With sincere apologies to Christmas, Thanksgiving, May Day and all the other days of note, I think that Independence Day is the most important of the American holidays.
It isn’t about the fireworks (we don’t have a local display anyway), or the flags, the patriotic music, or the hotdogs and apple pie. Hold on. Let’s keep the hotdogs and apple pie (NO ketchup on the dog and an unhealthy scoop of vanilla ice cream on the pie).
They say that holidays shouldn’t just be about all the fun stuff. Like Christmas is supposed to be about the birth of Christ (for all the Christians), and Thanksgiving should include giving thanks and being charitable, and May Day all about the contributions of labor, Independence Day should include some reflection on the events of 1776, the Declaration of Independence, and what came before, and what’s happened since.
Sadly that’s a lot to ask of too many of my fellow citizens.
This year, we celebrate America’s 250th, still a babe in the international woods. To be more precise, July Fourth is the birthday of the Declaration of Independence. It was still far from being a nation. The colonists still had a war to fight against the most powerful army in the world, and after that they had a government to cobble together for it all to become really viable. And if we really want to split hairs, the birthday of the Declaration of Independence could actually fall on July 2nd, the day that Richard Henry Lee’s resolution to declare independence was approved.
The Declaration of Independence is best known for thirty-five words. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
While it all seems pretty straightforward, that sentence has been the subject of some bitter debate. Most of the controversy is over the fact that of the 56 signatories, 41 were slave owners, the most prominent being Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the document. Of the 15 who did not own slaves, the most prominent was John Adams, who would become the second U.S. President.
How could the proposition of equality be self-evident when the men who wrote and signed the document bought, sold and owned men and women as property?
That was the most asked question even as the ink on the parchment was drying.
This week’s challenge from Beth of Wandering Dawgs (link here) is anything that begins with “B”.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area there is no shortage of boats.
The image below was taken in the morning at the marina in Emeryville.
Being a ship, the vessel below might take offense to be relegated to boat status. This image was taken looking east from the bay shoreline in San Francisco as the morning fog was burning off. As a bonus there’s a bird in this image.
Okay, let’s begin with FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) corruption. Taylor Sheridan could probably write a ten season drama series based on FIFA corruption and still feed another decade’s worth into the shredder.
The corruption was always a poorly guarded secret, not unlike the married (not to each other) coworkers who disappear into the janitor’s closet to scour for furniture cleaner and then emerge fifteen minutes later combing disheveled hair and smoothing down clothing.
In 2015, various FIFA officials were indicted and arrested for bribery, fraud and money laundering.
In 2018 I skipped the World Cup because it was being held in the rogue state of Russia. Turns out that Russia bribed FIFA for the rights to host the Cup. Why else would Vladimir Putin be gifted with the global celebration of the world’s most popular sport
I skipped 2022 because human rights violator Qatar (a nation with zero soccer tradition) was hosting the World Cup. Not only did Qatar grease FIFA palms in order to be awarded the tournament, there were credible allegations of abuse of the migrant workers who were constructing the facilities. Reports ranged from workers having to live in wretched conditions, to having to pay unfair recruitment fees, to having their passports confiscated. While Qatar reported 37 World Cup construction related deaths, The Guardian reported over 6000 deaths.
So after FIFA fought the law and the law won, why was I still ready to skip the World Cup this year?
Headlight glowin’ The cars hurry past Just like the years Are flowin’ so fast If I can get there I know I’ll be warm The ackin’ in my bones will soon be gone lAnd I journey back to Tonopah
I’ve got a caffeine buzz from a giant coffee, a sugar high from the biggest apple fritter in the coffee joint’s display case, and country music on the radio. With the probable exception of Las Vegas, the Sunday morning radio fare in Nevada is either a fire and brimstone Christian preacher, or pedal steels and lyrics about whiskey, pickup trucks and broken hearts.
I left Reno at eight and should arrive in Tonopah around noon.
Clark, Nevada at the junction of Highway 80 and State Route 439, aka, the USA Parkway.
