A River to Skate Away On

When you wake up to 5 degrees that feels like -1, your thoughts naturally turn to being outdoors. OK, I love cold a lot more than your average bear. After  I considered skiing down the road in front of my house, as so many do, I opted instead for going to my happy place in the Cascade Lakes and hiking along the riverbanks. Walking in snow is one of my favorite things, and we've had a fair bit of  it this weekend, especially in the mountains. While Mt. Bachelor has had 218 inches worth since October, the city has seen very little on the ground until this weekend.

Pines look better in Oregon than anywhere else. And I'm always impressed that so much wildlife is always an arm's length away, no matter what the weather. As I meandered, I watched a falcon, ducks, geese, baby ducks, baby geese, several ravens, and a dog who was absolutely THRILLED to see a nice, probably 33-degree river to pounce into.

We've got snow in the forecast every day for the next week. Yay!

(I didn't have my camera with me, so forgive the iPhone shots.)

Detroit, Eastern Market

Detroit, 2016

Eastern Market mural, created in 2015 by Fel3000ft. 

Daybreak, New Camaldoli

New Camaldoli Hermitage, Big Sur, CA

The Grotto, Portland

One of my very favorite places in Portland--and Catholic places anywhere. The Grotto is a sanctuary in a marginal neighborhood in north PDX. They have a cliffside meditation chapel that overlooks the Columbia River Valley, the Cascades, and Mt. St. Helen. It's where I shot this photo 7 years ago, which I just finished tonight.

Modness

I took this photo of my friend Marti in her dorm room back in college, way too many years ago. We lived together senior year, in a suite we called the Mod Quad. I entered it in my first photo show and it won an award. Marti and I are still friends, and she looks almost exactly the same today. God, I hope she still has that jacket.

Stockyard Cafe

I stumbled onto these grain silos on a backroad between Bozeman and Livingston on my first trip to Big Sky country in 2015.

Mirror

Spring, and its weathers, come to the Deschutes River.

Chapel Door, St. Gertrude's

I stayed at the Benedictine Monastery of St. Gertrude, in Cottonwood, Idaho, for a 2-week retreat. The monastery's remote setting, 200 miles from a major highway in any direction, provides a beautiful place to connect with self and spirit. This chapel was built from blue porphyry stone quarried from the hill behind it in the 1920s.

Deschutes, April Afternoon

These days, my health issues make walking any distance not my strong suit. So I've made a deal with myself that I'll be really present with 20 good minutes in nature, and try to find something beautiful. Yesterday it was the clouds and the water.

More Deschutes River

Deschutes River Banks

February 14

The Salton Sea

Driving the 111 through far southeastern California near Mexico, you suddenly hit a point where you know you've entered another world. To one side is arid desert and the occasional long train, looking surreal with its brightly colored cars in the hot white light as it parallels your car. To your right emerges the Salton Sea, a freshwater lake azure blue against bright white sands. As the land grows increasingly arid and the sun increasingly intense, even the subtlest of color pops out in bold relief, and everything is delineated as if under spotlight. For 350 square miles, the play of water against sand brings a study in contrast and the entrance of greater perspective than you felt at the last-stop gas station miles back in Indio. 

When beauty stops you in your tracks and you cut the engine before the lake, you tread on "sands" of pulverized fish bones. Perhaps the first thing you grasp: lakes hold a delicate balance of salt in their waters. And when too much enters, the life of its inhabitants necessarily perishes. All life walks a line of delicate balance. Human error can transform a thriving resort like Bombay Beach into a piscean graveyard, where wind-battered trailers serve as aluminum reminders of impermanence. Along the shore you see embedded volcanic mud pots and smell the saltiest brine of oversalination and decaying fish.

The brine enters your pores as the hot wind whips your skin. You try to forget that even this degree of salt cannot sanitize the DDT and Agent Orange remnants flowing through the pretty blue waters. Tough birds cluster together on rocks, though rampant white feathers prove that environments like this take down even the most resilient.

223 feet below sea level, Bombay Beach shelters solely renegades, with a harsh, drying sun that desiccates clutches of '60s and '70s trailers from the heyday, 

when more than a million tourists annually thronged to the resort, escaping the city to the end of the Earth. 

Today the tiny town of 300 boasts little more than a market and 2 restaurants. It's difficult to tell if most of the trailers you stare into are occupied or not.

And of course in a place where the rent is free and the sleeps smash the bounds of funky, there are always going to be artists...

But most amazing of all is just how lost you can get in the colors of the panorama before you, and the peace of being alone, far from the properly salinated places drowning in population.

[click to enlarge photos]

Wait - Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Photos by Heidi Utz

Detroit - Belle Isle

On an early June day, Ellen sent me here, to her favorite place, where she and Trixie had spent many hours in this urban oasis of nature. My first day out and the whole city lie before me--with its sadness and pain and broken dreams, the very black & white horrors of all it had endured. I wanted to see what her eyes had seen and feel what her heart had felt.

But this moment felt innocent and kind of Technicolor...And as children bustled nearby at their school picnic, I felt a sense of youthfulness & possibility & joy at a dream realized.

Open-hearted.

For those instants, all of Detroit shone...

Joshua

Joshua Tree National Park, April

Masked

Mardi Gras and ancient grace…a metal-masked warrior on the shores of debauche, 
French Quarter, 

a spring day, on the shores of somewhere different we'd hoped to be...

 

Ivy Mask B

I was once the emperor of leaves and you the empress of trees. And we pressed our arboreal hands together and fell…

face forward into fall

Accident Montage 3

Driver down 

with wings that float heavenward 

and eyes that will ever recall…

5 strokes 

that altered fate that altered god that altered time.

Accident Montage 2

And I dreamed I was flying. 

I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly…

and looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly…