August in Albuquerque
The grand road trip ended in Albuquerque, capital of the state of New Mexico. For those readers who aren’t from the U.S., this was the 47th state to join the union, in 1912. This happened, of course, several decades after the upstart revolutionary nation of the US declared war on Mexico, so far as I can tell essentially in order to take over most of what’s now our Southwest as well as my own adopted home state, California. Naturally, long before the Spanish-colonial creation Mexico declared governance and “ownership” of this parcel of beautiful desert, mountain and high plains, the area had been home to many native America tribes, both more nomadic and herder types, and more city-based agriculturalist-types. I believe one might think for example of the great difference in cultural habits and practices between the Apache, the Navajo, and the many different pueblo cultures such as Taos, Zuni, and the famous Hopi from what’s now Arizona (the 48th state to join the union, a month after New Mexico). Anyhoo, that’s enough about the past – in the present, New Mexico remains for me a place of beauty, cultural interest (its long history of human habitation and current highly visible and important presence of many Native-American tribes, but also of Hispanos whose ancestors were here long before the territory fell under US control), and … well, once simply can’t speak of New Mexico without pointing out its extraordinarily fine food! Inches were added to my waistline, which I’ve been working off by biking the hills of northern California. Enjoy these photos!
We were in New Mexico for my niece’s delightful wedding, which was on my own birthday. The best birthday present I’ve been given in years – a day surrounded by my family and getting to know the adult versions of my niece and nephew, and meeting her husband. Wonderful and pleasurable reason and occasion to get back to New Mexico for the first time since 2006. One thing (above) that I discovered is the city’s become more bike-commuter friendly than I recall from earlier decades. Yay!
If you’re coming from an abundant-water region, the Rio Grande may not seem so very grande to you. But remember this is the Chihuahuan Desert so any river that carries water year-round is vital to all life nearby. Down below you’ll see one of many canals that channel water from the river to the fields nearby; this river’s water has been irrigating crops since the ancient native cultures, and northern New Mexico still abounds in centuries-old acequias, collectively-managed irrigation canals established under Spanish-colonial rule whose water rights have passed down through the generations and changes of government to support small-farmer descendants of the early colonial-era settlers today.
And then, of course, there are both the myriad native cultures, as well as the desert and its storms. Following are some sequences of photos of dancers at the Pueblo Cultural Center, a wonderful cultural and history center with an excellent restaurant in the heart of Albuquerque which celebrates and documents the many Puebloan cultures native to New Mexico; I think and hope these photos are permissable under their policy and will certainly remove them if they’re not. Then there’s a desert storm which rolled in one morning while I was in my hotel room. I do encourage visitors to the US to consider time in New Mexico – it’s slightly off the usual touristic beaten path, and well worth the trip in my view. What I show here is just the tip of the iceberg.
From the River to the Plains
The photographic record of Mom & Paul’s excellent road trip continues with some images from the Minnesota-South Dakota-Nebraska leg of the journey. (And btw, for anyone growing weary of these rambles through the vast heartland of my homeland, fear not, there’s only one more entry due about the road trip, which wrapped up just two states south of where this entry concludes.) In Minnesota, we got to spend a few days being shown various lovely corners of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis & St. Paul) by my oldest friend, someone I’ve known as long as I can remember going back to elementary-school days. So what you’ll see here include shots taken on and around the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi river, in the heart of downtown Minneapolis (including the cool panoramic shot below in which the nature of the camera’s panoramic-image compilation means that the cyclist who was biking past as I took the shot appears in a cool little stop-action sequence…), followed by the only photo I kept from our journey across most of South Dakota, taken at our lunch & rest stop just west of the Missouri River. From there, we kept driving onward toward Nebraska, where Mom had been looking forward to visiting Carhenge, an unusual outdoor sculpture park just north of the town of Alliance, Nebraska. This puts it also close to Chadron, where I’ve learned my grandfather attended college back in the day…hence the photo of Mom on the campus. Enjoy.
Having grown up in the US, I’ve always known a lot of our wheat seems to come from North Dakota. What never occurred to me was that, a hundred and more years ago as our Euro-immigrant ancestors spread across the continent and dispossessed the prior inhabitants, their wheat would need to be milled and their other farm products marketed. The twin cities, it appears, gained much of their early prosperity by dint of turning wheat kernels into flour…witness the many descendants of flour and milling companies still headquartered there.
…look closely above, and any water you see in the distance is the Missouri River which we’ve just crossed in central South Dakota. Below, a fish-eye view of the main Carhenge scultpure, with other items also on display at the Carhenge Sculpture Park. 🙂
Cruising Northern Shores
The road trip continued….although it takes me far longer than I’d wish to get these photos sorted and up here for you to enjoy! After leaving upstate New York, Mom and I decided that we simply couldn’t bear another trip along the usual I-80/I-90 corridor the follows the U.S. southern shore of Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Michigan — our goal was Wisconsin, where we were able to spend a few lovely days visiting my aunt and uncle; and we were departing from Rochester which – by U.S. standards – is quite a piece north…and this led to my crazy idea to explore the northern shore of Lake Huron through Ontario. What a lovely outing it was!
