Here are some pictures from last month. I am working too much.

August 2026 Camera Roll

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This, I think, is the closest I’ll ever get to being on another planet. The Salton Sea is an unnatural natural place, remade by man in a colossal accident over a hundred years ago. It does fill a low point that was once an inland sea or estruary long ago, but agricultural runoff added strangeness to the brew. And now it’s drying up because we stopped doing that. It intensifies.

I look again and just wonder “where the heck am I?” Standing on an alien shore made of tiny shells with a crust of salts and solidified strangeness, that’s where I am. Across this body are unknown hills and the setting sun of some other star system. It’s hard to believe that we’re still in California. Maybe being below sea level has something to do with it, being inverted, surrounded by a great horizonal dam so immense that it cannot be perceived. There is a lot that is un-normal here, a lot that is sideways compared to normal when you look. And maybe there is no explanation needed right now. I like it.

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I love this rugged coast. This isolation, those rocks, that sand over there, and the rough water. There is nobody around, nobody but the people I brought with me. The place is empty but for the sea and the shore and the sky. Each adds just the right something, just the right color maybe, just the right texture and dynamic tension. The shore, here, is abrupt stone. There is sand on either side, outside of the frame, but this stone shelf has the drama. The sky is a crystal blue, softened with some marine haze at the far edges. And in between is the sea, the ocean!, restless and relentless and reaching in from those far edges to bash on this rocky bit of shore, right here.

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This location, this landscape, collects together in one relatively small preserve many of the features that define most of eastern Washington state. Of course it’s not the same as the long drives where you pass all the alternative iterations of the cliffs and coulees and canyons, the lakes and rivers, the bare rubble of land stripped to the basalt bedrock. Each of those places is unique, each has its own qualities and particular moments of perspective, often short or even only a glimpse through your car window. But this place is for walking and spending the night in the middle of it and getting up close to the magnificence of the huge landscape. This preserve has trails and waterfalls and streams and lakes, plains and cliffs and coulees that make a staircase descent down to the huge river’s edge. It’s just a little piece of it that stretches on for hundreds of miles.

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The sky this time is gold and blue and a bit of red there too. Sunsets have the most subtle colors that shift and change slowly and quickly. Yeah, it’s cliche to photograph them because it’s cheating. I don’t care. They shouldn’t be ignored when you have the opportunity to see them. Sunsets don’t put on a show every evening, each show is different and worthy of attention. You never know when the next one is going to come, when the clouds will be right, but even the cloudless ones can be quite interesting too. The colors are all over the place, colors that you don’t see everyday. This is one place where nature’s colors get really saturated and unusual and they don’t last long at all. I try not to miss them.

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Hey hey club people, it’s been a month so I thought I would trip through my photo roll and share a few pictures from July. As usual, I take quite a few pictures of random things that I see, but there are also a couple of sunsets. Enjoy!

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The Mill Pond is a “nature spot” near my MIL’s house on Long Island. A trail circumnavigates the preserve, looping around the large pond and up the Bellmore Creek that both feeds and drains the pond. The northern boundary is the Sunrise Highway, a large road, 3 lanes in each direction with a few stop lights and cross roads; the LIRR is parallel and on the other side of the highway. The east edge of the preserve runs against the Wantagh Parkway, a busy freeway that leads to Jones Beach. And the south edge is Merrick Road, a very busy four-lane arterial with many stop lights, lots of honking horns, and revving engines. JFK is not far off either, so planes pass overhead frequently too. There are not many quiet places. The western edge, up against the backs of dense neighborhood housing is the quietest place, the most “distant” from urbanity. There are birds and mushrooms and fallen trees, and people seem to think there are fish in the creek because sometimes I see them with fishing tackle. I find it hard to believe, but the pond drains into the South Shore Estuary, an Atlantic bay behind the Jones Beach barrier islands, after a short culvert under Merrick Road. It’s ocean right across the street.

