More observations from a transplant...plus Photos
This posting continues with my observations of
the Northwest now that I've been out here for 19 months. It rambles on about
the region and some of the aspects of the Northwest which tie together a wide
and diverse group of states, cities and towns. Mostly, these aspects have to do
with the natural environment - that which we see and that which we use for food.
Recreation will probably be dealt with in a future post. There are also a few
recent photographs which express the grandeur of the
environment.
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I've been thinking lately of "spheres" and
"regions." When I worked at NASA I was always somewhere between several regions
or spheres - these being influence and direction and "point." If I were working
a project for the Office of Space Flight, for instance, and there was some
co-mingling of interest from, say, the Office of Earth Science, then I would be
influenced by and directed by factors from both groups. I was within their
region or sphere.
Another instance: riding the bus. In DC the buses cross town - nearly all of them are through routes from one side of the city to the other via, usually, one big, long avenue or a series of "makes sense" avenue-strings, rarely making any hard turns. As one rode a bus for a long distance, the bus would pick up and discharge passengers from a variety of neighborhood, downtown, uptown or midtown regions - or spheres. As the bus went through these spheres, it's personality would change as the denizens from that area constituted either a new bulk minority or even the majority of passengers on the bus for that segment.
One reason I love taking public transportation is that it allows one to immerse oneself into these regions - differentiated as much by who comprises the population in the region as anything else the region does or creates. This is true of bus routes in cities and Seattle is no different in content even if it's different in form. The advantage of the District is that it's relatively flat with well-defined inner and outer boundaries - some straight lines on a map and others deep ravines with zoos and creeks in them - and it's built on a perfect square-turned-on-its-side diamond 10 miles on a side. Of course, the Virginians demanded their 23 square miles back after the War Between the States, and being conciliatory, the Feds obliged. But it's still a pretty "square" sideways rectangle of 67 square miles. The streets and avenues, being laid out in a master plan at episodic stages in its evolution, are pretty much like they are in Paris. They GO somewhere, they don't just connect. In a way it's even easier, more square and regular, than Manhattan - or say Chicago. Not many big cities have that much acreage with streets which go straight for miles and miles. Crossing places like these gives one a sense of invisible boundaries. There's only the neighborhood "feel" to define what's going on from one block to the next. Pretty much everything else is the same - flat, straight, maybe a hill here and there and maybe a shoreline or river but usually still straight or gently curved.
Here in Seattle, many of the streets are confined to definable segments of geography. Seattle is an interesting place and here's a good instance of why, geological activity could completely disrupt things in SO many ways and there are SO many of these potential geological "hazards" to think about. Hey, that's why it's "interesting," things happen! During the recent post-Tsunami analysis and commiseration and wonder and awe, the local office of the US Geological Survey, which also runs the local Tsunami information and alert service - local being like the northwest quadrant of planet Earth, created several simulations which they put on the web and held news conferences about. There's some really neat stuff on the web, so you should check out:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tsunami/time/wa/animations.shtml
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/211158_tsunamiseattle08.html?source=rss
http://geology.wr.usgs.gov/wgmt/pacnw/rescasp1.html
The movie of the simulated Tsunami striking Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle is:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tsunami/time/resources/animations/seattle_cap.qt
[ not mentioned but worth noting in this movie is that the bathymetry of Puget Sound and Elliott Bay is also shown - look closely into the blue areas which denote water to see the underwater canyons and ridges. ]
What's cool about all this is that under conditions of a 16-foot wave, Seattle's geography would allow at least one neighborhood to become an island. More cool still is the fact that Harbor Island would disappear. In fact the entire former tidal estuary of the Duwamish River would return and major chunks of SODO and the entire downtown and Elliott Avenue waterfronts would be gone. West Seattle would lose it's beaches on the Bay but not on the Sound. The result would be a cityscape which would mimic much of Washington State's coastline with waves lapping at cliffs heavy with fir. Most of the steep cliffsides of the hills here in Seattle have been declared hazardous to build on and turned into natural reserves and wildlife preserves and ecological niches. That pretty much defines the coastline of the Northwest. Of course, such a change would make the city unlivable in the present sense. The waters would recede and the third of the arterials in the city which were lost could be restored, including nearly the entire stock of railroad tracks. No airport runways, though! The economic loss to the harbor (no ships, no trains, no trucks) would be felt across North America. Most West Coast ports are now operating at or slightly above capacity. (Isn't everything in this country?)
Because of city geography like this very few buses traverse great distances across Seattle. Nearly all the buses do run either from one end to the other or from one side to the other. A couple of them make a most interesting set of dog-legs or incomplete loops. For most of the buses I take, each of them traverses a number of regions acquiring and then disacquiring the persona of that region. Traveling downtown is always a treat because just passing through Pioneer Square's sphere is enough to completely change the character of the bus itself. Sometimes it's giddy, foolish, silly out-of-towners on a spree, sometimes it's the entire wino crowd of the Fireman's Memorial park in PSquare (my abbreviation) moving up to the downtown homeless center at the Market. And sometimes it's an entire bus of Catholic Boys and Girls School's art classes heading for SAM - very schizophrenic with some students putting on airs and others putting down airs.
One doesn't necessarily become aware of this degree of micro-regionalization unless one either walks around a lot for great distances or takes public transportation a lot for great distances. Mostly that's because getting there any other way insulates the traveler from being exposed to any of the influences from these different spheres. Cities like New York, Paris, Berlin, Rio, and others are noted for the density of the spheres they contain. In New York, walking one block can take one to an entirely different universe.
I look for these things on the micro scale and on the grand scale. Actually I'm in a sociological trap where I'm always trying to perform like the movie "The Powers of Ten" on the sociological elements I'm encountering. Yes, that does mean the people. But also how the people have molded things to their way or molded themselves to the place's way. We've all experienced the time when out-of-towners from somewhere or something have taken over our neighborhood or town or city. That was them moving through you. Riding the bus is you moving through them. Zapping through downtown in a Lexus SUV with three of your closest compatriots just dashing about town, gets you from one of these regions/spheres to another in an isolated bubble - almost a time displacement machine. Walking or riding the bus/subway/tram/cable car/LRT/Metro from any of these different spheres to another allows (or forces, depending on your personal level of tolerance) for an absorption of culture through an immersion in it. Your are, indeed, forced to listen in on other people's conversations, "feel" their attitude(s), look at their dress and demeanor. A lot of folks are uncomfortable with that much personal information about strangers. But if you're curious, optimistic and pretty much open minded to anything and have this inherent faith in humankind, then putting oneself in the midst of a hoard of up-close and in-your-face strangers is a most interesting way to spend the time getting from Point A to Point B. And, if you're deeply motivated by some strange drive to amass vast quantities of direct, individual as well as group, behavior observation and assimilate this data into some sensible analysis about what makes people tick, or behave, in certain ways in certain environments, then riding public transport is a never-ending dream. You know, I did mention this, that I now carry a digital voice recorder as well as a camera on nearly 100 percent of my outings.
This thread, by the way, picks up on the earlier posting's comment about my illuminating more of what I've found out here in 18 months and the impact of cutting my tether a thousand days ago. You all knew that I was a "free floater," one who could accommodate my curiosity by studying ants if that's all there was for hours on end. Here in the Puget Sound area, I get to study an entire new city and the influence of a complete set of five million strangers in a natural setting that's, to say the least, among the most generous ever offered to humans. That means that I'm always picking up useless, new, information which I'm continuously filtering and processing through a thousand different mental algorithms I've got running. Things like "why this, here?", or "hmm, where have I seen that behavior (or pronunciation) before?," are always running through my head. I walk around this town a lot which means I see a lot of sky.
