Category: Uncategorized
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Food Booth | Grant County Fair | Moses Lake, WA | 2007
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Snake Handler | Leavenworth, WA | 2007
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Parking Lot Puddle | Wenatchee, WA | 2007 The soul stirs when portions of Mystery become earthbound. Reflections of Mount Rainier in a forest lake. The Milky Way splashed across a pickup truck windshield. An expansive sky framed by a parking lot puddle. Maybe we move closer to understanding such spectacles when they appear to…
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Spiky Weather | Twisp, WA | 2007 Weather blown eastward from the Pacific squeezes (I imagine) through mountain passes to stretch above Twisp. That explains the scalloped cloud pattern that mimics our old evergreen’s spread of branches. What the photo doesn’t convey is the heavy, moist scent of West Side forests that settles on us…
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Polar Dip | Lake Wenatchee, WA | 2007 Plungers strip down to their nuthins — bikinis or swim trunks — and pad barefoot through sleet to a jump spot at pier’s end. Brr. They pause a moment to assess their mental state (temporary insanity?), then leap into near-frozen Lake Wenatchee. Some years, they swim through…
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Crop Line | Waterville, WA | 2007 Brain power can shred a cloud into nothingness. I’ve seen it done in movies. But to mentally coalesce a puff on the far horizon and hold it there — a floating cotton ball — long enough to compose a photo … well, that takes cerebral grit. I’m not…
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Lone Tree | Coulee City, WA | 2016 Along the Waterville Plateau’s eastern boundary is Banks Lake, where there stands a proud, young tree that I visit frequently. I believe it has a message for me, although deciphering its whispers and rustles hasn’t been easy. The tree seems most plainspoken in winter, when the lake…
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Windmill | Waterville, WA | 2017 — Mostly it’s windmills and grain elevators* that break the Plateau’s flatline landscape. For more than a century, farmers have used these structures in practical ways to tap wind and gravity (pump well water, fill grain trucks). Backroad travelers use them as waymarkers — real-life pushpins to mark the…
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Snowmobiler | Waterville, WA | 2017 The entire sparkly white hillside was etched in snowmobile tracks. Vertical, horizontal, diagonal lines numbering in the thousands. It was as if the snow machine drivers had imprinted on the winterscape their own personal ley lines: “I was here,” they wrote with each zoom. “But I’m going there.”
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I don’t know a soul in the Waterville Cemetery, but I visit frequently to stand at its carefully defined border. It’s a line of delineation — on this side a quiet place to linger, along with the departed, amid snow-muffled plots under huge, dark evergreens. Out there, the exposed landscape of wheat and sage lies…
IrwinFoto 