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The Canaveral National Seashore is one of a few places where a harsher, more brutalist industrial-scale future intrudes into the timeline. Miles down the shore, as close as we can get at the safe distance keep-out fence line, there are launch towers, lightning towers, and enormous tanks of fuel softened in the moisture hazed morning air, hypnotized as Bob Ross used to say. It is before 8 AM and so hot; the Florida humidity is delivering on its reputation too, without even trying. Perspiration has nowhere to disperse to, my shirt sticks to me, damply. Even at this early hour though, families are playing on the beach, splashing in the gentle Atlantic waves, apparently unaware of the imminent space launch approaching the terminal countdown. The waves lap, the people play, and the clock advances. A few others have gathered with the fence keepers to see the future. We wait on the soft sand with the birds, the sand grass and scrub palm, for the next thing to come.

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It is like seeing the dawn of time, or a time very near that dawn. The waves crashing, they came from a storm somewhere near New Zealand, where New Zealand would be in millions of years. In my mind, the big waves we had this summer, they are the New Zealand waves. The waves in the picture above are different yet again, the picture is from a couple of years ago and in the winter. The big summer waves crashed over the rocks and the sea palms and would have looked very much like this at times, but even bigger. And different rocks at the dawn of time. It is also like seeing the end of time, because rocks very much like these will have waves crashing on them then too, and while it may not be sea palms on the rocks that day, it will be something on those rocks. Something in the spray, something like these sea palms soaking in the cold water and the warm sun rays under that far, far older sun.

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The rocks are in a different configuration, but that has always been true. There are still rocks. And there are still waves, and still sand. The creatures that are here have been here since long before I came on this shore. Crabs and clams and sea palms all cling to the rocks. Damp cold sand clings to my hands and feet, getting between my fingers and toes. Barnacles and anemones and starfish hold hard in the surf, beaten by the waves yet they persist as the tides rise and fall. The crawlies, the crabs and chitons, the starfish too, they are all moving to where the churn is. The stayers stay put. They move in a different way, generation after generation. The cold air and water, the relentless waves, all push me from staying here too long.

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Hello once again RSS and Email club members! This week the grab bag is from my photo roll last month. I’ve upped the gallery on the site rendering recently, now with lightbox and (optional) captions. Take a look there if the captions don’t come through this time in the email or rss feed (and I’ll fix it for next time).

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The wind whipped past us, surprisingly fast and consistent on the way up to the tower. It was cool enough that long sleeves became necessary in a short time. The winds grabbing fingers took Jeff’s hat right off his head once and tried a second time but Jan was ready. The clouds above were close and kept getting torn into little pieces; they rushed past just overhead.

The Coyote peak radio tower, our destination, is at the top of a steep walk from the park parking lot. It’s a relatively straight shot, only one switchback and a twist around the top of the hill. The bend back happens as we transit the gate and pass under the power line. The tower rises three sided and so many triangles; it is dotted with dozens of reflector dishes and studded with so many stubby cellular spikes. The tower complex is not only the tower, but a couple of buildings and it’s got a large tank too, bigger than either of them, maybe 5000 gallons. The building’s HVAC systems hum audibly above the wind and nearby trees rush and murmur in the streaming air. The tower itself is silent.

On the return trip, the passing cloud shreds finally dissipated, and with them the wind dropped to calm.

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Bright wet sand, slowly eroding rocks, and the waves crashing over all of it, always coming in and going out. Sometimes the sea is higher, and sometimes it’s lower, but in the colder months the waves are bigger and usually they’re smaller in the warmer. The water is always about the same cold fresh temperature, crisp and sharp and salty. The sand shifts and moves, traveling with the cold water down the shore, piled higher here and then there. That cold water brings fresh nutrients for the life that clings to the rocks, out there among the waves. Sea palm and barnacle, crab and clam. The mussels and the starfish, all the sea creatures have been here and toss in the tumult of the waves, mostly unseen yet found long ago. The rocks and the sand change every day, but the shore is still the same home, still the place to be.

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Hoping this works for catching the fireworks tonight. The wind should be light; I hope my bag doesn’t blow away. I should have weighted it with something, at least the battery pack.

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I find grocery displays fascinating as a subject of photography.

