Sunday, October 30, 2022
Dummies, Mannequins, and Lay Figures
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Bears and Poop
Thursday, August 18, 2022
Who Walks Small Towns in America?
Wander the streets at night in almost any small town in America and a nostalgia for an earlier time can set in. In the dark the predominance of black and white reminds one of photos from the last century. It was a time when car dealerships like this one above, formerly Teague Motors in Walla Walla, Washington were located on or just off Main streets. Expansive glass windows invited lunchtime ogling by businessmen or allowed farmers on their way to the implement dealer to consider a new car for the wifey.
Cafes offering biscuit and gravy breakfasts sat jowl and cheek with lawyer and insurance offices, or stores selling furniture, hardware, and groceries. At least one solid-looking bank building sat on one corner while gas stations with benches, where old men gathered, occupied nearby intersections. The city or county edifices stood their ground often in a prominent block to themselves, while theatres and bars provided nightlife. In the center of it all there might have been a small park with a grandstand. A funeral home added a respectable and somber presence.
In Walla Walla where I live now, there were a handful of hotels—some offering rooms for the well-heeled and others like the one over the former McFeeley’s Tavern not so much. Look above on the right side of the photo, you can see the elegant Whitman Hotel reflected in reverse in the glass. Resurrected from a significant decline, it now caters mostly to the weekend wine-tasting crowd visiting from Seattle, Portland and other big cities.
As a child, I remember the glorious feeling of entering the five-and-dime store on the main street in Mooresville, North Carolina. The fountain served grilled cheese sandwiches, ice cream sodas, and banana splits. I recall wandering its toy aisles looking for a cheap toy that I could afford with my little stash of coins. Back out on the street I felt important walking at the side of adults as they stopped here and there to do their business. Everything within an easy stroll. We might have walked home or taken a taxi. On Saturdays all the stores in Mooresville closed by noon. It wasn’t an inconvenience, but a consideration for employees.
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My nostalgia has limits.
In Mooresville in the 1950s and early 60s, I can’t recall seeing any people of color out shopping or even walking down the sidewalks on their way anywhere. In a town where Blacks were a significant portion of the population, they were denied the use of the “public” library or burial in the town cemeteries long after the Civil War and well into the next century. They were also denied the simple pleasures granted white children—easy, welcome, and safe access to downtown day or night.
Out west the towns hid “undesirables” under streets and in second story bordellos. Walla Walla had its share of underground passageways built to keep the Chinese population invisible or to provide hidden access to houses of prostitution. One such passage—now filled-in—led from the basement of the former Pastime Cafe across the street to the then upstairs bordello.
Walla Walla was late in banning prostitution. Even in the 1980s one could wander former establishments with their dreary small rooms furnished with iron bedframes or walk down a hall and peer into community bathrooms. Now those establishments have been reconfigured into offices or boutique hotels.
My town has changed. Few small American towns have had the good fortune of reinventing themselves like Walla Walla has. When I came here forty years ago, I could find a place to park on any block downtown, even on a Saturday morning. There were no shade trees or fancy light poles and benches. It was a drear place with empty storefronts. As apple orchards and pea fields shifted to vineyards and small family wineries became world-renowned, the town changed. In the photo below the gleam of a grill in that back corner of the car dealership is a Jaguar, and there is a collectable Willie’s Jeep to the right. No longer a dealership for the middle-class, it will be one for the better-heeled wealthy.
Saturday, June 18, 2022
Seeing Photo Opts in a Macro World
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Orange Peel Fungus, Aleuria aurantia |
As I try to focus the rectangular field of my phone screen, I struggle with a plethora of unexpected minutia. Bug eyes of a great black wasp, the subtle colors of a tiny mushroom, or the roughness of a snail’s skin. I find myself trying to see faster.
Sunday, May 1, 2022
Malheur Country: Birding, Historical Structures, and Views
"Wear boots. Knee high. It can be muddy around the ponds." Such was the advice of Steve, a gracious ranch-owner in the Malheur area of Harney County in Eastern Oregon. Steve had invited my friend Nancy and me to visit and bird on his property. (Yes, bird is a verb.)
The ponds on his property were host to several hundred American coots and various species of ducks. The birds moved from pond to pond as Nancy and I circled the dikes walking on dry alkali-coated roads. There was also some mud, but Eastern Oregon is experiencing a severe drought.
