In the West Country

Weston-Super-Mare, 1989

The photo above is one that gets a lot of attention from time to time. I'm not exactly sure why it’s popular. I think it has a lot of issues, photographically speaking.

In 1989 my wife and I traveled in England for the first time. We spent time in London and then lit out for the southwestern coast. One night we stayed in a b&b in Chedder, which in those days meant we would be staying in a family's guest room.

Chedder’s in Somerset, as pretty a sounding name for a county as you can imagine. For me, the name conjures up images of big puffy clouds and bucolic pastures.

Chedder’s a pleasant enough place, most famous for a local gorge of the same name. The home we stayed in was located outside of town. There wasn’t much to distinguish it. But the family was nice and our room overlooked a bucolic pasture.

This being our first trip to England, we’d been told not to expect much in the way of fancy cuisine. Our budget wasn’t overly generous, in any event, so we had a lot of pub fare. A staple of just about anywhere we ate on that trip was lamb and peas. No matter where we ate, whether it was a nice restaurant or a pub, the menu always included lamb and peas.

Realizing that we were only about fifteen miles from the shore of the Bristol Channel, we decided to drive out to the coast and have dinner at the seaside resort of Weston-Super-Mare. Weston was once a really popular place with factory workers from the big British cities. It was known for its beach, which is so flat that at low tide it extends a full mile out from the shore. There’s a big pier that reaches out almost that far and that had an ornate pavilion on the end.

Weston-Super-Mare was a busy place during WWII. Its location made it a strategic protection point for the Bristol Channel and the River Severn. German Luftwaffe bombers dropped some 17,000 incendiary bombs on Weston-Super-Mare.

When we arrived in 1989, though, Weston-Super-Mare had seen its better days. In fact, it was a pretty dreary looking place. We were there at what we supposed to be the height of the summer season and while not completely empty, the town was deserted enough in the early evening to be a little eerie. Such people as did see walking the streets and bobbing in and out of the various pinball arcades looked like thugs. The lights on the pier leading out to the pavilion probably would have been more impressive had more of them been working.

I'm told the decline of Weston-Super-Mare continued after our visit. For one thing, there are fewer factory workers in England. For those who still had job, the traditional August “workers holiday” was no longer the only time people could take vacation. But most crippling was the popularization of discount air travel and the introduction of cheap European vacation packages that made it possible for the working classes to travel abroad. The number of visitors to Weston-Super-Mare decreased each year. The pavilion and the outer end of the pier were destroyed in a fire in 2008.

But none of that mattered when we were there in 1989. We took a walk on the beach and drove up and down the tourist strip a few times before concluding that there was nothing in Weston-Super-Mare that we wanted to see any more of. We got back in our little rental car and headed back to the country. Along the way we stopped at a pub and had our daily dose of lamb and peas.

It Appears There Will Be a Spring

The Promise of Spring 1, 2011

I’ve been a little low lately. There’s nothing serious going on. No major issues. A few more deaths around me than usual. A few disappointments. A bit of a creative drought. The usual anxieties. But nothing that stops the world from spinning. I’ll get over it.

I gather this happens to a lot of people this time of year. We’re in the doldrums between [hopefully] the worst of winter and the promise of spring. The holidays are over. The weather’s too unpredictable yet to know whether we should start working in the garden or stay inside and paint bedrooms.

This happens every year. You think I’d have figured a way around it by now. (Aha! So this is why some people go to the Caribbean in February!)

Yesterday afternoon I took the dog out for a quick “run and a sniff,” as one of our elderly British friends used to say. On cold days these are utilitarian outings. You throw the tennis ball until the terrier’s compelled to run off into the ivy and do her business and then you go back indoors.

Only yesterday I decided to take the camera out with me. Just having the camera in hand makes me a more observant person. We played with the tennis ball and then I let the dog wander around some while I started paying more attention to my own surroundings.

What emerged yesterday was hardly a revelation. It started with a simple walk around to see which of the shrubs had survived this capricious winter and which hadn’t. That requires looking at things up close, snapping a few branches and such.