Named after James Clark, a potato farmer who settled in the area in 1862, Clark could probably get by just as well if it were nameless. No history to speak of (except for old James), no real community, and no life – just a place. If you’ve arrived at Clark looking for the romanticized America of manicured green lawns, tire swings hanging from oaks, white picket fences, Friday Night lights, Little League Saturdays, and Sunday church socials, well pilgrim, you took a wrong turn somewhere in
Iowa.
Clark is a charmless collection of concrete and steel distribution centers, an industrial center, a Food Bank, and an Indian restaurant; all incongruous intruders into the high desert. This isn’t the place where you settle down, raise the kids, and have barbeques with the neighbors. In Clark, there’s an extended stay motel that one would assume caters to corporate suits who visit just long enough to make sure that the local fulfillment center managers aren’t robbing the warehouses, and then, once satisfied, they get the fuck out and back to corporate in some big city.
The high desert is a place of rugged beauty, an allure that is, without doubt, in the eye of the beholder. It bakes in the summer and chills to the bone in the winter, and sometimes you have to look deep into the soul of the brown flatlands and rolling mountains to see the hard grace.
The money men and state and local government boys appreciate a different beauty – a green one. The land in the area used to be valuable for what was under it – silver. Now its valuable just for the open space to plant industry on. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis died and with their deaths went the Reno entertainment industry (that’s the ultra simple version of a number of events).
What to do?
Provide business friendly tax laws and miles upon miles of land to build on and a non-community that’s not put off by transient labor.
It took until my adulthood for me to appreciate this land. I hated it when I was a kid and my family drove east to visit the extended family in Salt Lake City. A mid-August, oven baked drone of a ride in a station wagon with no air conditioning. We stopped in Reno where I devoured a plate of manhole cover sized pancakes drowing in syrup, and dad fed the slots and had a bloody Mary. Between Reno and Elko, where a motel with a pool awaited, I mastered the annoying art of ‘are we there yet.’ Sixty years later I can appreciate the graduer.
If I turn to look westward I can still see the dark bulwark of the Sierra Nevada. It’s a magnificent sight. Not so much when parched pioneers headed west in covered wagons, caught a glimpse of the snow capped granite visage and realized they were in a race against nature. In 1846, members of the Donner Party looked at those peaks and saw death.
Every time that we made this drive dad would tell me about the pioneers who braved the long journey to California. Before I was ten I’d read Ordeal by Hunger, George Stewart’s classic book about the Donner Party. My dad’s spiels along with the book helped point me towards my degree in history.
My San Francisco is a series of posts that describes my own personal relationship with The City. My San Francisco pieces might be photo essays, or life stories, or commentaries – or a combinations of all three. My impressions aren’t always paeans to San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city, but like any city, it can be dirty and gritty
A brief gallery of San Francisco highrises from an up close perspective.
of this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, led by Patti Moed (link here). Patti highlights the various techniques to make make the subject of an image the real star of the show.
Simplify the background I like to use this technique in post processing images of city skylines or of a view that looks up the side of a building. That’s espcially true when there’s a bland, washed out sky and I’m post processing in monochrome. Below are three different views of the TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco. In each image I either darkened or lightened the blue sky in total, and then removed clouds either by healing or cloning.
I like to use a neutral background in some of my images of food. When I visit San Francisco on a Sunday morning I often stop at Tony Gemignani’s, Toscano Bros and Dago Bagel shop. In the image below I took out everything but the bagels. Note: That’s asiago cheese melted on top.
The subject for this week’s Monochrome Madness, chosen by Leanne Cole, is flowing water. I have plenty of images of flowing water, as during COVID one of the only places to venture safely, or without being rousted by the local fuzz, as we used to say, was a secluded beach (they were all pretty much secluded unless it was Spring Break in Florida but that’s a different conversation).
A few miles south of San Francisco is Gray Whale Cove, a small beach surrounded by an arc of cliffs. In normal times, the north end is clothing optional, so in normal times I wouldn’t bring a camera. But times were not normal and it was just me and the shore birds.