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Do you see the two sandhill cranes? |
In old homesteads in stands of cottonwoods, we saw great horned owls and even one nesting in the cliffs on Steve's ranch.
The barn is one-hundred-feet across with an interior wall of stone, sixty-feet across, punctuated by windows. Inside the interior wall foals were born, while in the outside circle wild horses were trained to pull wagons.
A pair of nesting great horned owls had taken up residence in the peak's beams. You can see one owl on the lookout in the upper left and the ears of a second in the huge nest in the lower right.
Wild horses are still gathered in the area. BLM has corrals where horses and burros are fed and eventually sold. It was difficult not to come home with a horse or a burro.
It is impossible to wander Harney County and not notice evidence of old ranches and homesteads, many still running, but some abandoned. Stands of cottonwoods marked where houses once stood.
Hines, where we stayed in what I thing was one of the 128 mail-order houses which were constructed for mill workers back in the 1920s, has its monument to ambition. Besides the carefully planned community of houses that still has an inviting neighborhood feeling, the mill owner commissioned an elegant hotel. Unfortunately, the timing was poor coming up on the Depression, so the concrete hotel named The Ponderosa never opened its doors.
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The Ponderosa |
The drought is tough on ranchers. Everywhere we went, locals mentioned their concerns of drought, of low wages, or lack of help. At the Frenchglen Hotel in Frenchglen south of Burns, the restaurant was quiet. Nancy and I were the only lunch customers. The hotel is owned by the National Park Service and will be open for an operating bid this next year. The current operator has been there for decades and is retiring. Finding help has been a recent problem. Fortunately the Frenchglen Mercantile two doors down is expanding into a former many-windowed porchlike room. An energetic local woman is making it into upscale coffee shop with couches, a woodstove, and local art for sale. The hotel's eight rooms are nearly fully reserved from now into next fall. Might any of you be interested in relocating and becoming a hotelier? The position comes with a room of your own!
I certainly felt sorely tempted to stay in Malheur country. What I found appealing was the immense solitude and the long views. The beauty is at every turn from the panoramic to the macro.
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Tuesday, March 8, 2022
Reflections of a Ukrainian Sky, Musings on War
As the earth rotated four times, Ukrainians saw the same sky seen reflected here in the windows of a Walla Walla building before those citizens looked up towards its early morning light and heard blasts and the whine of incoming bombs. Backing away from the glass of their windows, reluctant to turn away from the sight of their beloved buildings and neighborhoods, the Ukrainian citizens moved to their home’s windowless rooms or down to basements and designated subway stations—where they learned to make Molotov cocktails.
I wonder sometimes what it would be like if we could see in the sky a reflection of what has happened in the lands over which it earlier passed. Or if at least, the sky’s atmosphere would carry in its breathe the holler, the whimper, the shimmer, and the dust of such tragic events as the miscalculations of men instigating wars. The sounds from elsewhere raining down on those of us here might just detour us from thinking we too can covet what is not ours.
The building in the photo above was constructed in the mid-1930s, post WWI and prior to WWII. Mostly it has been an unremarkable building, a car dealership on the back of Main Street. As it is being renovated for some new endeavor, it is looking good. Its western-facing plate glass windows clean and gleaming in the day’s “cloudy with sun” forecast. It hasn’t and likely won’t be blown apart. All of us have turned into and pulled up that asphalt drive to park in the back lot and visit the candy store, toy store, frame shop or the latest restaurant where Merchant’s used to be. The storefronts and restaurants flip occupants, but none violently like those in the Ukrainian cities which will change by necessity as they are overtaken or bombed by Russian aggression.
There is much debate as to whether the relatively peaceful last few decades is an aberration or if the human race is moving towards a greater peace. I wonder if when we look down at our cell phone's news with the phone’s screen reflecting the sky above, the visions will contain the echoes and scenes sufficiently awful to convince us to be done with the necessity for those occasional internet searches for Molotov cocktail recipes.
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
My Word for 2022: Juxtaposition
And here are snow-layered heaters looking like elegant Parisian women modeling their hats out in front of the French restaurante Brasserie Four. Snow on heating elements. Score one for winter.
I’m set. I'm on the lookout for placements both intentional and serendipitous. Word placed by word, thought by thought, the footfall of one human by the footfall of another. The juxtaposition of things in time and the circumstantial placement of nature in all her ways.