The Beast

Corroding tractor wheels and tread, Bodega Bay, CA

All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Ecclesiastes 3:20

The sand master is reclaimed by the sand. When exposed to water and oxygen iron corrodes and breaks down through an electrochemical process enhanced by the presence of salt. Rust results from iron losing electrons to oxygen under the right conditions. The constant salt spray off a pounding ocean is a perfect crucible for rust. The once mighty iron treads of this bulldozer-like machine have been reduced to an inert curiosity. It's hard to imagine these parts were all once independent and well-lubricated, turning, pulling, yielding to the thrusting power of a diesel engine and thousands of tiny percussive explosions every minute. The peaks of the thick sprocket wheel look like mountains, also eroding, from very far away. The whole appears chiseled from solid rock. The beach behind is deceptively peaceful. The soft foam and fine sand belie the all-consuming ferocity of this slow-moving but all-powerful lip of the earth. The beach is the great equalizer, and that is why we bow before it.

The House that Jack Built

 

This old barn in Glen Ellen, California is a castle of light and rust. It is among the remains of Jack London's Beauty Ranch, a sprawling collection of defunct structures preserved as a State Park. A single photograph cannot do justice to the spirit of this place, where what remains of London's dream can be seen in crumbling ruins such as this, where filtered sunlight illuminates the spokes of an old iron wheel. It doesn't take special psychic powers to feel the haunting presence of Jack London here. Everywhere you look, everywhere you wander on the sprawling grounds of what is now a state park, the man who both wrote and heeded the call of the wild feels alive and present.

Before he was a best-selling author Jack London was a seal hunter, an oyster pirate, a gold prospector and a war correspondent.  His biography reads like one of the adventure stories he's so famous for, but his life can best be summed up by his personal credo:

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out  

in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom  

of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.

This was a man who lived. This was a man who did things and built things and let it all ride on a dream. Jack London dreamed. His prospector's soul never died. The man who wrote To Build a Fire - regarded by some as the greatest short story ever written had a fire burning inside of him. He was a perfect meteor who burned out in a brilliant blaze. He wrote these lines several weeks before his dream house was destroyed by fire.

This is what's left of Wolf House, the remains of what was to be a 15, 000 square foot mansion nestled in the Sonoma County redwoods on London's property. It is a sad and lonely place. These walls, with empty holes where windows were to be hung, seem like a more fitting tribute to the man than the grave marker he left for himself. What better tombstone than this?

Leaf-filtered light streams through the empty shell of London's physical legacy, just as his own body, wracked by kidney failure and weakened by an early bout of scurvy, was itself a broken filter through which the light of words poured through. And they were good words, strong words, words that spoke of men who struggled against the forces of nature and were vanquished by it. London's effort to ranch these harsh lands was also a struggle against nature and in the end, as it always does, nature won.

The stone that marks Jack London's grave was taken from the remains of the Wolf House ruins. There is no other marker above it, no epitaph or polished marble. His work speaks for him instead. A writer's work is his epitaph and this is especially true of a man whose best character was the wild. A stone covered by moss and lichen and ferns and dead leaves. London poured everything he had into this place. He wrote his last few books in order to support it - and those were the most controversial. He was accused of plagiarism and admitted it, to a degree. He needed the money to build his dream house, which wound up succumbing to that great force of nature, fire. In To Build a Fire, the man dies for failure to build one. The irony is staggering. Sometimes real life is even more poetic than poetry.

* * *

The House Where Nobody Lives

We lie in our warm beds and we listen to the sound of rain pattering on the roof. The walls that surround us are our walls and within them we pretend that we are safe. But what is a house and how safe are its walls? A house is, at best, but a temporary shelter constructed of materials that will quickly decay when exposed to that universal solvent we call water. This five room shack near Philo, California is only about a year or so away from collapse. It is a ruin that will not last the ages like some Roman temple or Pueblo cliff dwelling. No future archeologist will lie on her belly for months with a dental pick and brush, slowly revealing the remnants of this lost culture. Whoever lived here was not fascinating; nor craftsman enough to leave a lasting imprint of his legacy.