This region has a phenomenally high ratio of random weather covering almost the entire range of weather phenomena. I'm constantly looking about and trying to incorporate the wind movement, the solar incidence (real sunshine shining down or through), the effect of urban concrete versus forest versus water and the cumulative thermal effects of great bodies of water and large urban heat generators. Throw into this the effect on the winds and currents of all the mountains, peninsulas, jetties, bluffs and cliffs and shorelines. It's as vast an undertaking as any supercomputer-driven NOAA or NASA model. Except that for me and us - the humans - this is the kind of data incorporation that we were born to perform. One can "sense" things which is another way of saying that all these algorithms concurrently processing in one's mind are taking all this sensory input from our eyes, ears, skin, mouth, nose, body position, and more and adding that to the already-understood and memorized past experiences and creating a new future - predictive case - event. Yes, it doesn't take a weatherman to tall which way the wind is blowing. By constantly wondering, pondering, looking things up and positing ideas and testing their validity, one can "know" a place by its weather, by its geography, by its people.
How the people? Pretty simple, really. Just observe and note everything which people do - I mean everything. The way they walk up and down grocery store aisles, the way they merge into freeway traffic, the way they spend their idle time waiting in lines, the way they scamper when they need to hurry up. There are mannerisms which exist in areas. We could no sooner "not hear" a Southern accent than we could "not see" a blue sky. This is the grossest level of discerning. Follow this down a long and winding path and one can learn such things as how a particular neighborhood reacts to a locally-made bread or beverage or to a local politician. Be voracious and do this kind of thing everywhere and stash all this "data" into appropriate mental bins and let the algorithms ker-chunk away.
My conclusion about this place is that the Northwest is a region or sphere which is a sizeable chunk of arc-quadrant Earth. There's plenty of real reasons - the geography defines a sizeable area of an ocean and a sizeable area of a land mass. There are some things which occur here which only occur in certain, few, other areas of the planet (earthquakes and volcanoes, for instance). This region has a direct and directed-trade relationship with a huge coterie of partners "across the ocean." This has amazing parallels with the Northeast - different ocean, different partners, but the same linked-in-synchrony feeling and the same transliteration of language going on with the same shared use of visual metaphors.
From Carmel north every garden in the Northwest (and, yes, Northern California, NoCal, the SF Bay area, Humboldt, et al. are part of what I'm calling the Northwest) has a distinctive and palpable feeling of strong Asian influence, either Japanese, Thai, Korean, Chinese - from a dozen Chinas, or Indonesian or something. There's a very "felt" connection between one's abode, work-place and surrounding natural environment. The confluence of influence on that last one is both Oriental and Native and is almost a double-whammy on the non-Oriental or non-Native who lives in the Northwest. You're born here or you move here but you accept what this place offers on its own terms and part of those terms are that the natural environment is powerful, soothing, and to be appreciated and you incorporate as much of that natural environment as you can into your other life elements. You don't do that Back East. You don't really do that in the South unless you're on your own island or have your own little river or bayou running through your plantation. Up North - say Philly or New York, you'd separate the two and have a vacation place in the Catskills or Poconos. You wouldn't incorporate the two. You might do that in the Midwest if you had a great house or farm on a bluff overlooking vast rolling plains or a thousand little lakes or meandering streams by the dozen (think Missouri or Iowa or Minnesota or Colorado). You do that in that area which is still somewhat ill-defined by most of us - the Intermountain West. The West begins at the Front Range (Rockies) and ends at the Pacific. The Southwest "sort" of starts somewhere in Colorado - probably as far north as the Spaniard conquistadors actually got. Which means the Northwest really starts somewhere around the same place - let's call it Pueblo. And, remember, we're not talking the "same" magnificent geography, we're talking the same impact on the people of different but still linked and magnificent geography. Bozeman "feels" Northwest even though it's completely different than Boise or Eugene. Missoula is definitely Northwest.
States like Utah and Nevada are in both Northwest and Southwest regions but have their own internal sociological realities even beyond the draw from one or the other of these regions. However, Bozeman, Missoula, Great Falls, Helena, the Wasatch Range in Utah, these are all places which "feel" Northwest. Head north out of Salt Lake City and within an hour you'd swear you'd changed some kind of zone. Spend time at any of the lodges in Yellowstone and you'll feel the draw of the Pacific and the Orient and Alaska and Russia. I include Yellowstone because, sure, it's in the mountains, and sure it's in Wyoming, but if you've been there then you know how dominant this Pacific Northwest influence is. It's a bi-coastal sociology which begins its influence at the western edge of the Eastern Front Range of the Rockies. Leave the Plains, next stop Japan via SF/Seattle. Living in Seattle is odd in a couple of ways. Washington DC is a huge, mega, East Coast "mother" of a city and region and yet it's just one more huge, mega, East Coast "mother" of a city all strung in a row on the Atlantic Seaboard. There's nearly six million people living in the DC metro and the minute you leave that bunch there's another 2.5 million in Baltimore to the north or another 2 million in Richmond to the south. It's three hours from Richmond to Baltimore. In that time-span by car or train you travel straight through the heart of over ten million different souls. And that's on the low end of the density scale for the East Coast. Heck, there's only 13 million people living in all of Oregon and Washington states. There's a density reduction out here, compared to the Atlantic Seaboard, of about one-to-three (1:3 Northwesterners vice Northeasterners). That's just for the populous areas. What is unmentioned but not unnoticed is that the Northwest occupies nearly twice the area as the Northeast and contains some of the most amazing geology in North America.
So places like San Francisco, Oakland (and Berkeley), Portland, Bend, Medford, Boise, Seattle all have a disproportionate "mind" share compared to their cousins Back East (or Down South, or Out "West"). These cities and towns draw their regions in vast swaths and share freely between each other. Is San Francisco the king (or queen)? Sure it is. It's the only city in the country to come even close to Manhattan's density (16,000/sq.mile SF, 67,000/sq.mile NY County). It's absolutely right up there with NY for style, panache, gastronomy, inventiveness, and ahead in some areas of creativity. So one could call San Francisco the "bella donna" of the Northwest. And it is. It's a gorgeous city, seductive, electric, exciting, sophisticated, light and airy but deep and brooding and all of that is completely surrounded by and enveloped in this fantastic natural setting complete with rolling fog banks and misty, hazy, distant perspectives.
The railroads used this grandeur to lure new settlers and businesses westward over the mountains. But it's not just a lure. Once one is actually living someplace like Bozeman or Missoula or The Dalles or Eugene or Berkeley - or even Seattle or San Francisco - the grandeur oozes down into one's soul. One expects certain things to just "be" there - the mountains or the ocean or the lake or river with the backdrop of some mile-high range of escarpments. And, yes, the wildlife takes one into its own realm and one begins to look at things like fish as delicious renewable eating sources. Vegetables and fruits like to grow in a thousand micro climates scattered throughout the Northwest. Grapes really really like the inland coastal breezes and the Summer-long sunshine with cool evenings. There's a certain definition of a place which includes what's good to eat and drink from that area or that's easy to grow or make in that area. These kinds of places have a special feel about them.
