A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest.
September 10, 2021
I’m relaxing, if relaxation is actually possible, in the Delta Airlines boarding area at Oakland International Airport, known in airport-speak as simply, OAK.
At the airport, relaxation is an earned and short lived luxury. There’s a gauntlet to get through before you can put your feet up and read, or take the edge off with an overpriced, undersized cocktail in which the main ingredient, the one that takes the edge off, is often metered by an infernal invention called the precision pour. Bartenders at the airport lounge are not usually given any license to be generous, a constraint cursed by thirsty travelers, cherished by harried flight attendants, and let’s be honest, born of reasonable common sense.
Given COVID’s flighty, on again, off again nature and the dearth of pilots, attendants and every other body charged with getting an airliner in the air and safely back on the ground, a short lived airport stopover can, in the click on an airline app notification, become a protracted, patience sucking ordeal. Update. Flight 3456 scheduled out of OAK at 0800 has been canceled. You have been automatically rebooked on flight 6789 which is scheduled to depart OAK at 18:10. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you for choosing our airline.
Banner photo. The Downtown skyline taken from The Embarcadero.
If you ever have the opportunity to ramble the city sidewalks (assuming you have a city that’s handy ), look around you. No, not for muggers. Okay, yeah always keep an eye out for sketchy fellow citizens, but also keep your eyes open for the varied patterns.
The city is alive with geometry; a plethora of squares, rectangles, triangles, circles and cylinders. And if precise angles don’t move you there’s plenty of the shapeless, and the precilelessly planned amorphous.
And by all means look up.
I visited the Financial District one Sunday morning, specifically on Sunday, because on a Sunday the Financial is essentially closed and as devoid of people as downtown small town America. That might be the only thing that tiny Pocahontas, Iowa and San Francisco’s Financial have in common. On a Sunday morning you can fire a cannon down the middle of the street and not hit a thing.
Forsaken streets make it all the easier to photograph the architecture without the intrusion of photo bombing humans.
Standing on a plaza between Market and Mission Streets I noticed four highrise buildings separated by three city blocks. With a little imagination you can almost see it as one building composed of four designs. (Okay, maybe a lot of imagination).
From the plaza I walked up a flight of stairs and when I looked down, the pavement looked as if it had been laid unevenly, complete with uniform folds.
How many more lives will it take? Well that’s a damn good question. Answers? Anybody? Helloooo!
To the surprise of absolutely no one, another American town has adopted the slogan “_______(fill in the town name) strong.”
This time it’s Highland Park, Illinois, where, to the surprise of absolutely no one, a mass shooting occurred. In America, mass shootings occur to the surprise of absolutely no one. The only surprise is the actual location.
Hey a mass shooting! Coming soon to a town near you!
Are you, the reader, surprised to hear the news of another mass shooting?
Are you, the reader, surprised to see that I’m writing another post on another mass shooting?
You know, I sort of promised that I wouldn’t do this gun shit anymore.
But the gun shit in America keeps happening.
And so, here I am writing about the gun shit in America – again.
Damn, I’m just incorrigible. That’s what my wife tells me.
Why? Why keep writing shit about gun shit?
That’s a good question. These gun posts really must be off putting to the readers who prefer family stories, travel pieces and photo essays. Those folks are abandoning my ship.
And still I persist.
I persist because I’m pissed.
And I’m lost.
Lost in questions.
Questions, questions, questions.
And very few answers.
A few days ago my friend and fellow blogger Martin C. Fredricks IV, wrote a piece titled Declaring “Loss of Independence Day,” (click the link), in which he explains why he won’t be flying the American flag this July 4th – Independence Day.
Martin writes, “We can no longer, honestly or in good conscience, celebrate an “Independence Day” when all meaning of those words has been stripped from the lives of millions of our fellow citizens. It’s false. Empty. A sham. A lie that must taste like oil-soaked dirt in the mouths of women.”
I’ve been having the same internal argument with myself. Do I put out the flag on the Fourth?
Recent events, including outrageous decisions coming down from The Supreme Court, stunning revelations from the January 6th Committee hearings, a general nod and wink to white supremacists, and new laws in various states that come straight from an authoritarian playbook, are evidence of a democracy adrift and heading dangerously close to autocratic shoals.
I’ve had to ask myself, what exactly are we celebrating this year? What have we had to celebrate during the past five Independence Days? Abrogating rights? Perverting democracy? General baseness? Is this what we fly the flag to commemorate on Independence Day?
I almost never visit a cemetery, but I can’t pass up a forsaken, decaying old graveyard or boneyard.
What’s the difference you ask? Three different words that all seemingly mean the same thing.
Merriam-Webster defines them all succinctly as “a burial ground.” That’s far too simple. A graveyard can be a cemetery, but a cemetery cannot, unless through the work of time and vandals, be a graveyard.
West of here in Richmond, just up the interstate, there’s a cemetery called Rolling Hills, and it’s just as the name describes; rolling, grassy hills, so green and well manicured that it could be a golf course (that is if you flatten it out, take away all the gravestones and add a fancy bar). The gravestones and burial sites are neat and well maintained and it’s run under a boilerplate of do’s and don’ts that read like some sort of eternal homeowner’s association. Unless you’re there to pay a former someone a visit it’s a rather bland, depressing place – charnel white bread.
Off to the east, in Benicia, is a graveyard, the Benicia City Cemetery (because no community actually names its final resting place a graveyard). Like many final resting places whether it’s a cemetery, or a boneyard or “boot hill,” the Benicia City Cemetery sits on high ground, with a pleasant view of the Carquinez Straits, the waterway which connects the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento River.
Except for a small new section that has groomed lawns, the Benicia Cemetery is rolling hills of dirt, littered with weeds and debris from trees. Old gravestones, some cracked, some toppled, some half buried and others just crumbled piles of stone. That’s a graveyard.
A boneyard? You probably have to resort to a Stephen King novel to find a boneyard.
I usually stumble on graveyards during a road trip.
I was in Madison County, Iowa when I spotted a sign for Young Cemetery. The sign pointed up a short single lane side road. I took the road and parked. It was more cemetery than graveyard so I didn’t stay long. On my way back towards the main road I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a haunting scene; wispy, wind blown grasses, two bare, stark trees and the silhouettes of headstones. I suppose that from a distance and under the right conditions, Young Cemetery can pass as a graveyard.
Banner photo. Dad having a cold one. North Africa? Italy?
Hey dad. When you were a youth, did you ever wonder what kind of father you might be? You were at loose ends during most of your twenties. Did you even entertain the prospect of fatherhood?
You had a lot of time to run those thoughts around in your head. You were 36 when I was born. Mom was 30.
You couldn’t have realized it at the time, but when I was born you’d already lived nearly half your life, the final few years tormented by dementia. Knowing you, hell knowing anybody with a thimbleful of reason, if you’d been aware of what was coming down your street you’d have likely figured out a way to check out early, before the demon came a knockin’. I know I would’ve.
You came from Toole, Utah, a mining town that would’ve rested in the shadow of Salt Lake City, except that when you were born, in 1917, there wasn’t enough of Salt Lake City to cast a shadow.
By your late twenties, Salt Lake City was the biggest thing you’d ever seen and the furthest you’d been from Toole was Coeur d’alene, Idaho, where you did a stint with the Civilian Conservation Corps.
That all changed in 1944, when you joined the millions of men who shipped out, either west to the Pacific, or east to Europe to fight the last of the “good wars.”
Your wartime journey took you through Chicago, New York, London, North Africa, and the boot of Italy. The war was winding down in Rome when you arrived and met your future bride. I can only imagine your wide eyed culture shock.
It seems implausible, a young man, green as grass, from a desert mining town hooking up with a Roman girl.
There were times, many times, when the two of you seemed mismatched. It strikes me that maybe you met at a time in your lives when you saw yourselves without prospects and just settled. Continue reading
Anne Sandler hosts this week’s Lens Artists Challenge and has chosen the topic, Local Vistas.
I live in Hercules, California, between a range of hills (and the rest of America) to the east and San Francisco to the west.
Hercules is what you might call bland suburbia. Strip malls, tract housing and a city council’s yearning to be something other than a bedroom community.
That said, there’s much to be found by taking just a short drive.
At sunrise, the East Bay Hills might be adorned with eddies of morning fog.
San Francisco is about thirty minutes away on a good day – okay, a REALLY good day.
On the way you pass by Emeryville and its little marina. I’m a long time distance runner and my favorite boat is berthed here – Endurance.
The drive into The City goes past the busy Port of Oakland which handles 99% of the containers that move through Northern California. On average, 2.5 million containers pass through the port every year.
Parks and trails in the area afford interesting views of the bay and the port operations.