But what can we say about the occupants of the skeletal remnants of this old house? The oxidized wires at the left foreground of the photograph are what remains of their mattresses- where they slept and dreamed and laid sick and made love. Once they were brand new and pleasant to drowse upon, but the rain has eaten away their soft outer coverings and reduced them to a rusted metal mesh, revealing their functional core - row upon row of coiled iron springs. Nothing is safe from the corrosive power of water.

Standing in the back doorway, looking in through the kitchen, we can can see out the open front door to the road beyond where the photograph above this one was taken. Their stove lies toppled on its side. The white basin at bottom left is the kitchen sink. Someone stood here, night after night, washing dishes, baking pies. Someone stood at the window watching the rain and listening to the occasional passing automobile. Voices carried through these rooms, and lives were lived within these walls. But we cannot tell what kinds of lives they were, whether they were mostly happy or mostly sad. Though from what remains, it's hard to imagine them as anything but the latter. This is what the visible signs of decay do to our thinking. A corpse only reflects the form of the body that once lived. Not even the mortician's make-up will fool us into believing that he who lies before us is the person himself.

A closer look at the stove reveals the broken clock, frozen forever at 7:29. AM or PM? Does it even matter? Let's imagine it was morning, a time when this kitchen would have been in full swing. Who used to watch these little black hands sweep slowly round and round? How many pies did it measure? How many boiled eggs? Maybe none. Maybe the occupants of this shack were not quaint or reflective or adept at the fine art of baking. Maybe they were bitter and lazy. Maybe the cupboard in the background was chronically bare. We don't know anything about the people who lived here. We know only that people lived here. We know that they cooked and that they ate and slept here. But what they cooked and how they cooked it, and how well they slept, or even if they pondered the rain are all just wistful conjectures. It's hard to imagine that this was ever a nice place to live but again, that's because we are staring at a rotting corpse and not the living thing.

A house is a living thing when it is occupied by living people, and when those people are gone the house dies. In the Tom Waits song, The House Where Nobody Lives, he sings the following closing lines:

What makes a house grand
Ain't the roof or the doors
If there's love in a house
It's a palace for sure
Without love...
It ain't nothin but a house
A house where nobody lives...

And it's true. And what we see here is such a house, a house in a state of advanced decay that is not pleasant to look upon. Decay, in this stage, is ugly. It is a wet decay of mold and rot and reclamation. Walls peel and plaster swells as moisture seeps in and does what it does to wood that is dead. This is the natural process of recycling that requires no assistance from man. Nothing really needs sorting or melting down. Nothing we make with our feeble hands really needs carting of to some special facility to be rendered useful again. It will all return to dust and become reabsorbed.

Now the camera peeks in through that same kitchen window where we imagined the forlorned occupant staring out at the rain and the passing cars. What we can see here on the front of the cabinets in the foreground are the remains of yellow paint. Surely this was once a bright and happy place. The light here in the kitchen is good light and the large window that looks out back provides a pleasant view of moss-covered oaks. It was not a large house and they were not wealthy people but they did have all three of the three necessary L's for happiness - location, location and location. What more do we really need than a roof, a bed and a space for preparing our meals? Listen to the Tom Waits song for the answer.

* * *

Where the Wild Things Are: Five Oaks in 5 Minutes

What is it that happens when you stand in close proximity to a large tree? There is a calming effect not unlike that near a large body of water. They say that near water one is exposed to high concentrations of negative ions. Does the effect of big trees possess a similar chemical explanation? The great oaks of Olompali in Northern Marin County convey a sense of timeless perseverance. They stretch southward in a slow-motion photo tropic journey that is almost geologic in scale. The will to live is tactile and contagious. There is an energy present within all lifeforms that is palpable and in a tree that energy is not just spiritual, it's restorative.

A day among trees. After the rain all was quiet and Olompali was empty. This was the site of one of the largest settlements of Coastal Miwok Indians in California,  and one can sense that it was for the native peoples here a sacred place. Beneath these oaks there is a land that sings. It is not hard to understand why the native Americans did not understand the concept of secular and non-secular life. Their lives were enmeshed with the land and the land was alive with God, or what they called the Great Mystery.

