Category Archives: where i went

a pretty good day

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My day? How was my day? I’m glad you asked. My day didn’t go quite as planned.

My plan was simple. Most of my plans are simple. I’m not even sure you can call a vaguely elastic notion of ‘a nice lunch somewhere’ and ‘a walk someplace interesting’ a plan. But that was the extent of it. A nice lunch. A walk. What could possibly go wrong?

But first I had a minor problem to deal with. My debit card was about to expire. I’d called the bank before the Thanksgiving holiday to find out if a new card had been sent (I recently moved and was concerned the card might have been sent to the old address). I was assured the card had just been mailed to the correct address and I’d have it soon. But it still hadn’t arrived yesterday, so I called the bank again and spoke to a very polite young man named Michael.

Michael told me I needn’t be concerned, the card had probably been lost in the mail. But to be safe he could put a block on the debit card and send me a replacement debit card. He asked if it would be okay if he did that. I said “Why don’t you send a replacement, and I’ll keep using this one and keep an eye out for suspicious charges.” Michael didn’t think that was a wise course of action. It took a few more minutes of conversation before I finally realized Michael was just being polite; he was absolutely going to enforce a policy of blocking the existing card and issuing a replacement to protect me (and the bank) from fraud. And he was going to block the card NOW.

I checked my pockets; I had a total of US$19 in cash. Enough for lunch and a walk, but certainly not enough for the next few days. I asked Michael “What am I going to do for cash?” Simple — go to a branch of the bank, he said, and they’ll issue a temporary replacement card I could use until my permanent replacement card arrived.

So I went to the bank. A very polite young man named Terry said he was terribly sorry the post office had lost my renewed debit card, and he deeply regretted any inconvenience it caused me, but he’d be delighted to give me a temporary replacement card. He just needed to see a state-issued photo ID card. I gave him mine. It had expired. “Sorry,” polite Terry said. “You need to have a current state-issued photo ID card.” I showed him my Social Security card. No. I showed him my Veterans Administration card, issued by the federal government, complete with a brightly-colored photo of my smiling face. No. I showed him my voter registration card. No. I showed him various other forms of photo identification — everything from an ancient faculty ID card from Fordham University, to my library card, to my Utata business card, all with photos of me at various ages. No. I pointed out that it was highly unlikely I’d concoct an elaborate false identity spanning more than a decade just to obtain access to a temporary replacement debit card for an account with just a few hundred dollars in it, especially since I’d had an activated and working permanent debit card just an hour earlier.

Terry was very polite…but no. I needed to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get a new state-issued photo ID. On my return, he’d be over the moon to give me a temporary replacement debit card.

So I went to the DMV. Yesterday was the 29th day of November. Going to the DMV at the end of the month, when everybody who dawdled and/or forgot to renew their various licenses, is like a combination of attending a Palestinian funeral in Gaza (a mad, chaotic crush of people, all rending their clothes and wailing, wishing they too were dead) and an old-style Soviet bread line (an infinite number of somber, sad-faced, spiritless drones dressed in rags, waiting in line with bovine fatalism, without any real hope of getting anything remotely like what they’re standing in line to receive). To make matters worse, I arrived right at lunch time, when all the employed people who were delusional enough to think they could get their end-of-the-month DMV chores done during their lunch hour arrived. And when most of the DMV personnel went out to McDonalds for a Big Mac.

I got in line. I waited. I made it to the clerk — a polite middle-aged man named Raul. “I need to renew my state-issued photo ID,” I said. Raul would be absolutely delighted to renew my state-issued photo ID. Did I have a certified copy of my birth certificate? I told him the bank didn’t require a certified copy of my birth certificate to get a temporary replacement debit card…so no. “How about your passport?” No, I hadn’t brought my passport either (which wouldn’t have done any good anyway because it’s also expired). Raul said if I returned with a valid passport or a certified copy of my birth certificate, he would happily give me a new state-issued photo ID so I could get my temporary replacement debit card until my permanent replacement debit card arrived since my existing debit card had been blocked because the post office had apparently lost the renewal debit card.

Here’s something you may not know. In order to get a certified copy of your birth certificate, you need to go to the county courthouse and present a state-issued photo ID card or a valid passport. In order to get a valid passport, you have to present either a state-issued photo ID card or a certified copy of your birth certificate.

Happily, I actually had a certified copy of my birth certificate. So I returned to the house, found the birth certificate, returned to the DMV and Raul gave me a new state-issued photo ID, returned to the bank and Terry gave me a temporary replacement debit card. It took six hours. Then I had a very pleasant but very late lunch, and took a very short walk as the sun was beginning to give up.