A stack of containers at the Port of Oakland
Cranes at the port resemble something out of War of the Worlds
While browsing through blog rolls a wave washed over me. Debbie Smythe’s One Word Sunday and the subject, “Wave.”
I have hundreds of photos of waves so the most difficult part of the challenge was to cull the archives to find a handful of photos for this topic.
I’ve always lived within a short drive of the ocean and for a time I took the ocean and the waves for granted. That changed with the pandemic. During the winter months, a wide open lonely beach was one of the safest places to be. I visited the beaches of San Mateo County, California almost weekly.
It was a good opportunity to experiment with slow shutter speeds and a tripod.
It’s during the winter months when the wave action in California is at its peak.
Monthly Monochrome: Reviving a once a month short venture into the world of monochrome photography. (Tragic events in mid-May superseded publication of this piece)
When we think of monochrome, what first comes to mind?
Black and white – of course.
Stands to reason since that’s what we usually see represented as monochrome.
Monochrome can actually occur in any color, but the key is that the image must display one single color or different shades of a single color.
I used to dismiss monochrome as a relic, a curiosity. And then I tried to imagine the works of Ansel Adams in color. Beautiful I’m sure but lacking in the drama conjured by his monochrome photographs.
To be brutally honest with myself, my dismissal of monochrome was actually avoidance, because I’ve always felt it to be a daunting medium.
Color photography renders the world as everyone sees it. Monochrome renders the world as one’s artistic eye and imagination presents it. To put it a bit more bluntly, when presenting the world in monochrome, you’re hanging your artistic butt out for all to see.
Last month I took my Grandson Jackson on a long promised night tour of the prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
I saw this as a good opportunity to shoot in color and process into black and white. What could be a better subject to render in black and white than a crumbling, spooky prison? And better still, at nighttime.
America touts itself as being a civilized nation. Americans boast about being pro-life and congratulate themselves on valuing children.
And yet, America is killing its children. The word is filicide, and it’s defined as “the killing of one’s son or daughter.” This is America, a nation killing its own sons and daughters. America murdered nineteen of its children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. To be clear, the killing was carried out by one eighteen year old with an assault rifle. The rifle was the instrument that the killer used to carry out America’s mandate. The killer was simply acting at the behest of American denial, inaction and love of guns.
It doesn’t stop at killing children. Most mass shooters don’t discriminate by age. Some might discriminate by race, color or creed, but make no mistake, it seems that everyone is in someone’s gun sight.
National suicide – one mass shooting at a time. Don’t think of it as simply lives lost. America is immolating whatever shreds remain of its soul, its decency.
It was only ten days between the mass murder in Buffalo and the carnage at Uvalde.
Ten days between massacres. Ten days of renewed pleas for sensible, fair legislation regarding guns and ten days of excuses, deflection, thoughts, prayers and push back from the depraved, soulless people who beatify firearms as if they’re calves of gold.
Here I am writing about guns. Again.
Why should I write about guns? Again.
Who the hell knows. Just another scream in the wilderness.
When the next mass shooting occurs, and it will, I don’t know if I’ll do a gun post. I don’t know if I’ll ever write about guns again.
What’s the point?
Ninety percent of Americans want background checks and yet the politicians who are whores of the gun lobby are holding up any legislation.
What’s the point?
In Texas, if you’re eighteen, you can’t buy a beer but you can buy a killing machine. I can’t be the only one who sees the absurdity of that.
What’s the point?
In many states you have to jump through some reasonable hoops to buy a car. Not so much when it comes to a gun.
What’s the point?
I don’t have nearly the bully pulpit of the legislators who’ve prostituted their souls. You know, like Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz, who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the National Rifle Association, came up with his own solution just hours after the Uvalde massacre. “We know from past experience that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus,” Cruz said in an interview on MSNBC. “Inevitably, when there’s a murder of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it. You see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens,” Cruz added. “That doesn’t work.”
Ted Cruz and people like him see absolutely no problem with turning schools into armed citadels. He actually suggests these things with a straight face.
Why stop there? Let’s include churches, movie theaters, indoor and outdoor concerts, supermarkets, department stores, parks, public bathrooms, stadiums, farmer’s markets, gyms, night clubs, restaurants, every Starbuck’s in America and the fucking Chuck E. Cheese over at the local strip mall. Chuck E. himself can pack heat. Continue reading
The Life in My Years 