This enabled us to spend a night in the lakeside town of Blind River, ON and to explore portions of that enormous province that I’d never been anywhere near, previously – gaining a more visceral sense of the beautiful, rich rivers and waterways which the Ojibwe and Cree have traveled since long before my ancestors arrived near these shores. I really wish we’d had more time to stay, explore and enjoy high summer along the Canadian shores of North America’s Great Lakes — but the wedding date loomed ever nearer and we had many other people and places on the list before we intended to arrive in Albuquerque. So here, and without much further comment, you can enjoy shots from Blind River, some not-so-great but they are what they are shots taken by Mom as we drove across the international bridge from Canada back into the US where three lakes are all coming very close to one another, along the channel directly connecting Lake Superior to Lake Huron and quite close to where the Edumund Fitzgerald went down in stormy waters back in the 1970s as commemorated in that wonderful song by Gordon Lightfoot…and then some shots from the Lake Michigan shoreline along Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and one beautiful farm-field sunset shot in Wisconsin. Didn’t get the camera out much more in Wisconsin and this shot doesn’t do justice to the huge midsummer sun sinking below corn fields in real time, but trust me – the upper great lakes region in high summer is pretty wonderful to spend time in.
In the photo gallery and below, the three shots taken by Mom from the Sault Sainte Marie Bridge, which connects the nations of Canada and the U.S. across the locks and waterway which link Lake Superior with Lake Huron, you are looking west over Whitefish Bay and it’s maybe conceivable (what do I know?!) the camera sees as far as the water above the spot where the Edmund Fitzgerald was found.
Legacy of Leadership in Upstate NY
Much of the world uses “New York” as shorthand for the city of New York. Those who grew up or spent chunks of time in or around the city remember that New York is also a fairly large state (by east-coast standards) which stretches from the Atlantic beaches of Long Island to the shores of lakes Ontario and Erie. NYCity folks tend to call the rest of this vast area, once out of the 5 Boros, “upstate.” And it’s through “upstate” that my Mom and I travelled on the first leg of our cross-country adventure last month.
High on her list was Seneca Falls, seen in the disused riverside-factory shot above & site of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. In my school days little or no mention was made of the fact that women were not permitted to vote until the 19th amendment finally passed in 1920. In upstate New York of the 19th century were the leaders who stood early and proud for women’s rights, and finally pushed that amendment through after many decades of trying. (And oh by the way, the state legislature in good old Mississippi, ever the thought-leader here in the US, didn’t get around to ratifying that 19th amendment until…wait for it….1984. But, hey, even Switzerland didn’t get around to agreeeing women deserve the same full citizenship rights as men until 1971, and the last cantons didn’t get with the program until 1990. And I need to fact check whether women are allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia yet or not…but Wikipedia does tell me that they’ll be permitted to vote there in 2015…)
Here on the home front, Susan B Anthony got arrested & convicted for voting in 1872, in her home town of Rochester not far from the statue of Anthony & Frederick Douglass (good friends and intellectual sparring partners) with which my Mom is posed, two photos up. So anyhoo, we wandered through Seneca Falls, spent time in Syracuse exploring the history of the Erie Canal – which propelled NYC to the dominance it achieved in the 1800s, driven by a state government visionary & capable enough to establish a well-maintained and regulated system to bring boats, people and goods from the Hudson river (and, by extension, the Atlantic Ocean) all the way over to Lake Erie. We continued our exploration of the leadership tradition in Rochester, where we visited both Susan B Anthony’s house (and the statue!), and spent time at the Eastman House learning more about George Eastman’s impact on the popularization of photography. Enjoy the shots – and do consider a visit to upstate New York. Each time I’ve been anywhere from the Catskills north, I’ve wished I could linger longer and explore more. There’s a ton of natural beauty throughout, plus much interesting history scattered just about everywhere.
The study in Eastman House has lovely windows featuring all the modes of travel George Eastman had personally experienced – and flight is missing, since the house was built right around the time of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. This is my little “windows” section, with a detail also from the lovely Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in Rochester, which Mom and I drove past in Rochester. It’s privately owned but you can still drive by and look.