A tree is a great mystery. It is so easy to take for granted such a ubiquitous life form but then you come across one of them as striking as the tree above and you realize they are as unique and alive as any human being. Bound to a single location for the duration of what is often a very long life, a tree is like a king of a very small world. Over the course of its lifespan, many thousands of insects and hundreds of birds will find shelter and sustenance within its bark and among its branches. Most trees will never provide shelter for a man, or respite for an imaginative child. But all trees will do so for a vast variety of other lifeforms.

It may be difficult to see, but someone has nailed a small birdhouse to the trunk of this oak - a quaint idea that seems almost silly. The entire tree is home for birds. The birdhouse is of course built of wood, which required the sacrifice of one of the oak's cousins. But still, it is a noble gesture to build a house for birds. It's comforting to imagine an animal living under a roof, like Toad or Badger in Wind and the Willows. A birdhouse is one of the many ways in which we force a tree to be useful. Yet how often do we use them as-is? When was the last time you stood beneath a tree and wondered at it because it was a tree? When was the last time you looked into such branches as these and compared them to your own inner workings? One cannot help but think of capillaries, arteries, veins.

Every tree is worthy of praise and contemplation. But we are drawn to the great ones, the ones that seem to exceed even their own outlandish forms. They seem impossible - a delicate balance of curves and weight and geometry that defies gravity and explanation. Maybe trees are beautiful because they don't require explanation. In the absence of dinosaurs they are the world's great living wonders and it is only because they are immobile that they don't transcend such mythical creatures in the imaginations of the young. Picture if you will, as Tolkien imagined, a sentient, mobile tree society. Such asymmetrical, irregular-shaped arboropods would be terrifying, as the enraged Ents were to the Orcs who decimated Fanghorn Forest. Humans would indeed have something to fear from a suddenly awakened populace of trees.

A tree however only appears menacing, and we humans are often fooled by appearances. What we see in a tree, actually, is only half the story. For, an equally vital portion of its 'body' lies invisible beneath the ground. This is something we do not see. Its root system is roughly equivalent in mass and depth to its visible features. Though its crown and branches stretch up toward the life-giving sun, an upside-down copy of itself thrives with equal necessity in the dark recesses of the mineral rich earth, sucking moisture from the soil and probing ever deeper for that precious resource that binds all living things - water.

An old stone boundary wall, laid by hand alongside this gnarled oak which served, as many old trees have before it, as a survey marker. The moss, which is growing on the tree's north side, is to the tree as the barnacle is to the whale - an opportunistic freeloader that in this case adds dignity to the old oak. The lichen-covered stones and the faint line of barbed wire remind us that it was man who divided the land into arbitrary parcels for the purpose of his commerce, in arrogant disregard to the will of nature; which of course will reclaim it for its own purposes. Trees are, perhaps, the last of the truly wild things living among us. And how lucky we are to have them here, creating oxygen for us, sucking out our carbon dioxide, giving us shade and pieces of themselves to build our homes. If you can read this, thank a tree.

* * *

The Wooden Whale

The incongruous prop. A 14' wooden ladder lying among the marsh grasses, a mile from the road and a mere 100 yards from Kehoe beach on the Point Reyes National Seashore. At a fixed length and weighing about 100 pounds, it is an awkward, unwieldy thing. It was likely discarded in favor of a lighter, more portable aluminum model. It's former owner found it easier to throw it into the sea. It was not the tool of a painter, as it bears no staining or any sign that it was employed as a means to apply colored pigments in hard to reach places. No right tradesman would carry such a dinosaur as this, as it was virtually unportable. 

However it got to this secluded location, this practically antique ladder may have found it's truest and most honorable calling. To serve as an object of utility, to be well-made and useful are noble virtues. But to rise above such high functions to become an object of aesthetic beauty is to achieve a certain immortality. How many of its fellows, manufactured by the thousands in some poorly lit and virtually soulless factory, will ever transcend their natures and design to live forever as an artistic expression and a metaphor? 

The ladder's hard right angles and rigid forms, crafted by the hard hands of man, lie in sharp contrast to the irregular and curving form of nature as seen in this tidal marsh. The flexible brown grasses, the soft, reticulated clouds of condensed water, the rolling hills, the corpse of the ancient cypress - disembodied and covered in celadon lichen. The irony of the wooden ladder, propped up as it is by the mammoth trunk of an old growth tree cannot be ignored either. After all, the ladder was mass produced in order to serve the construction industry, home builders and home service providers - the greatest threat to trees and forests than all the world's asteroids and ice ages combined.