Related photographers:

• Andreas Gursky 99 cent
• Brian Ulrich Copia
• Stephen Shore Uncommon Places
• William Eggleston Untitled

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The offshore platform is just there, day and night. Lit, dark, and dusk, it is a permanent presence from an earlier strata. It could go on to outlast us all against the sea; a still anchor, untended and disused. And unreachable by us on the shore. Like a beacon of foreign industry, it’s always there, will be on the horizon doing it’s unknowable things, making it’s unbelievable produce.

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I spent a day at the Sonoma Raceway; my expertise in cars runs about as deep as playing Gran Tourismo and Forza Motorsports many years ago will get you. The cultural experience, the different scene in the pits, and all the forms and colors of the cars, the race track itself and its infrastructure made for a very interesting day. I’d do it again, for sure, just to see things that are totally out of my norm.

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I was out for a run when I spotted this one at the end of the trail where I turn around to double back and where the water goes underground and out to who-knows-where¹ so I made a quick audio note to myself to commit to coming back out here with a tripod and my real camera and taking a picture of it before it gets painted over by the city infra folks. This is that picture. The thing about this graffito is that it’s possibly the most intricate one I’ve seen in my neighborhood. There are some up the way, by the 87/85 interchange that change a lot, are a lot bigger, and are possibly more “art.” But along this canal, I’ve not seen anything this ambitious before. It was a little harder to get to than I expected; the gate I had slipped through last time has been tightened up a bit, so I had to climb over it this time. Just thought I’d share something I noticed this weekend.

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The forest is misty at five in the morning, and the air still and quiet. The wind broke sometime late in the night and the air was now only gently drifting. I was returning from the trail camp’s pit toilet, deciding what to do next in the dim pre-dawn gray. The edges of the trees are all softened in the pale atmosphere. Trail camp is at 1580 feet above the sea and I had expected to be in the clouds more than some of this weekend, but it had not happened until this morning, the last morning. There had been only blue skies and the tireless wind, and some thin shreds of white racing overhead, just out of reach.

But the wind had tired of its constant 30 mph or more racing and gusting in the green tops of the blackened red giants. Now it was something much less, something rarely heard and only faintly felt.

The low roar, the distant rumbling that had been noticeably palpable since the wind had picked up the night before last, it’s not gone. Perhaps it is not wind in the trees’ trunks. It could be waves on the coast, or maybe it’s still windy in the trees where the sound is coming from, where the wind has gone for a rest.

The sun is rising. I can see the crinkles in the tent’s rain fly in the grazing dawn light, and the tiny faint dots on the pages of my notebook without the flashlight.

Soon I will go back out, go for a walk in the misty dawn light and look, again, for the landing strip in the still air with the distant low roar. An airstrip is an improbable thing to find on the top of a ridge, in the middle of a redwood forest in the clouds, far away from everything. The map says it is there, so I will look for it.

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The wind blew all night in the trees, loud swishing & shushing in the high-high branches of the ridge top redwoods. Corrie had said yesterday that there was a wind advisory for the weekend; I had not noticed it on the forecast when preparing for the backpacking trip. In the morning, Saturday morning, I woke at my usual time, early and in a tent, in the first trail camp at Butano State Park and the sound continued. The sound is really two sounds; there is also a low infrasonic rumble which is much further away.

There was only one time in the night that I heard a branch fall. I had been trying to fall asleep and so I spent the next hour making a big effort to avoid thinking too deeply about what falling branches might imply about my current specific location in the middle of a stand of trees over 100 feet tall with little of substance between my person and heavy things up high and wind advisories and loudly whispering trees’ tops. I was not very good at avoiding thinking about what it meant. Phrases like “he died doing what he loved” kept crossing my mind, and while it is true that I did love doing this, this was not how I had imagined it. But I heard no more branches-falling-in-the-night sounds for a long time even though the wind continued relentlessly.

I somehow thought, while in my tent in the middle of the windy night, that I would be able to do some empirical science in the morning having to do with counting the newly fallen branches per square meter, and perhaps the pattern that they fell in to determine the source tree and if I should only move my tent or remove my person from the park entirely. What I failed to remember during this nighttime exercise in both actuarial warding and failed distraction was that the forest is already completely littered with fallen branches. Even without my glasses, in the dim morning light on my way to the camp pit toilet, I could not avoid noticing this fact. There is a lot of time in the forest for branches to fall.

