
Author: pilchbo
Missing from the brochures

One thing the Florida travel brochures seem to forget to mention? How you and your car will be inundated by flocks of vultures. Everglades National Park in particular has signs warning about damage to your car. (I think part of it is their fondness for the rubber on the car wipe blades.) My wife’s in Florida right now. Maybe they’re leaving her and her group alone? (And in actuality, they’re getting to be more of nuisance throughout the southeast part of the US.)
I love a parade

It’s not August, but I feel like posting a photo taken by my grandfather almost 70 years ago. He grew up in Seattle from the final years of the 1800s until he passed in 1990. He would regale me about what Seattle was like in those early years, before Grandma would say, “hush, now, Roy, he doesn’t want to hear about all that old stuff!” I actually did. This photo is one of three dozen (a long roll of 35mm film back then). From the shots I can tell my grandfather never moved, just shot what paraded by. This photo is interesting because the young woman in the position of honor on the float looks like my mother. I doubt it’s her–she was way too shy to be this involved in things–but nonetheless… I’ve not delved deeply enough into parade routes, but it’s very likely this corner now has one or more skyscrapers on it. I can tell from some of the photos that it’s at an intersection and the street that leads off in front of the building in the background goes steeply downhill toward Elliott Bay…but then, many streets do that in Seattle. I can see Bainbridge Island in the background of some of the photos shot just a few more degrees to the left. Today it would be impossible to see Bainbridge Island this far up from the Bay.
…and fire in the sky

Forest fires in the Pacific Northwest create spectacularly colored sunsets. This photo–likely digitized from a slide, but I’m too lazy to dig into the files and figure it out–was taken from the University of Montana’s Yellow Bay Biological Station during the one year I attended the UM.
Take it as it comes
A better Valentines Day
blue sunsets
What if sunsets were blue? What if they resembled my recollections: how I broke upon your hardness, how you ran from my insensitive cutting remarks, lasers which severed whatever tied us together those few years? Would I ever have experienced solar reds, oranges, pink-tinged magic? Known this reality? Turned from unreal shadows dancing on Plato's cave wall, pushed into dwelling among well-lit shadow-makers, my memories hold only blue shadows watching blue sunsets.

collecting

Some comb beaches pocketing striking shells, attempting time's arrest. I, rather, snatch sun's rays from morning and evening skies, saving moments too fleeting for memory--tweaking my specimens to resemble what my minds-eye says actually occurred.

Smoke in the Smokies

At the beginning of May 2004, we headed to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, primarily to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I’ve searched in vain for a photo taken around that time near our home in Grafton, New York, where Spring still fought Winter’s grip on our weather. Two days later we entered Spring’s glory, Smoky Mountains-style. I’ve posted other photos (here and here) which display the explosion of green we encountered. I said to my wife as we drove through undergrowth with leaves as large as my hand–some kind of berry, I suspect–and kept an eye out for black bears newly emerged for the Spring, “You know, I think I could live here.” Two winters later, as I cursed the snows again, an opportunity beckoned to test that conjecture, and I took it. North Carolina pleased us even more than Tennessee. Recently, I’ve posted several photos from that time because late January reminds me of the move, and the approach of Spring always makes me thankful I get to experience a long, lingering one here below the Mason-Dixon Line. I’m thinkin’ I need to put on my travelin’ shoes again…