And there, framed between two rungs of this now dead tool of man, a prehistoric eye. Perhaps the ghost of a giant sauropod. Perhaps the wooden effigy of a beached sperm whale.  It faces east, away from the sea, and before the gathering clouds. Maybe it's telling us something. Maybe we should listen. In the end, all the ladders will be gone, and all the walls they were designed to lean against will crumble, and all the men who place them there will have returned back to the dust from whence they came.

* * *

To Be an Oak

Coastal Live Oak, Lucas Valley, CA

In the days of  wooden sailing vessels a tree such as this might serve as a single bracing knee for a ship of the line. English Oaks were decimated for this purpose. The British Empire owed its success to its navies and its navies owed theirs to its ships, and the men who sailed them. The natural strength of the oak was part of the secret behind the might of the English ships and thus not an insignificant component of the might of history's greatest naval power. Thousands of oak trees died for the sins of colonialism.

But this is not an English Oak, it's a Coastal Live Oak living on a hillside in what was once a cow pasture in Northern California. It's primary use these days is to provide romantic atmosphere in the living rooms of Marin County in the form of firewood. There is nothing quite like an oak fire. The wood burns well and fills a home with a pleasant woodsy smell. Oak is also the preferred fuel of the pizza oven. How lovely for such a noble life form as this, to die for our humble palates and palaces.

To me, there is no living thing as stunning or as wonderful as a great oak. I am ever fascinated by their shapes. I've written about them before. In my novel Serpent Box an ancient oak tree plays a prominent role. When I look at an oak tree such as this, I do not see them as static objects. I see them in motion. I see them as vital, living things reaching for the sky. I see them in the midst of a dance. Swaying, turning, undulating. Oak trees are erratic, electric, fractal, chaotic, frozen. Or are they?

I remember seeing once a series of time-lapse photographs taken of a sea bed covered in starfish. Seen in real time, the scene was tranquil and static. Starfish move at a rate of speed roughly equivalent to that of a snail. But sped up, the scene was quite different. When several hours were compressed into a minute or two, the ocean floor looked like a freeway interchange. Starfish, zipping by in all directions, appeared as fast as automobiles, complete with traffic jams and pile-ups. Time *is* another dimension, and I imagine oak trees as simply stuck in ours. But if we could watch them over the span of a hundred years what we saw might resemble an upside-down lightning strike.

Same tree, different angle. The setting sun is obscured by one of the upper branches and the tree is in silhouette. Look closely, but relax your gaze so that it becomes slightly blurred. It might be some neural ganglia, or a piece of coral, or the spidery webs of frost on the window glass. The patterns of nature repeat at various scales and in a wide variety of locations. What an amazing thing it is - to be alive.

If you stand under an oak tree and shut your eyes you can hear it growing. If you hold your hand to its trunk you can feel it breathing, like the hide of some great, prehistoric beast. Trees are my favorite life forms, and oaks my favorite among trees. How beautiful it would be, to be an oak tree that is allowed to live out its natural life on a hill such as this. How many thousands of gallons of rain will it drink? How many sails full of wind will it catch? How many birds will perch in its branches in a hundred years? How many leaves will it grow and shed? And how many human beings will stand beneath it, hold their palms against its trunk and give it credence? Not many of those.

I would rather be an oak tree than a man. It is a worthier existence. And though it does not give very much back to the earth, it springs from the earth and is thus more a part of this world than I.

3 Photographs, 1 Day

It began in the laundromat, a place I had forgotten. A place whose magic I had forgotten. It had been almost 20 years since I did this. The ritual of quarters and $2 boxes of soap and quiet waiting amidst the calming hums. It takes an hour and fifteen minutes to wash, dry and fold a large load of laundry; which is something you take for granted when the machines are within the confines of your own private living space. Here you sit with strangers. Old women and young men. Polite smiles and anxious lurking. A wheeled basket of wet clothes, on deck for the next open dryer. Feeding fivers into the change machine. Staring out the foggy windows. Reading yesterday's newspaper. Reading a book. Spending a valuable chunk of your Saturday afternoon watching the suds swirl, watching your socks and your underwear spin. There is something very quiet, very meditative about laundromats. They are places of renewal and reflection. Here you must stop and wait for the water to do what water does - wash away the sins of your daily living.