All of a sudden it's not just regional cooking anymore, it's more the "way of cooking" of a region. One uses fresh natural ingredients because this region is one of the places where such things exist in abundance and variety. When the Safeway carries organic produce and meats and a large mulit-national North American as well as a fairly representative Asian array of foodstuffs you know that it's a "region" thing because Safeway just isn't the same place as Trader Joe's or some fancy New York Dean and Deluca. The Safeways in the DC area had a few variations between them based on neighborhood (local "micro" region) but none of them bothered much with organic anything because there was always the Fresh Fields to cover that market segment. Out here in the Northwest - in San Francisco, in Boise, in Seattle, the Safeway doesn't compete with Fresh Fields any more than it did in the East but it does carry organic food because that's what the people who live here want. Even if they shop at Safeway (btw, I shop at Safeway among the rest of the groceries shops I also use - and why not, if I can get Tillamook Cheese for half-price over say Metropolitan Market's price, it's the same Northwest, excellent, Oregon Coast cheese). They still seem to know how to make and market real chocolate milk out here. If you lead a healthy life then you can have a couple glasses of real chocolate milk now and then - it's not a sin, okay!
That's one of the regional elements of what I'm calling the Northwest - and that is the propensity of the people, all of them, top to bottom, rich to poor, conservative to liberal, to care about and want and buy good, clean, honestly-produced foodstuffs. Of course another thing about this same group of folks is that they like their fresh and natural food to taste really good. They want good places to eat out and for not all that much money. They also want fresh bread - French or whole grain - but fresh. Sure, Washington DC had its share of local bakers and I did stop at a number of them regularly. But here in the Northwest, the local baker's products can just as easily be found in the bread section of the supermarket. That's different. It's like that for a bunch of things most folks would consider important - bread, cheese, chocolate, fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry, seafood, fish, but, damn it, it's also true for wine, and beer, and even cola - both Thomas Kemper and Jones are native to the region and make as excellent a drink as IBC or Stewart. 'Course, this doesn't even begin to count the number of region-specific totally natural, homeopathic, or bio-pure products that co-exist on the same shelves and in the stalls of the same markets. Shoot, everyone out here seems also to like the natural beauty of either a "wild" or managed garden. Most of my neighbors, and these are equally split between men and women, produce a seasonal crop of flowers with some of them producing a seasonal crop of either fruits or vegetables or both.
I'm split between two incarnations. I'm the same Eastern effete liberal snob I think I've always been and feel totally at home in my studio overlooking the Sound making mobiles or painting or writing or messing with music, but I'm a new person who now knows the difference between what I used to think was "fresh" and real fresh. It's amazing what food can taste like when it's fresh and has been minimally processed if it's something like bread or chocolate or beer or coffee even. There's absolutely nothing to compare with a mouthful of just-picked-them-yourself right off the thorny vine blackberries. What's so wonderful about the ubiquity of the blackberries here is that you always know when someone's been a pig because they've got these deep blue-purple stains on either their clothes or hands or lips or tongue or all of the above. If they've been a voracious pig they've even got thread-thin red streaks on their arms or hands from picking the berries and having another slice of skin razored through by the micro-sharp thorns. Worse than puppy husky dog teeth.
There's an almost universal draw toward honest, good, foodstuffs and along with that goes a seemingly heartfelt goal of being honest and hardworking and efficient. Perhaps that's the early settler ethic still resonating. But it's something which exists in Montana, Idaho, parts of Utah, and the northern areas of California and Nevada, and Oregon and Washington and Alaska. British Columbia's in there too, but there's these little Canadian twisty-differences added, eh? I only recently discovered that there's this perfect valley in South-Central BC where there are at least a hundred vintners sharing maybe three or four score vineyards covering both sides of the hills following the lake-river-lake as it meandered through that area. It looked all the world like the counties immediately north of San Francisco. I've yet to try any BC wines as I still haven't plowed my way through even the bigger Washington State labels. And to further prove that I'm a long way from discovering everything about this area, I learned recently that instead of three local chocolatiers, there are five. The only other place I've ever lived which had so much to do with chocolate as Seattle (or even worse, San Francisco), was South-Central Pennsylvania - Dauphin, Cumberland, York and Lancaster counties (Harrisburg and Colonial York and Lancaster with the Amish thrown in). There were at least two dozen chocolate candy makers thriving when I lived there in the '60s; there are at least a dozen of them still thriving today. And, no, these are not your local branch of Russell Stover either. I always thought it strange when I would take US-22 (I-78) north from DC (via I-270 and US-15) to either New York, Connecticut or Montreal (sometimes) that when I was zipping through Allentown I would pass the Keebler Baking plant right south of the Interstate with a huge attached warehouse and truck-docking ports adjacent to what looked easily like an industrial baking factory, and that my Grasshopper "thin mint" equivalent and several other favorite Keebler cookies I liked were baked in that plant by robots. It didn't make the cookie taste any less good, it just erased any idea in my mind that there were Keebler "elves" making these things.
I've been to a few of the food factories out here already and the scale, even it some of them are as industrial, is just more manageable. I'd already mentioned that the Northwest has a density of people less than half that of the Northeast. It seems that because the land is so much more vast that these people out here have decided to congregate in fewer places. There is another difference to the density. In the Midwest, South or East (Great Lakes, Appalachia, Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, New England) there are towns everywhere and they are usually of a thousand people or more. Out here there are way fewer towns of a thousand people and they are further apart. The bulk of the population in the Northwest live in a collection of "urban villages," the biggest being San Francisco and perhaps the most modest a place like Bozeman or Helena or maybe Bend. Each, though, is the hub, the gravity source, for their portion of the region. The region (the Northwest) influences the whole but the micro universes have their own influence and share back with the region. When there are music or cooking or dancing or theater or art festivals in these urban villages, players from the entire region come to the same stage. Perhaps that's another element which ties all this sociology together, the participants are willing to travel to other areas and share their works and be influenced by these other places with easy grin-and-bear smile. I mean, if I lived in Helena I'd be pretty comfortable with my "place" and the ethic of where I lived but that wouldn't prevent me from diving in and enjoying the lively street life on Market Street in downtown San Francisco or the beautiful promenade streets in Boise. It's almost like what holds this whole sociological slice together is the notion that we're living in a place which is beautiful which allows us to live and eat and work healthy and have enjoyable lives and we like to see what viewscape others have.
In the Northeast especially, there's a concurrent thread of sociological similarities going on that have to do with tracing "roots," either of one's family, or of events, or of movements, or even of religions and methods of medicine and war. One thing the East is rich in is libraries and museums. One could travel the East spending time inside the former lives and dwellings of writers, artists, military heroes, medical heroes, and inventors. That's a form of human landscape which draws a huge number of participants. It's not that there is a dearth of libraries or museums in the West or Northwest, it's just that with fewer towns, fewer people, a history which is up to one third as short, there just aren't that many buildings housing artifacts of an important nature from some discernible point in the past. What there are are pretty amazing. There are museums in Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, British Columbia, Wyoming, Montana and ghost towns in Utah and Colorado and Nevada which show the way it really was. These are time pieces which have been frozen. The county museum in Bozeman is housed in the first modern jail the town built either right before or right after the turn of the 20th Century. This looks like the model for the Iron Maiden. The bars are more than an inch in diameter, the sheet iron itself is more than a quarter-inch in thickness, the hinges creak, the floor is deeply-layered brick on stone. Even as a museum and outfitted with interior showcases and discrete lighting one could not do anything but shudder and realize that being stuck in this place a hundred years ago would have been a really bad thing. Not warm, not comfortable, not quiet (amazing what steel walls and brick floors do to sound). There was even a "hole" which was in the far corner of the jail and which was a square steel cage of four feet by four feet and six feet high with a door which had no holes in it. There were small slits in the walls to let air through. That's a museum! Not much interpretation, just raw "show and tell." In a hundred years or so I expect the Gallatin County Museum to be in the same building but to have evolved in its interpretative skills to the level of perhaps the Poe house in Baltimore.
Even that Bella Donna, San Francisco, doesn't have the depth or number of libraries or museums that a Philadelphia or Boston or maybe even Cleveland or Pittsburgh has. It's got everything it should have, it's just not been around that long yet. So this youth effect has indirect effects on a lot of things out here. There aren't, for instance, generations of bygone factories or companies which changed names two dozen times but still make the same thing.
A relatively unique experience to a fraction of the Northwest populace exists in Puget Sound and further north along the Alaska Marine Highway and that is this lifestyle by ferry boat and the notion that one can live in a house on the water, and if not floating then on piers. There is, of course, the whole Staten Island gig and the millions who commute to Manhattan. That ferry system comes in second after Washington State Ferries. They both carry in excess of 20 million people a year. The major difference is that the New York ferries are just humongous. They carry like six or seven hundred people. The biggest Puget Sound ferry only carries about 300 people, but it also carries cars. And, if you live on the Outer Banks you almost can't avoid using the North Carolina State Ferries. I suppose there are Massachusetts Bay and San Francisco Bay ferry dwellers, too, but their number is vanishingly small compared to New York and Puget Sound. There's an extension of this service which continues all the way up to and past Juneau, and, BC has extensive ferry service between the mainland and Vancouver Island so in a sense the Northwest from Puget Sound onward is a marine highway environment. Island commuters - that's another regional distinction and having taken other East Coast ferries and a Great Lake ferry I can attest to the difference having whales and orcas makes. I guess that would be another regionalism - whale watching. Don't overlook the importance of the Northwest for eagle spotting. There's nowhere else in the country where there's as high a likelihood of seeing one to a dozen eagles in a single sitting as there is out here. In the mountains, in the river valleys, along the coastal cliffs. It may be our national bird but it's a local treat. Make no mistake, either, seeing an eagle every day or just about every day is a significant difference from seeing them maybe twice a week or two or three times every two weeks or so, which is how often I caught the two nesting pairs which roamed up and down the Potomac. I used to think they were "mine," but the pair I watch who live in nearby Schmitz Park here are truly mine because I can watch as they soar from their aerie on the daily fishing hunt, give up and head toward the creek valleys near here and start on their small mammal hunt. Again, it's the integration of the environment into my life which seems to be the most significant "cultural" change.
I'll blast this off into networld and return to more observations at a later moment. At some point in the near future I'll update the art pages with some of the new work. That will be tricky as most of the new work is three-dimensional and not likely to be captured easily in a two-dimensional image. That's especially true of mobiles because they move. I suppose I could try my hand at object photography and create a "walk around" VR of a mobile. That's a reasonable goal and if I'm successful you're sure to hear about it and get to see it.
As Roy Rogers and Dale Evans used to sing: "Happy Trails to you..."
Chas
[ By the way, I KNOW YOU KNOW THIS, but I'll say it here so it's hard to miss:
You can download any of these images directly using either Window/Control/Command
"click" on the image and saving to your hard drive. You can then open any image
separately in the imaging software of your choice - iPhoto/Preview/LView/Photoshop.
I try very hard to keep these images small and lightweight, but sometimes more pixels
is better and sometimes higher quality JPEG compression is better. I image for quality,
not price and only wish there were even larger screens running on everyone's system. ]
Images of downtown
One of the viewscapes facing north from an area on First Avenue I frequent because
it's the closest bus stop home from the Uptown Espresso on 4th Ave. and Wall where
I'm often at for a meetup. This is sort of dead-square in the middle of Belltown.
Looking south on First from that same general bus-stop area we find this serendipitous
neon dancing man. He doesn't do anything, unlike the "eye" in the image above, which
blinks. But dancing neon man IS fun to stare at - it's got one of the "right" combinations
of neon color and a bunch of captivating shapes. Plus, check the photon backscatter off
the shiny stone facing blocks of the building.
Just another ordinary Sonics game night at the Key Arena. The red neon of the sign
and the darker blue of the sky contrast nicely with the geometry of the Space Needle
highlighted against the pink-tinged clouds. Geometry has been corrected in this image,
which means the columns look like they do in real life and not like they do when taken
through a moderate wide-angle lens.
Skyscape while crossing West Seattle Bridge
This is a set of eight images taken while going West-to-East across the WSeattle Bridge to get to the Uptown Espresso on 4th Avenue
Wednesday evening. What's going on here is that the "center point" of the image - the Columbia Tower (aka Bank of America Tower)
(aka Amazing Developer Rip-off Deal) - the tall black building (aka Darth Vader Building) is not changing from its position in the
center of the image (left-right, top-bottom). What's also not changing is the rather continuous-tone gray of the bottom half of the
image. What is changing is the angle of view of the Darth Vader Building. Notice the position of some of the wonderful clouds with
respect to the various buildings; notice the amount of harbor water which is visible; notice the changing perspective of the red
ship loading/off-loading derricks; finally, notice the amount of sun-glint off the buildings downtown as the images progress from
a shallow angle to an acute angle. The angle sequence tracks the top left and across, down, across, down, and so on to the
bottom right. This is a "time-stop, angled-perspective" scene of the setting sun having fun with the city and the sky.
Not the same day, but another setting sun having fun with the sky, and in this case, the Sound.
And in the other direction there's the high cumulus still catching those long rays of the setting sun. The Sound sunset above is about 120
degrees left-to-right and this one facing the Cascades is about 170 degrees L-R.
One could literally spend an entire dawn or dusk doing nothing but watching the
interplay between sun, sky, and water or land mass. Each moment is a new image - a
new perspective, a new set of direct, reflected, and refracted light. Or, one could just
let this entire visual environment seep deep into one's soul and just take it for granted
that the "world" looks like this. That's what's so friggin' cool about Earth, there are at
least ten-thousand different, stunning, views of the same sunset from ten-thousand
different locations on the planet. And that's probably a ridiculously low number. Blake
Island is 4 miles offshore, which makes it 4.25 miles away in this image. It's a mile
long and a mile across at the north end (right side) and narrower at the south end.
Okay, here's an unusual one - a grave for a dog named "Coffee" who was only ten years
old when he died. Most of the gravestone can't be read in this image, but the dog was the
partner of a King County Sheriff. The dog died and this memorial was placed in front of what
is now the Java Bean coffee house in Luna Park area of West Seattle in 1995. Java Bean
opened in 1996. The guy on duty at the coffee house promised to ask the next cop or
sheriff's deputy who came in a little about the history. What's ironic is the dog was named
"Coffee" and buried here with grave marker in what one year later would be the front
sidewalk area of a coffee house. The coffee house barista didn't even know this was here.
(For locals, it's on Avalon Way about 100 feet south of the overpass of the West Seattle
Bridge, or 100 feet south of the intersection of Spokane Street with Avalon Way.)
Not all Puget Sound sunsets are multi-chromatic. This one is in solid tones of sepia and
gold - this is an undoctored image. This was today - Saturday, May 16 - following a morning
of cold, wind, and rain. Afternoon temps felt like they were mid-sixties - it felt like this image
looks - warm and slightly humid.