Corrie had also mentioned yesterday that this particular toilet had been rebuilt numerous times because trees keep falling on it. That observation is much more ominous now, in all this wind, surrounded by all these trees and searching for some statistical evidence to support a decision about what I should do with regard to my personal safety.

Later, after the bathroom, and after not counting any branches, while I was fetching my coffee things from the metal bear box I noticed something and admitted that I had told myself a very different story about the metal twang in the branch-falling-in-the-night sound last night. My water bottle was lying on its side.

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You might think allotment people are only green-fingered, but I think they’re a bit tin-fingered as well.

Giles Turnbull has a website on the internet and sometimes he posts pictures. The other day he had a nice post of observations and pictures from allotments. I’m not exactly sure of the translation misalignment, but it looks to be about the same thing as what I would call a community garden here in Northern California. Giles is also a well known internet person and that stuff is good too.¹

So I had a look around the community garden where my wife has a plot and made a few pictures. This survey is only a quarter of the plots. We’re much later in the growing season than Giles’ area, but the plants haven’t blocked things up that much yet.

I suspect Giles is making a bit of a joke by calling it “engineering” and I don’t mind that at all. Properly, this is jury rigging, though “vernacular” could conceivably be stretched to include this sort of improvised construction. That led me to jugaad and I love it, so much invention and freedom and creativity! We need more of this. Well, I do.

It’s a little hard to see in this next one but that is a writing desk there in the middle. I like to imagine it is getting good use early every morning, supporting an intrepid author putting in the work. The plants encroach a little more every morning and have to be shoo’d off the writing area now and then, the rascals.

As I was wrapping up I noticed this tool had been assembled from some left over parts too. Or maybe it’s a “proper”² tool that I just haven’t had the pleasure of yet.

I too believe that I will post some updates now and again as I scout more of the plots and see what else I see. There is still the other three quarters of the plots, just in this one community garden. Send your observations to Giles, or me too. Vernacular engineering is fun!

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I haven’t been on University Ave in possibly eight, maybe nine, years. Not since before the pandemic. It’s changed. It’s the same.

There are rich people. I mean really rich people. There are normal folks. There are homeless and beggars and buskers and panhandlers. There are people that are probably high, but who can really say. Maybe they’re just high on life. Or they don’t feel like wearing a shirt. What I am saying is that the people watching is good.

The CVS in Palo Alto has timed safes and doesn’t stock promethazine with Codeine anymore. At The RealReal, the security guard has to press a button to unlock and open the door for every customer. To let them in. And to let them out. Maybe the streets of Palo Alto are just like that now.

We walked down University Ave and got a juice at Joe’s. Mostly just to use the bathroom, but also to get a juice. The accent pink is an off-Pepto. That’s a weird choice for a cafe.

We walked back up and contemplated moving our cars. The signs seemed to say we didn’t need to, but they were a lot of words. Jeff told the story of the signs around the Smithsonian. How they were easily misunderstood by tourists, and lots of cars are towed every day at 3pm. He’d been lucky and seen the line of tow trucks on their daily mission. Palo Alto doesn’t seem like that kind of place, but I don’t know. We left the cars where they were. They were there when we came back later.

We kept walking up, looking for our dinner, and passed another Joe’s. A different Joe’s. I’m sure of it. Seems odd to put two Joe & The Juice bars within a couple of blocks of each other. Maybe a questionable pink isn’t their only problem. Maybe I’m hungry. Then again, I’ve seen the Starbucks diagonally across the intersection from each other. So, again, I don’t know.

Beeple has been by recently. That’s cool, I’m curious. It’s an ad. Coulda been some secret and cool art piece. You can go to his retrospective show, if that’s your thing.

You know what the standout at dinner was? The elevator. Darkest elevator I’ve been in. The best mood lighting I’ve ever seen. Who could resist it? Goes between two floors, a short trip, and has a disconcerting jolt when it goes down. Unaccountable how it got there, got in this restaurant. The chicken was quite good too. But that elevator. Probably worth a detour if you are into it.

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The lighting was particularly nice on this sign, well balanced with the setting sunlit background. I imagine it’s been here for decades, it has an 80s vibe going on. Just thought I’d share it.

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