I call this the “brown” season. It’s when I pick up all the dead limbs and debris that the most recent winter storms and winds have cast about. There are bushes to trim, dead materials to remove. The lawn is dull. The vegetable garden is covered. All in all, not exactly what I needed on a day when I was running low on enthusiasm.

Last Season, 2011

Then it happened. I noticed a little sprig of green poking up through the mulch in the woodland garden area on one side of our property. When I looked closer I found tufts of daffodils finding their way to the sun. The dog and I will have to be a little more careful now when we walk over there.

Then I noticed that some of the hydrangeas, even the ones that looked like they might not have survived the winter, have buds coming.

I’m feeling better already.

The Promise of Spring 10, 2011

The Deepest Cut

Members & Guests Only, 2003

It was a moment Mike wouldn't forget.

Every day he used his lunch hour from work to go pick up his old man and take him to the VWF for an afternoon of cards and drinking with his war buddies. Since the heart surgery the old man couldn't drive any more and he wouldn't talk about riding the bus even though the bus went right by the house and the VFW hall was only five minutes down the line.

"I ain't riding with those people, plain and simple," the old man would say every time Mike brought it up. "I worked too long to end up riding on some damned bus with all the cleaning ladies."

Mike couldn't get any more time off from work because of all the time he'd taken when the old man was having his operations. So the old man had to wait until Mike got off work at 5:30 and could pick him up and take him home.

"Where's Teddy?" the old man barked at him when he got in the car. It was already dark. Sylvia, the daytime waitress, had waited at door with the old man to make sure he didn't wander out into the dark and slip on the icy sidewalk. Mike gave her a short wave of thanks.

"Teddy and Laura live in Cincinnati, Dad. You know that."

"Why couldn’t Clare come pick me up? I don't like having to wait around while all the other guys get in their cars and go. Bristow and Cutty, I think they make a point of driving by the front door real slow just to tease me. Makes me look like I can't pull up my own pants."

"Dad, you know Clare and Todd and the kids live in Orlando now. There was nothing for them here anymore after the plant closed."

"You don't have to tell me anything, Buster. I know what it was like to work in that plant. I made tires, boy. There was none of this sissy call center stuff like you do back in my day. A man did a man's job. I took good care of your mother and you kids. Clare’s Todd, he knows how to do a man's job. "

Mike knew better than to argue. The old man had no idea that Todd was now working as a part-time tour guide at a cheesy reptile zoo in the Florida swamp just to pay the rent. Clare was watching neighbors’ kids to earn milk money.

"It's just me, Dad," Mike said with resignation. "I'm who you've got." The conversation quieted. As they approached his street, the old man looked over.

"You know what Sylvia said to me today?"

"What, Dad?"

"She said I must have a really good son to look after me like you do.”

Mike looked over at the old man. Maybe there’d be a moment of appreciation.

“You don’t know how much it hurt me to have to tell her that you'd been no help at all. Just a pain in the ass.”

Mike turned his head and looked ahead.

Finding Country

Nanney’s Creek Road, 2011

It used to be that you didn’t have to go far to find the country. You could drive five or ten minutes and you were in either the fields or the fields.

When I live now, it takes a good thirty or forty minutes to get to the edge of suburbia. There’s only one small farm left within a couple of miles of where I live, and it remains only because the patriarch of the family that owns it won’t let it be sold. But when he’s gone, I’ve no doubt his children will swoop in and turn the remaining pastures into fields of cookie cutter McMansions.

The Southern part of Virginia Beach is still rural in character even if less and less of it is no longer authentically rural in fact. Bit by bit, subdivisions of surprising affluence have crept down into the farming country. It’s still our city’s horse country, though these horses don’t work and when they’re carried somewhere it’s more likely to be in trailer towed behind a Range Rover than behind a pickup truck.

When I drove down to the North Carolina border this past Sunday afternoon there was hardly a place along the old two-lane country road where I couldn’t see at least a half dozen large homes situated on lots so close to the water level of Back Bay and the North Landing River that they were once considered undesirable for anything but raising soybeans and big fat water snakes.

February isn’t the best time to go looking at farms. The fields are just starting to warm for spring planting, which means most of the action is taking place underground. But every now and then you come across a view that reminds you that there was once some breathing space around here.

