Tag: photography

  • Estuary (writing while walking)

    Estuary (writing while walking)

    Knitted into the plot of the novel manuscript I’m working on (which I won’t summarize here) is an estuary restoration project. I’ve drawn on a couple of preserves I’ve visited in recent years to think about what the imagined place might look like, what it is trying to accomplish. Recently, I hiked through the South Slough…

  • Duct Tape Obelisk

    There’s a cemetery I sometimes walk through on my way to work, or on my way home. They’re mostly historic graves, though I think interments still take place from time to time. It’s quiet, with tall trees, a little poison oak, a caretaker’s trailer, and cigarette butts ankle deep at the entrance closest to campus,…

  • Resolution

     I don’t know if I’m afraid of heights, or afraid of getting down from heights–of not getting down–but when the guide said, it looks like rain, let’s start on the roof, I followed her up. Not wanting to miss anything, ready to add to my photo collection, eager to take in every nook and cranny…

  • Rebuilt wetlands: noise and surprises

    The Delta Ponds are former gravel pits, strung between a freeway and a shopping mall, a band of apartments and retirement homes, a batch of car dealerships. It’s a made place, and also a natural one. Reclaimed, reconstructed. It’s an attempt to re-complicate just slightly the once braided, now restricted course of the Willamette River. …

  • Your Vacation Starts Here

    It’s raining today–sure sign of fall–but this was one of my favorite signs this summer: Read the sign’s two parts together, you might think the job’s so great, it’s practically a vacation. Or squint your eyes and read only one or the other. After all, a great vacation doesn’t exactly start with an understaffed hotel.…

  • Layover Butterflies

    Sometimes the butterfly matches its flower. Or the rest stop accommodates the traveler, opens just the right amount of space, offers tasty cookies with that watery free coffee, anticipates what might seem like nectar in the middle of a journey.   This is us making the most–the best–of a 7-hour layover in Chicago, enjoying the…

  • Frozen

    After it snowed and before it really started raining this morning, I went for a walk. More of a crunch-tromp-glide-stumble-crunch; the ice crust on the snow was brittle, and the snow was deep. Here where it isn’t supposed to snow–or not snow much–we are frozen on the verge of spring. The ice is clarifying, isolating,…

  • Lily Pad

    For eight years now, we’ve been taking the same hike on my birthday. Some years we’ve pushed the calendar a little, but most years, it’s been on the day itself. And it doesn’t get old–not for me, anyway. Much as I love to take new hikes, this one, I could do over and over. As…