A Train Ride Under the Sea

Kent, 2002

My father worked for a railroad from his teens until his seventies. One of the perks of working for a railroad in those days was that family members rode the train for free. My sister made great use of the pass when was in her teens and in college. When I was little I used my pass to ride the train back and forth from Norfolk to Roanoke, Virginia, to visit my father. By the time I hit my teens and would have loved to ride the train a bit further, the family passes had been eliminated along with much of the passenger rail service.

Riding the train used to be a classy way to travel. The trains were comfortable. Proud porters kept everything spic and span. Even in the waning days of the N&W’s Powhatan Express train, dining cars still used real silver and meals were prepared by experienced cooks.

I don’t have the chance to ride trains much any more. They’re great North of Washington, D.C. and in a few other corridors. For the kind of cross-country traveling I do for work, though, it’s nearly impossible to make trains fit my scheduling and budget needs.

When I do get to ride a good train, though, I relish the opportunity. If I rode it regularly, maybe the Amtrak Acela between Washington and Boston would become routine. But since I don’t, the chance to ride a clean, fast and modern train is a treat.

The trains in Europe range from the completely worn out to the most sleekly modern. The rail system in Britain used to be a model of timeliness. But privatization of the British rail system has resulted in chopped up service schedules, poorly maintained rolling stock and compelled people who used to not need cars to become regular motorway users.

In 2002, my wife and I had a chance to ride the Eurostar train between London and Paris. At the time, it was the newest thing on rails in that part of the world, novel for offering the first-ever continuous rail connection between London and Paris via the Channel Tunnel under the English Channel.

It’s a terrific train ride. The cars are narrower than Americans are accustomed to, and in the hot and muggy summer months the train operators don’t quite embrace Americans’ concept of 72F air conditioning. Still, the service is prompt and the staff professional.

The only problem was that the French beat the English to the punch when it came to preparing their respective rail lines to accommodate the Eurostar. We barely inched our way from London down through Kent to the coast. The English countryside is pretty, to be sure. But you don’t ride the Eurostar to see the countryside. It’s for going fast.

And that’s what happened once we hit the tunnel opening at the coast. By the time we came out the other end in France, we were flying! The Eurostar can go as fast as 186 mph. That’s slower than Japan’s bullet trains or even the French TGVs. But as someone accustomed to pokey American rail speed, I have to tell you it was some kind of fast.

How fast, you say? Fast enough that it really was hard for my eyes to focus on anything but the scenery on the farthest horizon. Fast enough that the camera captured only blurs. (But I actually like them.)

Fast Train, 2002

The irony of the trip is that after zipping through the French countryside at a speed that makes your head spin you pull into Paris’ Gare du Nord. It’s an elegant train barn, to be sure. But after the high tech ride, stepping out into Nineteen Century Paris is a big of a shock.

But it probably wasn’t as much of a shock as the scene I performed a few days later when we returned to the Gare du Nord to take the train back to London. I’d forgotten to pull our passports out of the little money pouch that was belted around my waist underneath my pants. Having nowhere else to change, I had to duck behind a travel poster and reach down into the crotch of my pants to retrieve the pouch and passports while my wife tried to shield me from view with a raincoat. . No doubt the suave French passersby in their stylish suits and scarves thought we were just a couple of sex-crazed Americans.

Gare du Nord, 2002

The Hotel on the Hill

Anyone for Cards? 2011

For those of us who grew up in Virginia Beach when it was still a small town, one of our most enduring landmarks is the Cavalier Hotel. Opened just before the onset of the Great Depression, the Cavalier sits atop a natural sand dune overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. When it opened it featured such amenities as resort shops, stables, a library, kennels, a sunken floral garden, a golf course, yachting center and beach club. Back then you could step onto a train in Chicago and travel non-stop to the Cavalier’s own private rail station in Virginia Beach.

