Winter Comes, and the Creatures Leave, mostly…

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Photo #438: Hidden BuffaloLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012

Look closely. Do you see them?

The small line of four dark brown dots in the dry yellow grass, not too far below the tree line?

Two of them are quite close to the steaming geyser right on the treeline on the left of the image, if you can’t find them. They’re quite hard to spot at the size I post my photos in, so don’t feel bad if it takes a while.

It’s a herd of buffalo, sunning in the grass, enjoying the heat coming off of the geothermal vents nearby.

They were just about that tough to spot in real life, too.

  

Stand Tall, Brave Lighthouse, against the- calm, flat seas?

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Photo #437: Lighthouse PierLocation Taken: Frankfort, Michigan
Time Taken: May 2011

For many years, there was a poster hanging in the hallway by the stairs in my house. It showed the location of many of the lighthouses, or perhaps even all the lighthouses, lining the shores of the Great Lakes surrounding Michigan.

And every single time I contemplated the poster, I first looked at the small picture of this lighthouse.

It’s not too far from where my Grandparents live, so I would visit the town with this lighthouse fairly frequently. There’s one main road through the downtown of Frankfort, and at the end of whatever errand we were there for, we’d pretty much always go all the way to the end of that road, right to the parking lot at the beach. We’d pause briefly, look at the lighthouse and the sand and the many natures of the lake itself, and then turn around in the convenient loop in the lot and head home.

I’ve only walked out to that pier perhaps once at most. It’s a working lighthouse, not a tourist one, after all, and it’s fully automated. It was built long ago, and has guided ferries and freighters and yachts, telling them that this is a safe harbor from the storms that cross these lands. These days, the ferry no longer runs, and the town is just a small tourist town. But many ships still use the harbor, from pleasure craft for people just enjoying a ride on the waves to the fishing ships that supply the local smokehouses.

When a storm hits, the waves dance high above the pier, crashing and roaring as their path to the shore is interrupted. Other times thick fog covers the land. During the winter, most of the water is frozen along the shore, and the crashing waves leave a thick coating of ice on the pier. But most of the time, the sea is calm, and the sun is shining, and the lighthouse just merrily does its job.

  

Nearly 1000 Words on One Sentence. At least it’s not “in” instead of “on”.

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Photo #436: City TreesLocation Taken: New York City, New York (I don’t have any pictures of Pittsburgh, so I just went with what I had)
Time Taken: June 2007

My Dad picked up Elfhome, a book by Wen Spencer, last weekend. It’s the third in the series, so well, I decided to start from the first book and work my way up.

So today I found my copy of Tinker and started reading it.

And I was immediately struck by the strength of the very first sentence of the book.

It goes: “The wargs chased the elf over Pittsburgh Scrap and Salvage’s tall chain-link fence shortly after the hyper-phase gate powered down.”

Now, it does require knowing a few terms before you fully understand the nuances of the sentence. Elves, I’d hope you know. They’re a common race in many fantastical tales, both in the High Elf variant found in Lord of the Rings and the small house-elf of the Santa tales. This book primarily pulls from the High Elf trope. That means overly prissy extraordinarily beautiful people with pointed ears, astounding magical abilities, extremely long lifespans, and a connection to nature. There’s also “warg”, which is a large wolf-like beast that’s usually associated with enemies. They come from Norse myths originally, but Tolkien used them in Lord of the Rings as mounts for the orcish enemies the good guys had to face. They usually carry all the negative stereotypes about wolves and few of the many positives that real wolves bring to counteract the negatives.

In case you hadn’t realized, Lord of the Rings is kinda a big thing for the Fantasy genre. It codified a LOT of the tropes commonly used today.

On the other side of things, well, Pittsburgh is a city in Pennsylvania. It was one of the strongest members of the Steel Belt of industrial cities taking iron from the northern great lakes region and coal from the Appalachians and working them together to create large quantities of steel and the manufactured goods you can make with it. Unfortunately, the mid 1900’s brought a shift in the economy (and an increasing difficulty in getting to good coal and iron veins, since the area was already highly picked over) that made it no longer viable for these cities to continue doing what they were doing, and the Steel Belt turned into the Rust Belt. A whole slew of Great Lakes to Mid-Atlantic cities lost the factories and smelters that made them great cities in the first place. Some, like Detroit, never really recovered, while others, like New York City, reworked themselves and are greater than ever. Pittsburgh is somewhere in the middle, doing just fine but still looking back at its glory days with a lot of nostalgia. It’s still known as Steel City, and that’s also the reason the local football team is called the Steelers.

