Garden of lost soles

Rice is a wide spot on California’s Highway 62 and, some might say, seen too often on these pages.  It's also home to a shoe garden.  Right behind the shuttered service station and across the street from an old Santa Fe Railroad siding lays an entropic display of sneakers, boots and clothing.  This was once the site of a shoe tree that burned down under suspicious circumstances.  In its place has grown a bumper crop of footwear adorning a wire fence surrounding the footprint of a long gone building .  The shoe garden has been so fertile that the fabled Mojave Desert shoe bees have fertilized the adjacent station so that leather and canvas blossums are blooming there as well.

For yet another shoe tree drive US 50, America's Loneliest Highway, just west of Austin, Nevada where the most famous shoe tree once stood.  That one burned in 2011 and has been replaced by a new one just 20 feet away.   There's clearly evil afoot.  Be on the lookout for a barefoot arsonist in a 1967 VW van with California license plate h8shoes.

 

 

 

 

True New or Tried and True

When I drive to or from southern California I try to avoid the interstate and follow blue highways through the Navajo and Hopi reservations.  The vast emptiness of four corners country gives me a bounty of new material each time I visit plus a fresh take on stuff I’ve shot frequently. The images from my November trip with John Farnsworth were a case in point as is this image taken exactly five years earlier. 

 

I’ve been having a between the ears debate about the value of plumbing the depths of familiar subjects versus the thrill of discovery and how each is reflected in the photographic results.  Does the best work come from knowledge and examination of the tried and true or from the immediacy of fresh and new?  The answer is yes.

But then there’s the feeling that you need to get out of Dodge to get stoked; a feeling that is corollary to the more prevalent grass is always greener affliction from which I suffer.  This irresistible force mitigates for the theory that our art is best served by seeing absolutely new things and seeing them frequently.  At least that’s my excuse.

More shots from the road to follow.

The subject that wasn't

A couple of years back I drove from the Black Hills of South Dakota where I was on a climbing trip through Lead, pronounced Leed,  past Deadwood and into Cook County,  Wyoming to see Devils Tower.  In actual fact, the visit to South Dakota was for others in our party to climb.  I gave up climbing for Lent.

Devils Tower, itself an iconic climbing destination, was on a tick list of places I’d wanted to photograph so I made the jaunt northwest from Rapid City.  As often happens when you have a specific subject in your sights an unexpected one intercedes.  The happy accident takes hold and your intended objective fades to dark.

Such is the case with this tiny schoolhouse on the windswept plains of eastern Wyoming.  I can’t name the town because there is no town on Highway 24 between I-90 and Devils Tower. 

At precisely the moment I stopped to photograph the school I had a lens malfunction that caused a soft focus effect. The softness and imprecision recall images from the early days of photography and which are now being emulated with cheap plastic cameras such as Holgas or Dianas.  So despite my predisposition for sharpness this ephemeral quality brings an emotional dimension to the image.

Bad Sport

Nuptse from Kala Pattar

I stood breathless and unsteady atop 18,300 foot Kala Pattar, a brown hillock of no particular significance but for its epic view of Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse.  The hike to its slope shouldered summit was a slow slog of two short steps and a rest followed by two short steps and a rest all the way up from 17,000 foot Gorak Shep, the highest inhabited place on earth.  Though I was lightheaded when we reached the top the staggering panorama was worth every panting breath.  In the thin crystalline air Nuptse smiled with jagged snow clad teeth.

For trekkers summiting Kala Pattar or reaching Everest Base camp is the high point of their two week Khumbu adventure.  Each day of a Khumbu trek is a six hour hike of 2,000 feet or so between monestaries and tiny settlements.  That’s the formula for acclimatizing to altitude and being ready for the final push to 18,000 feet or for an attempt at a trekking peak of 20,000 feet or more.  Then at higher altitude the formula becomes two steps up and one down, where you climb to a new high point then come back down about half of the day's elevation gain to sleep.  Climb high, sleep low is the axiom. 

