New Slide Scans From Atitlan

R.I.P. Kodachrome 64

New Hardcover Photo Book

WOOSTER--I recently finished editing the following book. You can preview it and order it at the following link!

http://www.blurb.com/books/919865

An Expedition to Christmas Run Delta

WOOSTER--We set out to find the end of Christmas Run Creek on a fine mid-summer day when we both should have been working but the allure of going down a mini-river with a pail to catch minnows surely seemed like a better option.

I live in Wooster, Ohio. It is not my native town--though I am no longer sure where that might be--but this creek has run through my days here for well on nigh twenty years. I have walked it before a little. I still don’t know where its headwaters are but it runs from the private property of Miller Lakes, through the country club golf course and through Christmas Run Park. There the stream splashes past pavilions, a steep bank to one side and a groomed park on the other. Mothers take their children to play in its clear and innocuous waters. It passes under a covered bridge and if you walk a little down the banks are choked with a species of mint that smells of chocolate.

At the end of the park is a viaduct, higher than a tall man’s head and at the other end its deepest pool. You continue downstream past the old Wooster High football stadium and past houses and then through a run-down trailer park and soon you are at the fairgrounds. I had gone almost that far before several times and always I had wondered where it finally ended.

I suggested the venture to my friend Patrick because I knew he would be interested, that he rarely says no to any adventure no matter how small or large. So we set off to find where that piece of water ended. Of course the expedition would be very limited as I am pretty sure the watercourse ends in New Orleans. That Christmas Run would empty perhaps into the Killbuck, which would go somewhere into something and eventually into the Ohio River and finally the mighty Mississippi. But our plans were not so grand that day.

We crossed into the fairgrounds which led us through a long rectangular tunnel filled with spider webs which might have been easier had we still been the nine-year-olds we were feeling like. Past the tunnel the course narrowed between high, grassy banks and just out of the fairgrounds the mud began. At first we sank up to our ankles and then our knees and soon it was often deep enough to swallow a nine-year-old. We trudged and fought on. Pat stayed mostly in front, leaving me the choice of either stepping in the deep holes he had made or making new ones myself. There was little difference. For a moment we considered calling it quits. Where we stepped in the deep mire, bubbles of methane from the rotting foliage that had collected in these lowlands bubbled up like stinking jets from an unholy Jacuzzi.

But the thought of quitting passed quickly. We were on an expedition of exploration and just because we could quit and walk home didn’t mean it was right to. Finally, however, the constant struggle with the mud became too odious so we climbed the bank into tall grass and followed the course from above. We were lucky, it wasn’t saw-grass and later we found no ticks and we made good time. The landscape seemed African and I could imagine the tension of hunting lion in similar country. But there are few roving lions in Ohio and we saw not so much as a groundhog though in the water I did spot a fair-sized snapping turtle and earlier Pat had seen a water snake.

And finally we came to our goal. The end came suddenly, somehow. One minute we were following the creek and then we were at its end, barely a stream trickling into what I think is the Killbuck joined also by a section of old canal. We sat under a bridge, muddy and stinking like a couple of fairy-tale trolls, drinking water and admiring the handsome old iron pilings painted with high-water gauges. The bridge they supported was part of Old Columbus Road and the end of the Christmas Run Creek down by the corner of Wooster’s waste-water treatment plant. We agreed next time to follow it the other way, up to the Mountains of the Moon or wherever Christmas Run Creek begins. And then, in the hot, afternoon sun, we began the walk home and I told Pat of how once, long ago, my friend Robert and I followed the railroad tracks out of Oxford, Ohio only to end up in the exotic town of Hamilton.

Vineyard Job Movies

WOOSTER--I am ideally qualified for this job. But I didn't get it. Here are the videos I made. I had help from a lot of people and the music in mine is original from Jeremy Hartzler and Matt Yanock. We got our casts and found the locations, shot the cut outs and the second car team stuff. We all learned a lot.

