September 2008

There’s always one that doesn’t want to go home

Published September 30, 2008

Lake Crescent, August 2008

I wonder how many pets get inadvertently left here on the peninsula after family vacations. Everyone seems to have a story, if not one strictly from here. I remember our ancient Scottish Terrier ‘Slash’ falling out of a moving van in the hills of Tennessee when I was young. We recovered him- although whether lucky or not wasn’t immediately apparent- the dog was a terror and promptly bit my dad. My wife’s and my newest dog Emily was a Clallam County Humane Society rescue, after being found wandering by the side of the highway in Sequim.

Our recent trip to Idaho and eastern WA involved two lost dogs- one was just a pickup slowing to ask if we had lost the dog they’d seen back down the highway. The other involved a friend’s border collie that disappeared in the Quincy Lakes Coulees. Blaze, a charge of our friends, was also a CCHS rescue, a sweet dog, if utterly inbred and nuts. The long trip in the back of our friend’s pickup with 2 other wound up dogs and a horse trailer clanging behind was enough to send him yipping off into the void when she arrived late that night to the campsite and dropped the tailgate. The unspoken assessment was that coyotes probably got him the first night, but I actually found the dog hiding in a draw by Dusty Lake two days later. Sadly, only a brief reprieve- Blaze ran off again a couple days ago on a horse ride in the lower Elwha area.

Anyway, all this reminded me of when I turned off 101 around Lake Crescent to take this shot last month. A camper across the street with a family I thought had stopped to enjoy the dramatic view was instead looking for a dog. The father trying to gather up the family, saying ‘There’s always one that doesn’t want to go home. Cmon let’s go.’

‘Die in a Happy City’

Published September 22, 2008

Ediz Hook, Spetember 2008

Walking the spit of Ediz, there is the sense of fringe decay, atrophy at the unattended frontier. There is a sense of depopulation, as if through plague or economic collapse. Looking back to the mainland, Port Angeles also slumps at the base of the Olympics like so much uncontested Brink. Only the grandeur of Miocene tumult saves the town from it’s true scale, and its own teetering references.

Camus comes to mind:
The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. *

Granted, I have a certain animosity towards the town, and vaguely towards the country beyond it. Its social conservatism, lack of culture, willing absorption into the harvesting combine of Walmart, Costco, and the big box socio-economic model make me feel a bitterness that is ultimately powerless against the futility of such a place, and such an era. I wonder about the level of inertia needed to introduce change into this place, and others like it. No one mentions sacrifice anymore. Am I prepared to sacrifice? Prepared, no. But willing…? I wonder.

To entertain thoughts of economic collapse and other such irrevocable devastation seems unpatriotic, anarchistic and probably even criminal to some. I can’t help it. The need for the populace to succumb to the first reassurances from candidates has so far outlined our doom, even if it’s a contented one. Maybe the violent cycles of regeneration found in nature are a good model to follow, something that will ‘Rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.’*

*Albert Camus The Plague

Twinnings

Published September 18, 2008

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’

Published September 5, 2008

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 ghost of music

Published September 2, 2008

Creekbed, Kalaloch, March 2008

I wanted to capture the sounds of pouring rain, the ocean breaking and the alders mingling. I sought out a composition simply to be able to spend some time in this wonderful sound resonating up the creek bed. I respond to sound much as to light, and there are as many perfect sounds here as there are tones of light, and the scale of each describes the infinite.

Sound can be an achingly elusive thing to capture on film. It sounds odd, of course, but some images come so complete within their moment that the natural progression of appreciation gathers sounds, smell and memory in weightless ascension, almost like falling upward through an experience, finally bumping your head on epiphany. The heartbreak is that photography’s a visual medium, and there’s no hitting anyone over the head with it outright, and subtlety is usually an entirely conscripted event. So the sounds of rain look like a pale alder, and the music of the breeze looks like a ghosted branch, and the rest of the forest can be a tuning fork for all resonant concerns of tide and season.