July 2008 – № 75

Devolution

Published July 30, 2008

Ediz Bay, December 2007

The infrastructure is regressing around here. Dams are scheduled for disassembly, the lower Elwha Bridge has been demolished, and this pier is no more. It would be refreshing, but the genetic drift of commercial structures is never what it seems, and I can’t be sure that this pier didn’t just disintegrate in a storm. And there may be something in the works to take it’s place.

Recessions are always interesting in a small town. I’m an early casualty, getting terminated as residential and smaller commercial construction takes the first wave. Large projects on the state or federal level fare somewhat better. But it’s a little irritating to see a guard rail project begun for the length of 101 in this economy. We must be protected from blackberry thickets, soft shoulders, ourselves. Our drunken driving and falling asleep at the wheel. The contractor appears to be from out of state.

Blessings, though. I get to work on my stuff, which is nice. I’ve never drawn unemployment before, so it’s been an learning experience. I’ve paid into it for around thirty years, and I have 8 months’ worth if I need it. It’s odd to reduce 28 years of full-time toil into an eight month stipend. All the injury, swollen knuckles and collateral damage that comes with learning how to deliver newspapers, stock shelves, bag groceries, wash dishes and make Béchamel, pour a perfect B-52, toss a drunk out on his ass, stick frame a Dutch gable roof or cut crown molding…I feel the indignation simmering, but the fact is I’m nothing special.

Monday I went to unemployment class, got a refresher course in bureaucratic comedy and personal uncertainty. The instructor was nice but had developed a dark almost desperate sense of humor. She joked as she showed us how to make a resume on the overhead projector. Everyone was distracted. Some seemed almost peripherally appalled at the levity, but few had the confidence to be offended outright.

Thinking about starting over at my age is chilling. I’m only 41, but the thought of building pole barns piece rate in Quilcene isn’t appealing. I used to love building, building anything, but the thought of getting up at 4 am some anonymous February morning to drive around the Olympics so I can run along icy purlins by 7 am…Build a barn in 3 days or be consigned to minimum wage… Gee, my mind almost sound made up! Think I’d rather go back to kindergarten and just start over.

Naming conventions

Published July 29, 2008

Bridge over the Clallam River, October 2007

This is a sort of bridge to nowhere shot, though I wouldn’t dream of giving it so precious a name. It’s bad enough admitting that’s what I saw and felt at the time.

Visiting Clallam Bay is a mixed bag. It’s a profoundly depressed area with all the usual afflictions- meth labs, no industry and packs of feral cats roaming vacant lots. A maximum security prison sits atop the hill and surveys the Strait and Seiku headland like Elsinore. The only grocery store closed several years ago. But the local bar has three pool tables and there is an interesting new gallery down the street.

I sometimes feel like I should give these important social elements consideration, but political notions make me flounder horribly in thoughts of exploitation, intrusion and general brinkmanship.

The construction outfit I used to work for did the repairs to the bridge after a particularly hard winter, and also repairs to the prison roof. After work I would often come down to sit a spell before the drive home. Some autumn afternoons the fog, light and icy breezes mix for wonderfully ethereal lapses into nowhere.

A moment not here

Published July 22, 2008

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

Published July 19, 2008

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.

The long dark night of the…housepainter?

Published July 15, 2008

Crescent Bay, July 2008

The rush is on to paint my house before the rains return. Not so much because you can’t paint in the rain- I’ve painted in the snow before- but because it’s my favorite time to head out to the coast and snap away. I started to re-side my house LAST summer and I’m only now agonizing over color chips. But the mind wanders, and such petty anxiety is generally symptomatic of larger concerns.

I think/hope this project will continue for as long as I live here. Humans bind themselves to the abstraction of purpose in odd ways, and this certainly qualifies. I feel I’ve found my reason. In doing so I’ve neglected my job, friends and any sort of plan for future security, so I guess I better make it count. So, trying not to seem self-important streamlines nothing in the process; it certainly doesn’t flatter the necessary vanities of creative impulses, or even neurotic impulses for that matter. Saying otherwise is pretense, and tiresome at best.

Kafka comes to mind:
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.
That is the point that must be reached.