All fall down

Spring of leaves and fall of leaves were the medieval precursors to our terms spring and fall and say exactly what they mean. To whit, the leaves spring forth in April and fall to the ground sometime in October. 

Today we dwell on the lowly fallen leaf and more specifically on the detritus of another golden season in Boston. In a parking lot across from my beloved Museum of Fine Art the gusty winds have swept the fallen leaves into tidy piles that just as surely as a janitor with a broom. A catfish or a dragon per chance?

Less aesthetic but as illustrative of the season are leaves and a beer cup swimming in a puddle from Saturday's rain.

Not New Mexico

I’m riding this fog theme for all it’s worth. Here’s a tight shot with a filigree of branches and leaves that has an abstract quality to it followed by a wide shot of the beach that shows just how foggy it was in Cayucos one fine September morning. This is about as un-New Mexico as it gets. Not to brag but we're all about bluebird skies and vistas to forever.

Man and Beach

Beach towns like Cayucos pretty much exist to serve visitors. That’s not to say there aren’t townies around but the bucks that keep the enterprise afloat come from flatland turistas like moi. Notice how I throw around foreign lingoes with such aplomb.

An iconic beachfront scene is of folks strolling along the strand bare feet in the froth. Above is a hirsute dad with his equally tousled tot and below strides a burly gent with his teen in tow.

Post Industrial Motif

“Three stacks and a rock” is how Morro Bay is sometimes described by locals referring to the 580 foot rock monolith in its bay and the 450 foot smokestacks of its shuttered power plant.

When it was built by PG&E in the 1950s it was welcomed as a boon to the post war recession economy of the town of 11,000. Then in 2012 Dynergy, PG&E’s successor, closed the plant leaving an economic crater and a protruding eyesore with no mitigation plan or budget to remove it. Before the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and in the thrall of the plant's economic largess no one thought about negotiating a clean-up commitment from the utility should the plant ever close. And Morro Bay with an annual operating budget of $10,000,000 can scarcely bear the $30,000,000 needed to demolish and remove the plant.

“Where is the corporate responsibility in America?” asked Morro Bay mayor Jamie Irons. Left unfettered corporate responsibility is to profit, Mr. Mayor. It’s a simple as that.

On the plus side, Morro Bay’s three finger salute in the fog gave me these.

Mysterious and murky

These stripped down photographs of the lamps that light the pier in Cayucos, California remind me in their simplicity of the Sketches of Winter series. While the background in these additions to the Fog Series are medium gray instead of the paper white of the Sketches of Winter the Zen-like serenity is comparable.

This year I was blessed with one socked in day on the Central Coast and it provided enough fodder for at least two blogs. These lamps and posts recall gauzy late 19^th century images of a fog shrouded London, images that some have called saccharine. Call me old fashioned but I like the dreaminess and find mystery and melancholy in the murky dampness.