A WRITER'S WIT
Love has as few problems as a motor car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.
Franz Kafka
Born July 3, 1883
Ah, What a Little Rain Can Do! These photographs of Yellow House Canyon were taken in late May, after the first big rain came. Amazing stuff! Doesn't seem like the same place. (I also include photos of nearby Lake Ransom Canyon.) NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT Monument to an Old Sea On May 9, Ken and I visited Gove County, Kansas, east of U. S. Highway 83, to see the Monument Rocks National Natural Landmark. As you will note, monument rocks are the remnant of an ancient ocean, out in the middle of what is now the country's breadbasket. During inclement weather the roads are impassable. There is no admission fee, no rangers or other workers, no parking lots, and (the website makes clear) no facilities. I include a bit of the botanical life we saw there. The place is one of those little surprises that one encounters along the way. Google even helped us find it! NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT Additional Shots For a couple of days, I want to feature a number shots I didn't show last week when highlighting our trip up through the backbone of America, May 8-17. NEXT TIME: MORE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM MID-AMERICA
A WRITER'S WIT WY, CO, NM Perhaps my favorite part of the trip was a north to south swing through the eastern third of Wyoming. I'd always pictured Wyoming as part of the Wild West. And it is. But it is also a very genteel place, with great hotels and restaurants, polite people who help visitors. Devil's Tower, of course, was featured in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is easy to form sort of a mystical attachment to the tower. There is a 1.2 mile-long asphalt path built around the tower. So much to observe as you stroll or climb the lane. The wind, at least the day we were there, blew constantly. It shushed and whistled through the trees. The place is rich with something that is difficult to explain. Cheyenne experienced a ferocious snowstorm just three days before we arrived, and you can see the results are still on the ground as we arrived at the Little America Motel, which has maintained its 1960s decor. Yet all is up to date. Spacious rooms but with the amenities people have come to expect. Iron/ironing board. Microwave. Fridge. You could spend an extended amount of time there and be quite comfortable. There is a fine restaurant located in the main building. You never have to seek out places to eat if you don't wish to. One afternoon, we took a trip to Laramie, forty-five minutes northwest on I-80. What we had time to see was the Wyoming Territorial Prison / Museum. And one of the aspects that made this museum different was that large photographs and histories of nineteenth-century prisoners were posted throughout the prison. They weren't all rough and tumble sorts of guys. Each had his or her own interesting story. We spent our last night in Pueblo, Colorado. We visited two interesting places: the local raptor center, where we saw, among others, forty-year-old bald eagles that had been injured long ago. The other spot we enjoyed was Rosemount, a historical home built in the early 1890s by a wealthy merchant. The 24,000 square foot home was amazing, and I managed to get one photograph of the exterior (none were allowed inside). In our ten days, Ken and I traveled nearly 3,000 miles, and except for the drive between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs on I-25, which was a nightmare, the driving was enjoyable. Hardly ever less than a ten-car space between you and the next driver. Ahhhh. I lied. I didn't mean to, but we didn't drive back through New Mexico but reentered Texas by way of the Oklahoma Panhandle, where once again, you could burn up all state gas reserves by traveling at a cool seventy-five mph! NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT SD, ND, & MT The thing I appreciated most about the Dakotas and Montana is just how long winter lingers. We were there in the first half of May, and many trees had not even begun to bud out. There was still snow on the ground, not only on the mountains, but in lower areas as well. Of course, Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse are great monuments, worth visiting twice, but not once did we break a sweat! One nice day, though it was windy, we drove to North Dakota so that I could put it on my list of states visited. We ate lunch at a Subway, where things seemed to be booming because of the oil . . . boom. From there we drove fifty miles to Bowman, Montana, another state to cross off. Hope to return to both of these fine places some day, when Montana is warmer and North Dakota's boom has leveled off. NEXT TIME: WY, CO, & NM