Standing in the hall outside one of the doors to my studio you get a sense of how filled
with light it can get. That's the new paper mobile caught in the foreground dangling. The
microscope is a still-functioning reminder of a different life.
So...ooooooo! That's it for now, as already stated above - "Happy Trails..."
Another instance: riding the bus. In DC the buses cross town - nearly all of them are through routes from one side of the city to the other via, usually, one big, long avenue or a series of "makes sense" avenue-strings, rarely making any hard turns. As one rode a bus for a long distance, the bus would pick up and discharge passengers from a variety of neighborhood, downtown, uptown or midtown regions - or spheres. As the bus went through these spheres, it's personality would change as the denizens from that area constituted either a new bulk minority or even the majority of passengers on the bus for that segment.
One reason I love taking public transportation is that it allows one to immerse oneself into these regions - differentiated as much by who comprises the population in the region as anything else the region does or creates. This is true of bus routes in cities and Seattle is no different in content even if it's different in form. The advantage of the District is that it's relatively flat with well-defined inner and outer boundaries - some straight lines on a map and others deep ravines with zoos and creeks in them - and it's built on a perfect square-turned-on-its-side diamond 10 miles on a side. Of course, the Virginians demanded their 23 square miles back after the War Between the States, and being conciliatory, the Feds obliged. But it's still a pretty "square" sideways rectangle of 67 square miles. The streets and avenues, being laid out in a master plan at episodic stages in its evolution, are pretty much like they are in Paris. They GO somewhere, they don't just connect. In a way it's even easier, more square and regular, than Manhattan - or say Chicago. Not many big cities have that much acreage with streets which go straight for miles and miles. Crossing places like these gives one a sense of invisible boundaries. There's only the neighborhood "feel" to define what's going on from one block to the next. Pretty much everything else is the same - flat, straight, maybe a hill here and there and maybe a shoreline or river but usually still straight or gently curved.
Here in Seattle, many of the streets are confined to definable segments of geography. Seattle is an interesting place and here's a good instance of why, geological activity could completely disrupt things in SO many ways and there are SO many of these potential geological "hazards" to think about. Hey, that's why it's "interesting," things happen! During the recent post-Tsunami analysis and commiseration and wonder and awe, the local office of the US Geological Survey, which also runs the local Tsunami information and alert service - local being like the northwest quadrant of planet Earth, created several simulations which they put on the web and held news conferences about. There's some really neat stuff on the web, so you should check out:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tsunami/time/wa/animations.shtml
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/211158_tsunamiseattle08.html?source=rss
http://geology.wr.usgs.gov/wgmt/pacnw/rescasp1.html
The movie of the simulated Tsunami striking Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle is:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tsunami/time/resources/animations/seattle_cap.qt
[ not mentioned but worth noting in this movie is that the bathymetry of Puget Sound and Elliott Bay is also shown - look closely into the blue areas which denote water to see the underwater canyons and ridges. ]
What's cool about all this is that under conditions of a 16-foot wave, Seattle's geography would allow at least one neighborhood to become an island. More cool still is the fact that Harbor Island would disappear. In fact the entire former tidal estuary of the Duwamish River would return and major chunks of SODO and the entire downtown and Elliott Avenue waterfronts would be gone. West Seattle would lose it's beaches on the Bay but not on the Sound. The result would be a cityscape which would mimic much of Washington State's coastline with waves lapping at cliffs heavy with fir. Most of the steep cliffsides of the hills here in Seattle have been declared hazardous to build on and turned into natural reserves and wildlife preserves and ecological niches. That pretty much defines the coastline of the Northwest. Of course, such a change would make the city unlivable in the present sense. The waters would recede and the third of the arterials in the city which were lost could be restored, including nearly the entire stock of railroad tracks. No airport runways, though! The economic loss to the harbor (no ships, no trains, no trucks) would be felt across North America. Most West Coast ports are now operating at or slightly above capacity. (Isn't everything in this country?)
Because of city geography like this very few buses traverse great distances across Seattle. Nearly all the buses do run either from one end to the other or from one side to the other. A couple of them make a most interesting set of dog-legs or incomplete loops. For most of the buses I take, each of them traverses a number of regions acquiring and then disacquiring the persona of that region. Traveling downtown is always a treat because just passing through Pioneer Square's sphere is enough to completely change the character of the bus itself. Sometimes it's giddy, foolish, silly out-of-towners on a spree, sometimes it's the entire wino crowd of the Fireman's Memorial park in PSquare (my abbreviation) moving up to the downtown homeless center at the Market. And sometimes it's an entire bus of Catholic Boys and Girls School's art classes heading for SAM - very schizophrenic with some students putting on airs and others putting down airs.
One doesn't necessarily become aware of this degree of micro-regionalization unless one either walks around a lot for great distances or takes public transportation a lot for great distances. Mostly that's because getting there any other way insulates the traveler from being exposed to any of the influences from these different spheres. Cities like New York, Paris, Berlin, Rio, and others are noted for the density of the spheres they contain. In New York, walking one block can take one to an entirely different universe.
I look for these things on the micro scale and on the grand scale. Actually I'm in a sociological trap where I'm always trying to perform like the movie "The Powers of Ten" on the sociological elements I'm encountering. Yes, that does mean the people. But also how the people have molded things to their way or molded themselves to the place's way. We've all experienced the time when out-of-towners from somewhere or something have taken over our neighborhood or town or city. That was them moving through you. Riding the bus is you moving through them. Zapping through downtown in a Lexus SUV with three of your closest compatriots just dashing about town, gets you from one of these regions/spheres to another in an isolated bubble - almost a time displacement machine. Walking or riding the bus/subway/tram/cable car/LRT/Metro from any of these different spheres to another allows (or forces, depending on your personal level of tolerance) for an absorption of culture through an immersion in it. Your are, indeed, forced to listen in on other people's conversations, "feel" their attitude(s), look at their dress and demeanor. A lot of folks are uncomfortable with that much personal information about strangers. But if you're curious, optimistic and pretty much open minded to anything and have this inherent faith in humankind, then putting oneself in the midst of a hoard of up-close and in-your-face strangers is a most interesting way to spend the time getting from Point A to Point B. And, if you're deeply motivated by some strange drive to amass vast quantities of direct, individual as well as group, behavior observation and assimilate this data into some sensible analysis about what makes people tick, or behave, in certain ways in certain environments, then riding public transport is a never-ending dream. You know, I did mention this, that I now carry a digital voice recorder as well as a camera on nearly 100 percent of my outings.
This thread, by the way, picks up on the earlier posting's comment about my illuminating more of what I've found out here in 18 months and the impact of cutting my tether a thousand days ago. You all knew that I was a "free floater," one who could accommodate my curiosity by studying ants if that's all there was for hours on end. Here in the Puget Sound area, I get to study an entire new city and the influence of a complete set of five million strangers in a natural setting that's, to say the least, among the most generous ever offered to humans. That means that I'm always picking up useless, new, information which I'm continuously filtering and processing through a thousand different mental algorithms I've got running. Things like "why this, here?", or "hmm, where have I seen that behavior (or pronunciation) before?," are always running through my head. I walk around this town a lot which means I see a lot of sky.
