Wherein I break from slagging on Vegas to observe a happy occasion

Congratulations to Lewis! He and his partner were the 106th couple to enter into a domestic partnership in Oregon, on the first day those partnerships were allowed to be registered.

May they have many years of happiness.

No plastic, endangered species or environmental threats. Just food.

I just waddled home from an enormous meal at this place.

The Dungeness crab-stuffed tilapia was excellent, but the apex of the evening was the peach crumble that commenter Tony and I ordered to share, but nearly brawled over. It was gone in less than three minutes. Dueling spoons.

I'm full. Urf.

Who's been purgin' the sturgeon?*

I really don't know what to make of this. East of Portland about 45 minutes lies the Bonneville dam, which hosts on its grounds a trout hatchery and a pond which held seven endangered white sturgeon. Till Monday morning anyway, when an employee found the pond empty.

Sturgeon aren't little. I've been to Bonneville a few times, and those fish were big -- the news article says about five feet long, and that's about right. Here's a great image of them.

I guess I'd like to know how you can remove seven ginormous fish from a pond on a federal site without being noticed. This is a dam, people -- security once searched my trunk when I was taking my son to feed the trout at the hatchery. (Though I'm pretty sure that was because of the profusion of anti-W bumper stickers on my car.)

People suck.


*The single positive aspect of this event is that it allowed me to use this phrase in a socially acceptable manner.

Latest favorite photo

Here. A vertical is here.

I took these in eastern Oregon on the way back from Montana in late May. I made Mr. T pull off the highway (he's used to this sort of thing) while I spent half an hour trying to find an acceptable composition. I've been wanting a photo from this angle for a long time, but I'd pictured it very differently in my mind's eye. Essentially what I want is this composition, except taken from the middle of the river.

Hmmm.

Tulips and a confession

I still shoot transparencies on my SLR. Yes, I know. I might as well have just told you that I own a Betamax or an 8-track player. This is attributable mostly to money, though there are other factors. I anticipate making the leap to digital soon, but for now I use, for the purely documentary purposes of this blog, a tiny little digital point-and-shoot. So the "good" photos from my trips are often not available for several weeks after I shoot them, and in the interim I rely on my point-and-shoot to convey the general idea. It's possible to take a good photograph with it, but I would never rely on it for my "good stuff."

This weekend was the third year I've photographed the tulip fields here in Oregon. I made extensive use of this wonderful tree, shooting it from all angles, with different colors of tulips in the foreground. Here's what I was working with:











I used my long lens and homed in on the tree, an effect I obviously couldn't capture in the digital images above. The place was teeming with visitors, and I stood for thirty minutes waiting for the tree to be clear of people for one of my shots. On average, I waited about fifteen minutes for every image. But that's all right; much of photography is about waiting, and I was nearly out of my senses with pleasure at the colors and lines of this place. This is the third year I've photographed this field, and I believe it may have been the most beautiful this time:



April may be the cruelest month somewhere, but not here.

That time of year again

The trilliums are back.

At least, they're back in the Willamette Valley. I'll be seeing them at higher elevations until mid-May, but they arrive first down here. I love them. I spent about an hour photographing them in the late afternoon the other day, and hope to scrape up enough time again before they go. But as you can see above, I have a few from last year.

Don't ever pick a trillium. Once picked, it takes years to recover. I've heard rumblings that it's illegal to pick them in many places, including Oregon, but I've not confirmed that yet. At Tryon Creek State Park, where I do most of my trillium-wallowing, there are signs everywhere this time of year letting people know not to pick them, and why. But yet, every year, I'll be wandering some trail with a photo pack on my back and I'll come across someone with a big bouquet of trilliums.

Great. That's a big bouquet we won't be seeing on the ground next year, or likely several years after that. I think they might need bigger signs.

Tragedy in southern Oregon

Last night, I opened the door and stepped out onto the deck. I wore a fleece, but no coat. I had socks on, but no shoes.

It was cold. The air was stiff, and a bit moist. And the cold was unmistakable. It enveloped me immediately, snaking up my fleece and stinging the bare skin on my back, biting the tips of my ears. It instantly soaked into my wool socks, stripping the warmth from my feet. I stayed only a few seconds before returning to the warmth of my bedroom.

But before I did, I breathed deeply and thought about James Kim, who didn’t have the option of returning to a warm space. Motivated to save his family, he pushed into the Siskiyou National Forest after nine days in his snowbound station wagon. I can readily understand why he did it. I think almost anything would be easier than watching your family die, even plunging into the frigid Oregon wilderness in shirtsleeves to seek help.

I can only wonder what Kati Kim was feeling. There could have been no question which one of them would go. She was the source of the nutrients keeping their girls alive. She was left with a task that was, in its own way, as monumental as the one her husband faced: to wait, caring for two children, and reassuring the one who was old enough to know something was very wrong. She had to grapple with what must have been monstrous fears, without the comfort of a sense of acting concretely to alleviate them.

In the end, James Kim made eight miles in the freezing air on nearly impossible terrain, having had little to eat for nine days. I’ve hiked – mostly on trails – in Southern Oregon. Well-fed, with the proper gear, and walking on a clear footpath, traversing this terrain under your own power is a strenuous task. Under the conditions James Kim faced, it’s an epic.

Sometimes the world is too hard.