The Narrative Image

Calm and peaceful hike But I have to ask myself Why are trees hiding? Spring’s promise of life Takes on sarcastic shadings Before fall’s hammer A blanket melted One of life’s loopholes exposed Deep-cover agents Puffy land-clouds float Hide their dangerous orange teeth Until the sun sets A bsentee ‘landlord’ Occasionally peeks down “Now what have they done?” Stacked layers recede Layer after layer like Some Japanese print Warm air envelope Nurturing my slow ascent Laughs and disappears Cold knives slice at clothes At the edge of the moraine And yet we linger Why put these dreamscapes In a land where nothing lives Where only fools see? The shadow stretches From this vast mountain sundial Marking time for stars

A friend, wise in the ways of beer, convinced me to attend the Oregon Brewers Festival despite my intuition that however big the beer tents might be, they wouldn’t be big enough. Determined not to pay for parking, I spent nearly a billion dollars in gas searching for a free parking space which I never found. When I finally did find a place for the car, it was a stupid distance away from the festival. I saw many shiny buildings which I found impressive, I think, mainly because of their scale and mainly because of their un-natural order…and did I mention they were shiny? They also had reflections. I suppose reflections are a clever way to keep one from really seeing a building’s true facade. Without the reflections and the massive scale, it becomes more readily evident that buildings are clever complexes of stacked cubicles… …or cells. Some impressions from the Brewers Festival: The screaming bitter taste of hops Becoming a whore for wooden tokens Ideally beautiful girls dressed in tig...

Monkey-cam had been monitoring the internet for weather reports and once he saw the little smiling sun symbols in the weekend boxes, he began begging in earnest for another chance to see Cooper Spur before the onset of serious snow. Regular viewers may recall that Monkey-cam was in the process of testing some boundaries and chose our last Cooper Spur expedition as the scene for acting out his new found sense of independence. I kept suggesting lower altitude hikes because I was pretty sure the last weather front had deposited snow down to the 4000 ft. level, but when I got an email from Mr. Lloyd (of Long Shadow Photography - www.longshadowphoto.com ) reporting that the road to Cloud Cap was still open, I relented and started rounding up the hiking gear. Mt. Hood as seen from the Parkdale Ranger Station where you can’t get forest parking permits on Sunday because they’re closed. It’s a fairly long drive from Portland to Mt. Hood so I was glad to have Monkey-cam’s company. We tried to ca...

My backpack sat open on the driver’s seat. I was stuffing last things into it. I made a little nest out of a fleece pullover, put half a dozen bananas in it, and carefully stowed it in the top of my pack where it wouldn ’t get squished. (Monkey-cams, in general, become very cross on those occasions when you proffer bruised bananas as reward for risky photography work.) I could see the Monkey-cam sitting in the passenger seat of the car, staring out the side window, sulking. (Note: The Monkey-cam and I, by mutual consent, have agreed not to call each other by our given names. We believe that this policy will help depersonalize our working relationship and allow us to more easily recover from grief should disaster befall one or the other of us during our photo expeditions.) I ducked down and leaned into the car. “O.K.,” I relented, “would you feel any better about it if I agreed to carry all the water?” The Monkey-cam whipped his head around and glared at me as if I was the world’s most ...