It was the morning after a climb high sleep low day that I woke up seeing a flight of birds in my right eye, tiny black specks in some kind of avian dance.  I was feeling fit and ready for our planned attempt on Island Peak in three days time but prudence and easy access to a high altitude medical clinic just over the ridge in Pheriche mitigated for discretion.   I couldn’t very well duck a couple of Docs an hour away.

The only things the American and the French doctor could do were take my vital signs and guess at my malady.  The most sophisticated test available was for oxygen saturation and mine was an outstanding 98%.  I was ready for a double marathon at 16,000 feet for Pete’s sake.  “Au contraire mon ami, said kindly Dr. Moreau, you probably have a retinal hemorrhage and we must insist that you go down.  Only bad things will happen if you continue.”   With those words or some facsimile thereof my hopes for climbing a 20,000 footer were dashed. 

All the way back down to Namche Bazaar I cursed like a stevedore, no pun intended.   I was so damn fit. I was the fittest person on our team, guide included.  Two solo days down the trail and two more days in Namche imbibing certain medicinal beverages brought me some equanimity.  But when my group straggled in with the news that they had been weathered off the mountain and could not summit I was not exactly disconsolate.  I was elated.

Roll Tide

There are a couple of things about coastal Alabama that I really get.  One is the weather and the other is the ocean.  Say what you will about rednecks and crackers and that every other human, women included, wears a Crimson Tide hoodie, the lovely folks on Mobile Bay's eastern shore can lay claim to  miles of pristine beaches and to sinuous bayous lacing the coast.  Besides I grow weak at the knees when it's 70 degrees in December. 

Gulf State Park’s new pier juts into blue water for 1540 feet making it the largest on the Gulf.  Opened in 2009, the gargantuan pier replaces a smaller wooden one destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.  2,500 feet of fishing space along its rails welcome fishermen who can cast for King Mackerel, Mullet and Bonito 24 hours a day.  Below the pier white sand stretches for miles east and west. 

 

Another kind of pier probes Ducker Bay at sunset as long haul trucks on I-10 track the horizon.  Alligators crisscross the marsh beneath the walkway and crawfish cling to the pilings at the waterline.  The moist richness couldn’t be more different than the arid high desert of northern New Mexico.  The briny air at sea level seems as heavy as it is crisp and light at 7,000 feet in Taos. 

Feel the love

My friend and erstwhile traveling companion John Farnsworth passed on the query, “Can portraits still be original?”  I imagine the question was asked in light of the gazillion portraits that have been taken, drawn and painted over the centuries.  My answer was “yes.”  If a photograph, for example, captures something indelible about the person, a state of mind or a distinct personality, it is original.  And since no moment in time can be replicated absolutely it is an original by definition. 

With my response to the question I attached a photograph made last week of my niece Hannah and her boyfriend Chris.  I submit that the image is sweet as Hannah herself, and as original.

Please help. I'm falling.

The moment I got a glimmer of the Grand Canyon’s epic South Rim I descended into an abyss of corny snapshots and Kodachrome post cards.  The Grand has that effect.  I skirted the rusty maze for a dozen miles or so, pulling into every scenic vista for a hackneyed memento of the canyon’s grandeur.  Transcendence escaped me that’s for sure.

Still to paraphrase an old bromide, a bad day at the Grand Canyon is better than a good day at the office. 

I hadn’t been there for thirty years or so and still have a straw cowboy hat I bought in Flagstaff on the trip with the kids.  I’m a guy with lots of hats that are scarcely ever worn.  But then I’m also “all hat and no cattle” to use western lingo to describe a dude, a pretender and a tenderfoot.   Every boy, it seems to me, wants to be a cowboy and that’s been true of me since mom bought me my first boots in Tucson back in 1951.  The smell of leather still transports me to the Santa Rita Hotel, Porter’s Western Wear and the Rocky Mountain Oyster Club.  Rocky Mountain Oysters are, shall we say, byproducts of the round up. 

