Phoebus, Gateway to Freedom

 Phoebus, Gateway to Freedom, 2012

  

What can you say about a village called Phoebus? The name has no great historical significance. It may or may not have ever had a prime time. It’s always been somewhere you stopped in, or more likely passed through, on the way to or from somewhere else.

Phoebus (pronounced “Feeb-us), Virginia, is located at the Southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula, where the Chesapeake Bay meets the James River. It was first visited by members of Captain John Smith’s hapless band of English settlers in 1607. Back then the area was known as Strawberry Banks for, I suppose, either wild strawberries that grew along its banks or for, more likely, the shallow local waters.

It wasn’t, in any event, until the beginning of the Twentieth Century that Phoebus got its current name in honor of local businessman Harrison Phoebus, who’d been instrumental in bringing the railroad line to town.

Snow Bike Shop, Only Open on Saturday, 2012

Wikipedia will tell you that the town of Phoebus is “extinct.” It’s true that in 1952, Phoebus was annexed into the adjacent city of Hampton. But I’ll bet there are a few long-time Phoebus residents—Phoebeans? Phoebecians?—who would argue that while Phoebus’ time in history might have peaked long ago, it’s not out for the count just yet.

Today Phoebus is home to a mix of watermen, laborers and workers at the nearby VA Hospital and Hampton University. A few grand homes dot the waterfront. But mostly it’s a mix of old bungalows and simple two-story houses. Today people who probably wouldn’t have chosen to live side-by-side somewhere else reside side-by-side in Phoebus, sometimes peaceably and sometimes not. And while Phoebus arguably qualifies as a “walkable” neighborhood, most people appear to drive and it’s unlikely one could be sustained completely by Phoebus’ retail offerings and services.

 

Peeling Off the History, 2012

[Although it has little do to do with the overall tone of this post, I feel compelled to mention to anyone thinking about going to Bender’s Comic and Used Book Store, a sizable time machine of old comics, magazines and action figures, should know in advance that there’s a sign in front of the “Adult” section informing you that there’ll be a “30 Minute Limit.” It had to be explained to me while that’s necessary.]

 Never Came, 2012

Despite facing many challenges, Phoebus has ambitions. It was, after all, the first place on the Peninsula where Captain John Smith’s men landed in 1607. (And look what that triggered on an unsuspecting North American continent!) In the Twentieth Century NASA trained astronauts just up the road from Phoebus until Lyndon Johnson used his political clout to have NASA headquarters moved to Texas. If you’re old enough to remember when space flights were cause for around-the-clock television coverage you might remember the name Christopher Craft. Turns out Craft, former NASA flight director and “voice” of NASA for all those flights, was born in Phoebus. (That seems to complete the list of Phoebus natives who made it big.)

I don’t know whether it’s the historic connection or the space age connection that Phoebus is working with. Not much of either played out within Phoebus’ precincts. But like a lot of places, Phoebus needs something to be proud of, and for now it is, as the pennants that hang from the streetlights proclaim,  “Phoebus, Gateway to Freedom.”

 

 Phoebus Fire Department, 2012

Life Lessons

Delmarva, 2008

When you reach this grizzled age—I’ll be sixty in a couple of weeks—everything seems like a life lesson. Or maybe it’s just that all the lessons that life’s been trying to teach me have become unavoidable.

Whatever the case, I came across this line the other day while reading The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht:

“If you’re making your journey in a hurry, 

you are making it poorly.”

I love this idea.

Years ago Calvin Trillin wrote about his father’s obsession with “making good time” on his family’s annual vacation excursion. The introduction of affordable automobiles, consistent road standards and, finally, the creation of the interstate highway system—advances that gave us greater control over the whens and wheres of our travels than we’d ever had before—made travel more about “making good time” than about the scenery along the way. It’s even a joke, as in, “He knew he was lost, but he was making such good time that he wouldn’t stop to ask for directions.”

For those of us inclined to take a closer look at things, the journey’s every bit as important as the destination, maybe even more so. You have some idea of what awaits you at a destination. It’s what happens before you get there that surprises you.

Air travel, for example, eliminates all the opportunity of what comes between origins and destinations. Where’s the adventure in that? You step from one jetway into the plane and then back out into another jetway, as if you did nothing more than fly from one concourse to another.

Trains are pretty good when it comes to examining things. You cover a lot of ground. The windows are big. Plus, trains tend to follow the old roads and back sides of towns. There’s a lot to see. But your opportunities to stop and examine things closer are obviously limited.

This is why I tend to do my best examining when I’m either in a car or, better still, walking. It’s even better if there’s no destination in mind. So there’s no mandate to “make good time.” To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, if you have no destination, almost any one will do.

The mobility aspect of the car is great. But for my money your eyes never open to photographic opportunities quite enough unless you’re walking. There’s no pressure to “catch it all before it passes.” A leisurely pace—you can’t rush—gives you the time to slow down and notice things. You can walk around something. You can see what it looks like from a different perspective. If you get tired, you can find a place to sit, and this opens up the whole new and endless variety of ways to see a single place at different times with different people walking by.

The mind boggles at the potential.

The irony, of course, is that I get photographer’s block just like writers get writer’s block. I’ll have no interested in anything. I won’t see a reason to go out and explore.

But if I summon the energy to pick up the camera, get in the car and drive to a place where I can sit and let my mind relax enough to become attuned to my surroundings, I will inevitably come up with something to photograph.

One Picture, Two Impressions.

The Color Version, 2012

I know it’s painfully obvious. But I still find it interesting how many different interpretations there can be of the same scene.

I’m not talking about the kind of different interpretations you learn about in Psychology 101 where ten people witnessing the same event tell ten different “true” versions of the event.

