SHITTY CONDON POETRY

A thin, icy, cloud painted crystals overnight onto chilly windshields

Till the morning’s faux summer-sun chased it into low places

Winter’s premature apparition melts in gullies, carved across sloping fields

Behold a golden diamond set in a blue dome of sky, quiet and still as if in permanent stasis

Until Winter’s specter fingers stretch forth, over brittle, golden-fields shivering

Birds bail out of the sky, as if some great dangerous tide is turning

I stand atop a deep cut scar, a canyon, a river’s ceaseless dithering

Gusting winds kick up a haze though no fire is left burning

This bird’s eye view reveals my path through history, those days of triple digits

The river, flashing cold blue grins, teases saying, “I still got your (pretty-good) fishing pole”

It seems unlikely that a river’s fits and starts, its endless fidgets

Would craft such nonsensical wondrous scenes — absent any goal

Though born of different mothers — those distant violent mounts, these carved out hills —

They put on similar fashions, they rock their gravity skirts

Strong gusts comb the blond stubble of this barren high desert, yet my nose fills

With juniper pollen, hints of sage — varieties of earthly dirts

This isolated house — it’s hearth — someone’s metaphor for heaven

Did it nurture its humans, or do tragic skeletons somewhere repose, without testament or will

I can see for miles and miles and not see one Seven Eleven

Or gas station for that matter, my sketchy gas gauge reading empty while slanted downhill

Those grasping spectral fingers from before

Dragging a cloud blanket behind me, to swaddle me in cold darkness

A crowd of fans are waving at the sun they adore

“We really love what you’ve done with these pressure gradients”, they confess

Winter seems certain to win this seasonal battle, yet one pinwheel yet strives

To blow the snow off the mountain (with picturesque backlighting)

The vanquished apparition rises from the valley again, as if with infinite lives

Who would have thought 23.5 degrees of tilt would guarantee forever fighting

Announcing...

"Earth's Crammed with Heaven."

Showing at

The Academy Theater Lobby
during the month of July

7818 S.E. STARK ST. PORTLAND OR, 97215

See a movie for $4.00 and as a bonus,
see scott's themed exhibition...

This turns out to be pretty hard to do...to describe my photography exhibition theme.

Most often it turns out long winded.

So, in an effort to make it simple, I'm going to relate an experience that got me interested in photography in the first place.

Hiding in the tall grass at the bank of a channel connecting two small lakes, a friend and I lay watching an industrious beaver tow a dressed log through the water to the foundation of its growing lodge. My friend was so close - she reached out mischievously and gently grabbed the log, and held it in place... and for an instant an increasingly irritated beaver engaged unknowingly in a brief tug of war before identifying the unlikely source of its frustration.  Becoming wise it scolded us by slapping its great flat tail on the surface of the water. It disappeared beneath expanding concentric ripples. In the distance, its kin also slapped the water, telegraph fashion, relaying a warning in a similar expanding network.

Moments like these seem to be... worth sharing.

I had been privileged to witness the culmination of nature's marvelous handiwork. In this case, a particular species of rodent - slowly crafted over 75 million years - performing remarkable feats of engineering.

It led me to the conclusion that I needed to get a better camera.

Because sometimes, you just stumble into places... or moments, where the world is beautiful... where the Earth is crammed with Heaven, and even a skeptic like me can feel blessings and grace... and perhaps taste for an instant what the world can be.

scott dietz

Images and text copyright scott dietz 2013

Mt. Adams Fire (09-22-12)

 Mt. Adams as seen from the Cooper Spur shelter (Mt. Hood) on 09-22-12

Mt. Hood’s lengthening shadow, straining for the eastern horizon 

Smoke from the fire doing a pretty fair impersonation of clouds 

The timberline trail spirals on around the mountain 

Toyed with the idea of composing a shot here, but Lola the dog was feeling territorial 

Mt. Adams beyond the shelter 

Mt. St. Helens 

As night falls, the source of the smoke becomes evident 

The scale of the fire is slowly revealed as the sky gets darker 

An inferno about the size of a mountain 

Swirling winter clouds ride autumn’s cool night air into the valley, like circling predators patiently waiting for a flickering campfire to go out. 

Detailed information about the fire can be found here: http://inciweb.org/incident/3249/

COOPER SPUR HAIKU - MT.HOOD, OREGON

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

Absentee ‘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

REVILED BEAUTY: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 2006-2009

Back a few weeks when snow paralyzed a significant portion of Portland, a spare contingent of Portland Art Museum staff managed to open the facility’s doors on time and kept it running until reinforcements managed to straggle in. Their heroic efforts afforded me an opportunity to take in the WILD BEAUTY photo exhibition in relative solitude. http://www.northwestphotography.org/WildBeauty.htm



I’d been working at establishing a relationship with the gorge over the past couple of years… oh screw it.

…maybe it would be more accurate to say that, like some shallow, materialistic paparazzi, I’d been stalking the gorge with my camera, hoping to capture an intimate or private moment (say maybe a nipple slip) so it was an unexpected bonanza to find myself peeking into the equivalent of a childhood photo album.

The thing is, the pictures were really beautiful, and seemed to become more beautiful as it became evident how difficult the early art of photography was to practice, but the unspoken commentary that I began to hear was the proud whispering of entrepreneurial immigrants boasting of their remarkable feats of exploitation.

It was an odd feeling. I felt proud to be a member of a species so clever as to be able to bury Celilo Falls under a captive river, so clever as to be able to skim power from descending water, so clever as to be able to create infrastructure that doubles as art, but also, I felt like a dick – like wanting nothing so much as to ‘do it’ only to find myself later (and counter intuitively) mourning the loss of innocence.

The Columbia River gorge is still beautiful. We have a ways to go before we start sucking so much water out of it that it starts to flow backwards like some forsaken California river. But we should be mindful that come the next ice age, the tables will turn and any of our kind that are left (how’s that for optimism?) will be scoured out by glacier spawned floods that would impress even Noah.
Anyway, maybe someday, if Wild Beauty the Sequel comes out, I hope its editors might see fit to include a portrait of the gorge as I have come to know it.

Columbia River from I-84 – close to the Corbett exit - 01-11-2009

Oneonta Gorge - 02-18-2007

Vista House Lights from I-84 viewpoint – 01-11-2009

Vista House looking suspiciously like a Cylon – 09-16-2006

I suppose if you were tasked with crowning the Columbia River Gorge with a giant toilet facility, you could do a lot worse than this.

Beacon Rock – 08-04-2007

Bonneville Dam from Table Mt. – 04-01-2007

Columbia River in bondage – 01-13-2008

Beacon Rock from Bonneville Dam – 01-13-2008

Eagle Creek Trail – 01-01-2006

Columbia River – Looking West from under the Bridge of the Gods – 03-11-2007

Construction site near The Dalles Dam – 07-19-2008

Basalt cliffs – Washington Shore – Close to railroad tunnel #12 – 10-11-2008

From railroad tracks looking west – Washington shore – 10-11-2008

Fishing Platform – Washington shore – 10-11-2008

Near Hells Gate channel – 10-11-2008