70° at 45° North Latitude (Reprise)

Posted on Monday, March 30, 2015 by Dick

I get a free vacation day on the fifth Monday of every month. Enjoy these images from April of 2011, just four years ago.

This is what a 70° day can look like in Northern Vermont. Yes, that is Lake Champlain. Yes, that is snow on top of the ice on Lake Champlain. I took those photos April 9, 2011, when the ice was still in but a southern breeze had pushed warm air up from the Gulf of Mexico.

It is probably not that warm today.

Looking southerly:

Looking west (that speck in the distance may be what’s left of a fishing shanty):

Looking northerly:

Chuggita Chuggata

Posted on Monday, January 27, 2014 by Dick

Floating objects we call “chugs” wash up from time to time on the beaches here in the Keys. Cuban boatbuilders work with materials scavenged from junked cars, crates, roofs, packing.

These almost-boats are small enough to build in the sheds and garages of Cuba where craftsmen keep ’53 Chevvies running and can make a Vermont farmer cry with their ingenuity to recycle and repurpose and reuse 60-year old iron.

Then 20 or 30 desperate people crowd aboard for a journey of days or weeks across open ocean, dodging Cuban and American patrol boats, huge, blind cargo ships, go-fast drug boats, and other sharks.

The salvaged engines have only one direction: north. The engines run at a chuggita chuggata low speed slowly propelling people who hope for the best when they leave everything behind.

In spite of our political malfugalties, those 20 or 30 people are desperate to get one foot on American soil.

Many chugs look like boats for obvious reasons. Humans arrived on Borneo by “boat” at least 120,000 years ago. Egyptians knew how to sew wooden planks into a ship hull as early as 3000 BC. Boats have evolved since then but most still have a pointy end to go through the water first and a hull shape that is easy to push. Most chugs are like that.

A different chug arrived on Coco Plum last Fall. It is unique in construction with a welded rebar space frame, metal roof panels hammered into shape, and styrofoam blocks as flotation and deck combined.

The boatbuilder impressed me for inventiveness and resourcefulness. Many of these unseaworthy boats sink; the Styrofoam blocks might have been awash under the load, but they would support it. The lightweight roofing protected the flotation from abrasion. The rebar frame kept the people aboard and kept the boat together.

I’ve wandered over to Coco Plum to photograph the chug several times, including yesterday, and ended up with a pleasingly good batch of images. I had pre-planned, so I knew what I wanted to compose. And I checked that the tide would be out at the time the light was right. The vessel was a little higher on the beach than I remembered so the background was within the Depth of Field zone but I stood in the water and shot with the 100mm lens. The detail is so fine that you can count the threads on the rod used to secure the hull to the top frame.

I like these images; this album will continue to grow.

I’m thinking we want anybody that resourceful to live and grow here, too.

The “wet foot, dry foot policy” is the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that permits that anyone who flees Cuba and makes it onto United States shores can to pursue U.S. residency a year later. Any Cuban caught on the waters of the Florida Straits (hence the “wet feet”) are sent home or to a third country. Any Cuban who makes it to shore (“dry feet”) can stay. The law provides for expedited legal permanent resident status and, eventually, citizenship.

News:
A Key Largo man tired of “illegal immigrants” was jailed for threatening a man with a knife after asking a group of people for “their papers.” (The 50-year-old construction worker he pulled the knife on is from Miami and was born in the United States.)

At least 18 Haitian migrants died on Christmas day as their boat carrying 50 people capsized off the Turks and Caicos islands. Eleven Haitians died in 2012 when a boat carrying 28 people from the Bahamas to Florida sank.

Forty residents of Perico, a town about 100 miles southeast of Havana, drowned at sea on a failed attempt to cross the Straits in 2007. The group included between nine and 12 children and expected to make landfall in the Keys.

We have an interesting way of enforcing national immigration policy here in South Puffin. The Key Largo man was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, battery, and criminal mischief. His bond was set at $114,000 but we give the few illegal immigrants we catch free room and board before sending them back.

Over on another border, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio offered to detain illegal immigrants his Tent City because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced they would release a number of illegal immigrants held in immigration jails. See, the Feds needed to cut costs.

Can you spell Immigration Reform?

The muttonheads we sent to Washington to fix laws like this are too stupid to fix the problem but men and women and children from every country in the world will risk their lives to get here anyway. Just think how much we could accomplish if people like this chug builder could build real boats here.

On the other hand, I don’t have much use for pictures of cruise ships but I’ll have plenty to photograph as long as people are willing to come here on boats like these.

“Dainting”

Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2013 by Dick

My business card identifies me as a Barefoot Writer, Photographer, and Engineer.

When I have a camera in hand, I’m primarily a photographer but I’m leaning more and more into digital painting (“dainting”?). My dad whose 94th birthday would have been today was a pretty fair amateur photographer. My mom was an award winning painter.

I took a series of photos looking across Burlington (VT) harbor and Lake Champlain toward the Adirondacks on a gray and dismal summer day. The weather didn’t keep the sailors away, just the sun. Rather than losing what was a nice scene with good composition, I decided to use it as the underpinning for this digital painting.

No camels were harmed in the making of this work, since it was all done pushing colored bits rather than colored brushes.

The idea for creating a photorealistic — and artistic — image from a bland photograph isn’t new to me. American artist and illustrator Bert Monroy is one of the pioneers of digital art. In an interview I heard he talked about his (phenomenal) Times Square panorama but even more than that, he reinforced this notion I have of making lemonade out of the spilled lemons.