Misty Memories, 2003

Cavalier Hotel Entrance, 2011

Cavalier Lobby, 2011

In those days, the guest room baths had different spigots for hot water, cold water, ice-cooled water and salt water. The Cavalier was the kind of place where you dressed formally for dinner. In the summer guests strolled down the hill to the Beach Club to dance and be entertained by the likes of Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, the Dorseys, Woody Herman, Bing Crosby, Artie Shaw and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald stayed there. Presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, too.

Cavalier Pool Loggia, 2011

The U.S. Navy took over the hotel during WWII for use as a radar training school. The indoor pool was emptied and used as a classroom. The stables were cleared and turned into dorms.

After the war, everything was different. The days when the well-to-do traveled with steamer trunks, hunting dogs and servants were over. Like a dowager who’s lost her wealth, the Cavalier fought to keep its face up against increasingly competitive conditions and an America infatuated with automobiles and motels.

Still, up through the years of my youth in the 1950s and early 1960s the Cavalier was the place for social events of any repute. My sister learned to swim in the Cavalier’s indoor pool. I attended cotillions in the elegant ballroom upstairs. When you drove up the hill and Carlos or one of the other doormen reached out to open the door you felt that you’d really arrived.

Let the Light In, 2011

By the late 1960s, however, the fate of the hotel was in question. The old place was wearing out and expensive to maintain. In 1973, the Cavalier’s owners built a new high-rise hotel across the street on the oceanfront. It was nice, but didn’t set the same standard for luxury that the old place had.

Meanwhile, the old hotel on the hill fell into greater disrepair. Periodic renovations were done to keep the place open and patch together ancient mechanical systems. Every few years there was talk of some new scheme for adding a new wing or guest room tower. But all these ideas were ultimately dismissed as too costly and not structurally sustainable on the sandy dune. There began to be talk that the hotel on the hill might even be demolished.

The hotel was saved when a farmer from the rural Southside of Virginia who’d become fabulously wealthy when a very rare and valuable mineral was found on his property stepped in. The old man was a crusty dude, given to drinking and holing up in a suite of rooms in the old servant’s lodge down the hill behind the hotel. But he loved the Cavalier and refused to let the old hotel on the hill be razed.

In 2011, the Cavalier is still an independent property owned by the farmers’ descendants. The oceanfront hotel stays open year-round. The old hotel on the hill is used occasionally for social and corporate events throughout the year, but opens for overnight guests only during the summer.

I heard recently from a friend who’s knowledgeable about such things that the hotel on the hill is again at risk. This prompted me to go down and walk around its main floor once again. The hotel opened for the season a few weeks ago and sports a fresh coat of paint. The public spaces are spruced up and I could see where the ballroom is getting a decorator’s face lift.

Fresh Paint, 2011

So maybe the old hotel on the hill isn’t going anywhere for a while. And until it does, those of us with old memories of the Cavalier will continue to gather for a drink and dinner in the Hunt Room Grill, a basement space that in the hotel’s heyday was a private club for male guests. It’s only open now between New Year’s Day and Easter while the oceanfront hotel’s rooftop dining room closes for the winter. The food’s nothing to write home about. But they keep a fire going in the giant fireplace and the bar’s a congenial place to tell stories and swap memories.

Million Dollar Slums

Creeping Suburbia, 2011

When we moved to our current neighborhood thirteen years ago we knew it wasn't exactly isolated. But it was still heavily wooded enough to feel away. Add to that the fact that the neighborhood is a dead end surrounded by water and that there are two intersections before you get to our house that have the same street name on all four sides of the street signs and you have a sense of how away and confusing it is back here.

When we moved here there was a moratorium on new construction in the area. Tighter environmental standards had resulted in the owners of undeveloped property not being able to build or subdivide until the city sewer reached us.

When that eventually happened, the wooded property across the creek from us was quickly subdivided and put up for sale. I’m not a developer. But what I know from observing what happened across the creek was that by shoehorning as many lots onto that property as they did hey created problems we’re going to have to deal with for decades.