Rather, I’m talking about how easy it us to change the meaning of a photograph by just changing one thing. And again, I’m not talking about editing out an ugly sign or other obtrusive elements.

I took the picture above a few weeks ago while out in the car on a rainy day. I hadn’t taken any pictures in a few days and was carrying the camera with me to a meeting just to see if having the camera at hand would inspire me to see something fresh and interesting.

I didn’t see anything fresh and particularly interesting. But I did come to a standstill at a stoplight long enough for me to lift the camera to my eye and take this picture of the blurry scene through the windshield. I was initially drawn to the colors. I focused on the windshield so that the colors would be purposely blurred.

That should have been the end of the story. I should have downloaded the picture from the camera, given it a brief “Pfft!” and sent it to the trashcan.

But I happened to be refreshing my Adobe Lightroom skills and grabbed this picture to play around with. I made a few basic adjustments and then, just as I was about to sign off, converted the picture to back-and-white. In that brief moment, by simply removing those warm blurry reds, I took the focus off the colors and instead made this picture about the raindrops on the windshield.

No great revelation here. Just another example of how a single simple change can change what you thought was interesting into something that’s arguably more interesting.

 

The B&W Version, 2012

For the Want of a Nail

A Three-Ladder Job, 2012

 You probably recall the old proverb about how “the kingdom was lost…for the want of a nail.” I was taught when I was young that if you don’t take care of little things as they occur they tend to grow into bigger things that can overwhelm your ability to address them. I haven’t always heeded this lesson. But it has never proven less than true.

Years ago I discovered that my mother had been driving around for a couple of years in a car with a malfunctioning air bag system. When I asked her how she had passed Virginia’s mandatory annual vehicle safety inspection she shrugged and said the guy who did her inspections said not to worry about it. (Nothing, apparently, a little duct tape across the flashing dashboard warning light couldn’t resolve.)

I wasn’t half as concerned about the air bags as I was about what else the guy might have overlooked.

Closer to home, the picture above shows the team of guys who’ve been swarming around our house the last few days. Living where we do we have to be doubly mindful of moisture, mold and rot. We take care of our house. Still, little things get by you from time to time.

Like the flying squirrels I wrote about not long ago. They’d likely been wintering in our attic for years. But it was only when the larger gray squirrels followed them in and started munching on the woodwork that I knew I had to so something. 

It’s not like I didn’t know work needed to be done. Several springs ago I started noticing pileated woodpeckers pecking away at the wooden fascia boards that trim the roofline and corners of our house.  They’re pretty birds. But they were eating our house! I thought they were eating the wood. But it turns out they were pecking through the wood to reach the wood bees that had gone unnoticed burrowing into the fascia boards.

At first I’d just stick my head out the window and yell at the woodpeckers to scare them away. This is the kind of ridiculously foolish mitigation Rebecca Costa describes in her fine book, The Watchman’s Rattle, which I strongly recommend, by the way, if you haven’t heard of it.

The flaws in my mitigation strategy were pretty obvious. Consequently, the woodpeckers left the fascia boards on our house looking like Swiss cheese. 

My second, and also futile, mitigation strategy was to fill the holes made by the woodpeckers and then repaint. That’s when I discovered that the damage was larger and deeper than I could see from the ground.

That’s when I also realized just how uneasy I am working on tall ladders. The peak of the roof over the main part of our house is so high that I’ve been told I could fit a third floor underneath it if I wanted. I don’t, but the fact remains that our roof is higher than I want to be.

So the bees and the woodpeckers continued their annual picnics on the house. I knew I should be doing something. But it was just too easy to overlook. Then a couple of hurricanes did some more damage and the gray squirrels joined the demolition team. I had no choice but to get serious about this assault of nature.

It turns out contractors don’t like my roof, either. The actual repair carpentry involved is relatively easy.  Doing it nearly forty feet off the ground is another thing.

But it seems that if you throw enough money at the task you can find a reputable contractor whose crew will tackle the job.

There was talk initially of placing scaffolding around the house. But everyone agreed that while that would be the most comfortable approach it would also be inefficient and costly overkill. So the contractor’s team settled on a multi-ladder strategy. They even make it look entertaining, which at this price makes me think I should have invited some friends over to watch the show.

 

A Four-Ladder Job, 2012

A Little Higher, Please, 2012

Stuff Around

Yellow, 2012

That title isn’t a verb. I’m not talking about stuffing anything.

Rather, I’m referring to the stuff that you find “around” on a rain day when you don’t want to go outside to take picture.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I know I’m the one who’s always going on about “doing something creative every day.” But I was so distracted much of the time that most of my creativity was going into making client reports into something worth reading.

“I’ll make it up on the weekend,” I told myself. But then the rain set in. And when it wasn’t raining it was dark and gloomy, so much so that Mrs. B and I sought refuge in the movie theater.

We also took advantage of the gloomy weather to upgrade our cell phones. This means there’s a new woman in my life named Siri. With a name like that, I like to think she’s a young exotic beauty from, say, India or Indonesia. But in truth Siri’s voice sounds more like that middle-aged lady in Kentucky who is the voice of AT&T, Bank of America and a bunch of airports.

One of the other benefits of the new phone is a better phone camera. I hope this also means I’ll have noticeably better quality images when I use the iPhone while traveling. (Of course, it’s the camera that got better. The person taking the pictures is still the same old me.)

Anxious to see what this new phone camera can do, I took a quick spin around the house yesterday afternoon with the new phone to see what sights I could see. No great visual miracles, it turns out. But a few interesting colors, shapes and shadows.

Must go. I think I hear Siri calling me.

 

The Illusion of Light, 2012

 

Crisp, 2012

 

Nature’s Forest, 2012