Departure and Return

Into (and out of, sans glasses) the cold and fast-running Stanislaus River near Ripon, Ca. on May 28, 2008

Booty!

 

Infinite Love

 

First photo:
Taken by American W. Eugene Smith in 1971, the black-and-white photo depicts a mother cradling her severely deformed, naked daughter in a traditional Japanese bathroom. The mother, Ryoko Uemura, agreed to deliberately pose the startlingly intimate photograph with Smith to illustrate the terrible effects of Minamata disease (a type of mercury poisoning) on the body and mind of her daughter Tomoko.  At the wishes of Tomoko Uemura's family, the photograph was withdrawn from further publication in 1997, 20 years after Tomoko's death and the copyright for the photograph was granted to the Uemura family.


Second photo:
"Gramps" details the final years of coal miner Frank Tugend’s life, which he spent in the care of his family. Tugend suffered from generalized arteriosclerosis in the years before his death and required assistance from his grandsons for virtually every task.
In the photo, Dan Jury is seen cradling his grandfather in the year 1974. “On February 11, 1974, Frank Tugend, aged eighty-one and of dubiously sound mind- but certainly of sound body – removed his false teeth and announced he was longer going to eat or drink. Three weeks later to the day, he died.”

Leaves and Loves

I've decided I don't want to speculate or ruminate on the relationship or affinities of these two photos. A whole lot of living has gone on in the 14 years between their creation. I just want to show them together.

Melina Wade Staal, taken November 15, 2017

Edna Milagros Staal-Robles, taken December 12, 2003

Beyond the Road's Edge

A little over 20 years ago I wrote a poem called "By Day, By Night" about humans believing they own the world, that anything they can see belongs to them. But, the world is more than our property, it is an entity that has not relinquished its claim to itself. It cannot be owned - that is only a fantasy that man entertains in his arrogance.

By Day, By Night

By day, the winding mountain road presents many vistas,

And all we see becomes our own.

By night, our headlights barely reach the shoulder.

And in darkness, the earth moves to take back its own.

Then, just a few years ago I ran across this poem by David Ignatow for the flip side. It seems he feels that suburbia is intimidating; I don't see the natural world as intimidating, more as powerful and benign. Still, reading these two poems feels to me like looking at the same scene from very different angles. Beyond that, I was struck by the commonality of the image of car headlights and the road. In Ignatow's poem, the light is constrained "timidly" to the center of the road; in mine the light is unable to penetrate the "primeval" darkness beyond the road's shoulder.

Suburbia

The silence of the suburb

its woods primeval dark.

Cars drive through,

their lights

timidly centered

straight down the road.

(David Ignatow)

Globes

My sister-in-law posted this on FaceBook a couple days ago to celebrate Earth Day:

I had a flashback to a piece of artwork I did back in the very early 1960s. Besides the basic concept, what surprised me was how similar our globes are.

Full Dorsal.

You can get away with anything,

 Esquire magazine, April 2015

if you wait long enough:

Two Virgins album, November 1968

Tanks for the Memories...

My1934 Ford 1-ton  truck has carried a wide variety of goods during my tenure as its owner (1971-present), when its doors bore the "Demon Hauling" business name and a variety of painted-over phone number testifying to my frequent changes of residence). Before I acquired the truck in 1971 I think it spent most of its life hauling boxed prunes and apricots around one of the many orchards around Almaden California (in the then lush Santa Clara Valley). All the stuff I hauled and all the places I went in this truck is another tale altogether. In this post, I'm focusing on a specific type of cargo: water storage tanks.
From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, I lived in Mariposa, California with Edna and our kids (Aischa, Gabriel, Nicolas). As part of my "Carpentry Etc." business I did occasional work for Sylvia Schaefer (not sure of the spelling of her last name) who owned a local and free "penny-saver" paper (with her husband Jim) that competed for a while with the historic Mariposa Gazette. The Schaefers lived on a hilltop near town and their land had water problems; that is, they had drilled several wells over time to find a reliable water source and none of them produced much water. This lack was complicated by the fact that Sylvia liked to garden. So I created for them a complicated  plumbing and electrical system that linked all the wells and turned each one on when there was water available. The system worked well enough that the Schaefers decided they wanted a larger storage tank to capture the output. They found a used one that was for sale in Catheys Valley by Rita and Tony Kidd. My job was to haul it and install it. Thus, the photo below, taken by Sylvia as I struggled to get the heavy steel tank off my truck and avoid any loss of control could have sent that tank charging downhill uncontrollably - to the detriment of the tank and my reputation. So, I used a lot of ropes and proceeded with extreme caution. And, eventually the tank was landed safely on its bed of gravel and railroad ties.

Fast forward to 2015 (!) and the place Melina and I live on Triangle Road in Mariposa. Last year we installed a 2500 gallon tank as a water/fire-fighting reserve. This tank draws from our main well and, through a booster pump, feeds the house and Melina's gardens. Because of the drought we have experienced here for the last couple of years, we both have thought a lot about ways to save rain water, reuse gray water, and possibly pump water from an old, shallow well on the property. We haven't gotten very far on the plans and details, but when I saw a 1500 gallon tank for sale over in Ponderosa Basin (on the fb SWAP Mariposa page) we knew we had to get it.  As you might guess in this dry region, tanks are in big demand these days and used ones don't come up for sale very often. So I immediately agreed to the selling price and committed to pick it up ASAP. Saturday morning (3/21/15) found us rambling down Triangle Road in the very same Demon Hauling truck. At the place, a young man came out of the house to watch us load it. He volunteered that we might want to turn it on its side and roll it onto the truck bed. But, I wanted to load it right side up (and have it sitting flat on its bottom for more stable travel) and so we pushed and winched it up three 4x4 skids on the back of the bed, only to find, with the tank half on and half off, that the tank's diameter was a few inches larger that the distance between the stake sides of the truck. Just a bit embarrassed, I volunteered that he was right. And so,we let it slide back down, tipped it on its side, and rolled it up and onto the bed. We then spent about a half and hour strapping it down. The photo below shows it at our place, near the house and gardens. FYI, unloading a plastic tank is a lot easier than unloading a big steel tank; Melina and I handled it easily. Just where it will eventually be installed and how we will use it and supply it remain to be discovered. The adventure has just begun!