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 have limits.
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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 from high-up rivers of air. More than once, we’ve noted: Earth’s perfume.
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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 ice floes to reach shore. It’s a public measure of willpower every Jan. 1 at the Jim Sophie Memorial Polar Bear Plunge. Again: Brr.
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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 saying that happened for this picture, but the cloud did disappear seconds after I shifted focus.
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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 is frozen and muffled. That’s when the tree communicates through stillness and silence — its most vigorous move the casting of a shadow. I think I’m starting to understand.
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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 spot.
*On second thought, power poles are also important “verticals” on the Plateau landscape. They’re less valuable as waymarkers, however, because they all look so similar.
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Snowmobiler | Waterville, WA | 2017The 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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Cemetery in Winter | Waterville, WA | 2017 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 shrouded in winter mist or shimmering in summer heat. It often has an other-worldly feel that, I think, would beckon a spirit from its rest.
IrwinFoto 