The problem is that they subdivided the property into six small lots instead of four that match the density of the rest of the neighborhood. The lots sold quickly and a string of McMansions followed quickly behind. From the start the people who lived in those houses had problems with one another. Because their houses were so close to each other and their lots are configured in a jigsaw puzzle-like array of pie and flag shapes in order for everyone to have deep-water access, there were problems with noise and privacy. Everybody looked into everybody else's house. Water splashing out of one person’s swimming pool practically landed in the neighbor’s swimming pool.

The worst part—and I’m not really sure why this happened—is that these lots attracted a very contentious bunch of people. The first family’s son bullied the neighboring kids and eventually got kicked out of school for selling drugs on the school bus. The next family’s son tried to burn down their house and a few of the neighbors’. The third family was racist, anti-Semitic and generally rude and crude. Their kids stole stuff off my boat and that of my neighbor. Their open displays of hate and general disregard for anyone else made them the worst.

Between the drugs, alcohol, racism, anti-Semitism and general thuggish behavior, the police became regular visitors to their block and a flock of lawyers was kept busy untangling the litigation that arose between these three families.

Eventually, the “worst” family was compelled to leave the state for legal reasons. The kid next door to them who liked to burn things was arrested after threatening to harm his younger sister and is now prohibited from coming anywhere near here.

The other day I read in the paper that a bank would be foreclosing on the home of the family whose kid sold drugs. Apparently they’d stopped making payments on the million dollar loan they used to buy the lot and build the house. (A million dollars!!!) That house was sold on the courthouse steps yesterday and now belongs to someone else.

I feel about the houses on the other side of the creek as one might about a mean dog. The houses themselves aren’t bad. But the way their lots were designed and the way the houses relate to each other physically create a toxic situation. Ever the optimist, I have my fingers crossed in hope that the new people who eventually move in will be a nicer lot. It’s going to take a powerful bit of niceness to overcome the design flaws and bad vibes that have been created in that little cluster of million dollar slums.

In Just One Day

Quiet Morning on 200 Central Park South, 2005

I sometimes think of photography essays or projects that are large and long-term. But I’m not always very good about completing them. The older I get the more I wonder whether I’d have been diagnosed with some kind of attention deficiency had I come along later.

In any event, I’m assured every now and then when I find something that is purposely brief. It doesn’t have to be an event or anything of great importance or insight. Sometimes I don’t even notice I’ve done it until after it’s over.

During a trip to visit our daughter in New York in 2005 I took a series of pictures that I thought told a pretty interesting story about the city “in just one day.” You can see the whole series here.

The series starts just after sunrise with my morning walk and ends at midnight in Times Square, a place I’m not always keen to hang out. In between are stops in the upper west side, central park, Lincoln Center, midtown, downtown, and the theater district. That’s hardly a comprehensive audit of Manhattan, much less the entire city. But at the time I thought it was a pretty cool to include a few quiet morning moments, an exploration of the Ansonia Building, meet a cabbie who wanted me to take his picture “so you can make me famous,” watch a parade of Buddhists and an elephant on Fifth Avenue and end up with a bunch of gawking tourists in Times Square.

Hare Hare, Hare Hare, 2005

I couldn’t help but think of Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s lyrics for "New York, New York," about three sailors with just 24 hours to see New York City, "from Yonkers on down to the bay.” There are lots of swell songs about New York. But this is my favorite. An excerpt:

New York, New York, it's a wonderful town,

The Bronx is up and the Battery's down,

The people ride in a hole in the ground,

New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.

Manhattan women are all dressed in satin, so the fellows say,

There's just one thing necessary in Manhattan,

When you just have one day,

Gotta pick up a date, maybe seven or eight,

By your way, in just one day.

New York, New York, it's a wonderful town,

The Bronx is up and the Battery's down,

The people ride in a hole in the ground,

New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.

(Lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Green)

On This Stage, 2005

Mama, do these people know Jesus? 2005

Not the Decisive Moment

Gaines Way, 2010

In the process of working through a stack of old photo files on my computer, I’ve been spending the last few evenings going through the remaining unsorted pictures I took at Martha’s Vineyard last fall. Last October it was easy deciding which were the best and which were the worst. It’s dealing with the rest that trips me up.

A ruthless editor would probably tell me to ditch the whole lot of them. If I can’t see in them ten months later what I thought was worth photographing at the time, why should I expect anyone else to? So why waste the space and energy on them?

The problem is that for a moment, however brief, I thought each one did have potential. Even if I knew that what I captured in the camera wasn’t exactly right, I had an idea of something I might do to improve it.

The gap between what makes some pictures keepers and others discards can be so narrow. If I had a more confident sense of quality control I would discard them all. I learned years ago, though, not to discard gap pictures summarily because even if they seem mindless to me they sometimes have marketable value to someone else. Once discarded, there’s no bringing them back. So I keep them around trying to find value. (Yes, I know I’m sounding like one of those hoarders you see on TV.)

Gaines Way, above, is one of the Vineyard gap pictures. Straight from the camera I could see that it wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be. This is the result of me having waited too long to take the picture. When I first saw the house there was a rich golden light on it from the rising sun. But I was standing too far down the beach to compose the picture I wanted. By the time I got to the right spot the light had changed.

I don’t mention this as an excuse, but rather as an affirmation to myself that it’s okay that sometimes you just can’t get every picture you want and every picture you take isn’t going to be a winner. In the case of Gaines Way, the result is still mindless. Just saying that out loud (if only to myself as I type this), I realize now that I’ve bridged the gap with this photo and that it will be discarded.

Once the moment’s gone, you can’t bring it back. No need fretting over it. Move on to the next picture.

A Gift

Winstonholme, 2005

The other day a friend and I went to visit another friend who was recently told by his doctors that death is imminent. As in just a few months. Our friend’s health has been fragile since he received a transplant heart almost twenty years ago. But for most of that time he and his wife have been able to travel and enjoy the company of friends, family and good food and wine.

For someone who’s been through so much, health-wise, this recent advanced cancer diagnosis is a double insult. But there’s no arguing with it. It’s there. He’s got it. That’s it. Wary of a flood of people coming around to make “final visit” calls, though, our friend has chosen to tell just a few people about his condition.

I’ll admit that I was wary of visiting. I didn't want to be one of those people making last visit calls. I know enough to have an idea of what I shouldn't say on such occasions. But beyond that I still worried that I’d fall inadvertently into some maudlin trap that would depress rather than lift the spirits of our friend.

So it was with some caution that I approached this visit. Both of us did. I remembered from my father's last weeks that many people who've been strong and independent in their lives don't like to have people see them when they aren't able to command the room like they used to. We didn’t know whether we’d find our friend in bed or in a wheelchair, breathing strongly or grasping for air.

The visit started on a good note. Our friend greeted us at the door with hugs. I'm pretty sure neither of us had ever been hugged by this man before. He was never the huggy type. But these were grateful, sincere hugs. We were immediately at ease.

Being more foresighted than me, the friend who accompanied me on this visit thought it might be interesting to challenge our friend to think about some issues we've been facing at a nonprofit in which we're involved. A dynamic business leader in his day, our friend has devoted the latter years of his life to civic and philanthropic affairs. He’s the kind of person who’s at his best when faced with a challenge to work on.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on it. But I believe this turned out to be the greatest gift we could have given our friend. Instead of talking about his condition, an inevitably gloomy discussion for someone who’s living the condition 24/7, the conversation quickly moved to issues to which our friend could apply his considerable intellect. He's always been outspoken and intolerant of mediocrity. This used to lead some people to consider him arrogant. But those of us who’ve known him for a long time know this is the kind of resentment you can get when your ideas are insightful, honest and clear.