This region has a phenomenally high ratio of random weather covering almost the entire range of weather phenomena. I'm constantly looking about and trying to incorporate the wind movement, the solar incidence (real sunshine shining down or through), the effect of urban concrete versus forest versus water and the cumulative thermal effects of great bodies of water and large urban heat generators. Throw into this the effect on the winds and currents of all the mountains, peninsulas, jetties, bluffs and cliffs and shorelines. It's as vast an undertaking as any supercomputer-driven NOAA or NASA model. Except that for me and us - the humans - this is the kind of data incorporation that we were born to perform. One can "sense" things which is another way of saying that all these algorithms concurrently processing in one's mind are taking all this sensory input from our eyes, ears, skin, mouth, nose, body position, and more and adding that to the already-understood and memorized past experiences and creating a new future - predictive case - event. Yes, it doesn't take a weatherman to tall which way the wind is blowing. By constantly wondering, pondering, looking things up and positing ideas and testing their validity, one can "know" a place by its weather, by its geography, by its people.
How the people? Pretty simple, really. Just observe and note everything which people do - I mean everything. The way they walk up and down grocery store aisles, the way they merge into freeway traffic, the way they spend their idle time waiting in lines, the way they scamper when they need to hurry up. There are mannerisms which exist in areas. We could no sooner "not hear" a Southern accent than we could "not see" a blue sky. This is the grossest level of discerning. Follow this down a long and winding path and one can learn such things as how a particular neighborhood reacts to a locally-made bread or beverage or to a local politician. Be voracious and do this kind of thing everywhere and stash all this "data" into appropriate mental bins and let the algorithms ker-chunk away.
My conclusion about this place is that the Northwest is a region or sphere which is a sizeable chunk of arc-quadrant Earth. There's plenty of real reasons - the geography defines a sizeable area of an ocean and a sizeable area of a land mass. There are some things which occur here which only occur in certain, few, other areas of the planet (earthquakes and volcanoes, for instance). This region has a direct and directed-trade relationship with a huge coterie of partners "across the ocean." This has amazing parallels with the Northeast - different ocean, different partners, but the same linked-in-synchrony feeling and the same transliteration of language going on with the same shared use of visual metaphors.
From Carmel north every garden in the Northwest (and, yes, Northern California, NoCal, the SF Bay area, Humboldt, et al. are part of what I'm calling the Northwest) has a distinctive and palpable feeling of strong Asian influence, either Japanese, Thai, Korean, Chinese - from a dozen Chinas, or Indonesian or something. There's a very "felt" connection between one's abode, work-place and surrounding natural environment. The confluence of influence on that last one is both Oriental and Native and is almost a double-whammy on the non-Oriental or non-Native who lives in the Northwest. You're born here or you move here but you accept what this place offers on its own terms and part of those terms are that the natural environment is powerful, soothing, and to be appreciated and you incorporate as much of that natural environment as you can into your other life elements. You don't do that Back East. You don't really do that in the South unless you're on your own island or have your own little river or bayou running through your plantation. Up North - say Philly or New York, you'd separate the two and have a vacation place in the Catskills or Poconos. You wouldn't incorporate the two. You might do that in the Midwest if you had a great house or farm on a bluff overlooking vast rolling plains or a thousand little lakes or meandering streams by the dozen (think Missouri or Iowa or Minnesota or Colorado). You do that in that area which is still somewhat ill-defined by most of us - the Intermountain West. The West begins at the Front Range (Rockies) and ends at the Pacific. The Southwest "sort" of starts somewhere in Colorado - probably as far north as the Spaniard conquistadors actually got. Which means the Northwest really starts somewhere around the same place - let's call it Pueblo. And, remember, we're not talking the "same" magnificent geography, we're talking the same impact on the people of different but still linked and magnificent geography. Bozeman "feels" Northwest even though it's completely different than Boise or Eugene. Missoula is definitely Northwest.
States like Utah and Nevada are in both Northwest and Southwest regions but have their own internal sociological realities even beyond the draw from one or the other of these regions. However, Bozeman, Missoula, Great Falls, Helena, the Wasatch Range in Utah, these are all places which "feel" Northwest. Head north out of Salt Lake City and within an hour you'd swear you'd changed some kind of zone. Spend time at any of the lodges in Yellowstone and you'll feel the draw of the Pacific and the Orient and Alaska and Russia. I include Yellowstone because, sure, it's in the mountains, and sure it's in Wyoming, but if you've been there then you know how dominant this Pacific Northwest influence is. It's a bi-coastal sociology which begins its influence at the western edge of the Eastern Front Range of the Rockies. Leave the Plains, next stop Japan via SF/Seattle. Living in Seattle is odd in a couple of ways. Washington DC is a huge, mega, East Coast "mother" of a city and region and yet it's just one more huge, mega, East Coast "mother" of a city all strung in a row on the Atlantic Seaboard. There's nearly six million people living in the DC metro and the minute you leave that bunch there's another 2.5 million in Baltimore to the north or another 2 million in Richmond to the south. It's three hours from Richmond to Baltimore. In that time-span by car or train you travel straight through the heart of over ten million different souls. And that's on the low end of the density scale for the East Coast. Heck, there's only 13 million people living in all of Oregon and Washington states. There's a density reduction out here, compared to the Atlantic Seaboard, of about one-to-three (1:3 Northwesterners vice Northeasterners). That's just for the populous areas. What is unmentioned but not unnoticed is that the Northwest occupies nearly twice the area as the Northeast and contains some of the most amazing geology in North America.
So places like San Francisco, Oakland (and Berkeley), Portland, Bend, Medford, Boise, Seattle all have a disproportionate "mind" share compared to their cousins Back East (or Down South, or Out "West"). These cities and towns draw their regions in vast swaths and share freely between each other. Is San Francisco the king (or queen)? Sure it is. It's the only city in the country to come even close to Manhattan's density (16,000/sq.mile SF, 67,000/sq.mile NY County). It's absolutely right up there with NY for style, panache, gastronomy, inventiveness, and ahead in some areas of creativity. So one could call San Francisco the "bella donna" of the Northwest. And it is. It's a gorgeous city, seductive, electric, exciting, sophisticated, light and airy but deep and brooding and all of that is completely surrounded by and enveloped in this fantastic natural setting complete with rolling fog banks and misty, hazy, distant perspectives.
The railroads used this grandeur to lure new settlers and businesses westward over the mountains. But it's not just a lure. Once one is actually living someplace like Bozeman or Missoula or The Dalles or Eugene or Berkeley - or even Seattle or San Francisco - the grandeur oozes down into one's soul. One expects certain things to just "be" there - the mountains or the ocean or the lake or river with the backdrop of some mile-high range of escarpments. And, yes, the wildlife takes one into its own realm and one begins to look at things like fish as delicious renewable eating sources. Vegetables and fruits like to grow in a thousand micro climates scattered throughout the Northwest. Grapes really really like the inland coastal breezes and the Summer-long sunshine with cool evenings. There's a certain definition of a place which includes what's good to eat and drink from that area or that's easy to grow or make in that area. These kinds of places have a special feel about them.