Here the water doesn’t so much flow as it crashes.
It also crashes at Cambria just north of San Luis Obispo.
After my brief bathroom stop at Bordertown, which is not a town at all but a tacky first taste – last gasp casino just over the Nevada state line I’m driving past Cold Springs. It took only a few minutes of strolling around the Bordertown casino for the stink of a stale ashtray to cling to my clothes.
Traveling this stretch of 395, Cold Springs is the first real town you hit when you enter Nevada. A glance at the sun exploding on White Lake sears the eyes. It’s still about a twenty minute ride until 395 turns into a metro freeway in Reno proper. Twenty minutes through the rolling high desert hills, past the warehouses and fullfillment centers that colonized the hard dry ground seemingly overnight.
After the quickie divorce business petered out, and most of the glitzy resort trade shifted four hundred miles south to Las Vegas, the local chamber of commerce realized that the next big boom would be in these broad, multi-acre, squat, flat top buildings perforated along one or two sides by a row of loading bay doors.
Vast acres of sterile, gray, concrete and steel fulfillment centers sit on the edge of the Great Basin Desert, a region that stretches from the Sierra Nevada to the Wasatch Range of Utah. Big rigs towing sets of doubles, and in some case triples (they’re legal here) flow in and out of the fullfillment centers. The rigs regurgitate and feed, and then depart the Reno metro area towards all points of the compass.
Just east of Reno is Sparks and east of Sparks are more farms of fulfillment centers and then farther east is little Fernley, Nevada. Beyond that, the Great Basin Desert becomes an arid land of desolate beauty. Out there, the towns are small, and few and far between. As a child my parents took me on the drive across the Great Basin to visit the aunts and uncles in Salt Lake City. I didn’t appreciate the panorama then. I do now. I’m also aware that the rugged, parched beauty is shrinking.
On the rough rocky blank strips between fulfillment centers, or on one of the parking lots, one can spot the incongruity of a few wild horses. These beautiful beasts are living history, the ancestors of horses abandoned by ranchers, Native Americans and pioneers. There are lineages that go back to the Spaniards who explored present-day Nevada in the late 18th century. The ages have steeled these horses against the harsh, cold, high desert winters and the blazing summers. But as hardened as the mustangs have become to the severity of nature, there’s nothing in their ancient genes to shield them from human progress. And so they get pushed further and further east.
At the outskirts of Reno it all starts to look familiar as Highway 395 is transformed from a rugged scenic highway into a metropolitan freeway. The peace of the high desert is behind me and I’ve merged into the urban chaos of on ramps, off ramps, honking horns, aggressive drivers, and billboards hawking casinos, adult novelty shops, and local ambulance chasers.
Reno.
It hasn’t changed much since the last time I was here, which was pre-COVID. We arrived at about the same time that the Burning Man Festival had cleared out and some of the local parking lots were packed with denizens that made the place look like a scene out of Mad Max.
Cruising Virginia Street, past the Circus-Circus, the Silver Legacy, the Eldorado, souvenir shops, pawn shops, and far too many vacant lots. The Cal-Neva is still here, a shadow of what it was when my parents used to stay there. Bless its venerable heart, Cal-Neva is still advertising bargain basement steak and egg breakfasts, and steak and lobster or prime rib dinners.
Reno seems like a town looking for an identity after it was all ripped away by California’s Indian gaming casinos and the unrelenting gravitational pull of Vegas.
When I arrive, there’s enough sharpness in the air to realize that it’s October. A month ago, it would have been stifling. By the end of this month there might be a dusting of snow, certainly by Thanksgiving. Today is kind of a tweener.
The sidewalks are desolate if you don’t count the down and outers and the out of towners. The former, scruffy souls, wear long hair, beards to match, and Western wear (it is Reno after all). Their skin is worn to sunbeaten hides, and as you walk past them they look at you, even the younger ones, with eyes that are old, orbs that have seen lives that most of us would rather remain blind to. In fact most of us choose to remain blind to these very people, as most of the time we don’t deign to meet their gaze. They could be any random bit of refuse on the street. They carry their lives in dirty, worn backpacks.