He didn't disappoint us on the day of our visit. He'd not only thought about our challenges, but come up with a list of terrific ideas and solutions, quickly cutting through our excuses and BS with a clarity perhaps unique to someone who doesn’t have time to spare nor feelings to coddle. He’d even created a graphic identity for our initiative that in just a few words and strokes of a pen cut through years of indecisiveness and wordsmithing on our part.

I have to tell you, as a person who enjoys being around people whose thinking keeps me on my toes, it was an exciting conversation. I don’t know who was having more fun. I know I went hoping to give him something. But I’m not so sure he didn’t give us more.

Instead of the visit being brief and maudlin, it lasted for over two hours and was full of energy. At the end, our friend was tired. But rather than be drained by the rigors of strong medicine, he was fatigued with the satisfaction of accomplishment.

When you're facing the end, people can be so solicitous. They want to show their love and respect. But I’m also pretty sure that if you’re the person who’s time is short, the last thing you want is people gathered around you talking about your health. When my time comes I hope someone will give me the opportunity to exercise those parts of my mind that give me not only the greatest intellectual stimulation and satisfaction, but also the greatest distraction from my physical condition.

Compression

Fifth Avenue Jumble, 2003

I wrote about negative space yesterday. While looking at some old pictures of New York last night it occurred to me that I should also say something about compressed perspective. (These are not related concepts. It’s just how my mind bounces around.)

The effect seen above in Fifth Avenue Jumble is something that’s hard to do with either of the short lenses I use most often. But with a long lens—this was shot with an 80-400mm lens set at the 200mm length—you can get all sorts of neat effects. The most noticeable thing is that a long lens brings objects closer to you, or you closer to them. Neither the photographer nor the subjects actually moves, of course. It’s all in the optics and I couldn’t begin to explain how it works because, among other things, I can’t remember which of convex and concave brings things closer and which makes them farther.

The effect of a long lens can be a lot of fun without being exaggerated or gimmicky. Long lenses are the everyday tools for most sports photographers, so we’re accustomed to seeing the compressed depth of field they create. A long lens that is not only well-built, sharp of focus and fast of aperture is worth its weight in gold (and frequently costs as much as if it were actually made of gold).

The photograph of the workmen on the Williamsburg Bridge, below, was taken using the same 80-400mm lens. I was on a street level sidewalk a good hundred yards away from where the men were working. The long lens, however, brings them close. If you look beyond the workmen you’ll see that this lens also creates the impression that the red brick apartment complex in the background is behind the men rather than a half mile or so across the East River in Manhattan.

The Williamsburg Bridge Repairmen, 2003

A long lens is one of those camera accessories a lot of new photographers want soon after getting into photography. For each generation of lenses I’ve bought through the years, a long lens was always the second or third lens I invested in. The 200mm Nikkor lens I bought in 1968 is still working, though it isn’t compatible with any contemporary digital cameras. (A few years ago I gave my 1967 Nikon camera and the lenses I used with it to a local grade school that still teaches kids how to work in the darkroom.)

When I changed over to digital photography I bought the aforementioned 80-400mm Nikkor lens. Although it’s always clean and ready to go in my camera bag, I find that there are relatively few times when I actually use it. It’s used mostly on occasions—say, when photographing a parade—when I’m carrying two cameras and the camera with the long lens is a backup or being used for a special purpose.

Some people swear by long lenses when they’re doing street photography because you can stay quite some distance away from your subject. But for the same reason that the long lens makes for an interestingly compressed scene in Fifth Avenue Jumble, I find it’s not unsatisfactory for street photography and candid photographs of people because 1) it results in such a “flat” image and 2) because even if I’m not very adept at doing it, I still feel like I have to be close enough to the people and scenes I’m photography to have a sense of what it’s like to be in their space.