Archive for the ‘Roadtrip’ Category
Discarded Underwear
Monday, September 28th, 2009Celia, Baja, 1991
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
This is a shot of my (now ex) wife, down in Baja California, a week or so after we got married, which was somewhere around 1991, I’m pretty sure, although I have really always struggled with dates.
Then, as now, the thing I enjoyed the most in life was spending all day, every day at the beach. What I didn’t realize is that this is somewhat rare. Even my surfer friends nowadays have this ridiculously activity oriented approach: they head out, surf for a couple of hours, and then leap back into their cars and dash back into town so that they can engage in activities and feel like good, productive, patriotic Americans. Surfing is leisure to them, but leisure is an activity.
This makes no sense to me. It’s a Calvinist thing, from what I understand.
One awesome thing about Celia was that she really could chill out on the sand without any compulsion to do activities. She understood leisure.
Vancouver Island, 1994
Sunday, June 21st, 2009I’ve been to this place twice. The first time was during a family vacation in the 70s. I remembered it as cold, desolate, and stunningly beautiful. I remembered enormous driftwood - not just a piece of wood but the entire tree. I remembered abandoned lean-tos and other shelters made out of driftwood, by hippies, I reckoned.
And when I returned a little over 20 years later, it was exactly as I remember.
Vancouver Island, 1994
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
Long Beach, on Vancouver Island. 1994.
Opposite side of the island from my parents’ house, which was right on the beach. That was my mother’s deal. She loved the ocean. My stepfather was a prairie boy and hated both the ocean and all the trees. He preferred a flat and endless stretch of wheat fields.
My mother said that when she died she didn’t want any sort of a big fuss with a lot of people. She just wanted her immediate family to wade into the ocean she could see from her porch and quietly scatter her ashes there. So that’s what we did.
A day or two later I took a solo trip across the island.
Long Beach was a place I remembered visiting when I was about 12. I remembered it was cold, desolate, and really beautiful. I also remembered that hippies had built all sorts of shelters out of the driftwood.
It hadn’t changed much from my memories as a kid in the early 70s. It was still desolate, beautiful, and the only signs of humans were odd bits of hippie detritus.
Miles of beach, middle of August, and I was the only person there.
The Salton Sea
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009More from the set I did in February.
Just South of Mecca
Saturday, February 14th, 2009“Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and cannot be found.”
Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost persons and things, has his own trailer park, just south of Mecca.
I’d guess a person living in the Saint Anthony Trailer Park is indeed lost, at least to the rest of the world, as is the case with pretty much everything near the Salton Sea.
North Shore, Salton Sea.