The latter, the visitors, don’t dawdle on the sidewalk. They’re drifting between casinos. They’re wearing Bermuda shorts or Chicago Bulls basketball shorts, even though the only thing they’ve dunked within distant memory is a Krispy Kreme into the morning coffee. They wear shirts that range from alohas to tees bearing classy slogans like “Morning Wood Campgrounds” or “The Cake Isn’t The Only Thing That’s Moist.”
They used to walk around with paperboard buckets filled with quarters to feed the slot machines. Those days are long gone and now the slots have a name; TITO – ticket in-ticket out. The clinking-clanking sound of coins being dumped into a hopper is ersatz now. Coins have been replaced by thermal paper vouchers with a barcode that represents the player’s money. Once the gambler is done the machine spits out a ticket. Or if it’s been a bad day at the slots it spits out – nothing.
My first order of business is to go to Barnes and Noble and buy a highway map of Nevada. I carry maps because I do not subscribe to the motto, ‘In Google we trust.’ I put only slightly more trust in Google than I would a United States Senator.
After my one night in Reno I’m veering off of 395 and going south on a long, desolate drive to the old mining town of Tonopah which is way the hell out and gone in the Nevada desert; where GPS might be a bigger gamble than a tight slot machine. Truth be told, after having checked out the drive on a map, I’m having a few second thoughts about this pilgrimage. I only know the name Tonopah from a Little Feat song called “Willin”. Until I saw it on a map I wasn’t sure the place existed outside of the songwriter’s head. But it’s there, just a bit southwest of dead center Nevada – and pretty fucking far from anything.
It’s still too early to check in so I’m going to grab lunch. I’m headed east past Sparks to a place one usually doesn’t equate with eating . . .
You walk in reverence, overwhelmed by the sheer number of white markers that shine bright in the midday sun. At Arlington the gravestones go on and on until they disappear over a short rise and continue on, unseen. On a sweltering July day in Gettysburg they march in lines from the bright unrelenting sun, to fade into the dark, under canopies of shady green groves. At the Presidio of San Francisco the departed rest on a bayside hill and keep watch over the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. At Normandy the markers stand out against the backdrop of blooming white clouds, blue skies and a roiling English Channel.
Every now and then, for no particular reason (unless you are a comrade, or friend, or family), you stop and read; a name, a date of birth, a date of death, and possibly a short description. These are the final resting places of the men and women who accepted the duty to country, the commitment to be sent to a land, maybe one they’ve never heard of, to take arms against young men and women not so different from themselves.
Cora and I have walked the cemeteries at the Presidio of San Francisco, Arlington, Fredericksburg Virginia, Gettysburg, Appomattox Court House Virginia, and Omaha Beach. In the nation’s capitol we’ve touched the gleaming ebony face of the Vietnam Memorial.
Appomattox Court House, Virginia
For Cora and I they are names of people unknown to us. For so many others they are the never forgotten faces in photo albums and camera rolls. Memories of holidays, graduations, weddings, births, joys and sorrows, and ultimately the last full measure.
Fredericksburg, Virginia
It was called Decoration Day when I was a child. When first coined, the name reflected the day’s original purpose as stated by General John A. Logan, who led an organization for Northern Civil War Veterans. “The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
This week, Ritva Sillanmäki leads the Lens-Artists Challenge with the topic, Choose a Color. ” . . . select one color (excluding black and white)”. . . “where your chosen color is the prominent hue . . .”
In the hills of Granada is the Moorish district called the Albaicin. It is a free for all of hues. In the Albaicin there is no discrimination against any color of the Pantone – they are all represented in spices, clothing, rugs, pottery, various foods and sweets and anything you can imagine. At one confectionary we saw pyramids of Turkish delights.
The Life in My Years 