From one cathedral to another. This one just up the hill. By this time it had really begun to rain. The woman came in and put down her purse and she dropped to her knees to pray. 22 years in San Francisco and this was the first time I had ever set foot inside Grace Cathedral. The light was spectacular, as it is meant to be in such places. It was even better in the gray of the rain. All the candles seemed to be lit, there was not an unlit candle in the church. This was a day for prayers. Much like the laundromat, this was a place I could stay in for hours. No sound other than murmurs and gentle footfalls. It's the quietness that I seek. Liberation from cell phones and televisions, anything with a screen. Yes, that's what it is about these two places, there are no screens, no screaming electrons. I am drawn to places where I cannot be reached or monitored or reminded how big the world is. I want to go where it is small.

Did they serve him well? That's what I wanted to know. While they lasted, did they keep his feet comfortable and sufficiently warm? From some unknown Chinese province, a long journey in the container of a ship, a short stint in a discount store and then a fortnight at the end of the legs of a man. Did they just suddenly stop working? I want to imagine that he stopped right here, on this corner, and that he just stepped out onto the sidewalk in his stocking feet and said "Goodbye friends, may you serve another less fortunate than I."And he took the laces with him because they were still good. He was that kind of man. And then he walked right down the street you see here, never looking back, maybe even whistling as he went. I have an inexplicable fascination with abandoned shoes.

A Little Den of Dreams

Remember records. Remember what it was like to browse album covers, not necessarily knowing what you wanted but knowing you'd find it. The iTunes store may have more titles but it has nothing on this treasure trove. A record store has a personality, a feel. It has a soul. 101 Music, on Grant Street in San Francisco's North Beach is a gem, and one of the last of its kind.

Here you could buy dreams. Music and the instruments to make it. Staring at record albums, feeling them pass through your fingers, stumbling upon something rare and unexpected - that's what record stores were all about. Now they're freakish curiosities, like haberdashers, or shoe cobblers. Little enclaves of nostalgia reserved for the few remaining vinyl connoisseurs.

The neighborhood record store was, in the 60's and 70's, a place to discover something you never knew about yourself, because popular music was always slightly ahead of you. It was an ever evolving barometer of culture and the truest reflection of the zeitgeist. Music showed you where you came from, what you were and where you were going. The record store, to a 12 year old boy, was the philosopher, politician, preacher and poet in his own backyard and his gateway to the mysterious world of adulthood. There never will be anything like them again. Saving money and traveling to a place to obtain a physical object that held the song you needed to hear, not just now but anytime you wanted. That was still a special feeling. And as incredible as it is to carry my entire record collection around in my pocket, I would give up that convenience in heartbeat for the experience of scavenging for records in a place like this again. And playing records in the dark with my brother until dawn.

Big Water

What do we see in a curve of steel, a line of chrome, a sweep of glass? That rich lacquer and the depths of red paint? All those specular distortions. The Victorian facades of Main Street, Ft. Bragg, lie in the background and as a faint reflection in the white half of the quarter panel. Those times have faded. We're now firmly in the era of speed and space. The geometry of the classic Detroit iron is all about curves and lines, flares and folds. We see a haughty optimism. An almost narcissistic hubris that would so quickly fall pieces in the decade to come. But look at us here. Proud and patriotic. It was, after all, our boldness and technology that just led a world at war. California is the land of the possible and the land of the dream. Why not join us out here in Bel Air? Swimming pools and movies stars. The platinum triangle where palm trees sway gently in a ocean breeze. This was the fantasy that General Motors was selling at the time when this marvel was created - by the hands of the men and women of Michigan, which is a corruption of an Ojibwe word meaning big water. How fitting. There is nothing more promising as a vast expanse of water.

The Upside-Down Schwinn

The Upside-Down Schwinn Continental

Who can say what happened here? I present two possibilities.

A man parks his bicycle at a Venice Boulevard bus stop and leaves it locked to a post. When he returns he finds his wheels are gone. What is he to do?