With that stream of consciousness I've wandered past my Grand Canyon moment.  Novelists often describe how the book wrote itself.  I think I just experienced that on a pedestrian level.

 

Take the long way home

As I wound my way home crossing the Navajo Nation near Tuba City I missed my turn to Ganado and found myself once again on familiar turf; an honored theme throughout this adventure.  It’s as if my co-pilot, literally a Pilot, was going to take me through Cow Springs and on to Kayenta whether I wanted to or not.  The long cut probably cost me two hours but what the heck, it’s only time. 

Since I hit the road in Havasu muy late, the sun falling behind me created a heavenly glow on the homesteads and tiny settlements dotting highway 160 toward the Four Corners.  The Navajo reservation is a vast place made even vaster by enormous sweeps of desert scrub punctuated by the occasional hillock or mesa.   It’s an empty beauty of which I never tire.

Most Happy Fella

John reconnected with the lovely Betsy Tuesday.  It was a heartwarming scene as the big galoot embraced his sweetheart after lo these many months.  When we arrived Betsy was smiling through a long charge from her perch above the Victorville valley floor.  The sun shone, birds sang and all was right in the world.

The mechanic, the erudite Austin Stockdale, told John that his 1986 Vanagon would take him anywhere his heart desired but that an oil change wouldn’t hurt.  That’s when John’s eyes glazed over.  Oil changes and John Farnsworth are words not uttered in the same sentence.  John said he might top her off instead.  There’s no arguing with that, ahem, judgment.  But I digress.

It seems to me that Farnsworth was mighty lucky to have found Austin.  The guy diagnosed the problem, a cracked distributor cap, replaced it and housed the wayward bus for six months or so for pocket change.  Merry Christmas and a hearty ho ho ho to you, sirs.

The pics included capture the magic moment for all to share.  Happy trails John Farnsworth.  Write when you learn how.

 

 

Below Low

The thirty five mile long Salton Sea clings to life at 226 feet below sea level.  A watery inland sea that was caused by a Colorado River flood in 1905 the Salton’s salinity increases each year and when summer temperatures reach 115 a noxious sulfur odor wafts as far as Los Angeles.  Once a playground of the famous, Guy Lombardo set several speedboat records there, the Salton Sea has descended into shallow salty death rattle.  What’s left is a population on the fringes of society on the shores of a lake it can’t use but with the faintest glimmers of the inland lake’s brief heyday.

 

 

 

The Salton, it seems fitting, sits astride the San Andreas Fault.  If one terminal illness doesn’t kill it another certainly will.  A waiting for the apocalypse Eden housed in shambling mid-century houses and oxidized 1940’s trailers. 

Abandonment Issues

Photographing Rice, California is like visiting an old friend.  Rice, formerly known as Blythe Junction, was a water station and substation for the Santa Fe Railroad in the thirties and grew to robust population of 15 by WW ll.  Today nada, zip, zilch.

Hualapai Nation

The Hualapai Reservation established in 1883 occupies a million square acres of northwestern Arizona from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon to Interstate 10 and west to Kingman.  The 2,300 Hualapai have embraced tourism as a path to financial sufficiency and are best known for their so-called Sky Walk, a much maligned platform of glass and steel that extends 70 over the Grand Canyon and which, many would say, is out of keeping with a wilderness environment.

Today Peach Springs feels desperate with an over arching melancholy.  It was not apparent, at least in late November, that the tourism model has had much traction and government service continues to be the Hualapai’s primary source of employment.  Unemployment hovers at 40% as it has since 2004.

Critters

This post is long on visuals and short on verbage as my body is on tilt.  Too too much fun with Big Daddy Farnsworth,  These are companions to the corral pics of my last post and are sort of obligatory since it's Sunday and I haven't been late yet.  I have one word "sky."  It's mighty big over the Navajo Nation.