grandmother died so we had to go to Orange to help with arrangements before the funeral. She died in her sleep at her home without any illness or hospitalization a few weeks shy of her 87th birthday. It was a tough surprise, but then it’s hard to imagine a better way to go.
On the long drive east to Orange, we saw a coyote standing on the side of the road outside Elgin. He ran when he saw us. We spotted a red-tailed hawk perched on a power line near Houston. A bobcat ran across the road in front of us in Orange. I never see that much wildlife from my car. I had never seen a bobcat before. The weather was weird too. Powerful storms kicking up while we were in church, where she was honored, and also right before the funeral.
My mind kept going back to Caesar: “When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
Of course she wasn’t royalty or even a prince, but she was noble. She would help anyone who needed it. She took in the lost. She never gave up on anybody.
In June of ’01, we found ourselves driving from Maine to Montreal. We needed a break and so stopped at the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury, Vermont. I paid my respects to the dead in the flavor graveyard behind the factory.
When you’re at the beach it’s all so clear, but later, looking back it fades and blurs and starts to feel more like the lazy aimlessness you felt while there.
Sometimes photography yields happy accidents like this random shot made with a junky underwater throwaway camera. I find this blurred and washed out image far more satisfying than whatever I was actually trying to do.
This is the beach outside our hotel in Cancun. We were there in Jan ’98 for our honeymoon. The water was rough, black flags and all, so the calm Carribean seemed more Pacific to me.
We stayed in Cancun a few days drinking gringo drinks from coconuts before renting a car and breaking out for Yucatan. We visited Tulum, stayed a few days in Merida where we went to Uxmal (I posted a picture of some of the ruins here) and the Puuc Hills before returning via Chitzen Itza.
I got this shot of Honolulu, looking out towards Diamond Head in July of ’79. During that summer, we moved from Washington, DC to Subic Bay Naval Base in The Philippines, but the journey was as exciting as the destination since we had a three-day layover in Hawaii.
I was between 2nd and 3rd grade, but all through 2nd grade we had studied Hawaii. I learned all about the various islands, King Kamehameha, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa, and had even tried poi. We were in Arizona visting my grandparents when we found out that we were going to get to go to Hawaii.
I was very young, but I remember it all very clearly. I think it was the combination of spending a year studying it before actually getting to go that had the effect of searing it all into my mind. Unfortunately, I was recovering from chicken pox and had some kind of infection on my foor that prevented me from getting to go to the beach, but we saw quite a bit of Oahu anyway.
It’s funny. I couldn’t find an old photo since some rearranging has made the Closet of Old Photos and Other Unfinished Projects more difficult to reach, but then sitting back at the desk, I saw this one framed and waiting right where it’s always been. I guess I just haven’t noticed it in a while.
It was taken in March of ’95 somewhere in northern Arizona. That’s me in the middle. The woman on the right is my wife, but not then. We were still just friends. The woman on the left is L. She introduced us, but I haven’t seen her in years. J took the picture.
That trip took us to New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, Vegas and finally to LA where I fell in love as the sun fell into the sea.
Fenced out or fenced in? If I followed every barbed wire strand in Texas it would lead me to the moon and back and I’d still not have gotten any nearer to the other side.
When I was a kid, the story of the lost dutchman who disappeared while searching for a legendary gold mine on Arizona’s Superstition Mountain fascinated me. I remember looking at those mountains whenever we visited my grandparents in Phoenix and imagining all the stories that they must hold.
I like this photograph, taken with my old 110 in 1982, because faded with time and dirt, it reminds me of the myths of the old west and the magic they still hold for me.
I’d love to follow that old dirt road leading along the telephone poles up onto that mountain and search for that old mine myself even though I know it would be as futile as searching for the Loch Ness Monster or the Seven Cities of Gold. Hopefully, though, they wouldn’t some day spin yarns about the lost Austinite’s gold mine.