Snapshots
September 23, 2005
We managed to get in a few road trips
during the summer season. Stacey went to Berkeley for a
workshop the third week in June; that Monday evening the boys
and I drove to the Lock and Dam at Barling because conditions
looked right for a summer haze red-ball sunset. We were right,
and Cliff snapped a picture with our old point-and-shoot
digital camera from the roadside on the Crawford County side.
The next evening we drove up to Mount
Magazine to watch the full moon rise from the south overlook.
It looked like there was going to be an awesome sunset, so on
the way we drove over to the Cameron Bluff overlook, but as the
sun got low on the horizon the haze was inpenetrable.
Likewise the full moon wasn’t even
visible when it first rose, then as it got higher it appeared
as a dull pink ball. Grant grabbed the old point-and-shoot and
snapped a picture of Cliff and the moon.
Eighteen hundred miles away, Stacey
was sightseeing near the Golden Gate Bridge.
On the last Friday in July, Stacey and
Wanda took the boys to the animal safari in Gentry. Then they
drove a short distance into Oklahoma to see the 77-foot
waterfall at Natural Falls State Park.
Friday September 23, Joey and I had
been keeping an eye on the weather hoping some promising sunset
conditions would hold up. I checked the weather satellite
images online and was surprised to see one of the spiral arms
of Hurricane Rita, which had moved inland, over Arkansas. The
arm was rotating and headed in our direction. I told Joey our
only hope was to drive north so that the arm was above us and
not blocking the setting sun to the west.
We drove up Highway 59 and it looked like
my plan might work, except the sun was sinking fast and we
couldn’t find an interesting shooting location. We turned
east on Highway 62 toward Lincoln and spotted a barn that
worked out. The sunset turned out to be one of the best
I’ve ever seen.
