the borrower's debt is the only regret of my youth.
This is a post for my IRL friends Derick, Maria, Alex, and Quentin, but maybe someone here might find it interesting, too. Get ready for photo death.
IRELAND, 2009
Look familiar, Woosterski? (Because that's a much better collective term than 'Woosterians,' or 'Woosterites,' and hell if I'm going to call you Scots.) Turns out Cork has a thing for castles, too. I didn't think you'd care for thirty pictures of gray stone buildings next to ponds and swans (plus one po-mo architectural wonder housing art exhibitions, typical), but this is the back of the central campus clock tower, and I hoped you might get a kick out of that!
Toomey Acounting Services. Twomey Double Fiber Bread. Mama O'Tuama's Home for Wayward Girls.
Part of my route to university; I'd walk along a river past a funeral home, endless pubs, and bakeries, and the odd political office. That big stone clump on top of the hill? Fomerly an English fort, and now the seat of the Irish equivalent of the police force. The church below it proclaims itself as a site of near continuous religious worship for 2000 years.
Close up of said church, right under the iron gates.
County Kerry. A hired taxi-driver gave dad and I the tour, and later kissed me on the cheek and called me a 'fine girl as ever 'twas seen.'
Again.
And again.
Once more!
FAMILY, 2011
A remarkably unflattering photo of Ma.
Dad, dead center of his Senior Citizen Softball team photo.
And here, dressed more festively.
And Cosmo dressed to match. (Corgi.)
My younger brother, Chance, pre-cancer. Rapper Alias: RatTail. You only wish I was kidding.
GOING TO COLORADO WITH AN ACHIN' IN MY HEART, 2011
The Badlands, sighted on our second day of the trip. Heat like you wouldn't believe, but compensated for by scouring winds at all hours of the day. At camp, I watched some number of dragonflies (four for sure) alight on an acacia tree, with perfectly timed reactions to wind changes -- they'd rotate around the tree, as it blew harder or fell away momentarily, and I couldn't believe it. How beautiful. And though these photos are largely of the rock-forms, there were points of almost endless grassland, too, and dandelions the size of your fist, and that sea-moment I'd always seen on teevee, where the grass bends under the breeze in rippling, flotsam-lacking waves, and it really happens, which I hadn't believed. I'd grown up next to cornfields, and although they certainly get windy shakes, I'd never seen quite the same oceanic effect before. We hiked into this keyhole amongst the stony clusters, and I remember finding foothold after foothold, not looking up, yet ... and then getting dizzy as soon as I did, staring over nothing but Badland scrub and random roadway, and there was this roaring wind that you couldn't talk over. Very hard earth, though. I skinned my knee in a fall that wouldn't have dented me at all on Pennsylvania soil.
More.
EVEN MORE.
MORE FOREVER.
This is Kathy Elk, the only attendant at the Wounded Knee Memorial. Both dad and I had wanted to see it very badly, and it was ... humble, compared to the general expectation of what a memorial is? Only an unmarked grave in the middle of a chainlinked fence, and a graffitied Leonard Peltier image over a street sign. She'd explained that the general feeling was that those people needed rest, and so no reason to make it a tourist attraction. Dad had wanted to see it because historical narratives of oppressed individuals are something he has a passing interest in, particularly Irish and Native American narratives. Mine was less academic. I'd been reading Scalped, right up to the present issue, and while much of what that comic strikes me with is linked to the characters that populate it (being both wonderfully shady, and horribly empathetic), some of it has always been ... the nature of the backdrop, a fictional Native American reservation in South Dakota. I have been lucky. So incredibly lucky. Dad is wealthy, fullstop, but my mother makes $16,000 dollars a year, and that makes for a piss-poor existence at times, but it's rural farm poverty, smackdab in the middle of dairyland, and so it's a whole different beast than the poverty depicted in Scalped, and I wanted to see it, and to know it was true. That things really were so terrible there It's hard to believe in something heard about, or depicted -- it's so hard to hold it right in your heart, you know? Haha, this might be a cheesy-ass post, but I mean it. And so I wanted to see what it was like, as observantly as possible, with as little intrusion as possible. (Perhaps not a possible comibination.) I can attest, now, that it was just very, very bad there. Our route made many more accidental bends through Native American reservations, almost always at the same level of deprivation, but pocketed. Gutted trailers, with goats tied to them, and ten bone-thin dogs picking at trash cans, and burlap doors.
This is after several hours on US Route 212, probably the prettiest stretch of highway I've ever seen, right after the lazy prairie turned into the Beartooth Mountain pass. Dad and I drove up switchback after switchback, and after 2000 vertical feet of this, we finally figured out that we weren't going around the mountain -- we were going over it, in this killer feat of engineering. This is the view from midway up the climb, looking over where we'd just came.
And this is the view of the other side of the mountain, hitting the 9000 feet of elevation, making for a total climb of 7000 feet. Not bad for sea-levelers! It was exquisitely cool (a complete turn around from the 90 degree weather from an hour hence, in southern Montana) and windless -- just a whistle from the velocity of the car itself, before we descended into this top-lakes and pine forests, and eventually settles into ...
Grizzly Country. :D Dad told me tonight that he was a lot more scared than he let on, but I think we both conducted ourselves fine for the circumstances. The camp was mostly just damp and pitiful, except, when I got up to pee for the umpteenth time, I caught the moon at this perfect moment -- it was the biggest and brightest I'd ever seen, beating out the night that Derick and Alex and I hung out on bleachers while those two traded fake pick-up lines under the harvest moon. One of my favorite memories, ever.
Then straight on into Yellowstone. One thing about the west: bikers a gogo. There's some kind of motorcycle mecca in South Dakota, but even in Wyoming, they're everywhere!
Buffalo a gogo, too!
I apologize for the car-taken quality of some of these.
Erk. Case in point.
That's it, essentially. There are more photos, but this house has a total dearth of serviceable flash-drives at the mo', so I'm afraid I can't share them in any timely way. I hope you've enjoyed them. I'm not much of a photographer, and dad's camera ain't much of a camera, but these were deeply beautiful places. I do wish I could find some storage device, because our photos of southern Wyoming (they made a state and nobody came) are a bit more varied than these, being a red and desolate Martian landscape at the best points, and don't suffer as much with my obsession with OMG A BIG CLOUD WITH A BIG SHADOW CLICK CLICK CLICK. Though, straight up: we don't have clouds like that in Western Pennsylvania. Don't get me wrong, we've got our share of ... ahm, cloud varieties, I suppose? Cumulo and cute, or scary nimbus, or cirrus -- but they come in clusters, and you don't get such a sense of .... horizon, here. Whereas my jaunt in the west acquainted me with such a ... a sense of space, and these continental clouds, that slid slowly across the ground. Plus, Boulder had some pretty points -- I hiked up to a glacial lake with some philosophy friends, and that was gorgeous, crusted with aspen, and bone-splitting cold. Worthy of a photo, but alas, ain't got none. I hope you enjoyed this.