The bike is old and heavy. Why bother to carry it home? Whoever needed the wheels saw more value in them then he saw in the bike as a whole. It is a solid, steady, American made Schwinn, built at a time when that name was Cadillac. It was, once, a bike to be proud of, a bike to be seen riding and to be riding. And now it is dead and desecrated. It will never again feel the wind. It will never glide or roll. It will stay locked to this post for months, waiting for the City to come and cut the lock and cart it off to a scrap yard. It will stay here waiting for that as he passes by day after day, mourning its loss from the window of the bus. Waiting for the junk man to come. Waiting to be crushed and melted and reformed into something far less graceful.

When he returns he finds that his wheels are gone.

If he returns at all. Maybe it was always his intention to abandon the Schwinn Continental. He leaves it on the street and just walks away. Lets the scavengers take it. Lets the vultures dismember its corpse. Leaves it locked to the post so that it will remind him every day he passes by, of how technology has let him down. He leaves it belly up to be gutted like a deer. Die you miserable piece of crap. Let that be an example to all the other bikes, and to everything else that beguiles us with false promises of freedom.  He leaves the bike a heretic locked in a cage to starve and rot. The upside-down Schwinn is not a loss it’s a victory, it’s a symbol of his frustration with all things mechanical. It’s a Luddite’s trophy buck, a final straw in his battle against technology. This time he is not the fool. This time he shows the machines who’s boss. We made you and we can unmake you. This time he won. The bike is a scapegoat for the all those other things that confound him. The laptop, the smart phone, the blender, the car. The low-tech Schwinn Continental died for the sins of the high-tech world and it will not rise again in three days or in three hundred. But it will rise again. The protean magic of metals guarantees this. It can be melted down and reformed.

Bring me your bicycles, children, bring me old cars. Bring me your bed frames and soda cans. And I will burn them in the pits of hell and render them formless, and I will strip them of impurities, and they will glow with new light in my crucibles of salvation and I will remake them, not in my image, but in your image of me, and deliver them unto you as new beings, ready to serve you once more.

*

I shot this with a Canon T1i using my 10-22mm wide angle lens. It was about 8am and I was walking west on Venice Boulevard in Culver City, just opposite the Museum of Jurassic Technology, when I saw what was left of this bike. I wish I had spent more time photographing it. I took only the one shot. It’s one of those photos that surprises me. My expectations were low. But looking at it now I realize how beautiful it is. I love the symmetry of the image as a whole. Once again my subconscious has captured triangles. Trinities. I love the light on the pedal. I love the sagging chain and the no dumping sign at the curb. All of this accidental. There is no skill involved, no talent. The key to photography, I think, is not to think to all. Let the camera capture what it wants. Surrender to your subconscious and you will be amazed by what it chooses to show you.

Have a Coke and a Smile

There was a time when a physical package would both evoke a feeling *and* provide for easy accessibility to goods. Form not over function, but in service to it. The glass Coke bottle may have been the most perfect package.

Take this beauty I rescued from the ground on Mt. Tamalpais recently. This is a prime example of the so-called hobble-skirt Coke that’s become an indelible American icon. Produced between 1917 and 1965, these aqua, ice blue and green glass bottles are heavy, tactile and fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. This one has the classic city stamp, San Francisco, embossed on the bottom. It’s a 6.5 oz bottle, which means it dates from between 1958 and 1965.

One can imagine that for a brief period of time, long before it was tossed aside (probably from the window of a passing car), this indestructible wonder sat nestled in a bed of ice cubes in one of those red galvanized steel coolers you see now only in antique stores. Some rebellious teenager in cuffed dungarees and a white tee-shirt reaches into the cold, dark tomb and plucks out the icy bottle. With a flick of the wrist that is now a lost art he pops the top with that no longer familiar click, snap, fizz, tinkle and tilts his head back for a pull on the real thing – the pause that refreshes. 

My grandfather, now 92, used to brag about how he’d poor Coke into my baby bottle. I was literally raised on the stuff. It was unfashionable to breast feed back in 1965. For me, Coca-Cola was the closest thing to mother’s milk. There is nothing that evokes a hot summer day like an ice cold Coke. Hold the cool bottle against your brow and lean back on the machine in the shade. At 6.5 ounces this was basically a shooter. A perfect dose of summertime. 