All of a sudden it's not just regional cooking anymore, it's more the "way of cooking" of a region. One uses fresh natural ingredients because this region is one of the places where such things exist in abundance and variety. When the Safeway carries organic produce and meats and a large mulit-national North American as well as a fairly representative Asian array of foodstuffs you know that it's a "region" thing because Safeway just isn't the same place as Trader Joe's or some fancy New York Dean and Deluca. The Safeways in the DC area had a few variations between them based on neighborhood (local "micro" region) but none of them bothered much with organic anything because there was always the Fresh Fields to cover that market segment. Out here in the Northwest - in San Francisco, in Boise, in Seattle, the Safeway doesn't compete with Fresh Fields any more than it did in the East but it does carry organic food because that's what the people who live here want. Even if they shop at Safeway (btw, I shop at Safeway among the rest of the groceries shops I also use - and why not, if I can get Tillamook Cheese for half-price over say Metropolitan Market's price, it's the same Northwest, excellent, Oregon Coast cheese). They still seem to know how to make and market real chocolate milk out here. If you lead a healthy life then you can have a couple glasses of real chocolate milk now and then - it's not a sin, okay!
That's one of the regional elements of what I'm calling the Northwest - and that is the propensity of the people, all of them, top to bottom, rich to poor, conservative to liberal, to care about and want and buy good, clean, honestly-produced foodstuffs. Of course another thing about this same group of folks is that they like their fresh and natural food to taste really good. They want good places to eat out and for not all that much money. They also want fresh bread - French or whole grain - but fresh. Sure, Washington DC had its share of local bakers and I did stop at a number of them regularly. But here in the Northwest, the local baker's products can just as easily be found in the bread section of the supermarket. That's different. It's like that for a bunch of things most folks would consider important - bread, cheese, chocolate, fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry, seafood, fish, but, damn it, it's also true for wine, and beer, and even cola - both Thomas Kemper and Jones are native to the region and make as excellent a drink as IBC or Stewart. 'Course, this doesn't even begin to count the number of region-specific totally natural, homeopathic, or bio-pure products that co-exist on the same shelves and in the stalls of the same markets. Shoot, everyone out here seems also to like the natural beauty of either a "wild" or managed garden. Most of my neighbors, and these are equally split between men and women, produce a seasonal crop of flowers with some of them producing a seasonal crop of either fruits or vegetables or both.
I'm split between two incarnations. I'm the same Eastern effete liberal snob I think I've always been and feel totally at home in my studio overlooking the Sound making mobiles or painting or writing or messing with music, but I'm a new person who now knows the difference between what I used to think was "fresh" and real fresh. It's amazing what food can taste like when it's fresh and has been minimally processed if it's something like bread or chocolate or beer or coffee even. There's absolutely nothing to compare with a mouthful of just-picked-them-yourself right off the thorny vine blackberries. What's so wonderful about the ubiquity of the blackberries here is that you always know when someone's been a pig because they've got these deep blue-purple stains on either their clothes or hands or lips or tongue or all of the above. If they've been a voracious pig they've even got thread-thin red streaks on their arms or hands from picking the berries and having another slice of skin razored through by the micro-sharp thorns. Worse than puppy husky dog teeth.
There's an almost universal draw toward honest, good, foodstuffs and along with that goes a seemingly heartfelt goal of being honest and hardworking and efficient. Perhaps that's the early settler ethic still resonating. But it's something which exists in Montana, Idaho, parts of Utah, and the northern areas of California and Nevada, and Oregon and Washington and Alaska. British Columbia's in there too, but there's these little Canadian twisty-differences added, eh? I only recently discovered that there's this perfect valley in South-Central BC where there are at least a hundred vintners sharing maybe three or four score vineyards covering both sides of the hills following the lake-river-lake as it meandered through that area. It looked all the world like the counties immediately north of San Francisco. I've yet to try any BC wines as I still haven't plowed my way through even the bigger Washington State labels. And to further prove that I'm a long way from discovering everything about this area, I learned recently that instead of three local chocolatiers, there are five. The only other place I've ever lived which had so much to do with chocolate as Seattle (or even worse, San Francisco), was South-Central Pennsylvania - Dauphin, Cumberland, York and Lancaster counties (Harrisburg and Colonial York and Lancaster with the Amish thrown in). There were at least two dozen chocolate candy makers thriving when I lived there in the '60s; there are at least a dozen of them still thriving today. And, no, these are not your local branch of Russell Stover either. I always thought it strange when I would take US-22 (I-78) north from DC (via I-270 and US-15) to either New York, Connecticut or Montreal (sometimes) that when I was zipping through Allentown I would pass the Keebler Baking plant right south of the Interstate with a huge attached warehouse and truck-docking ports adjacent to what looked easily like an industrial baking factory, and that my Grasshopper "thin mint" equivalent and several other favorite Keebler cookies I liked were baked in that plant by robots. It didn't make the cookie taste any less good, it just erased any idea in my mind that there were Keebler "elves" making these things.
I've been to a few of the food factories out here already and the scale, even it some of them are as industrial, is just more manageable. I'd already mentioned that the Northwest has a density of people less than half that of the Northeast. It seems that because the land is so much more vast that these people out here have decided to congregate in fewer places. There is another difference to the density. In the Midwest, South or East (Great Lakes, Appalachia, Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, New England) there are towns everywhere and they are usually of a thousand people or more. Out here there are way fewer towns of a thousand people and they are further apart. The bulk of the population in the Northwest live in a collection of "urban villages," the biggest being San Francisco and perhaps the most modest a place like Bozeman or Helena or maybe Bend. Each, though, is the hub, the gravity source, for their portion of the region. The region (the Northwest) influences the whole but the micro universes have their own influence and share back with the region. When there are music or cooking or dancing or theater or art festivals in these urban villages, players from the entire region come to the same stage. Perhaps that's another element which ties all this sociology together, the participants are willing to travel to other areas and share their works and be influenced by these other places with easy grin-and-bear smile. I mean, if I lived in Helena I'd be pretty comfortable with my "place" and the ethic of where I lived but that wouldn't prevent me from diving in and enjoying the lively street life on Market Street in downtown San Francisco or the beautiful promenade streets in Boise. It's almost like what holds this whole sociological slice together is the notion that we're living in a place which is beautiful which allows us to live and eat and work healthy and have enjoyable lives and we like to see what viewscape others have.
In the Northeast especially, there's a concurrent thread of sociological similarities going on that have to do with tracing "roots," either of one's family, or of events, or of movements, or even of religions and methods of medicine and war. One thing the East is rich in is libraries and museums. One could travel the East spending time inside the former lives and dwellings of writers, artists, military heroes, medical heroes, and inventors. That's a form of human landscape which draws a huge number of participants. It's not that there is a dearth of libraries or museums in the West or Northwest, it's just that with fewer towns, fewer people, a history which is up to one third as short, there just aren't that many buildings housing artifacts of an important nature from some discernible point in the past. What there are are pretty amazing. There are museums in Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, British Columbia, Wyoming, Montana and ghost towns in Utah and Colorado and Nevada which show the way it really was. These are time pieces which have been frozen. The county museum in Bozeman is housed in the first modern jail the town built either right before or right after the turn of the 20th Century. This looks like the model for the Iron Maiden. The bars are more than an inch in diameter, the sheet iron itself is more than a quarter-inch in thickness, the hinges creak, the floor is deeply-layered brick on stone. Even as a museum and outfitted with interior showcases and discrete lighting one could not do anything but shudder and realize that being stuck in this place a hundred years ago would have been a really bad thing. Not warm, not comfortable, not quiet (amazing what steel walls and brick floors do to sound). There was even a "hole" which was in the far corner of the jail and which was a square steel cage of four feet by four feet and six feet high with a door which had no holes in it. There were small slits in the walls to let air through. That's a museum! Not much interpretation, just raw "show and tell." In a hundred years or so I expect the Gallatin County Museum to be in the same building but to have evolved in its interpretative skills to the level of perhaps the Poe house in Baltimore.