5 Views of the Statue, 3 of the Tower, and other odd angles on NYC & Environs
OK, so I figure if off-angle shots of SF seem to have appealed to enough of my viewers a few weeks ago, I’d finally put up the grab-bag of odd shots from NYC and its region which couldn’t be made to fit in that last entry from Storm King. What you’ll see here are shots from a flat, gray day in Red Hook, which used to be a rather gnarly neighborhood when I lived in Brooklyn. It now seems to be hipster central, and has a few big box stores (most of these were shot in and around the Ikea parking lot), which were not yet permitted inside the 5 boroughs by the time I went west in the late 90s. These shots include some odd views of Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the lovely new One World Trade Center building. Some people are calling it, in classic American let’s-use-terms-without-considering-what-we-mean-by-them manner, freedom tower. I never quite get which freedoms that kind of folks mean, since they’re always wanting to take away my own freedom to disagree with the foreign wars they like to start start (or to take away my friends’ freedom of choice in matters of reproduction or of life & love partner) – but hey, who ever expected words to actually mean something?!
OK, off that soap box for now. Other things in this entry: the impressive Great Falls at Paterson, NJ; a couple shots from the reservoir in central park; and pond scum at a wonderful bird haven in northern NJ. Paterson began its life as an important and powerful mill town, driven by the force of these waterfalls and the river that creates them. Its manufacturing glory days are long since past, but these falls, like the history of the Erie Canal which I’ve been visiting & will document later here on the blog, remind me of how the country was built and grew and prospered in our formative years.
I’ve noticed a lot more views and viewers on the blog recently, and I want to thank viewers both new and old for your interest. I hope you’ll come back, and I hope you’ll leave comments and let me know what you’d like more (or less!) of. Ciao.
High Summer – Storm King
Perhaps my single favorite place to visit in the NY Metropolitan area is Storm King sculpture park, which is something like two hours or so north of the city itself. My mother, who dearly loves grand sculpture of the Calder, Nevelson and Noguchi style, first introduced me to it back in the 1980s, or perhaps even earlier though I believe my first visits would have been early-mid 80s. I have fond memories (and photos) of visits there with a dear friend now long-dead of HIV; such is the nature of places one’s visited again over decades – and I also appreciate the new large works or temporary displays that appear every time I visit, about which there’ll be a caption or two scattered throughout.
In season, no visit to my mother feels complete unless we also head up to Storm King for a day. And you do need to allocate a full day for this trip, especially if you are coming from NYC…and please do try to get here , even if it feels like one thing too much – if you love nature and abstract sculpture, you won’t go wrong. So in early July we headed up with my brother for an afternoon of enjoying the art, the flowers, the nature. They’re not open during winter months, and my recent visits have been in the shoulder seasons, so this was my first chance to appreciate the glory of the wildflower beds at their summer peak. Hope you enjoy these views – and do visit, or support your nearest arts institution instead. 🙂
The mirrored fence was newly refurbished for this season so truly stands out at one edge of the lower lawn area (far center in the panorama above) – they have a more formal name for it, but I think of it as the route I I typically take toward Andy Goldsworthy’s wonderful wonderful two stone walls at Storm King, both additions of relatively recent decades…you can see shots of those in an entry I made in December 2011), and so I had fun with some arty selfies with it, though this is a piece you really do need to experience in person.
And since it was high summer, we saw a good bit of floral and natural beauty. Some time a decade or two back, they started letting large areas of the lawn flourish with higher wildflower patches rather than always mowing it all down, and the results are wonderful. I also did my usual up-close-and-personal study of a few little vegetal items that grabbed my imagination.
The piece above is isn’t my favorite – tends to give me the willies a bit too much – but I do love the wildflowers. The lawn full of Mark di Suvero scultpures, shown below with a foreground of black-eyed Susans, certainly is one of my favorite spots here…though that could be said of nearly all corners at this truly wonderful place…
Other Angles on SF
Between assignments, I’ve been a wanderer since I first filled up the storage space in January, 2005. People viewing my life from outside often express envy of how much I ‘get’ to travel: comments along the lines of “oh, it’s so exciting that you get to go to all these places and travel so much.” People who know me a bit better, or people for whom, like me, going to work = packing a bag with (one hopes) sufficient saline solution & undergarments for a year’s assignment in a remote location of which one has, so far, only indirect knowledge, understand that the travel is the part I hate the most. And that the rootedness that comes from identifying one solid piece of earth as one’s spiritual and physical home is what I envy everyone else the most. Be that as it may…the participant observer is an identified role in sociology and anthropology, and as someone who increasingly feels reasonably comfortable many places, but at home nearly nowhere (aside from a few places like SF Bay area and LA’s west side), I do have a certain distance from what I observe in most places. And what I observe in the US is always most fascinating and too often disturbing, since it’s the place o’ my birth and so on and so forth.