I shot this with a Canon Digital Elph point-and-shoot and what I love about the photo are the three diagonal lines. You’ve got the beautiful lichen covered stone cutting across the foreground. The wedge of grass behind. The pie slice of the dark forest, and then of course the cobalt sky. I find triangles to be aesthetically pleasing and when I can I frame shots to create as many as possible. I love this photograph. Tell me how it makes you feel.

The Ears of the Dead

they move in different rhythms

when they move at all

ossified, oozing

stonefaced turning

blurry rivers

burning

suntanned and bearded

a-muttering concordance

staring high lonesome

in shuffling thrombosis

where distant clouds gather

or pigeons wheel wanting

in starfish-paced wanderings

and sometimes they spin

whose eyes left loving

whose hearts less leaving

with some mother holding

a boy who would be king

and now,

my copper-skinned brother

look not upon me

for I cannot bear it

don’t turn your head

your eyes,

are still baby-blue

please,

your hands,

that held marbles

and leopard frogs

and tops

don’t show me, don’t.

reduced to

mitt-like beaten

bags

don’t make me look

your shriveled witch-feet

poking out from  under that charity blanket

please God

your hair wild like the boy you once was

make it stop

your gray teeth,

bubble gum and lollipops

no, don’t turn your head

your ears, your once soft baby ears

the countless coos and whispers

oozing now the dead green

tide of desperate measures

never look into the ears of the homeless

never

The End of the Line

When we think about technology and how it has changed us we tend to focus on those objects which play to that sci-fi romantic vision promised us in the movies and comic books. Dick Tracy's two-way wristwatch TV is a reality in the form of the new iPhone. Orwell's telescreen is frighteningly close to what we have in social media. Orson Scott Card's vision for the net was remarkably prescient. But we overlook the less sexy tools and inventions which have saved us from the toil and drudgery of hard labor. Consider the industrial clothes dryer.

 

When is the last time you've been to a laundromat? Or better still, when was the last time you saw a line of clothes hanging out to dry in the wind? Look at this thing. A heavy stainless steel mesh encased within a rotating drum that facilitates hot air circulation. The tumbling drum ensures wet clothes receive maximum exposure to hot air. What might take three to four hours fifty years ago is accomplished in thirty minutes and for under a dollar.

Consider the space-age design of what you see here. It could almost be the hubcap of a 1938 Hudson or the nose cone of a V1 rocket. It's an example of accidental beauty in design. Whoever it was, was not focusing on outward its appearance when it was designed. This product was not sold on a retail showroom floor and its customer was likely not browsing through catalogs while musing over images of open dryers. This image was rarely seen, except of course by those mothers, college students, bachelors, spinsters and winos who haunt the urban laundromats of America.

I was drawn to the forced perspective of this image. I stuck the camera into the drum.  I used a 10-22mm wide angle lens; which really helped me achieve this effect of being sucked in. The three 'fins' pull me toward the big metal eye.  The tiny holes feel like empty faces. An audience. An industrial beehive. And where was this made, this uncelebrated masterpiece of efficiency? I'm not sure. But I suspect this is American steel, as this dryer is at least thirty years old.

I could have spent the whole day in this laundromat. My photo safari began here, in North Beach, but this is where I found the most inspiring image. Now I want to do a whole series on laundromats.

The Untold Adventures of Faraway Boys

There is wind. Yes, there is that. There is the cold ocean wind. There are gray waves and white caps and old boats washed up on the sand, and sunlight in the Spanish Moss and Tule Elk like black paper targets on the ridgeline, driftwood and deck planks, big dumb things with google-eyes and Rhorshac spots that low.

There are dogs. There are dogs. Spirit guides, and mud-stained angels that run and swim and retrieve wonderful objects made of wood washed clean by blowing sand, aghast and lonesome, waiting for the boys to come and take them home.

There are waves in the sea. And birds. Coopers’ hawks and vultures, grackles on the white fence, a raven on the wire, all this by the roadside dairy we stopped to admire, the gulls, the terns, the little pygmy owls, the orphan kite shrill, a redwing blackbird, a myriad of sparrows and plucky wrens. We wish to fly.