A WRITER'S WIT OK, KS, & NE For some time I’ve wanted to make a road trip to visit a number of states I’ve never been to before. To get there, however, Ken and I had to travel through a few we were quite familiar with. It didn’t seem to matter; we found new and different sights to see. As we crossed the Oklahoma Panhandle, it seemed about as spare and barren as parts of the Texas panhandle—the leanest thirty-five miles you’ll ever see (for us, about sixty miles, since the highway crossed at an angle). Just over the border into Kansas we visited the Mid-America Air Museum in Liberal. I’d previously toured the Smithsonian’s new Aerospace Museum outside Washington, DC, in Virginia, but the Liberal museum was a fair match, boasting over a hundred planes. We spent about an hour there, and I shot a number of photographs. Then onward we drove to Garden City, Kansas, where we would spend the first night. It’s amazing, but establishments such as Holiday Inn Express and Hampton Inns and many others have become ubiquitous, even in a place as isolated as Garden City. I’d visited the town once before, when my college choir was on tour. It was 1968 and I’d brought Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood with me to read on the long bus rides between concerts. That January day had been cold, the elms stripped of their leaves. Now, the town of 26,000 seemed refreshed, with signs of money flowing through it like the underground water used to keep everything so green. We ate dinner at the Golden Dragon, not far from our hotel. Talk about ubiquitous. I’m always amazed that Asian restaurants can be found in even the most remote locations of our country. And the food was good. The next day we hunted down the Monument Rocks National Natural Landmark in Gove County. You have to follow a number of dirt roads that are deemed impassable during inclement weather (according to its website), but on May 9 the roads were dusty and relatively smooth. Ken explained to me how such a sea formation came about, how it has lasted throughout the millennia. The rocks are apparently unmanaged, and there is no charge, no asphalt parking, no facilities. While we were there, only one other party pulled up in their car to check it out. After thirty minutes of listening to the bird life, observing the bovine populations, marveling over this natural structure, we found Highway 83 once again and headed north. In Oakley we attempted to visit the Fick Fossil and History Museum, but its new structure was still under construction, and so we drove on to Colby, Kansas. There we stopped and visited the Prairie Museum of Art and History. It is similar to Wichita’s Cowtown or Lubbock’s National Ranching Heritage Museum, but each region has its own particular gems, and if such structures are maintained, they will continue to inform school children and adults alike what our frontier country was like. Late afternoon, continuing to follow Highway 83, we headed for North Platte, Nebraska. Though I grew up in Kansas, I’d never visited this state before. The highway took us through Nebraska’s central region, gently rolling hills in places, smooth agricultural surfaces in others. We easily found our motel, in spite of its sort of hidden location, and we walked across a dusty path to eat at Whisky Creek Fire Wood Grill instead of waiting in line for thirty minutes at a nearby franchise restaurant. We shared a meal in a booth and talked about our day. On May 10, because we were anxious to reach Rapid City, South Dakota, we headed straight for our destination instead of stopping off to see much in between. There would be much to observe once we arrived. NEXT TIME: SD, ND, & MT A WRITER'S WIT More Antics The photos below are brought to you courtesy of our backyard birdcam by Wingscapes. You can set up the camera in a variety of ways. The most successful way for us has been to prop it up several feet from a small pool. The movement as well as the creature's heat trigger the camera. It has some faults. You can't control the exposure, getting some shots that are underexposed and some that are overexposed. The lens isn't the best. The smaller birds seem to evade its powers, but I think it's a matter of going into the bowels of the camera and changing the settings, which we plan to do soon . . . if we can figure out how. We believe the directions originated in Chinese and then were fed into Google Translate, and we all know how that works. NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT Plain but Amusing Due to having to make an unexpected out-of-town trip, I was unable to meet my self-imposed deadline of posting "My Book World" tonight. Instead, I present more backyard birdcam pictures. Grackles have never been so funny nor robins so coy.
NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014 A WRITER'S WIT Backyard Birdcam Photos NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT Serenity2004. October 30. End of season at La Serrania, a retreat on the island of Mallorca, Spain. The air is about seventy-eight degrees, the water much much cooler, as the pool is not heated. The sky is full of clouds. It may rain, but for the moment, the air is inviting, issuing the last gasp of summer, and no one wants to miss a second of it.
