Prowling the Jungles of Chicago

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Location Taken: Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, Illinois
Time taken: April 2008

Sometimes you find animals in the oddest places. Like inside a store, or in this case, a conservatory (that’s a glorified greenhouse, by the way).

I’d gone to this conservatory with my class during the Urban Studies program I was in. It’s one of the really nifty things about Chicago, so of course it made the list. I don’t recall what we had to do aside from wander around and just look at the plants. The plants were distracting enough, as was taking photos of them.

And then, in a room filled with palm trees and similar tropical plants, I saw movement where I did not expect it. And there, hidden in the leaves, was this cat.

It was not a friendly cat, but then, few cats are. Perhaps he was wild, or a pet kept to keep down pests in the place. In either case, he quickly spotted that I was looking at him, and froze. We stared at each other for a while, and finally he decided I was not about to eat him, and nonchalantly wandered across the path to a different room, one filled with mosses and ferns that he easily hid himself in.

But still, for five minutes, there we were, woman and cat, staring at each other.

  

A Bridge From a Distant Time

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: April 2012

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of my hometown is Bollman Bridge. It crosses the local river right near the other potential most noticeable feature, Savage Mill. That’s the building in the background, behind what you should have hopefully realized is the bridge.

This small town was started around the mill. There’s a nice set of waterfalls just upstream from here, which made it a great place to draw power from water. A large stone channel was built, running along the edge of the river down to the flatter ground where they built the mill. Then the water ran through a waterwheel as it fell back down to the river it came from, now twenty feet lower than it had been.

It was a textile mill, and the water powered the great looms. It was successful enough that they expanded it out, and worker housing sprang up around the area. Of course, all this industry meant they needed some way to bring raw materials in and completed goods out, and the best option was train.

Which also meant they needed a bridge over the river for said trains. At first, they just built a standard stone bridge, but after they expanded the mill to make use of this newfangled “steam” technology, they realized the bridge needed replacing. So, instead of building another heavy stone one, or a short-lived wooden one, they stole an iron bridge from somewhere else.

Ok, ok, they didn’t actually steal it. But this bridge was originally constructed elsewhere and moved over to Savage in the 1880’s, nearly 30 years after it was built. This move probably saved it, and certainly saved an important piece of bridge history.

You see, it’s the last of its kind. It’s an example of the first successful iron bridge design, the Bollman Iron Truss. There had been some iron bridges built before, but they kept failing due to flaws in design, and when a bridge fails, people get very wary of that type of bridge. But the stone and wood bridges in common use had a lot of drawbacks, especially in what types of gaps they could cross (for stone) and how long they lasted (for wood). So when Mr. Wendel Bollman was put in charge of the Baltimore & Ohio’s train bridges, he kept looking at iron designs, and eventually invented his own.

It’s full of redundancies, so that any one piece of iron (or even any five) that failed wouldn’t bring down the whole thing. This was exactly what was needed to help bring back confidence in iron bridges. And he built a lot of them, even forming his own bridge-building company.

So why is there only one today, if he built so many? Well, technology moved on. People figured out how to make steel cheaply, and started building bridges out of that material. Steel bridges could support heavier locomotives, and heavier locomotives could haul more freight. So over time, all the iron bridges got replaced, and the iron melted down for other uses.

This bridge, though, had a different fate. It was on a small rail spur, one that ended right at the mill less than a tenth of a mile from the river. Rather than replace the bridge to support heavier locomotives, they just backed the train cars into the loading dock and never bothered actually crossing the bridge with the locomotive. This system worked just fine up to the day the mill closed down in the 1940’s.

Eventually the old mill was converted into its current incarnation, a mixture of antique shops, specialty shops, and artist’s studios. And the bridge was declared a National Civil Engineering Monument and converted into a foot bridge. There’s a second bridge crossing the river right by it for cars, but the red-painted bridge is still going strong. Those redundancies Bollman put in have given it a rather long life, and it will stay around for many more years.

  

Brown River and Green Islands

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

Every so often we get strong storms that dump lots of rain for hours. I know I’ve mentioned before how the combination of Atlantic humidity and the mountains slowing down fronts can lead to long rains, but it can also just feed more and more moisture into a system. And that means more and more rain, coming down hour after hour.

Flash flood warnings are pretty common in this area, but I don’t worry about them. My home is perched up on a hill above a river valley, so all the water actually has some place to go.

The river can take it too. This photo is after one of those day-long storms, and it’s not even overflowing its banks. It’s close, yes, and half the islands in the river disappear under the murky brown water, but it is all going downstream without any detours into places we humans don’t want it to go.

Still, I occasionally go down to the river, stand on the pedestrian bridge crossing it, and watch the water rush by under my feet. There’s such force and majesty to it, even if it’s just a bunch of muddy water.

  

“Door” is one of those words that quickly stop being a word when you look at it too long…

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Time Drawn: 2006

Door?

Door.

This was one of my earliest experiments with something I do regularly now: drawing directly in pen with no pencil guidelines.

That’s why the door isn’t exactly square (or rectangular, I guess). No guidelines equals wobbly lines.

It was a door in the art building, if you’re wondering. I think it was a teacher’s door, with a textured glass top window.

I also had fun leaving a lot up to the viewer to fill in. That’s why only the areas of the door that were noticeably darker and drawn it, why half the window is white, stuff like that. It’s a useful technique that lets you capture areas of similar color in a way that actually drawing it won’t manage. Even the faintest line is too dark.

Door?

Door!

  

Lost in the Fog and the Green and the Bones of the Trees

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Location Taken: Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008

It’s the oddest difference. The beaches, I mean, they’re different on each side of the continent. The North American continent, that is. And the United States area of it, even.

On the east coast, you have long flat beaches, with a tan sand and scatterings of rock, like in this photo. There are places with cliffs, but still, the beach area has that certain look. It’s really well settled, too, all up and down the coast line. Anywhere that isn’t claimed by marshes is claimed by houses of sun-worshipers and hurricane-darers. Further north, in the land scraped bare by glaciers, there are very few beaches. Instead, bare rock goes down to the waves, rising strong and tall above it.

The west coast, or at least the more northerly parts of it I have been to, have long beaches broken up by large seamounts rising out of the waves. Tidal pools are common, and the sand is more gray than tan. And the mists roll in beautifully, coming off the ocean as the winds move in from the sea. Perhaps further south, in sunny California, the tan beaches take over, and the sun worshipers crowd in. From what I’ve seen, though, for much of the coast, the trees crowd in instead. And the trees of the west coast have the sheer size to truly be a crowd. Tall and dark, noticeably darker than the trees of the east, and strong enough that even in death they have a presence. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen more than a few scraps of driftwood on east coast beaches, but on the west, the pale bones of ancient trees lie all along the shore.

I do not care for eastern beaches. They are parceled out, and crowded tight, or are marshes where just to enter is to disturb the balance of nature, and to wake the clouds of mosquitoes. Western beaches, again, at least in the north, are emptier. Few people live on the coast itself, for it is a harsher shore than the gentle east. Until you head down below the fault lines that define so much of the coast, down to Los Angeles, the coastal mountains crowd in against the shore, and the land occasionally quivers and sends houses crumbling down the cliffs they perch on. That is, if the relentless force of the waves do not bring them down first.

The harshness and wildness is what calls to me. These are beaches where a person can get lost in the sounds of the waves and the smell of the trees. It is tough to find a stronger form of the serenity of pure nature.