Monthly Archives: February 2018

Ghosts in the Forests: Family Adventures in Olympic National Park 2004 & 2005

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Memories from Family Adventures in the Mountain Forests

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Enjoy anyway!*

Long ago memories: Talia before a downed tree in Sol Duc Campground, Olympic National Park. Kate is on the distant left. The boy on foto right is one of their new “campground buddies.” Summer of 2005. Foto by Morgan Bass.

Our blended family enjoyed many adventures into the wilds of Washington State. We spent more time in Olympic National Park than in any other national park or wilderness area. Memories of these trips, while wonderful, flitter like ghosts in a sad happy kind of way. Most of this is due to the disruption caused by the March 2010 housefire in particular. We lost about 90% or more of our print fotos, slide transparencies, and digital pictures from the time before the Fire. We had many hundreds, almost 2,000 pictures from family trips to the Olympics after the Fire such as from the Summers of 2010 and 2011. Only a small few images remain from some of our adventures before then. In some cases, however, nothing survived the Fire.

These losses led to a blurry fragmentation of memories as we all struggle to recall what happened when. These pictures, for example, stem from two family camping trips to the Olympics, including both Salt Creek Park – Clallam County Recreation Area and the national park as well as visits to other local gems in the area. One set of fotos is from our August 2004 trip there and the other from 2005, possibly August as well, altho the those pictures stamped February 2006. They clearly were taken in the summertime thus placing them back in 2005. These digital images have been copied and shared several times. Often the time dates reflect the time copies of the now-lost original images was shared, saved, recopied, reshared, and saved again. My family’s story here is as much about our relationships to our memories of places, times, and people as well as the road trips and camping adventures we found ourselves upon. Sometimes all this feels as if we’re chasing ghosts thru the forests.  Continue reading →

Grove Avenue Blues: Scenes from Richmond’s Fan

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Scenes from Life in The Fan District of Richmond, Virginia, 1985-1986

All Fotos by the Author unless otherwise stated.

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Enjoy anyway!*

Me in December 1986. A rare throwback foto rescued from the 2010 Fire & cleaned up, a still ongoing project. I’m 27 yrs along then & soon to graduate the same month with my MFA from grad school @ VCU in Richmond, VA. Foto by friends David Wilson & Tina Ennulat, who lived across the hall from me in an old row house in The Fan, the Bohemian area back then. I’m in their apartment holding EJ the Kitty Cat. EJ’s short for Emma Jean. Funny thing you wouldn’t catch me dead in that shirt today, but back then it was among my favorites, lol… Hair’s a lot longer now, way pass my shoulders, but no where near as thick. Ahhh, train wrecks on Memory Lane!

The Fan was the Bohemian part of Richmond, Virginia. Those of us who lived there back in the 1980s and earlier fancied ourselves to be living in the Southern, post-Confederate equivalent of New York’s Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. New Orlean’s French Quarter probably had a better claim, but The Fan was unique and bizarre back when I lived there for two years in the mid-to-late 1980s.

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Seattle Vignettes: A Prose Poem in Five Parts

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  1. Dead Man on the Steps with One and a Half Legs
  2. Bag of Dimes
  3. Tattooed Hands
  4. Donuts, Needles, Jelly, and Blood
  5. P.S. Box of Donuts in the Rain

 *All of these vignettes are interpretations of real events I experienced in Washington State along my way to work from SeaTac to Seattle and back again during the Cascadian Winter of 2017 – 2018. ~ Author’s Forewarning

Dead Man on the Steps with One and a Half Legs
Rain poured in torrents
as dawn broke sunrise into silver and gray.
I hurried down South 176th Street in SeaTac towards the airport to catch my train to work.
Can’t be late again.
Won’t be late again.
I shall arrive early to work
to keep my job alive.
My commute is 3 hours long roundtrip.
Why do good people scatter their trash along the streets?
I passed all kinds of trash, mostly food related, as I approached the SeaTac Visitor Information Center,
also known as Seattle Southside Visitor Center.
A man lay curled upon the lower steps. Continue reading →