During the walk I saw the best Men’s Toilet Ever:

menAnd I saw this quickly-walking woman who had no interest in having a cold beer:

cold beerBack at the house, the mail had been delivered. You can imagine how I felt as I approached the mailbox. But of course, the debit card hadn’t arrived while I was out getting the temporary replacement debit card. This is real life, not fiction, and real life rarely gives you a neat and tidy resolution.

In real life, mostly what you get is another day pretty much like the day before. Every so often real life drops in a day that’s twisted as a pretzel. But I kind of like pretzels, and even though my day didn’t go as planned, I thoroughly enjoyed most of it. It was still a pretty good day.

crows

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When I was a kid, a neighbor had a crow for a pet. I was altogether fascinated by that bird. It was huge and black; it walked with a dignified, clerical stride; and it was astonishingly clever. It was so smart it hardly seemed to belong to the bird family. It was was almost as if some sort of spirit being was inhabiting an unnaturally large bird’s body. The bird was so large I found it a little scary and intimidating, but I was completely taken in by it.

Ever since I’ve been a fan of the crow. A fan of all the larger Corvidae, actually — ravens, jackdaws, rooks, magpies — but mainly the plain old common crow. One of the things I love about crows is that despite their size (they’re burly bastards; they get up to about 21 inches from beak to tail) they’re almost invisible. People simply don’t notice them most of the time. Cardinals, they notice. Goldfinches, they notice. Blue jays (also Corvids, by the way), they notice. Bright, cheery, colorful birds — even the tiniest of them — get noticed. Crows get ignored. It’s like they have the power to cloud the minds of humans.

From the day I first picked up a camera, I’ve wanted to take a good photograph of a crow. Not a good ‘nature’ photograph that includes a crow. Not a documentary photograph. Not a ‘pretty’ photo. What I wanted was to take a photograph that showed crow-ness. I wanted to shoot a photo that depicted crows as I understood them. That desire became more intense after I discovered Karasu, the book of photographs by Masahisa Fukase. Karasu means ‘ravens’ in Japanese. The English-language version of the book was called The Solitude of Ravens. They were the most amazing black and white photographs — strange and wonderful. Fukase’s ravens were feral and furious; they looked supernatural and dangerously smart. I wanted to photograph a crow the way Fukase photographed ravens.

And I tried. For years I tried. If I saw crows — in town, in the woods, on a bike path, it didn’t matter where — I’d often follow them. I have been led astray by crows more times than I can count. But I never got a shot I liked. Never.

Yesterday on my Thursday Walk for Utata I happened to hear some crows flying overhead. I was talking on my cell phone at the time and had to end the call rather abruptly. “Oh god, crows…there are crows…lots of crows…have to go…bye.” I couldn’t see where they were coming from; a bulding blocked the way. But as I cleared the building I could see a tree filled with crows. Filled.

So I rushed to get there. I needn’t have hurried though. Crows kept coming. And coming. And flying away and coming. For an hour crows came, landed in the trees, rested a bit, took off, flew away. An hour. The most amazing hour. And they were still there when I left, still flying away, still arriving.

After about ten minutes I realized there were really too many crows. It was impossible to focus on just a few. It was a crow jumble, a mosh pit of corvids. It was almost Biblical. I’ve no idea how many there were. An overwhelming number of crows. There are, for example, 482 visible crows in the photograph above (Yes, I actually counted them, putting a red dot over each individual crow so I wouldn’t count them twice; 482…and there are certain to have been some I couldn’t make out in the tangle of branches).

The noise was staggering. Thousands — tens of thousands — of crows, all cawing and cackling. It created a sort of pervasive white noise. Your brain filters it out. Intellectually you register it as noise, but it somehow seems both physically and emotionally distant. Like if you were hearing it through the wrong side of a telescope — if that makes sense. Perhaps it was just sensory overload.

It never occurred to me to use my camera to video the crows — which I deeply, deeply regret. Instead I tried to find some way to photograph the mass, to show the scale of the murder of crows. It was impossible, of course. Maybe Fukase could have done it. Maybe. I surely couldn’t.

Eventually I stopped trying. I let the camera hang idly in my hand. I just stood there and watched and listened and was amazed.

It was, for me, a truly phenomenal moment — if you can call an hour a ‘moment.’ I don’t know why so many crows gathered together. I don’t know where they came from or where they were going. They were flying off into the sunset. Literally.

I still don’t have the photograph I want. I came a bit closer, but I suspect the only way to show real crow-ness — to show the essence of crow — is to zero in on just a few birds. Three, maybe, or four. Or two. Maybe one. Maybe just a part of one. I don’t know.