Even that Bella Donna, San Francisco, doesn't have the depth or number of libraries or museums that a Philadelphia or Boston or maybe even Cleveland or Pittsburgh has. It's got everything it should have, it's just not been around that long yet. So this youth effect has indirect effects on a lot of things out here. There aren't, for instance, generations of bygone factories or companies which changed names two dozen times but still make the same thing.
A relatively unique experience to a fraction of the Northwest populace exists in Puget Sound and further north along the Alaska Marine Highway and that is this lifestyle by ferry boat and the notion that one can live in a house on the water, and if not floating then on piers. There is, of course, the whole Staten Island gig and the millions who commute to Manhattan. That ferry system comes in second after Washington State Ferries. They both carry in excess of 20 million people a year. The major difference is that the New York ferries are just humongous. They carry like six or seven hundred people. The biggest Puget Sound ferry only carries about 300 people, but it also carries cars. And, if you live on the Outer Banks you almost can't avoid using the North Carolina State Ferries. I suppose there are Massachusetts Bay and San Francisco Bay ferry dwellers, too, but their number is vanishingly small compared to New York and Puget Sound. There's an extension of this service which continues all the way up to and past Juneau, and, BC has extensive ferry service between the mainland and Vancouver Island so in a sense the Northwest from Puget Sound onward is a marine highway environment. Island commuters - that's another regional distinction and having taken other East Coast ferries and a Great Lake ferry I can attest to the difference having whales and orcas makes. I guess that would be another regionalism - whale watching. Don't overlook the importance of the Northwest for eagle spotting. There's nowhere else in the country where there's as high a likelihood of seeing one to a dozen eagles in a single sitting as there is out here. In the mountains, in the river valleys, along the coastal cliffs. It may be our national bird but it's a local treat. Make no mistake, either, seeing an eagle every day or just about every day is a significant difference from seeing them maybe twice a week or two or three times every two weeks or so, which is how often I caught the two nesting pairs which roamed up and down the Potomac. I used to think they were "mine," but the pair I watch who live in nearby Schmitz Park here are truly mine because I can watch as they soar from their aerie on the daily fishing hunt, give up and head toward the creek valleys near here and start on their small mammal hunt. Again, it's the integration of the environment into my life which seems to be the most significant "cultural" change.
I'll blast this off into networld and return to more observations at a later moment. At some point in the near future I'll update the art pages with some of the new work. That will be tricky as most of the new work is three-dimensional and not likely to be captured easily in a two-dimensional image. That's especially true of mobiles because they move. I suppose I could try my hand at object photography and create a "walk around" VR of a mobile. That's a reasonable goal and if I'm successful you're sure to hear about it and get to see it.
As Roy Rogers and Dale Evans used to sing: "Happy Trails to you..."
Chas
[ By the way, I KNOW YOU KNOW THIS, but I'll say it here so it's hard to miss:
You can download any of these images directly using either Window/Control/Command
"click" on the image and saving to your hard drive. You can then open any image
separately in the imaging software of your choice - iPhoto/Preview/LView/Photoshop.
I try very hard to keep these images small and lightweight, but sometimes more pixels
is better and sometimes higher quality JPEG compression is better. I image for quality,
not price and only wish there were even larger screens running on everyone's system. ]
Images of downtown
One of the viewscapes facing north from an area on First Avenue I frequent because
it's the closest bus stop home from the Uptown Espresso on 4th Ave. and Wall where
I'm often at for a meetup. This is sort of dead-square in the middle of Belltown.
Looking south on First from that same general bus-stop area we find this serendipitous
neon dancing man. He doesn't do anything, unlike the "eye" in the image above, which
blinks. But dancing neon man IS fun to stare at - it's got one of the "right" combinations
of neon color and a bunch of captivating shapes. Plus, check the photon backscatter off
the shiny stone facing blocks of the building.
Just another ordinary Sonics game night at the Key Arena. The red neon of the sign
and the darker blue of the sky contrast nicely with the geometry of the Space Needle
highlighted against the pink-tinged clouds. Geometry has been corrected in this image,
which means the columns look like they do in real life and not like they do when taken
through a moderate wide-angle lens.
Skyscape while crossing West Seattle Bridge
This is a set of eight images taken while going West-to-East across the WSeattle Bridge to get to the Uptown Espresso on 4th Avenue
Wednesday evening. What's going on here is that the "center point" of the image - the Columbia Tower (aka Bank of America Tower)
(aka Amazing Developer Rip-off Deal) - the tall black building (aka Darth Vader Building) is not changing from its position in the
center of the image (left-right, top-bottom). What's also not changing is the rather continuous-tone gray of the bottom half of the
image. What is changing is the angle of view of the Darth Vader Building. Notice the position of some of the wonderful clouds with
respect to the various buildings; notice the amount of harbor water which is visible; notice the changing perspective of the red
ship loading/off-loading derricks; finally, notice the amount of sun-glint off the buildings downtown as the images progress from
a shallow angle to an acute angle. The angle sequence tracks the top left and across, down, across, down, and so on to the
bottom right. This is a "time-stop, angled-perspective" scene of the setting sun having fun with the city and the sky.
Not the same day, but another setting sun having fun with the sky, and in this case, the Sound.
And in the other direction there's the high cumulus still catching those long rays of the setting sun. The Sound sunset above is about 120
degrees left-to-right and this one facing the Cascades is about 170 degrees L-R.
One could literally spend an entire dawn or dusk doing nothing but watching the
interplay between sun, sky, and water or land mass. Each moment is a new image - a
new perspective, a new set of direct, reflected, and refracted light. Or, one could just
let this entire visual environment seep deep into one's soul and just take it for granted
that the "world" looks like this. That's what's so friggin' cool about Earth, there are at
least ten-thousand different, stunning, views of the same sunset from ten-thousand
different locations on the planet. And that's probably a ridiculously low number. Blake
Island is 4 miles offshore, which makes it 4.25 miles away in this image. It's a mile
long and a mile across at the north end (right side) and narrower at the south end.
Okay, here's an unusual one - a grave for a dog named "Coffee" who was only ten years
old when he died. Most of the gravestone can't be read in this image, but the dog was the
partner of a King County Sheriff. The dog died and this memorial was placed in front of what
is now the Java Bean coffee house in Luna Park area of West Seattle in 1995. Java Bean
opened in 1996. The guy on duty at the coffee house promised to ask the next cop or
sheriff's deputy who came in a little about the history. What's ironic is the dog was named
"Coffee" and buried here with grave marker in what one year later would be the front
sidewalk area of a coffee house. The coffee house barista didn't even know this was here.
(For locals, it's on Avalon Way about 100 feet south of the overpass of the West Seattle
Bridge, or 100 feet south of the intersection of Spokane Street with Avalon Way.)
Not all Puget Sound sunsets are multi-chromatic. This one is in solid tones of sepia and
gold - this is an undoctored image. This was today - Saturday, May 16 - following a morning
of cold, wind, and rain. Afternoon temps felt like they were mid-sixties - it felt like this image
looks - warm and slightly humid.
Standing in the hall outside one of the doors to my studio you get a sense of how filled
with light it can get. That's the new paper mobile caught in the foreground dangling. The
microscope is a still-functioning reminder of a different life.
So...ooooooo! That's it for now, as already stated above - "Happy Trails..."
Posted: Sat - April 16, 2005 at 01:26 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM