190 | Ocean Beach

1985 | Ocean Beach, San Diego County

I have lived in coastal California for seventy-two of my seventy-four years, so it’s probably not an exaggeration to claim that I have seen millions of waves.

This picture has been sticking to my hand for years; I have tried to toss it away as ‘ordinary’ but it stays around in my stacks. All I can do at this time is post it and see what it looks like in the context of the other work on this blog.

I visit this place often, but have not seen this old friend ever again; it shows special character as it takes in the light and gives up its power on the shore.

187 | Big Ideas

1989 | San Diego

I remember that when Alex and I built this N-scale railroad, it took extra locomotive power to haul the trains around the many loops, but we had made our goal of fitting one scale mile of track onto a half-sheet of plywood.

This wasn’t his only interest – among others, astronomy was big in his six-year-old head, and here at the corners we see some of that. Finally scanning this negative, I’m struck now by his drawing (dimly, at left here) of the conjunction of the planets in our own solar system, and especially that he drew twelve planets. He has always been forward-looking; we shall see.

186 | Small Wager

1983 | Lake Havasu, East Shore

Mark Kimball was very enthusiastic about the natural scene and studied wildlife management before taking over a rustic fishing lodge on an ideal spot on the Elk River in Oregon. Before that, he had been enamored with the 8x10 camera, and strove to take pictures of the unspoiled landscape. In fact, he made a bet that he would never take a picture of a human-altered scene. I collected my winnings early on – he had scrambled along a lovely salmon stream during low water and made several pictures of a deep, clearly primeval forest, but not long after, he sent me a picture of a road washed away from a fine hillside, appending our landscape photographers’ mantra, “Geology in Action!” He then confessed that he had indeed lost the wager.

Not long after, we made a hot trip in June to Hoover Dam to enjoy the spectacular managed spilling of 50,000 cubic feet per second of the Colorado River through the dam’s spillways. That entire structure was really “built” – that volume of floodwater in this big early snowmelt barely flattened the circumference of the huge circular openings of the twin 500,000-CFS spillway tubes. The next day, after a 100-degree overnight in the so-called Valley of Fire, we drove on to Lake Havasu. Mark set up his big camera to photograph in his preferred manner, but he was looking at a constructed reservoir and a pumping plant on the far shore. We thought the forlorn palm trees were nifty, but I’m not sure that Mark knew that he was standing on a groomed subdivision site, surrounded by the altered West.

185 | Pulling Over

1987 | Interstate 580 down into the Great Valley

Here’s another view; I had driven over Altamont Pass at least a hundred times before this moment, on long trips from a hundred miles north of here to four hundred miles south, always admiring the terrain and its light, but loath to make a long drive even longer. I ran out of excuses on this particular day, expecting little and getting plenty.