ready.

I am going to miss this. Sheets drying on the line that is. Sun streaming. Slight breeze.



It's weird I know that I miss the rain. We all do here in Seattle. Even the hygienist at the dentist the other day. It's been months really since it's rained. And we all secretly love the rain.



We ... I ... love the sun too. And sheets drying on a clothesline of course. And summer breezes. And wearing canvas shoes sockless jeans cuffed high. Flip flops. Tossing frisbees at the park a few blocks from home. Leaving the windows open all night. It being light until late. Cassiopeia. Andromeda. But we ... I ... miss wearing wool. And scarves. Layers. And blankets. And seeing my breath hang in the air. And holding mugs of coffee or tea wrapped in both hands sipping slowly cos it is too hot to drink quickly. Crunching leaves. Golden. Yellow. Winding down.

*  *  *

Beginning of October tomorrow. Another week forecast of sun. Upper sixties to low seventies. Have not had to fire up my furnace yet. And got to hang my sheets out again on the line today while helping install a roof the perfect weather for it not too hot not too cold and sun to warm the tar. Past September weekends still spent in the mountains.

So I'll take it and not complain too much. For sure.





I'll be ready though for when it first smells like rain and there are grey clouds looming and then it just drizzles or it pours doesn't matter and I can embrace autumn proper and wear a scarf and a layer of wool and hide under a blanket on my front porch watching it all unfold.

You seem to be

a perfect memory of the future

reminding me how life is meant to be ...

~ P   S   B

winner.

From the just-released album 'Elysium' ... And as only the Pet Shop Boys can do so brilliantly - this can be taken quite sadly or quite optimistically.

I choose optimistically.

petty things slip away in the silent high places.

Given the time frame in which the following was written (it was first published in April of 1918 - the North Cascades National Park would not be created for another half century) ... I found it grandly profound. Even without that frame I found her writing - all of it - quite profound. Hilarious at times. Poetic. She flips from storytelling to sentiment - wit to wisdom - in a sentence. She talks about snow and ice and silence being everywhere. About it always being good to do a difficult thing. About the impossible becoming possible. About how - without expecting it - they happened on adventure.



And here - near the end of it all - she writes of their experience going up and over Cascade Pass ...

The pass is too wonderful not to be visited. Some day, when this magnificent region becomes a National Park, and there is something more than a dollar a mile to be spent on trails, a thousand dollars or so invested in trail-work will put this roof of the world within reach of any one. And those who go there will be the better for the going. Petty things slip away in the silent high places. It is easy to believe in God there. And the stars and heaven seem very close.

~ Mary Roberts Rinehart
From Tenting To-night: A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the Cascade Mountains

From within the sounds and banners of the vast horizon,
        without words, into an inner silence, came:
        Remember well this magnitude.
        Lift your eyes,
            that the great meanings shall not flow by unheeded.
        See.
        The world's beauty carries in trust
            the importance of your salvation.

~ Cedric Wright
From Words of the Earth published by the Sierra Club © 1960

the impossible challenge.

T H E   I M P O S S I B L E   C H A L L E N G E .

I had sent a photograph to K. Posted it in the mail to her earlier in the summer. It was random black and white of the Picket range in the North Cascades to share with her a moment captured of mountains she needs but cannot envision. The shadows and light. Her response to me later was simple. Profound. In a half-question she wrote back -

'Maybe what you photograph best is silence.'

And that stopped me in my tracks.

For that in a sentence so concise - so clear - defined in an instant what I must now do with this old wooden view camera and the whole vastness and solitude of the North Cascades. But in an instant later begged the question for me: how does one go about photographing silence?

After a moment of thought the only possible answer I could come up with frightening was a single word … unintentionally.

And I realized it seemed as if this project - limitless in its scale and just as frightening as my answer in its scope - is like the ultimate lesson David Helfgott received from his piano professor when attempting the similarly musically-limitless interpretation of the third piano concerto of Sergei Rachmaninov in D minor -

'You must learn the notes David … so that you can forget all about them.'

Learn so that we can forget.

But it made perfect and absolute sense. Discover our purpose. All that we intend to do. Then - and this I know will be the hard part … forget it all. Let the future - everything that it may be … just be. Knowing without knowing. Just doing.

I have no idea if I can photograph silence. I may very well fail. But I know for certain I will never know without trying ... an old wooden view camera and some beautiful lenses and a rickety tripod stuffed in my pack up over mountains and passes high across glaciers and down through valleys all there unfolding before me.