Peeling Paint and Old Lace

My eye is always attracted to old things on the cultural landscape.  Fancy new buildings don’t interest me…old buildings are the ones that have always caught my attention.  They have textures and character that fit with black and white photography.

There was a time when I chased weathered wood siding with a Red 25 filter.  Old and broken windows.  The mud walls of old half-timber houses.  The faded blue-green door and window frames of old log houses.  Those scenes are mostly gone from our local landscape and I miss them. 

The Gift of Friends

Memorial Day weekends used to be very special to my wife and me.  Frank Yocum would set up his mist nets at a place down the road from my wife’s parent’s farm and would catch and band birds.  He would get started on Friday before we arrived and continue through Monday.  He always had a gaggle of followers, kids and adults, maybe a dog (but no cats were allowed), who were anxious to see what would be around the corner in the next net.  All kinds of warblers, Baltimore Orioles, Cedar Waxwings, hummingbirds, an occasional hawk, and lots of other birds would show up in his nets.  He would patiently untangle each one and put it in a compartment in his collecting box, then move on to the next one.  Once all of the nets were checked he would remove each bird, examine it, record any existing band, and band it.  Everything was carefully recorded in his notebook.  He would be sure that everyone present could see what a beautiful bird it was.  Then he would take great joy in placing the bird on its back in the palm of someone’s hand and gently folding their fingers around it.  He would instruct the lucky person to then slowly release the gentle grip they had on the bird.  To everyone’s delight, the bird would often lay there on its back for several seconds before it realized that it was free to go and fly away.  Frank is gone now.  The bird banding weekends ended many years ago but we still remember them and our friend Frank. 

There was an elderly woman who would often sit near us in our church when we started to attend there.  Two of her sons worked for my dad but I didn’t know her.  One Sunday she stood up during sharing and recited a deep and beautiful poem.  She was a poet.  She left her poetry to the church when she died.  Fifteen hundred pieces or more…trials, variations, finished, and published.  Some of them are very pedestrian but a few are so deep…

The people who surround us are gifts that we often take for granted.  I am surrounded by musicians, artists, writers, birders, astronomers, and other naturalists, quilters, gardeners, bakers, photographers, woodcarvers, woodworkers, a luthier, preachers and theologians, and many others who simply share their wisdom through conversation.  I am the recipient of a constant stream of gifts from them, given simply by their presence, their friendship, and their sharing. 

Portraiture

I was going through some old black and white negatives last week.  This is one of my all time favorites.  Over the years I haven’t taken very many portraits.  I always felt like I was intruding into the other’s personal space…something that I have never felt comfortable even asking for permission to do.  I always admired, with some envy, the black and white portraiture of Yousef Karsh, Irving Penn, Ansel Adams and others.

My single example was a quickly made photograph of one of my cousins who worked for my dad.  Taken in the mid-‘70s when I was in graduate school, I had just stopped in to see the guys I used to work with and happened to have my camera, a Mamiya C220 TLR, with me.  The beauty of working with a twin lens reflex camera was that you could continue a conversation while you took the photograph.  I took a guess at the exposure, dialed it in, focused, and released the shutter all without having to raise the camera to my eye.

This photograph also brings back memories.  My dad and an uncle owned a tire business.  They hired a lot of people over the years from all kinds of circumstances.  My brothers all worked there, as did lots of cousins, a couple of second cousins, and guys in high school or just out looking for their first job.  They even hired a few guys who needed a job when they got out of jail.  It was hard, dirty work…and dangerous if you didn’t pay attention to what you were doing.  But that was where many of us learned to work, learned to drive a truck, learned to fix whatever broke, learned the value of humor in getting along with each other, and whole lot of other things that turned out to be valuable later in life. 

Dust Devil

We saw lots of beautiful and interesting landscapes on our travels out west last fall.  On the last day, just two hours from home we saw the nicest example of a dust devil that I had ever seen.  I was driving on a two lane section of U.S. Rt. 30 east of Lima; my wife was asleep in the passenger seat.  Suddenly I saw a large dust devil in a cultivated field some distance ahead of us.  I woke up my wife and asked her to get her camera out to photograph it.  Her camera is a point and shoot that takes some time to come to life so I slowed down.  The traffic behind me, usually impatient on this stretch of road, slowed down too.  My wife got two nice photographs of the mini twister…the final two photographs of the trip.

As I accelerated back up to cruising speed, I noticed that the traffic behind me was in no hurry…they were enjoying Mother Nature’s performance too.

The Second Sign of Spring, Revisited

Dave raised some uncertainty in his comment about the “actual” date that the average daily temperature turns around each winter.  After all who am I to question the veracity of Dick Goddard?  But the ball was back in my court (I hate those athletic references) so I went for more data.  My wife has an office at the Northern Appalacian Experimental Watershed near Coshocton, Ohio which is run by the U.S.D.A. Agricultural Research Service.  Yesterday she came home with the daily average, max, and min temperatures for every day since April 1, 1939.  Using it I calculated the mean temperature for each date during that time period through last winter for the dates December 1 thru February 28.  That is the data plotted in the illustration. 