Princess Anne 36, 2011

I took the pictures posted here because I was initially drawn to the trees. I started photographing the big tree in Nanney’s Creek Road years ago. Each time I go down to look at it another storm seems to have hacked more of it away. It wasn’t until I came home and looked at the photos on the screen, though, that I noticed that the skies were a much more interesting story.

We’ve become accustomed to photos of the earth taken from airplanes and satellites that show weather systems swirling above us terrestrial souls. It didn’t occur to me until I looked at Nanney’s Creek Road that I was getting a view of such a swirl from underneath. Is that a dynamic sky, or what?

The sky in Princess Anne 36, below, is arguably less thrilling. You could probably argue that it distracts from the composition of the trees that first attracted me. But upon reflection I think it makes for a more interesting photograph. Besides, my car tires were sinking into the mud at the edge of the field as I contemplated this shot. If I’d waited much longer for the sky to clear, I’d probably still be stuck there now.

Tasty Meadows

Tasty Meadows 16, 2011

There are several memorable moments in of the 1981 movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman, not the least of which is Lily Tomlin’s performance as the aforementioned shrinking woman and Charles Grodin’s performance as her harried husband.

But the part my wife and I always chuckle about when we remember that movie is how the neighborhood Tomlin and her husband lived in was called Tasty Meadows. The only thing that distinguished the houses of Tasty Meadows from one another was that they were all painted in different pastel colors.

I mention this because I took a ride through my own city yesterday, particularly the part that has been developed since 1980, and was taken aback at how lacking these neighborhoods are in color. Whenever my wife and I drive past one of those neighborhoods where hundreds of homes are built from the same three or four templates and the colors are all within three shades of beige, we look at each other conspiratorially and whisper, “Tasty Meadows.”

I suspect this palette had more to do with the limited range of colors available in vinyl siding in the 1980s than with a desire of the developers to create mind numbingly dull looking neighborhoods. It certainly says nothing of the people who live in these homes. They were looking for good space and value in their purchases and these homes undoubtedly fit the bill.

Tasty Meadows 42, 2008

Yesterday I revisited a new subdivision I lasted visited just over two years ago. It’s built at the site of what used to be a string of immense and deep sand borrow pits. When I last visited, the sides of the largest of the old pits, an eighty-five acre monster of a hole that looks to be every bit of 50– 60 feet in depth, had been graded to such a sharp pitch that while attempting to photograph it I nearly tumbled down the hill into the water at the bottom. Since then, the pit has filled almost completely with water.

That much water is impressive, although given its depth it’s not the kind of body of water I’d have built a children’s playground right next to. But what really caught my eye about this subdivision were the colors of the homes. The first home built there were in same dull shades of beige you see everywhere. But the more recent additions have been bolder with color.

It’s a strange project. On the one hand, it reminds one of Celebration, Florida, the Disney Corporation’s attempt to merge New Urbanism with a Potemkin-like sheen of traditional conservative values. All of the houses have front porches big enough for people to sit on and observe their neighbors and the life of the community. Some of the houses are even arranged around broad common lawns, with vehicle access and parking diverted to alleys in the rear.

Tasty Meadows 45, 2008

But that’s as far as it goes. Nearly all of the newer additions to the neighborhood are being built with 8’ vinyl fences that not only cast deep shadows across yards at all hours of the day but noon, but also mitigate the safety value of having all those people sitting on their front porches observing the life of the community. The fences as much as announce: “We may be neighborly, but what goes on within this wall is none of your damned business!”

Tasty Meadows 12, 2011

You Never Know Where They Come From

Any rooms at the Bates Motel? I dunno. Let me go ask Momma, 2010

I’m always curious to see which of the photographs I post at Flickr will catch the attention of the Flickr community. They’re a discerning lot and you just never know what’s going to click with them.

My all-time most viewed photograph is actually a short Flip camera video, 40 Seconds of Zen from the Dead Horses. As of yesterday, it had been viewed nearly 21,000 times. Each day a dozen or so people get added to the count. I don’t know where they come from or how they find their way to this little video. The Flickr statistics tell me only that the majority of them come from “unknown sources,” leading me to believe they’re here because they were searching for “Zen.”