Some recent observations, for those outside the US who’ve missed it:
Our supreme court’s decided that companies (on whom most of us rely for our health insurance, crazy though that seems to anyone from a sane nation) have the same right to religious freedom that individuals do – and they get to express that right by dictating what forms of family-planning and possibly other health care choices their employees (and their employees’ family dependants) may make within the insurance plan. To illustrate the broader socio-political insanity this ruling might unleash unless the country gets to single-payer soon, I’ll take a short quote from Justice Bader Ginsburg’s strong dissent from the narrow majority’s decision: Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today’s decision.)
This follows by a few years the same court’s decision that companies have the same right to freedom of expression that individuals do – meaning they can buy all the elections they want now, pretty much, as in campaign donations and campaign advertising are pretty open game for whatever rich & greedy corporation wants to drive “public” policy its way.
So, to review: companies can (and do) buy as many politicians as they want; and companies can (and do, now) ensure that their employees receive only the health-care services that the companies’ owners approve of. (And oh btw, for those believing this is a ‘narrow’ ruling – check out the definition of closely held, and what % of Americans work for such a company. Not so narrow, eh?) Ah, ‘democracy.’ And lots of my American friends ask how I can stand to live & work in so many other countries where corruption and greed are so rife… 
But at least there’s always SF to go home to. Indeed, I guess the fact it’s such a successful, happy & healthy city because of its openness to heterogeneity and its willingness to embrace the importance of good, common-interest governance to the health & welfare of society & individual citizens (i.e. not just big companies & their majority owners) is precisely what’s always made it so very scary and threatening to the Koch-funded tea-party types. Oh well, their loss, unless they succeed in dragging the rest of us down with them. Enjoy the views, folks – I realized I’ve actually shown very little of SF in these pages over the years – not quite sure why, but here’s a bit finally.
Beauty in the Details
Eight miles into the Atlantic from the mainland coast at the border between New Hampshire and Maine lie the Isles of Shoals, a small cluster of windswept rocky bumps in the ocean which housed some of the earliest long-term European settlements in North America. Ample cod fishing fueled the economy, a legacy you’ll see reflected in the weathervane on top of the old stone church which now serves as non- or multi-denominational chapel for the many conference-goers who enjoy week-long conferences and other retreats at Star Island, which has served as a base for Unitarian-Universalist retreats and conferences for more than 100 years. I’ve just been out there for a week of meditation, my third such outing since 2009. I’ve deeply relished and valued all of these meditation weeks, the intensity with which they permit to settle into the moment and clear my mind and emotions of plans, of worries, of day-to-day “reality” and just be for a bit. In essence, meditation – especially when I’m on Star to do it – takes me to a mental and spiritual place which evades intellectual and verbal description. That said, this time more than my two past such retreats, I was intensely drawn all week to attempting to photograph & record the magnificence of that which is small, the perfect beauty and reality of this physical world, its tides and seasons and flowers. And though I’m working with a very basic pocket-sized field-appropriate camera, I think my results were reasonable. Hopefully you’ll find at least some of these images as lovely as I do and maybe they’ll take you into a quieter place for at least a breath or three. Peace, enjoy.
At first I thought crab, now I think maybe mouse. I get comfortable with impermanence through meditation…a good thing, in my current life plan/lifestyle…
California Coastal Reconnection
smw, slt has been in my titular US home of San Francisco for three weeks now. Prior to that, during the post-assignment re-alignment of my sensibilities that I undertake after each international work stint, I spent five weeks living on the coastal side of Los Angeles. During that time, my activities consisted primarily of the following: bike rides up and down the coast and up into Topanga Canyon, concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, concerts and museum visits at both Getty Centre and Getty Villa, and getting together with the various friends I have there. On the theory that it’s good to post the imges from my last location before leaving my current one, I present a selection of shots undertaken during those activities. Each photo has a name which says what it is, and I think I will let them do all the speaking. If you’re in touch with me, you know the process of transition and rearrangement I’m undergoing vis-a-vis preparation for the next phases. If you’re curious but not yet in touch…what’s stopping you? 🙂 Enjoy!
Creeks, Peaks & Streets – (Ma)lingering in LA
smw, slt has now returned to Port Moresby, from 4.5 lovely, wonderful and restful weeks in LA. With fond thanks to the family members and friends who spent time with me in LA, many of whom flew great distances to be there, I present herewith my usual too-big selection of photos. It’s late Monday, already more than 24 hours after I landed back in POM, and I know that if I don’t post these fast then it’s likely to be weeks and weeks before I get to it. I’ll have a full couple weeks of settling back in here. So I’ll keep the text short and focus on the photos. Folks who live in LA are usually happy when outsiders think of it as little more than a knot of crazy freeways overloaded with traffic, but in fact there are many wonderful things about the region, and these photos may give you glimpses of why I always find it one of the most relaxing places to spend my down time, especially when I can stick to my bike and the streets of Venice – which I did quite well until the final week on this trip. The final week took me out a bit more into town and yielded some of the – too many – photos of Disney Hall that you’ll be seeing, both above & below. Hope you enjoy. 🙂
I’ve become addicted to physical therapy: this time for tennis elbow to allow me my regular tennis outings once I got back here; last time to fix my shoulder after tearing it up on the roads of N Kivu. Above and below are shots of the birds, flowers, bikers, walkers and waters of Ballona Creek which forms part of the route to my physical therapy appointments. Yes, the bike ride to and from PT is half of the reason for my addiction. 🙂
When my mother and brother came to visit, Trisha Brown Dance Company was doing a big retrospective in collaboration with UCLA, including a fantastic site performance at the Getty Center – as you see, these 10 dancers spread around the center doing a 40-minute performance were just a magnificent blend of movement, architecture and natural environment. And above, by contrast, a street-side view of Disney Concert Hall, yet another of LA’s architectural (and acoustic!) gems.
