Skip to main content

Raw Landscape


I have enjoyed most of the foreign countries that I've visited, and I've made multiple trips to Japan, England, France, Switzerland, Italy and Spain (I'm not counting the Central and North American countries like Canada and Mexico.) Digging into cultures and getting to know people and a place is probably something that I picked up from my father and mother.


But, for the most part, those are places which have been inhabited for hundreds of years, where the landscape has been cultivated and shaped by the people who have lived there.


Maybe that is part of why I'm attracted to the West, as the Native American populations never tried to change a place, but simply live in it.


It seems to me that very few of us know how to do that today. We want to add trees and shrubs and gardens around our homes, and are seldom content to accept the land the way it is, and may have been for many decades or centuries.


That is (to my mind) part of the dilemma about our species.





True North, our five-year old Golden Retriever, in a beaver pond at the Bar E Bar Ranch, owned by the Carneys, north of Cora, Wyoming, June 2010.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A New Direction

Marshall and I went to Alaska together in 2010. The vehicle that we traveled in (Marshall's Sprinter) was so enjoyable that I bought one in late summer 2011, and have begun to make frequent trips around the west. Right now, Marshall and Bonnie are in Marfa, Texas (on Facebook, check out "A Month in Marfa.") Next month, we're going to begin and post a website of postcards between artists, dating back to the early 1970s. I'm probably going to launch a new blog in the next couple of months.....travels around the west, and my work on the archives of photographers L.H. ("Ben") Benschneider, and Robert C. Bishop. Stay tuned.

Toad River Lodge, Saturday 28 August - POSTSCRIPT

A A collection of over 6,800 hats stapled to the ceiling throughout the restaurant....and growing. One of the stories associated with the place is the origin of the name....The Alaska highway was constructed in 10 months, 1942-43. One version of "Toad River" is that the engineers had to tow supplies and materials across at that particular point, and it somehow got bastardized from "towed" to "toad." There are many such strange stories and origins to the naming of places in Alaska.              (I mean, why was Denali originally called McKinley? (other than his recent assassination....he never visited the place.)

Why Idaho, redux

Sometimes, I really wonder about Idaho. I mean, I drive out towards "Craters of the Moon" National Monument, about ninety miles east of where I live (and believe me, it is exactly what the name describes), and I have to go through Arco. One thing: when you go through Arco, eat at Pickle's Place. and have the fried pickles. The Park, in front of "Numbers Hill," across from Pickle's Place. The relevance is due to the long-time nuclear energy research done at the Idaho National Research Laboratory, 100 miles southeast.