But that theory doesn’t hold much water, if you’ll pardon the pun. Here’s another little video I posted that also has the word “Zen” in the title. It’s been viewed by fewer than 150 people. And here’s yet another one, this time a photo with “Zen” in the title. It’s been viewed by fewer than 100 people. So much for that theory. (Looks like I'm more interested in Zen than them.)

My second most viewed image, Old Sparky, is a photograph of the old electric chair in the Texas Prison Museum. It’s been viewed by more than 7,000 people. As with the 40 Seconds of Zen from the Dead Horses, new people find their way to this photograph every day. Flickr statistics tell me they come primarily from search engines. So my assumption is that they come as a result of interest in the death penalty. (I do know that this photo has been used at two web sites devoted to overcoming the death penalty.)

The other day I posted the picture above, “Any rooms at the Bates Motel? I dunno. Let me go ask Momma,” at Flickr. It’s a scene I’ve photographed many times through the years, but one I’ve always chosen to show as a black-and-white rather than color image.

I took this picture last October. It was so far to the bottom of the list of pictures I liked from that series, though, that I wasn’t even going to post it at first. I try not to repeat myself. I also think Flickr has a relatively short attention span for series that don’t punch you every day with something really exciting. But I liked the composition, the great light and the blue sky. So I posted the picture and went on about my business.

Some of my usual friends stopped in to comment, for which I am always grateful. But then, later in the day, I started getting comments and e-mails from people I’ve never heard of before. They wrote to me in French, Italian and, I think, Portuguese. The French I could understand. The Italian I could make out. The Portuguese I had to go to Babel Fish to interpret.

Every now and then one of my pictures will be featured at Flickr’ Explore page. If you hang around Flickr long enough this will happen to you from time to time. Flickr doesn’t tell you they’re doing this. You usually notice it in the form of an uptick in traffic to your Flickr page. But someone also usually comments that they saw the picture at Explore. This time, though, there were no such notes and I couldn’t find this photo at Explore.

I guess this’ll give me something to think about this weekend while I should be thinking about finding a Valentine.

News From the Front

Tie a Yellow Ribbon, 2006

We got a letter yesterday from our nephew who is about to complete Basic Training in the U.S. Army. He’s a bright young man, holder of a Master’s Degree in History, and a member in good standing in his father’s family’s long line of humorists. He’d always said he wanted to continue his education and perhaps have a career in academia. So it was no little shock to his family when he decided instead to go into the service. He said it was something he needed to do to prove something to himself. He tested so well when he enlisted that he’ll soon be off to spend a year at one of the world’s most respected foreign language training programs.

But before that happens, he’s got to finish Basic training. I’ll let him describe:

“We’ve been absurdly busy lately, preparing for the final weeks. A few days ago we spent 17-18 hours a day at the range, firing day and night. The night firing was TONS of fun. We were able to use [list of advanced technology].

Only two major field training exercises and the physical training test are left before graduation. We can all taste the end of Basic now. We’ve driven by the graduation field several times while ceremonies were being held, and I can’t wait for ours. You’ll have to let me know if I can pull off a shaved head look, as I’m running out of hair to mess with.

We just finished our field training exercise, a three-day ‘camping trip.’ The first day started with a 10-mile march in full ‘battle rattle.’ It’s the stereotypical crawl-through-sand-whilst-being-fired-upon scenario. TONS of fun! Besides, I was too exhausted from the march to be scared.

Tomorrow we get to throw dummy grenades before qualifying with live grenades. Can’t wait to be told to blow stuff up and get PAID to do it! Heck, I got paid to WALK a few hours the other day. Not a bad deal!”

Although our nephew may make Basic sound like a bunch of boys and girls having a good time playing with guns and holographic sights in the piney woods of South Carolina, we know it’s very hard work. Drill sergeants are no less demanding or imperious than they’ve ever been. They’re preparing these kids for service in very dangerous places. While our nephew is off learning foreign languages, some of his fellow enlistees will likely move into the battlefield quickly.

But if and when our nephew goes to battle, I’ll be assured knowing that at least one sensible young man will be weighing the factors before him carefully and using the sophisticated and lethal forces available to him judiciously.

Or at least he’ll be doing this if he can learn to accurately lob a grenade in the right direction.