At left, Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood has expanded since my last visit; and WeHo park has gotten a radical face-lift and a big new parking lot complete with graffiti art since my last visit. 🙂 Below, some shots of me at Disney Hall’s garden, taken by Mom, the only visual proof that I was actually in LA these last weeks…
Below, if this lays out as hoped, if you look closely you’ll see a bit of a rattlesnake’s tale sticking out of that brush. This hike in Topanga Canyon was rather exciting for my friend Steve and me, since we nearly stepped on not one but two rattlesnakes, and nearly walked into a buzzing swarm of wasps or some other flying insect that generated a certain sense of menace in our brainstems… Further down, again if this works as I hope, a junction sign on the hike; we tried to avoid heading toward Cheney for obvious reasons.
Above & below are my photographic ode to the streets, houses and beaches of Venice. It’s so much more than the drug-addled beach walk full of tacky t-shirts, which is just the face it shows tourists. 🙂
Above, my photographic ode to Walt Disney Concert Hall, an acoustic and architectural masterpiece in the heart of LA. Below…a shot to confuse you: from last August, standing in line for our boat trip at Margaret River in Northern Territory, Australia. Since there’s so little of me in this post, figured I’d remind you what I look like…
Los Angeles Miscellany
smw, slt has been back in Los Angeles for 2.5 weeks now, weeks that have flown by with the speed of a bullet train. Less than two weeks from this moment as I sit in bed at dawn uploading these pics and writing these captions, I’ll be back on the airplane winging my way across the Pacific. Since there is much that I dearly love, and much that I dearly love to make fun of, in my home state and home country, I’m bringing you some of both. Just captions to explain, nothing much else. Enjoy.
LA County Museum of Art (first shot) has expanded quite a bit since the early 2000s which was the last time I lived here in LA full time. Similarly the construction around the Ballona Wetlands by Playa del Rey, the two shots above, has continued and added plenty of cars to the roads, but left these lovely fields of wildflowers and wetlands for birds in a few pleasant pockets.
Immediately above, the main central garden at the gorgeous Getty Villa, reopened in 2005 when I’d already begun this wandering lifestyle. Since I live by the water here it’s easy for me to bike up the Getty Villa, spend a morning or afternoon in the gardens and enjoying the classical collections – something I do as often as I can! Above is one shot of the Santa Monica mountains as seen from an odd angle of the Getty Centre, which has remained blessedly similar to what it was when I left LA to start living as I now do…
Two studies in orange from the Long Beach Aquarium: above, California Poppies (our state flower!), which blanket hills and valleys in a golden-orange carpet every spring; below, orange jellyfish (known to our Australian cousins, I believe, as marine stingers – perhaps more accurate but less poetic, don’tcha think?) in a tank inside the lovely aquarium which I was delighted to visit – along with the Getty villa – with my friends Cate & Dan, and their parents Neal and Elizabeth, when they spent a few days out here with me. Thanks :-).
Above, a few more shots from the lovely mid-town LA County Museum of Art, whose regular collection still surprises me on occasion (even after a few years as a member), and which underwent substantial expansion in the last few years; below, sunset in Marina del Rey, the last place I lived full-time in the US: you can see why, huh? 🙂
And these last shots: can’t help myself when I get back to the US… I mean, seriously, the level of coddling that our litigious society forces upon all institutions. Anyone who didn’t figure out that you’re in the foul ball area deserves to be hit; anyone who doesn’t notice the giant drop off down to the rushing traffic below deserves to fall…and so on. Btw, I was always taught the four styles of Chinese cuisine were Szechuan, Hunan, Canton & Northern/Beijing…who knew that New York had become one of China’s regional cuisine hotspots! 🙂
And we end with the Getty Centre, scultpure garden and the road, under construction and very biker-unfriendly (this I know: I travel mostly by bike here in LA, when I’m not on the bus), below the Getty.