I used a Kodak digital, c2000, and it didn't handle the sun as well as later cameras, but the shot is still a favorite of mine. NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION A WRITER'S WIT Santa Fe Boy 1980 I was trying to capture the geometry of the shadow play on the sidewalk, and out strolls this delightful kid into the shot. His shadow is like a ghost, a second personality perhaps. In the production of the photograph, I have to sacrifice what the overhead signs (a favorite subject of mine) have to say. Ah.
FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014 A WRITER'S WIT Messing Up Mother Nature On the same visit that Ken and I made to Yellow House Canyon several weeks ago, we saw some things that weren't so pretty. Officially, a road has been rerouted, and so has the pathway for floods, should they ever occur again. The other things not so pretty were in the form of trash that individuals feel entitled to throw in the canyon because they can't think of anywhere else to put it. Just kids with too much time and too many tires on their hands? I wonder. FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION
A WRITER'S WIT Yellow House Canyon Weekend FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION FOR 3/31/14
A WRITER'S WIT Yellow House Canyon FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT Kolorful Kayaks On this day in October 2008, Idaho's Red Fish Lake appeared like glass. Though Ken and I returned to the lake several times in the coming years, we never saw a day that the water was this calm. Moreover, upon one visit, we would see the kayaks piled on top of one another, their vivid colors faded by the elements. This photograph seems to have caught them at their best. Also the sky. The forest. A perfect day, a perfect peace.
FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014 A WRITER'S WIT Route 66 Meets New Destiny This past weekend Ken and I took yet another chance to flee West Texas. While the Panhandle suffered single-digit temperatures, we experienced, by comparison, much milder temperatures in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Laguna tribe has built a casino, The Route 66 Casino, on land that would otherwise be useless, and they seem to have turned it into a thriving business. Unlike a number of other casinos we've been to, the Route 66 is kept clean from the busy carpet of old Route 66 icons, and an "asphalt" road making up all the major aisles of the casino and hotel to each and every machine. Employees work hard to keep ashtrays emptied and machines free of finger prints. I find it easy to see how one can get hooked on gambling. The hum of the machines, each with its own two-speakered music coming at you, each with its own characteristic sounds. The thrumming reward you receive when you make fifty dollars on a Wheel of Fortune turn of the wheel. It spurns you to press the Max Bet a few more times. And then you win maybe two hundred dollars, and you think this will go on forever. And sometimes it does, all the way to four hundred dollars. Never mind that you've allowed the machine to suck you dry to the tune of a hundred dollars to win that much. But then there are all the other machines. Penny machines. Dollar machines. Machines with almost every worldly motif: pyramids, TV shows, movies, myths, old and new. There's blackjack, if you're into that sort of thing. Real poker games, though video poker has its own rewards, if you're shrewd enough to outmaneuver the machine. In addition, the place has three eating establishments, a pool, and a work-out area. It's not Vegas, but it's a nice weekend getaway! And it's only six hours from home. FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT Fort Ticonderoga, New York, 2003 I'm not sure why I love this photograph so much. Maybe it is the point of view—I was able to scoot down onto a series of steps, aiming my camera at calf level. Perhaps it is the wonderful contrast of dark navy and scarlet. Perhaps it is catching these eighteenth-century gents in a twenty-first century stance, cell phones vibrating in their pockets, their parallel shadows in the afternoon sun of an August day in 2003. Perhaps it is the patch of sky located below the stained drum, the turquoise cannon aged by time. The stone wall still standing after all these years. I could now go back eleven years later, and, though the young men would have spread to the far corners of the earth, this wall would remain essentially the same. I would just bet on it. THURSDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT A Warm February Day in Palo Duro Saturday, February 15, it was 86 degrees in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas! Celebrating 38 years together, we took advantage of the great weather on this day trip. A WRITER'S WIT Hawk in the Neighborhood Not the greatest shot in terms of photography. I had to shoot with a telephoto lens through three panes of glass. Still, this hawk is an unusual sight, and it entertained us throughout the day, as it sailed through the air above our block. FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
