At the end of his brilliant short story A River Runs Through It Norman MacLean muses about various metaphors and realities he had touched on in the story, and ten ends with a simple declarative statement:

I am haunted by waters

.As the two pictures in this entry can attest, I am haunted – and fascinated – by lights and its cousin, shadows.

Both pictures taken this week with a trusty iPhone, capturing those shades and lights many seem to miss.

How the upper photo happened:

• Early morning, sun reflects off some vehicle part in office park parking lot.
• Reflects through an skewed vertical blind in one of our group of offices.
• Composite of negative light (shadows) from outside bush and inside blinds projected high up on kitchenette wall.

It’s not a window – it’s a shadow window.

Crater Lake

After a decade of hiccups – family, pets, the anti-tourism tsunami of COVID – we finally took a vacation this year. (View constantly updated gallery)

It was our usual type of vacation – we usually pick a destination to be the jumping-off point for day trips; only one work week, and after Labor Day (so the kids are back in school and things are less congested).

Our “home base” this trip? Medford, OR, in south central/western Oregon. Known mainly as the headquarters of Harry & David and the eponymous apple, it really is a weird town. One-runway airport (six gates total), a slice of downtown that they are trying to preserve and gussy up, and long stretches of basically abandoned old warehoused, manufacturing plants.and such.

Why Medford? I really can’t recall, but it isnear Crater Lake, and had at least some other locations around it for day trips. We did not select Medford because we wanted to say we’ve been to Medford.

That said, some thoughts on the places we saw. We had six days (Sun-Fri), but first & last days were primarily travel days – long days with connections in Seatac (outgoing) and Salt Lake City (coming home).

Going to take me some time (as always) to process photos and say what I want about everywhere we visited.