I did a second order polynomial curve fit to the data, having no reason to choose that function other than to get a curve fit.  The fit had an R^2 value of 0.79…not that good so I didn’t leave it on the graph.  A real statistician would do the fits and tests to come up with a date.  I’m not a real statistician.  It looks pretty flat across the bottom of that curve but, being the optimistic person that I am, I am staying with sometime in the middle part of January.  You decide.

Thoughts on a Midwinter’s Evening

It is calm this evening as I come in from the barn.  It’s cold…the temperature hovers in the mid-teens.  The animals were hungry; demanding more fuel to stoke their internal metabolic furnaces for the long night ahead.  I stop and look around at the landscape.  The snow from yesterday’s storm covers the ground but is gone from the trees.  The clear sunny sky of today’s forecast is, in reality, overcast and gray.  Before me is a mostly monochromatic gray scene.  The only colors are shades of sienna and burnt umber in the dead weeds sticking out of the snow.  The overcast down near the eastern horizon shows the slightest hint of rose, so slight as to make me think it is probably just my own hopeful imagination playing tricks on me again.

I detour down the hill to the pond.  The thin veneer of ice is covered with a dusting of snow.  There is a large gray splotch in the middle where the water has seeped through to the surface.  Dead grasses and cattails stand guard in their tattered brown uniforms all around the shoreline.  There is no sign of life save for the tracks of deer running all around.  Even the birds are absent tonight.

But life is there.  Buried in mud, hiding in deeply furrowed bark, sleeping in an underground den, or packed tightly in the fat buds at the end of a tree branch, life waits in its midwinter slumber, on hold for those first warm days of spring.

Along the Waterfront

On the way back to pick up my wife, I drove down along the Sandusky waterfront.  I love those places…a mix of old industrial buildings, little shops and other attractions, and both personal boating and commercial shipping.  The Sandusky waterfront is no exception.  It is sad to see some of those beautiful old limestone industrial building in decay…in one of them you could see sky through one of the windows.  The roof was gone.  Those old buildings are a big part of what makes the place interesting.

I didn’t spend nearly enough time there…

Common Places

I continued through Marblehead and then turned north toward the Lake to enter the gated community of Lakeside.  The character of Lakeside has changed over the years.  Its streets used to be lined with small old summer cottages and huge old trees.  The place evolved from an old Methodist campground.  I remember when the village water system ran on the surface and was drained every winter so it wouldn’t freeze.  My parents had a place there for many years where we would spend our summer vacation.  Today many of those little cottages are being replaced by large expensive houses.  It’s just not the same place.  But this was the place I wanted to go to today.

There are common places on this earth where you can sit and naturally think deeply into the past.  There is such a place down along the Lake in Lakeside.  Today it is landscaped and perfect but it was more natural when I spent time there.  I would go there and sit, looking out across the lake.  The wind, the waves, the weathered limestone full of fossilized sea life, the tenacity of the small plants in tiny pits and pockets in the rocks… my thoughts would gradually turn backward in time, 200 years, 10,000…or half a billion.  Thoughts of naval battles fought just a few miles away during the War of 1812, of French voyagers with canoes full of furs, of native people living along the shore, of the Cat Nation, of the great glaciers, of the time of great mystery…245 million years for which no record remains in Ohio’s rocks, of the ancient shallow seas that once covered this land, full of living organisms that formed the limestones…

Orthodox

The Holy Assumption Orthodox Church is just around the corner from the lighthouse in the village of Marblehead.

The Marblehead Light

My wife had a meeting in Sandusky yesterday.  She asked me if I wanted to go along.  Sandusky is in northwestern Ohio on the shore of Lake Erie.  I like that area of the state, particularly in the cooler months of the year when the boaters, etc are not around.  I dropped my wife off at her meeting and headed off to explore some of my old haunts.

I drove west along the shore of Sandusky Bay crossing over it on the Edison Bridge then turned back east along the south shore of the Marblehead Peninsula.  The peninsula shows all of the marks that man can leave on the land.  There are active peach and apple orchards, commercial vegetable patches, an active limestone quarry, fish cleaning establishments, restaurants, art galleries, ferry docks, abandoned houses and fishing boats, marinas, a Coast Guard Station, old houses and summer cottages, and huge new condominiums popping up on every square inch of land overlooking the water.  There is even an old civil war prison on Johnson Island, just off the south shore.

My first stop was at the far eastern tip of the peninsula at the Marblehead Light.  The state acquired the land several years ago, made it into a state park, and has restored the grounds.  The winds were cold and the rocks and sidewalks were icy.  It felt good to get back in the car for the drive to the next stop…