But last evening’s experience didn’t cure me. It added another level of enchantment to my understanding of crows.

noodling away a sunday morning

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Last Sunday my brother Roger Lee and I went out for breakfast. For no real reason, we chose to leave the city and go find a diner or local cafe in a small town. Iowa is teeming with small towns. We found ourselves at CayAnne’s in Woodward (population 1024), and breakfasted on biscuits and a tasty but rather odd-looking spicy sausage gravy.

just outside of CayAnne’s restaurant

After breakfast we sort of noodled around the county, sliding in and out of various small towns. Like the town of Moingona (population unknown, but it’s really small), where we saw the original town school. It’s not in use (at least I don’t think it’s in use), but it was nice that the town cared enough about the old building to preserve it. The school probably constitutes about 5% of all the town’s structures (excluding sheds). Like I said, the town is really small.

moingona schoolhouse

Moingona is named for the native American tribe that inhabited the area before white folks arrived and casually took their land and kept their name. The town was home to Kate Shelley — the first woman in the U.S. to have a bridge named after her. On a stormy night (okay, it was a dark and stormy night) in July of 1881 a railroad bridge was partially washed out by a flash flood. A pusher locomotive that had been sent out to inspect the track conditions failed to notice the mostly-missing bridge. Our Kate, hearing the crash, rescued two of the engine’s crew (the other two died). Knowing that a passenger train was scheduled to pass over the bridge soon, Kate (relying on the illumination of the storm’s lightning) crawled across the remaining span of the damaged bridge, then ran a mile or so to alert the nearest depot manager of the problem. The passenger train, with 200 aboard, was stopped in time. A grateful Chicago & NorthWestern Railroad rewarded her with US$100, a half barrel of flour, half a load of coal and a life-time pass. Later they named a nearby bridge after her.

railroad track and dusty road

After we left Moingona, we discovered the railroad tracks were still in use. We began to sort of leisurely follow them. I can’t say it was an intentional decision at first, but the tracks seemed to parallel the general direction we were heading. After a while, we began to feel some sort of connection with them.

union pacific – building america

I believe it was outside of Ogden (population 2041) we came across some sort of slag heap, or possibly the tailings of a mining operation (both coal and iron were mined locally in the late 19th century). The truth is, I don’t know what the hell it is. It’s a massive pile of something. It looks vaguely like a smallish, Midwestern version of Ayers Rock in Australia. You can get a sense of the scale of the pile by noting the house and large garage on the right side of the frame. Aside from the dwarf alpaca, this pile of something may have been the oddest thing we saw all day.

a very large pile of something

We eventually found ourselves in the town of Boone (population 12,661). Boone was originally a coal-mining town. A pair of thick coal veins were discovered near the banks of Honey Creek, which attracted local blacksmiths (who needed the coal for their forges). It became incorporated as a town in 1866, the year the C&NW Railroad laid track through the area. The Lincoln Highway passes through Boone. That’s the first transcontinental road built for the automobile. The Lincoln Highway begins at the intersection of 42nd and Broadway in Manhattan and ends at 100 34th Avenue in San Francisco; that’s the address of Lincoln Park and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. When I win the Lotto, I think I’ll spend a few months idling along the length of the Lincoln Highway.

boone scenic valley railroad

Boone, to my surprise, also turns out to be the home of the Pufferbilly Days Festival. I’d never heard of Pufferbilly Days. In fact, I’d never heard of a Pufferbilly, It turns out that Pufferbilly is another term for a railroad steam engine, and the festival appears to be a celebration of All Things Railroadish. The Boone Scenic Valley Railroad operates a number of old railroad engines, and periodically takes passengers on short jaunts around the area (including, apparently, the Kate Shelley Memorial High Bridge, which I’m assured is the longest, highest, double-track railroad bridge in the country — who knew, right?).

engineers

While we were nosing around the depot area, a couple engineers and assorted other folk were warming up Engine 6540. Unfortunately, by that time Roger Lee and I had already pissed away the entire morning and were running late, so we couldn’t stay to see if they were planning to take the train anywhere.

All in all, it was a strangely entertaining morning. Unfortunately, I failed to photograph the herd of dwarf alpaca (which, upon closer examination, turned out to be a single adult alpaca standing in a herd of goats) or the peculiar reddish-orange sausage gravy we had for breakfast (the gravy was similar in color to parts of the large Pile of Something which, now that I consider it, is a wee bit alarming). Still, I still managed to shoot just under fifty frames during the morning. For me, that’s a lot of photos.

Roger Lee and I plan (well, as much as we plan anything) to do this periodically over the next few months. We’ll take off on a Sunday morning, find a small town for breakfast, and then wander around pointlessly until we’re late, after which we’ll hurry back to the city. It may not be a very tight plan, but it’ll do.