Washington in Bloom
smw, slt has packed up the big bags and moved on for a longer term again. This time we’re off to Papua New Guinea where we expect to be working for a year. This is going to be an interesting assignment for me – new and different context and part of the world for me to work in, also a new role as head of mission. As usual, this will remain a personal blog of the world as seen through my eyes…so more about PNG if, as and when appropriate. For now, my farewell to the land of my birth comes in the form of a photographic essay of my lovely final week there, spent in Washington, DC. Since many of my international friends have never been to the US or DC, I enjoyed taking shots of the city in its springtime glory. DC is a lovely city to visit – excellent free museums you can wander in and out of at will, grand monuments to the many of the great thinkers and founders of the American experiment, and lots of public green space around the mall and monuments. I’ve tried to show some of this, along with the occasional shot of me or my family, some of whom also came down to DC while I was there. Enjoy the shots – I’ll throw in the occasional caption, but I’ve nothing else to really add in terms of text for now. Peace, health, companionship to us all in the coming year.
….this year, one understands, was the 100th anniversary of DC’s famous cherry trees being donated by the nation of Japan. As it happens my visit was perfectly timed to see the trees go from bud to full bloom, thanks to several days of glorious warm sunny weather. Below it’s me enjoying brunch with my little cousin twice-removed, Adair — he’s Amalie & Bryan’s son and they drove down from Baltimore for a really great brunch with me, my mother & brother, and my cousin Maria. Thanks, guys :-).
The Washington Monument is the tallest building in the District of Columbia (and building codes will keep it so), and it’s therefore fairly omnipresent and makes a good focus for — too many, I know… — photos.
From the FDR Memorial.
…above, taken earlier in the week; below, about five days later once the trees had burst into full bloom. That’s the Jefferson Monument, by the way, my personal favorite both because I think it’s the most graceful of the three biggest & oldest monuments, and also because Jefferson was such a great philosopher of democracy, and also a conflicted representative of the ideals he represented: a committed Democrat who had slaves and agreed to the original language of the constitution which gave slaves no rights whatsoever but counted them as partial people for the distribution of political power in the new system (for allocating seats in the House of Representative, if my memory of history serves correctly…)
…Thomas Jefferson: a statue of the man, and some of his words.
Above, from the Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial; below, me in a particpatory art installation on display at the (fantastic, free) Hischorn Gallery.
One of the more unusual monuments is Theordore Roosevelt National Memorial Island, to which I went both in honor of the man who launched our national park system and was the first political leader to recognize the importance, in a nation clearly growing at a very rapid rate, of setting aside open space for future generations to enjoy and for the protection of our natural heritage…and also to remind myself that Republicans have not always been as willfully ignorant, greedy, and dishonest as they seem now to have become. Below are two shots taken from the island; one shows the Watergate Hotel (yes, site of that infamous incident from which so many later government scandals around the world have drawn their name) as well as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (built to honor JFK of course).
A corner of the old executive office building, some shiny memorial column, and a corner of the mall all on a sunny late afternoon; below another shot of the gables and turrets of the old executive office building.
Above: earlier in the week; below: later in the week 🙂
A farewell shot of the capitol dome behind the Washington monument. May American politics find a measure of sanity and civility while I’m away.
Yosemite, My Yosemite…
For the holiday weekend to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday, I went down to Yosemite for a few lovely days of hiking and relaxing with some great friends from SF and LA. I’m based here in SF now since early January, then back to LA in February with an expected start of my next assignment either late March or some time in April: not yet quite clear. More on that whenever I can. For now – enjoy the pics of Yosemite in an unusually dry and snowless winter. Hopefully there will be some storms soon, because as those of you who know it will see, these photos do NOT look like Yosemite should in mid-January (= mid rainy season)! Nonetheless, as you see in the shot below, of me next to a frozen Chilnualna Falls, the temperatures are cold enough, there’s just been no rain or snow for two months in this wet season!
Above, a few shots of Nevada Falls with not much water but a good bit of ice; just above, my shadow self-portrait on Illilouette Creek, up above the Mist Trail, and below a very thin trickle of water in a late-season dry Vernal Falls, below Nevada Falls. For those not familiar with Yosemite: usually in the summer and after a good rain, the water streams over this many for most of the width of that rock surface.
…and as our final shots, me with the boys: Jim from LA, and Howard & Gene from SF who organized the whole thing and who are familiar faces to regular blog followers since they’re my most reliable friends for visits when I’m in unusual spots outside the country. Thanks, guys. 🙂 And, below: the lovely city by the bay as seen at high speed from the San Mateo Bridge as we were delivering Jim to SFO on our way home…
Homes for the Holidays – A Sampler
Christmas morning, my brother Steve reading the newspaper while I try to share the last wildly varied batch of 2011 photos before it becomes 2012. Croissants are doing their final rising over in the oven here at my mother’s house. This is my second winter holiday season at ‘home’ or with family since 2004 (since then, in order: China, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, NYC, India, Congo…no wonder I get confused sometimes). Perhaps the smell of croissants baking will prompt Mom to rise and then we can satisfy my older brother’s curiosity about what might be under the lovely Christmas tree off to my right. Last year at this time I’d been in my new home of Mweso for about two weeks and was celebrating these holidays with new colleagues in a beautiful new location and a great new job.
