280 | Fern Street Circus

 

1991 | Grape Street Park, San Diego

San Diego nurtures many distinct neighborhoods, never swallowed up in the city’s postwar growth. Each seems to have a life of its own, with residents who know how to live that way, and who know how to maintain an identity on the sprawling map.

279 | Gravity

 

1980 | Bill Martin inside Shasta Dam

Though Shasta Dam is designed as a gravity structure, an enormous chunk of concrete holding back the three arms of the Sacramento River in an engineering-advantageous site, the dam flexes about five inches over its designed range of full-pool and draw-down levels.

Of the various means of tracking the dam’s response to the seven trillion tons of water impounded upstream, this one is most reliable — a plumb-bob on a five-hundred-foot wire passing through the heart of the dam, with reference cross-hairs in several interior galleries.

278 | Brown Field

 

1987 | San Diego

This was the occasion of a small air show, displaying planes of many generations, where my pre-school son was able to enjoy a view from the cockpits of several vintage aircraft.

I don’t have much from this day, but I do remember making this one, being impressed with what I could not see.

277 | Streetwise

 

1976 | San Francisco

I enjoy driving, and I make an effort to look ahead and attend to the essential tasks. My grandfather taught me to look a mile ahead, if the road allowed. (That might have come from his early years in Idaho, working around muddy hollows or snowdrifts while driving a horse-drawn milk-wagon, or on foot, to spot a river crossing where a boatman might ferry him across, to sell encyclopedia subscriptions to rural parents who were sometimes not literate themselves.)

And so it’s a relief to be a passenger, and to direct my attention to the challenge of my moving camera, and things flying past.

276 | Dam Sight

1977 | Hoover Dam, View SE into Black Canyon

I’m surprised that this picture is from the 1970’s; it looks more like what I was working on after the turn of the millenium. That’s the beauty of photography; it’s intuitive for me, so I can take good pictures with minimum fuss and then find a fuller sense in them as I mature.

But this is the vintage view, historical, in fact — the new high-flying bridge across the canyon has deeply eroded the spectacle of the dam itself. The bridge is dramatically high, and in spite of its spidery look, it’s the most imposing structure in Black Canyon, diminishing the dam’s great sculpture and Art Deco details.

I miss the old days, when the dam was the centerpiece of water management in the Southwest. From the roadway crossing the dam’s top, I remember looking down to the tiny ant-sized people visiting the transformer deck, over five hundred feet below. Later that afternoon, I rode down the elevators through the interior, walked out on that same deck, and gazed back up at other ants along the crest, looking down at me.

275 | Readiness is All

2011 | Winslow, Arizona

We were looking forward to staying several days at the lovingly restored vintage Harvey House, La Posada. As we checked in, the clerk asked if we were in town for the parade.

Parade?”

“Yes, it’s the biggest thing in northern Arizona, and all the Native tribes gather for the long weekend so sell. It’s huge.”

So that afternoon, we explored the hotel’s many wings and artifacts (much of the displayed art and weavings throughout had favorable price tags) and charged our batteries for a big day to follow. I did take a little walk at sunset to get a sneak peek at the parade route, and where the sellers would be setting up their booths.

In the morning, we found that Route 66 through the entire town was a half-mile-long bazaar. Between pictures (oh, and the parade, including a unit celebrating one of the last of the surviving WWII Navajo Code Talkers ▷ and the memory of his fellows).

I asked my wife to be on the lookout for a silver Hopi or Zuni badger-paw money clip, like the one I have used for many years. Our good friend A. had admired mine, but I did not want to part with it, even as a gift to a dear friend who had traveled many desert miles with me — I was holding it close as my talisman.

After a few minutes, Debbie waved me down, beaming. “Like this?”

It was exactly like mine, of the ten- or twenty-thousand pieces of jewelry on sale in Winslow that day.

▷ You could look them up. A very important story.

272 | India Street

2006 | San Diego

San Diego is a big city, but counting its area, not its density. It has spread out like a double-handful of mercury, but rolling out only in three directions. So the city center is being reworked at a gentler rate than in other places, so there’s room to stand well back to appreciate what has been there for a while.