Category: Recently Observed
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21 Poplars | Moses Lake, WA | June 2019 We seem earthbound nowadays, weighted daily by new scares and scandals. So I’ve come to appreciate anything that points the way skyward — bean plants curling to the sun, birders with binoculars angled up, poplars not as windbreaks but guideposts to
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Pelican | West Richland, WA | June 2019 Strangers often rouse suspicion. Where do they come from? What do they want? A fisherman near Horn Rapids on the Yakima River spit chew and jutted his chin at the flock of white pelicans perched midstream. “What the hell are they doing here?” he asked. “They eat…
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Memorial | West Richland, WA | June 2019 The artificial flowers shout amid the miles of sandy scrub. No epitaph on the pole, but bright blooms definitely deliver the message: “We remember.” I slow at such roadside tributes to figure out how
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Mountain | Prosser, WA | June 2019 Sunrise burns away haze, lights up the mountaintop. The peak is actually quite distant — more than 100 miles — but clear air and a telephoto lens allow western and eastern Washington to merge with no trouble. That’s rare, since the state’s two regions (urban vs. rural) squabble…
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Construction | West Richland, WA | June 2019 How the world is made continues to fascinate. I recently stood mesmerized by a tortilla machine that used a conveyor belt to introduce dough balls to their fate (flattened, seared, stacked). The crane in this photo hoisted joists 12 stories for assembly, said the guy next to…
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Strawberry | Pasco, WA | June 2019 Small things reflect big things. Spiral shell = spiral galaxy. Leaf veins = river delta. Strawberry = supernova. “To see a world in a grain of sand … hold infinity in the palm of your hand,” wrote poet William Blake. The more we wander, the more we
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LIGO | Hanford, WA | June 2019 Black holes and neutron stars collided long ago to produce gravity waves that ripple through the fabric of the universe. Which means the Earth, your body and that breakfast burrito you ate in the car were all crinkled for an instant by distant cataclysms. Me? I hardly noticed.…
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Shed | Trinidad, WA | June 2019 Emptiness has its own allure. Blank landscapes, barren hills, cloudless skies, walls enclosing nothing. It’s my desired mental state, if only for a
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Shallot | East Wenatchee, WA | February 2019 A shallot sliced in half resembles the cross-section of a brain. What are its thoughts on life and
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Shirt | Wenatchee, WA | February 2019 Shirt wrinkles tell a story, she says. The folds are determined by the fabric’s quality, the stresses in a man’s day, how he sits and
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