I go for a realistic representation in my own work, even if the individual objects are more drawn than pixelated.

My own Burlington lighthouse is pretty accurate. The sailboats, at greater distance, less so but they stand up to poster sized enlargement. And I deliberately flattened what Liz Arden called “the cartoon mountains.”

I take a lot of images at my own beach on the Atlantic in the Keys. It’s a place I like to go back to again and again and I like taking you all along. Every day is not perfect there but every day is perfect in my photographs.

Of course, the painted nude is perhaps a bit more fanciful. That palm doesn’t exist in nature. I don’t think my inch of beach has ever seen that much surf although I did use it and its sky as my model. And I’m pretty sure no ladies have taken the sun quite that way on that beach. I do like the artistic use of body paint.

Did I mention that I occasionally nap on the beach?

Enjoy.

Road Trip

Posted on Monday, September 2, 2013 by Dick

My folks never needed to wait for Labor Day to take a road trip. I was not born in the back seat of a 1940 Buick but I might have been if my dad hadn’t gotten a job the week before.

It all started when he came back from the ETO, married my mom, and swept her off on a grand tour. Over the years, they circumnavigated the United States by car a dozen times, packed the car and drove somewhere for weekends or weeks at a time, cruised hither and yon in the boat, and one year even moved to Gallup, New Mexico, so my mom could paint there for three months.

Rufus sent me an AOL advert flogging the five most awesome American roads to drive in a ragtop. By a strange coinkydink, it’s Labor Day and I have a topless car.

The Overseas Highway, U.S. 1 for 127 miles through the Keys to Key West
Getting to Key Weird is easily as much fun as the destination. There are few mile markers along the way without an art gallery, a state park, live music, fishing, and, of course, the beautiful blue horizon beckoning from every bridge and byway.
I live there and I can’t get enough of it.

Route 2, M-22 117 miles across Michigan
We dipped the kids’ toes in the National Lakeshore but curvy M-22, is a whole lot more fun to drive than the towering sand dunes.

Route 3, the 266 mile Aloha Loop on the Big Island
“This one may require some advanced planning” the tour director wrote. From snorkeling at Hookena Beach Park to climbing Hawaii Volcanoes National Park there are “majestic views from just about anywhere.”

Route 4, 208 miles across Monument Valley, Arizona

The northeast corner of Arizona (Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii, or valley of the rocks) mostly includes the area surrounding Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, the Navajo Nation equivalent to a national park. This was also part of the area where my mom painted.

The 310 mile Route 5 of Death Valley
Pack plenty of water and gasoline to traverse the arid desert of Death Valley National Park where there are dunes, lava flows, desert overlooks, and mountains way in the distance but close enough to touch. The Badwater Basin is the lowest elevation in the United States.

I’ve been on (almost) 4 of the 5 trips. We skirted Monument Valley and I don’t do off-road, so I haven’t done the 17-mile route inside the park. And I’ve never been to Hawaii.

“I have done Hawaii,” Rufus said. He spent two days circumnavigating the Big Island and spent the night in Hilo. “I MAY also have done the Michigan run accidently, driving from Manistee to Traverse City. But if so it was probably at night.”

Heh.

More Roads
“How on Earth did they miss the Pacific Coast Highway?” he asked. “I have done that from Sherman Oaks to just south of Monterey but never did get to Monterey.” That highway runs alongside some of the most beautiful coastlines in the country; it is designated an All-American Road.

He also hasn’t “done Skyline Drive but the impressions I’ve had suggest it should have made the list, too.”

I have and it should. In fact, I try to route myself along there when I drive from Rufus’ house to my friend Bill’s house just south of Charlotte. That 105-mile road runs along the ridge for the entire north-south length of the Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

A road trip through the mansions and gardens of Chester County and the Brandywine Valley in Pennsylvania is pure nostalgia for me since I grew up there seeing those sights and sites every day.

SWMBO and I spent an August weekend on the beach in Cape Cod hopping from clam shack to dune to vintage home. Take a sweater. We forgot. It gets cold on the beach when the sun goes down.

Then there is the Forgotten part of Florida, the “real” Sunshine State where crackers raised cattle and life was simpler. Christmas has one of the nicest and most unexpected Town Parks in the state. It is really, really dark around Chiefland at night. Daytona may be better known but race cars roar across Sebring almost every weekend. Route 27 around Okeechobee introduces locks to let boats navigate the elevation changes across the state. Florida has hills? Who knew?

Maryland’s Eastern Shore offers up-close encounters with skipjacks, crabs right off the dock up the Choptank in Cambridge, and wild Chincoteague ponies. Our first stop with the boat was in the Northeast River but we wandered down the Bay year by year to Chestertown. Joe Strong has passed and his Kibler’s Marina has gone upmarket as the Chestertown Marina now.

Cellular coverage is lousy along the small towns and hills and dales of U.S. 95 in western Nevada but Liz Arden says I could spend a month gunkholing along that highway.

And let’s not forget the Vermont Maple and Cheese Trail! No matter what Arizona Highways thinks, the Green Mountain State offers great food and the best fall scenery in the world.

Bottom line is this: there are few roads in this country that don’t have something interesting to see or do and gas is only 15 times more expensive than when I was a kid. Go see something today. Take your camera.