Category: Cityscape
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Pool | Fairfield Bay, AR | September 2019. Travelogue #2 | What’s a vacation without a swimming pool? We savored a cool dunk most evenings, but my brother also used the pool as a data bank. He picked the brains of fellow swimmers — many were local residents — about living in North Central Arkansas.…
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Tarmac | Dallas, TX | September 2019 Window Seat #4 | An airport ramper I knew years ago had an easy relationship with extreme weather. “Take shelter inside your clothes,” he said. “And have the right clothes for every situation.” Rampers, who load luggage and de-ice planes (among myriad duties), have gear to combat blizzards,…
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Hubs | above Dallas, TX | September 2019 Window Seat #5 | I’ve heard that trucks haul most U.S. freight but haven’t seen real evidence for that claim until landing at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Hundreds of rectangular distribution hubs with thousands of loading docks serving (I’m guessing) millions of semi-trucks surround the huge aviation…
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Winglet | above Ogden, UT | September 2019 Window Seat #2 | Upturned fins, called winglets, at the tips of jet wings blend airflows of differing pressures that could cause turbulence. I like them because they look cool, rather rakish. I’ve always thought it’d be great to have some kind of winglet to ease everyday…
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Night Light | Fairfield Bay, AR | September 2019 Incandescence #3 | “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again. So there is really only one logical conclusion:
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Bulb | East Wenatchee, WA | September 2019 Incandescence # 1 | “Suppose you make a [tiny] hole in an ordinary electric light bulb and allow air molecules to pass at a rate of 1,000,000 per second. The bulb will become full of air in 100,000,000 years.” — Francis William Aston (d. 1945), Nobel Prize-winning…
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Drive In | Coulee City, WA | July 2019 There are travelers, I’ve heard, who zip past roadside eateries even though hunger has hitched a ride. In my family, those first faint cravings trigger the search for jalapeño corn dogs and teriyaki chicken wings. In fact, hunger governs the brake pedal, so we slow at…
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Vintage Outhouse | Twisp, WA | July 2019 Edward Abbey (d. 1989), desert denizen and author who helped inspire the environmental movement, laced his in-your-face defense of Mother Nature with humorous observations. In “Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness,” his account of serving as a ranger at Arches National Park, he noted a placard…
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Fish Ladder | Wenatchee, WA | August 2019 The struggles of salmon to get home and have babies are monumental. On the Columbia River, predators (including fisher folk), ship traffic and hydro dams top the list of challenges. Yet, from a (smug) human perspective, the spawning parents seem to have adapted well to climbing fish…
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Salmon | Wenatchee, WA | August 2019 There’s no better lesson in fulfilling one’s purpose than to stand mesmerized at a salmon observation window. The huge fish, many ragged from their journeys upriver, swim with a determination rarely seen in daily life. Every muscle propels them to
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