I wrote the last blog entry my final morning on the island of Lamu, in Kenya – early August. Then I returned for about eight final weeks of challenging and productive work in Mweso, did the fastest debriefing and return to the US that I’ve ever done — left Mweso on 30 September, Goma on 2 October after a full day of meetings there, debriefed in Amsterdam on the 3rd afternoon and 4th morning…and did a short presentation about Mweso and MSF’s work to a group of NYC high school students on the afternoon of the 5th. Since then I’ve spent: a wonderfully relaxing five weeks getting my head together and biking along the coast a lot in LA; the thanksgiving holiday with Steve, our mother, and our uncle and aunt in Pittsburgh; and the past four weeks with my mother here in the NYC suburbs. What I’d like to share with you all are photos I took during all that time – last weeks in my Mweso home and our outreach sites around the zone, plus images from lovely outings in my various US homes. Between assignments, I really am an unemployed homeless person but I’m blessed with lots of generous friends and families who welcome me to share their homes here.
Returning to the US was a bigger shock than usual this time – spending my first few nights with my friends near Columbus Circle, I’d stare out their windows at the towers of midtown Manhattan and the bustle of traffic on the street, and wonder if I was really still in the same world. I know I am, but the shock of transition and change can be so overwhelming at times. As usual I’ve taken full advantage of so many luxuries, from Thai food and midnight bike rides through quiet, safe , good streets to concerts and plays with lots of friends. Email conversations have just begun between me and MSF about where I’ll go next, and when. I’ll be in SF for most of January and some of February and then tentatively plan a cross-country trip to visit friends and relatives scattered through the nation’s mid-section…but as always the plans remain open to amendment based on evolving news about possible future assignments… More on that if and when appropriate.
..Above: me in June, on day one of construction of the health post in the beautiful mountain-top village of Ihula, something that we & the village & the BCZ can and should be rightly proud of. Above that, Mweso sunrise a few days before I left in September; Steve, Mom & me at Fallingwater late November; Calder on a hillside at Storm King early October; and two views of the Great Falls in early December. Below, a self-pic the evening I got back to LA.
I don’t want to write much now – I’ve said it all before and I hope the photos are interesting enough on their own. What I’m throwing up here are are photos of the following which occurred in the order listed: a trip Mom and I took in early October to Storm King Sculpture Park in New York State; a few Venice sunsets; a trip with Steve, Mom, and Aunt Judy & Uncle Bill to two Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses outside Pittsburgh – one being Fallingwater, arguably his most famous creation and the other being Kentuck Knob which also has a sculpture garden on its grounds; and some wintertime views of the Great Falls in Paterson, NJ in early December, which we visited to give Sam a different image of NJ…perhaps they’ll do the same for you. 🙂 I’m organizing the photos based on variety and visual pleasure for me, and hopefully a sense for some of you of why I sometimes find simple questions hard to answer – when you consider that all of these photos were taken between mid-August and mid-December in places that felt at the time, at least to some extent, like home to me. A bit lower down, I will include in italic some text that I wrote on about my third morning back in the US when my nerves will still a bit raw at how totally different everything is here than where I’d been living so very recently. Since it’s sat unfinished for 12+ weeks and I’m now in a very different space, I’m not going to bother completing it… I hope the photos may tell you things I can’t find the words for now. May 2012 bring more peace, more health, happiness and stability to us all, known and unknown, all the rich, beautiful, conflicted & organic mess that is modern homo sapiens and our green home world.
All the autumnal photos of beautiful grounds on a sunny day with sculpture in foreground or background were taken on … October 10 … at Storm King, one of my mother’s and my very favorite places in the NY metro area. I’ve been visiting Storm King since the late 1980s any chance I get and am always happy I’ve gone; this day felt unusually blessed because the weather was so lovely and walking around the grounds cleared my head so well and reminded me some of the things to which I have access here, that I can’t see when I’m working normally.