A WRITER'S WIT Minister of Whose Interior? February 10, 2014, Zadie Smith, “Moonlit Landscape with Bridge”: The Minister of the Interior of an island nation deluged by a typhoon abandons his place in the world by using his last shred of power to board a plane to Paris, where this man in his sixties will join his family, whom he has sent ahead. ¶ The Minister’s internal turmoil is the engine that propels this story: along his way to the airport, his last ride in an official SUV of black, with a driver whose courage is fading fast; a look back at his purpose as he stops and unloads crates of bottled water to islanders so crazed with thirst that they are more greedy than grateful. During the water delivery, the Minister loses a shoe in the muck of the storm—emblematic of something else he is leaving behind. Then his one-hour trip to the airport evolves into a five-hour ordeal, and he suffers a broken elbow in a melee while stopping to take a leak in a public place. A knife-wielding maniac, a man the Minister was once comrades with, “hails” a ride to the airport only to shout BON VOI YAH GEE at the minister as he boards his jet. One senses, as the minister grimaces and moves toward across the tarmac, that his elbow will be the least of his pain. Smith is the author of NW. Gil Inoue, Photographer TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A Black-and-White Day on 32nd Street A WRITER'S WIT Las Vegas: Misc. Signs THURSDAY: FOURTH AND LAST PART OF AN UNFINISHED STORY
A WRITER'S WIT Las Vegas: Architecture THURSDAY: A STORY PART 3
A WRITER'S WIT Las Vegas: Landscape and Pattern THURSDAY: PART 2 OF THE STORY
A WRITER'S WIT A crisp December day in the desert city of Las Vegas, and you see all kinds of people doing all kinds of things! THURSDAY: A STORY
A WRITER'S WIT Orphans My parents beg me to drive them
To the desert, almost a thousand miles In three days. “It may be the last time I get to see Sis,” Dad says with Mom Nodding, her tongue Poised on her top lip—like my sister always did, Plotting to change the channel when no one was looking. “Daddy doesn’t see so good anymore,” says Mom, “And I don’t drive at night.” “Alrighty, then,” I say. The last day of touring-- A string of bathroom stops Between Flagstaff and Phoenix-- Leaves no time for pasta, Perhaps some poulet, So we stop at Burger King. Besides her Coke, Mother Now begs for a glass of water So she can gulp Seven small missiles for the arthritis Creating speckled claws That once cinched my Buster Browns. “But I want it with a lid,” She whines to my father, “So I can take it to the room.” She cocks her head like my sister always Did before grabbing the last drumstick. One door and a breath away, I snap the seal on a fifth of Chivas, And I summon A similar stop At the Blue Ribbon Café Somewhere in 1957 Ohio. The fare was gold nuggets of shrimp Which I relished While others ravaged their chicken. “Put a lid on your Coke And we’ll take it with us,” Mother had said, rolling Her eyes as I bubbled the Bottom with my straw. That night In an eight-dollar cabin That shivered When semis thundered by, We all jammed into two beds: Mom and Dad in one, Three of us in another, Arms and legs crossed like Debris from chicken dinners. My wayward fingers clipped Nearby flesh with greasy pincers, And my sister squealed betrayal. “Don’t make me Come over there, Nicholas,” Mother snapped over dad’s snoring. “I’ll whale you Into the middle of next week, I swear to Christ I will.” I suppressed one last giggle Like gas not passed During communion, and I now Twiddle thumbs Over the steering wheel, Watching two old people Fiddle with that infernal lid, On their way out of a Burger King Somewhere in the desert. A strand of Mother’s hair whirls Like silver silk in the wind, and With head cocked to the sky, She might be ten. Again I sigh and ignite the engine As they fairly skip over to the car. Dad snaps the back door knob As I did at twelve—and they Clamber into my Rear view mirror, The children I never bargained for. ©Richard Jespers TUESDAY, A STORY |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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March 2024
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