“Scrap and Salvage”, on the other hand, sure sounds like a junkyard. And it is, as the next few paragraphs make quite clear. Combined with the fact that it’s in Pittsburgh, you’re supposed to picture a solidly middle-class region with strong ties to manufacturing and pride in metal. This gives a slightly different spin on the idea of the junkyard, elevating it up a social class or two from the idea of the dirty, junk-ridden heap of rusting metal the standard trope conveys.

Finally, there’s the hyper-phase gate. That’s solidly Science Fiction jargon. The “hyper” is usually used for science that excites something (I mean that in the scientific sense of excites, of making it more active), while “phase” is usually used for different states of being, like the three standard phases of matter being liquid, gas, and solid. “Gate” is used for a device to pass from one place to another, like a gate in a fence lets you into a house from the street. Put them together, and you’ve got a device that excites something to allow you to pass from one state of being to another. Think Stargate for an easy example.

So this brings us to the fun bit of the sentence. Here we’ve got three rather different worlds coming together. There’s the Fantasy of the elves, the Science Fiction of the gate, and the Down-to-Earth aspects of being in a junkyard in Pittsburgh.

These, as you may have realized, do not normally go together.

Plus there’s the inherent conflict of the fact that this Down-to-Earth location is being quite literally invaded by a battle in progress between the elf and the wargs, adding a sense of action to a sentence that’s primarily for setting-establishing.

Add all this up together, and well, there’s about four or five mysteries just in that sentence. Why are the wargs chasing the elf? Why are there elves in Pittsburgh? Why a junkyard, since it’s by far not the typical setting for Fantasy books? What’s a hyper-phase gate got to do with any of this? And why is there a major combination of Fantasy, Science-Fiction and Modern day, quite unlike just about anything else you’ve ever read that stays within their nice little genre borders?

Which makes this a rather powerful opening sentence when you think about it. The goal of the first few pages of a book, and especially the first sentence, is to draw in the reader. And nothing gets a reader as interested as a whole slew of mysteries and questions they come up with on their own that they know will probably get answered if they just keep reading. And then, well, the characterization and plot will have gotten going and they might as well just keep on with it and then they’re 93 pages into the book and realizing that their neck is stiff from sitting in one spot for so long.

  

By the Light of the Clouds

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Photo #435: Snowy CityLocation Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: January 2008

It snows in the city just like in any other place far enough from the equator, and Chicago is a place that gets frequent snows. So it’s not at all surprising that I have some photos of snowstorms from my time living there.

Usually you think of cloudy days as dim and dreary, and snowy days make you feel cut off from the world. But when it snows in the city, every single light source from all the cars and houses and streetlights get caught by the snowflakes and reflect around. And when the light gets up to the cloud layer, it frequently bounces right back down, careening off a particle of water in the cloud. And of course, the time when we have the most lights on is at night, for some odd reason.

This has the odd effect that snowy nights in the city are actually rather brightly lit, as all those photons bounce around. It’s certainly bright enough to read by, and people just continue on as if it wasn’t snowing.

But then, very little affects the patterns of a city.

  

The Delicate Curl of a Fern… emphasis on delicate.

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Photo #434: Fern LeafLocation Taken: Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: April 2008

Every summer, hordes of ferns unfurl around the woods by my Grandparent’s place. Their delicate leaves curl out gradually from the tight spiral of the young fern, creating an ever-changing landscape of low-laying leaves.

I, of course, was directed to step on them.

Well, only the ones in the path through the woods. They grow fast, so mowing them down to keep the paths open gets very time-consuming. But they’re delicate, and their stems snap easily, so every night, as the horde of grandkids went through the woods playing Frisbee golf with my Grandma, we’d merrily trample every fern frond we saw.

How often do you get adults encouraging you to destroy something, after all?!

Despite all the death and destruction I bequeathed the fern population over the years, I really do like these plants. They’re rather different from most of the trees and grasses and flowers you find. They have a very different texture and rigidity to them, they form a marvelous canopy all the way down at knee-level, and of course, there’s the spiral of the young ferns.

This, of course, is because ferns are a very old plant.

They show up in the fossil record around 360 million years ago, about 235 million years before the first flower spread its petals to the sky. And they ruled the planet way back then, covering the vast swamps of the Carboniferous era. They have held strong, changing slower than most other species, watching the years go by. Ferns were around at the rise of the dinosaurs, and they survived their fall. These days, they hold onto their niches in the world, crowded out by the more sturdy modern bushes and flowers and grasses, but they still hold on.

Well, until a horde of grandchildren come rampaging over them, anyway.