Postcards from the Creative Journey

Rain, Rain, We're Going Away

And here's another one.

It is a fact that if the weatherman says 100% chance of rain it's not going to rain everywhere all the time. That's true even in the Fraser River Valley in British Columbia. It rained a lot as we made photographs in the Fraser River Valley, but it didn't rain all the time everywhere we were. We made do photographing out of an open car window or being patient enough to wait until the rain let up a bit. Low clouds are always fun as they quickly move along the river. 

We forecast our future photography based on the weather and we will be heading south and over the Cascades to the (hopefully) dry Oregon desert. We'll lose a couple of days in travel, but at least we won't be stuck in the perma-rain cloud of winter in the Pacific North West.

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The Fraser River Valley east of Yale, BC. We found what looked like an old version of the main highway out of Yale. It had some spectacular overlooks of the Fraser River and was completely deserted. The low contrast lighting from the heavy rain clouds muted the bright color of the yellow leaves. 

604 Whatever Shall We Do?

Weeks have gone by and we’re pretty sure that Captain Meyersmith had our wagon train on the right trail. Until everyone stopped. We could not see it until we got right up to the edge. Daddy called it a Dirty Devil because we could see no way around it. We’ve trusted in God for this entire trek. Momma is confused because God put something so beautiful and so deadly in our path.

Whatever shall we do?

603 Practice, Practice, Practice

We all hated practicing scales. We wanted to play music, not practice. But that was what we had to do. We hated music theory, too. Mother said that we had to know theory and sight read to play music. We just wanted to have fun with music. But before we could complete all our music studies, we had to work around the farm and didn’t have time to play music ever again.

I wish I would have continued my music studies.

602 Finding a Lost Cloud

When she was very young, our daughter became afraid when she saw fog for the first time. To help her with her fear our quick reply was that fog was nothing more than a cloud that was lost. Eventually, the fog would be tired of visiting and would go back up into the sky. The best explanation is one that is understood. At that young age she wasn’t ready for the thermodynamics of cloud formation.

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A wonderfully foggy day on the Washington Coast. More photographs Lost in Fog.

601 Ssshhh! You'll Disturb the Bats.

It is a lovely old building, built in 1822 as a kitchen. Plantation kitchens were set apart from the main house because they would almost always burn down. Better the kitchen should burn down than the main house. I would have loved to go inside to see and photograph the old kitchen but the building was off limits to visitors. The guide said the building was home to a colony of bats that were on the endangered species list. The bats couldn’t be disturbed, so the building was closed to humans.

600 RTFM* (Read That Fine Manual) !!!1!!

This was among the first photographs I made with a new digital camera. The two hundred page manual only had about twenty pages of (what I considered) useful functions, so those pages were all I learned. This is what I wanted to learn and felt confident in the use of the camera. Now, on to using the camera in the field...

After making this photograph, I accidentally touched some unknown combination of tiny buttons on the camera and the camera came alive. The EVF began a slide show of my recent photographs, panning and scanning each image and playing some very nice synthetic guitar music.  I started laughing because what else was there to do? With no idea how to stop the slide show, I turned the camera off and hoped that the show wouldn't continue when I turned the camera on again.

The lesson learned is you do actually have to learn how to use all the functions of a camera. Which means you do actually have to RTFM.

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*As an IT veteran I know there are other interpretations of this Acronym.

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This is blog number 600.  Wow.  A very big thank you to all of you for stopping by and reading these weekly Postcards from the Creative Journey. 

599 An Afternoon in the Kitchen

I loved sitting in the kitchen on a stormy day. Nana would sit in her rocking chair and I would sit in the other chair and watch her crochet and listen to her stories from the old days. The big stove made it nice and toasty warm and the smells from her cooking were always wonderful. Nana cooked like she did in the old country; nothing written down, all from memory. She said she cooked since she was my age and didn’t need a cook book.

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A photograph and story from the Hughes House.

598 Revelation

We were eating lunch in Escalante, Utah when some other tourists sat down at a table next to us. They were first time visitors to the United States. In the course of some friendly conversation the man said, “I now understand why Americans are so religious. Looking out on the incredibly beautiful landscape of Utah,” he said, “it’s difficult not to believe in God.”

Sometimes, it takes a different set of eyes to get us to see the truth.

597 Going Up the Stairs

Momma said I had to go to school so I could learn to read, write and cipher. I wasn’t very big and the school was on top of a hill. You could see the whole town from there, not that there was much of a town there. But first, I had to get up the stairs at the front of the school. It was quite an effort for a young boy with short legs to get up those stairs.

It’s still an effort to get up those stairs, but that’s because I am no longer a young boy.

596 Aunt Fanny’s Last Night

Aunt Fanny always read from her prayer book. She needed her glasses to read and the two were always very close together. On her last night she finished her prayers, put her glasses in her case, but didn’t have the strength to close the case. She went to Jesus that night, her glasses and prayer book on the table next to her.

595 When Dreams Become Real

I knew these airplanes. I knew them from books I owned and from the Revell models I made of these warbirds. I remember the heady aroma of the Testor’s Liquid Cement we used to assemble the plastic models. No longer 1/40 scale, they were right in front of me; the real deal; life size, metal and rubber, close enough to touch.

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One of the images that didn't make it into A Boy's Dream, the folio from the Erickson Airplane Collection. The Curtis P-40 is almost always restored as one of General Claire Chenault's Flying Tigers. They just seem to look best that way.

594 A Little Bit of Graffiti

James Henry Harris. Your little sister said that you picked up that paint brush down at the mill and you painted your name on the wall. What in heavens name possessed you to be so vain as to think that people would want to see your name? I sent you to get the corn milled, not write your name on the wall. I would hope you leave more of a mark on the world than having your name painted on a wall. Who knows how long that paint will last? Imagine what people will think or say about that?