And here’s the text I started in October and never finished: Early autumn in New York rather than early spring in the high country of North Kivu. (Late September = early spring south of the equator, technically…) Quite the change of location and cultural milieu to take in. As I write this I’m watching the sky grow lighter off to the east, as the nighttime lights of New York City’s skyscrapers slowly wink out and the deep blood-red-orange of sun’s earliest warning lightens to pale peach and the upper sky goes from black to pale blue. Soon the ball of the sun will blaze out and make it uncomfortable in this lovely window seat overlooking central park and the skyline. I’ve been fortunate to take advantage of good friends’ hospitality here in Manhattan, which coupled with three jet-lagged early mornings and three stunningly clear, sunny early autumn New York days have combined to give me three of the best-ever sunrises I’ve seen in New York. Quite the welcome home, really. Pity I didn’t think to bring my camera, but just trust me that the views of central park, skyline and sunrise make this an amazing window seat.
Which is just as well because it all adds up to helping remind me I’m not in Mweso any more. And I’m not really even sure quite what or how to say about that. Since I’ve put so little about Mweso on my blog, I feel a need to give it more air time, so to speak. It hardly seems right that the past ten months of my life were based in this place where I and my colleagues (both international staff and national staff) all worked hard, week in and week out, to do some very good work (if I may say so), and of which I’ve barely put anything up on the blog. Some of my friends have seen emails with more detail about my life and work in Mweso, but since this is always a personal blog and since my life in Mweso was 95% about work, there didn’t seem much to say about life in Mweso.
Most of these photos from DRC were taken during several different days I spent high in the hills at and near the town of Ihula, where we ran a mobile clinic 1x/week, when I arrived there a year ago, and where we worked during my time to construct a new health post which would then make quality care available, with our support, every day of the week to the folks up here who’d otherwise walk many hours – often across front lines – to get to health care. The sunrise shots sprinkled around were taken from our expat home & base-office one morning before my departure.
And so what you see are mostly photos of Lamu and London for the past ten months. Sure, both are great places that I was delighted to visit on my vacations from Mweso. But what have my last ten months been about, really – trust me, it was not dominated by the waves on the beach or great dance and theater in London. (Oh by the way, the sun is about halfway above the horizon over around Queens now; a livid pinkish-orange ball that I can already no longer look at. When I look at the two entries here in which I did show photos of North Kivu and say a bit about it, I think I did a fairly decent job of talking about how we live and what I was doing there, more or less.
My first day back in the US, I spoke to a group of high-school students here in NYC about MSF, our work, my work, and so on. One student asked about common misconceptions and I responded about over-romanticizing, or over-dramatizing, what we do or how we live. (And that’s where I ended in October. Not gonna finish those thoughts now. You probably get it. Lower down there are actually some pics of me at work, hauling rocks and shoveling sand for the foundation of the new health post.)
Above, Fallingwater; below, Kentuck Knob. Fallingwater: a magnificent house constructed on/in/over a waterfall – truly spectacular. Kentuck: so much less dramatic, but so much more like home: I would LOVE to live in Kentuck Knob, and would feel comfortable and happy all the time, I suspect. I think Fallingwater would make me feel constantly overwhelmed by its own magnificence – it doesn’t feel homely to me. 🙂
Mom, Paul & Steve at a Berlin-Wall segment installed in the sculpture garden at Kentuck Knob, which also contains some Andy Goldsworthy stone work, cousin to the two twisty curvy stone walls you’ve been seeing in photos from Storm King. If you don’t know Andy Goldsworthy, find a place to see his installations – photos can’t do them justice; they are site pieces best seen in person. Stones, water, walls are themes in these photos – from hauling stones for the foundation at Ihula, to Goldsworthy’s playful stone walls; from the huge stone support wall on the downslope side of Kentuck Knob to the waterfalls at Fallingwater, the Passaic River in Paterson, or at Ohiopyle on the Youghigheny River downstream from Fallingwater, below.
Ciao, Los Angeles
Early morning drizzle on the canal out my window in Amsterdam, first morning after the end of European Summer Time. How appropriate that my ‘summer vacation’ ends and my first night in Europe is the end of their summer time. During my month in LA I took essentially no photos – was far more interested in yoga, cultural & restaurant outings with friends, bike rides and general relaxation. Moreover, LA was hit with heavier and more frequent than usual October rains and cool temperatures, so there were rarely such views as those above and below from the lovely roof deck of the place I stayed in Venice.
For those curious who don’t already know, the plans are now fairly clear – I’m here in Holland for two weeks of training, then visit various friends and family types in northern Germany and Berlin, followed by time in Paris to get my French back to high proficiency before having to work in it full time, and finally back to Amsterdam to brief and fly to Democratic Republic of Congo. That’ll happen in mid-December, and thereafter I’ll be quite out of touch — both because I’ll be quite busy again and because my internet access will be much more limited.
That’s all I really have to say now – still a bit jetlagged, but knew if I didn’t get these photos up I never would, and felt I should do something to acknowledge leaving the home continent again. I’m trying not to worry too much about the US elections coming up shortly. I’m encouraging myself to be moved by generous and hopeful impulses more than anything else. Take care.
(so much world, so little time....) 