Sick

WOOSTER--I pulled up at the Woodland house and my mother was running the lawn-mower up the stupid slope on the front that ought to be just plants on a very hot and humid Midwestern day. I parked and took the lawnmower away from her and finished the mowing. I needed a few things at WalMart and she suggested we go together and she drove because she likes to be in control and is scared of my driving on principal even if I've never had so much as a couple parking tickets. It was one of those Wally-world adventures: a soap dish, a memory card, a box of Rice Crispies, some swimming goggles and two avacados that requires an inordinate amount of walking. Near the end we re-met and she began flagging and said she wasn't feeling well and would I mind pushing the cart. We checked out and she said she was feeling sick.I asked if I should drive and she said no but a few minutes later she pulled over and I drove us home asking if maybe we shouldn't go to the Emergency Room.

We got home and she went and took a bath and it got worse from there. She came down and lay in the entry way and began vomiting and, as she said later, "There is nothing worse than throwing up on yourself with no warning and not caring."

My father went and got our next-door neighbor, Barbara, a Nurse Practitioner who had recently lost her husband. That same morning he had asked, "Have you met Barbara?" I shook her hand as she came in to see my mother on the floor.

I have never seen her sick before. Never seen her unable to handle the pain. This being my mother who births easily and refuses Novacaine at the dentist. And although I have come back and seen her older I had never seen her in pain and I let the nurse do her work and put her towels on her head and when it was finally not working I got my car up to the front and we walked her out and got her to the ER.

They got her in fast enough and under Barbara's medical insiderness got the IV in and the morphine onboard and they took blood and took her for a CT scan but then we sat there in the darkened room for four hours until the results came back.

I will always remember my mother's smile when she came back from the scan when the pain had been stopped by the morphine and she could get by the pain and see her worried husband and displaced son and widowed neighbor waiting.

We waited and bandied about diagnosis and I got to know my parent's neighbor the widowed nurse and listened to my mother's breathing. And finally the doctor came back and it was a 2mm kidney stone. They wrote prescriptions and I pulled my car up and put my mother in back and drove carefully home. And I was afraid to go to sleep and not listen to her breathing. But the next day I had to make her stay in bed even though she thought she passed the thing and when I left to take care of some business I came back and her Saab was gone.

Winery Job Application

WOOSTER--My friend Jake told me about this job as Wine Country Correspondent right when I got back to the US. The major part of the application was to shoot and submit a one-minute video explaining why you should have the job. Here is mine. Please give it a view and send a vote for me and then come visit me in California! Click on this text to see it...

The Civil War

WOOSTER--Though it is, at times, difficult to lead a peripatetic lifestyle, and I miss a certain Swede, it is also good to move and change and to be back in the United States. I have missed my family and friends and in more intangible ways I have missed America. It isn't the small things, those rarely have mattered to me. I have lived too many places and worked in too many regions and countries to get overly upset about small luxuries. And as for habits and daily routines I have been so long in different places that the only ones possible (for long) are those of work and rest I impose upon myself.

So, Sweden's lack of pepperoni, Saltine crackers, Taco Bell and a few other culinary delights aside, it wasn't those things I missed about the United States but rather the broader concepts of the land itself and the effect those have had upon its citizens. Succinctly put, I have missed my fellow Americans. I have missed their directness and amiability, their willingness to express an opinion and to hear one and to extend a hand and invite men and women of goodwill, wherever they hail from, over for a cookout or out for a beer.

Obviously, America has its share of problems, misfits and misanthropes, but they are not who I am speaking of right now. Sweden has its goodly share as well as does every land. Right now, while missing someone very special to my life, I am also reveling in being back in, well, yes, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I am certain I will have more to say on the subject of Europe and the US, Europeans and Americans, but right now I will add one simple benefit of being back: my photographic eye has been reset to my own homeland. Above is a series of photos I shot the day before Memorial Day when the Civil War monument in Wooster Cemetery was rededicated. God Bless America.