Children, we are little golden mirrors made of plaster and bits of shell. We are marrow. We begin in the tunnel and wind up on the side of the road. We are made mostly of water. We flow over the low dunes and down to the sea in dead hulking ships, where the cool salt spray stings our eyes among the sweet musk of Holstein cows drifting in from the meadows above the whicker dunes like grandpa’s cigar smoke in the dog days of our time.

We are brittle. We are black boned. Cormorants in droves of silver dust. Where moss gathers, deadfalls speak of bright mornings to come, filled with sparkles and nights of wonder.

We actually fly. We skim the meadow lightly. The combined weight of us dwarfs the biomass of ants. We defy the rigid math of rockets. Our bodies flit. We are not aerodynamic. A good, strong breeze will blow us away.

There is the sound of the ocean, and the white noise of the sea, the hollow rush of water at the hull line, the rapping thunder of sail cloth, the whine of small winches, our little bare feet like tom-tom drums at the dock-master’s shack where an old man whistles the hauling songs of the men we dreamed we’d become.

We remember the water. Horseshoe crabs glisten under the moon. The sound of Spanish Mackerel, Conger eels thick as an Adirondack bat, smash their heads on a stone. Barnacles faintly ticking after the ebb of the wave, a drag-net heavy with silversides. The old dock-cat, Peaches, chewing snapper guts and bones.

Smalls hands, small engine. Oil and gas, cough like a crone until you choke it good and make it flood so that we always have to row. The rusty oarlocks. A sweet patina of creosote and paint. The lap, lop, lip. The gentle pull. The small drips alongside the large, the gunwale, drifting through tidal inlets in our moccasins and birch bark canoe. Dipping, the oars, the water is obsidian smooth and black as wort until the crab pots drop. It’s celadon in the bubbles and the whoosh.

The wind in the cattails. Black birds, red blaze, black wings, throat noises, puffed necks and wobble in the reed beds, cicadas thick as a man’s thumb. Birds like you’ve never seen. Slouching night herons still as stone and cranes bright as ghosts, Eider ducks and Mergansers, Grebes, Mallards and Loons. And boys. Skinny-armed and flouncy banged, trailing fingers chewed down in the cool brack. Trolling. Bamboo poles and sidewinders for the stray snapper or blue.

Floating. In our beds past midnight, lay there, unspeaking, listening, not unknowing, listening, to the sound of the foghorns at Execution, the sound of the waterways, the oboe-like warning, the French horn at dawn, the battle brewing, the boys quietly reciting, Hail Mary after Hail Mary, fending off the devil in the dark, with the windows wide open and insects buzzing against the screens like an untuned guitar string, that heavy surf G string that sounds like the bottom of the canoe when we strike the beachhead and skim up to where the horseshoe crabs couple beneath a summer moon heavy with a crane-like glow.

Night fishing. The poles and the tackle box rattle like a telegraph on the back of the Sting-Ray. Your legs dangling around the banana seat, your hands gripping the sissy-bar, a clothes-pin jutting from the fork for the baseball cards you wrecked in pursuit of mini-bike sounds, when it didn’t really matter, because you only used Mets. Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. Sadecki and Tug McGraw. That was my own hissy-fit.

Weaving and whooping beneath the arc lights, throwing shadows this way and that, serpentine and arm-flopping in the hot July night of the Bluefish run, up to Bolton’s for sandworms in a little cardboard box filled with shredded black seaweed, those terrible annelids from the days of dinosaurs with pinchers on their faces that came out of their heads like a dog’s dick comes out of his pecker-hole. That’s lock-jaw for life.

It was a day. It was a night. It was a time. Lived for one whole second in the music and the light. We stole a Bowman’s Point dinghy and rowed out past the fleet and had ourselves a breakfast of RC Colas and buttered rolls. We smoked a Winston and a Parliament.

Row back to the swamps, where stripers feed on plump killies. Go back deep where nobody goes, behind the reed beds where horseshoe crabs grow big as manhole caps and live to a hundred and five. Fish all day and come home after dark. Find a secret island. Get some more cigarettes and a baloney hero from Sabbie’s. Hold our hands in the bait-well and feel the pointy minnows. Row out to Garvey’s Point and dig for paint-pots. Never go back.