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Category: Rialto

The least likely, and what was liked the least

bonzai
limbs
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Rialto, March 2014

Rialto for a short day, nicotine withdrawals. 1200th day either smoking or quitting, such a massive idiot.

Kept seeing nothing but insects in the margins.  Actually, I am typically fighting a tripod somewhere in the background, as if succumbing to some millipedal skirmish. Not therapeutic or regenerative in the least.

No ocean view from here, but the sounds do undulate like my interest levels, and drown out the whimpers besides.

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Rialto, June 2009

But I think I’ll park it on this note- something about the tall and skinny is keyhole-esque- a bit brighter, and a bit more optimistic.

Rend

Rialto, June 2009

Went back out to Rialto, a leaden hostile feeling most of the day- not unlike the sky here. I’m feeling pretty restless and impatient with all my current projects. Could just be the summer blahs, but I need a fresh kick in the ass to kickstart some new growth. The things I used to look forward to are becoming mere routine, chin furrows in the dirt farm, so to speak. My eyes are so close I’m seeing the same lines everywhere. In any case, this project needs to be deepsixed until I get some fresh perspective, before I become a caricature of myself.

Twinnings

Rialto, September 2008

I spent the week in Eastern Washington, the Quincy Lakes region, and western Idaho. It was a marathon huff & scramble among the coulees and antelope brush and I immediately missed the icy afternoon fogs of the coast. My brain surrendered memory and actual tissue to the relentless sun and cloudless sky.

We left Idaho early yesterday morning, thinking we’d have a leisurely drive back, stopping in the Palouse and Washtucna Coulee to frolic. But as soon as the sun was out…well. We hung shirts on the rolled up windows and made a nine-hour tunnel of the drive home. Uncle.

To celebrate arriving home I scanned and fiddled with this image, because I’d been thinking about it off and on throughout the trip. Ironically, the treeline and spires remind me of the columnar basalt walls of the canyons in Quincy. Something of a twin in structure and loom, if a bit friendlier to the hiker with 50 pounds of gear. I’ll develop the actual trip negatives when my brain cools a bit.

‘Drifting White Race’

Rialto, September 2008

There must be ten ways to spell Quileute. The tribe seems to prefer the preceding, but the river is spelled Quillayute, and Edward S Curtis spelled it Quilliute, despite mentioning a historic spelling of Qiliyut. The first contact of the tribe with white men was with Spanish or French traders who washed in on boats. The tribe named them for their lack of land, color.. and perhaps resolve. Drifting White Race. With the staggeringly hysterical vitriol of the latest election race, I tend to agree. But I enjoy trips out here in ways that an atrophying and doughy white culture; cyclic history, exclusionary politics, unfathomable incompetence and hypocrisy can not invade. Ok, maybe just a little.

But where was I.. It’s thought that the present name of the town La Push came from the French la bouche, or mouth- perhaps in reference to the mouth of the Quillayute River.

More from Curtis:
“The Quilliute have fought with almost every salt-water tribe between the Columbia River and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but mostly with the Ozette Makah. The affairs were more often defensive on the part of the Quilliute: the usual method of attack was to lie in ambush in the woods and cut off the unwary, killing men and carrying off women and children, and are known in memories of men born as late as 1863.
“In death the body was wrapped in skins and pushed headlong into a hollow log and arranged so that it lay on its back with the head towards the east. “

-Edward S Curtis, from The North American Indian

A moment not here

Rialto, February 2008

A little interlude from a personal favorite-

The river runs fast at the mouth where the shore is made of the sky, and the waves curl inward fanwise from the sea. For the swimmer there is no warning posted against the sharks that enter and patrol the channel.

Some time before sunset birds come to stalk or scurry along the sandbar, but before dark they are gone.

Paul Bowles, Points in Time

High water mark

Rialto, February 2008

Everywhere are these little piles of stones. Cairns, if I’m not mistaken. They mark trailheads, campsites- I can only assume this one was meant to gauge a high tide. If so, I hope little was at stake.

I was tempted to get way in, set up very close and have the pile fill the frame. But of course I fell for the semi-tragic scale of the tiny pile of rocks against the scope of the Pacific and the sea stacks off on the horizon, especially with the haphazard teeter of the stone on top of the pile. The tinyness of some things can be, I suppose, touching when paired with the reliable futility of collecting things, arranging them. One has only to suffer a scant glance around to see similar collections- little tableaux of driftwood, shells, kelp hearts. Ultimately hapless but hopeful monuments against the crush of time.

Correspondingly, I wanted the foreground of the print to look bright and optimistic; the background to be less certain. Turbulent, inevitable, if not yet altogether distinct. Not sure it works, but I can’t seem to print it any other way.

A spacious split second

Rialto & Cake Rock, September 2007

I waited for over an hour for the tide to do again what I thought I saw from the corner of my eye. I’m always chasing peripheral impressions. But I waited more for me than the tide. I was about to pack it in when the cycle finally repeated. The next time it happened I was sure it would be too small, and so on..Must learn to count. How many second chances do I get?

Hey, over here

Rialto Beach, January 2008

I’ve been sitting on this one, mainly because I have wildly disparate views of it- almost by the hour. Today it’s mostly unloved. I’m posting it in an effort to move on. A lot of my work is more abandoned that finished, but this feels just a little more strained.

The day I took this I had been in a sort of ‘macro’ mood with tides and sand patterns and wasn’t really seeing anything more than 12 feet away. The irony is I spent several hours stooped over and semi-squatting trying to get the angle, selective focus and shutter timing right with tidal pictures and was rewarded with shite, fairly. Not to mention sore legs and back spasms. For this one I essentially stood up, yelped, and pointed the camera at it. Ack.