The Narrative Image

I have a creative friend with a whimsical nature who is in the process of designing and building a dog park. There are ever expanding trails and benches and points of interest featuring eclectic artwork. Because it is a dog park, she figured a natural addition should be a fire hydrant...and so she found one on the internet and bought it. She offered to let me restore it. The first surprise was that the fire hydrant weighed about 300 pounds. To my brain, that seemed like an amount of weight that, while heavy, should have been manageable. But my 58-year-old knees had some input on that idea, and when they initiated a labor embargo , my back also came up with some heartfelt complaints. The first step was to smooth out the previous paint job(s) which turned out to be something of an ordeal because of the thickness of the enamel paint and my uncertainty about whether or not the old thick paint was the kind that had lead in it. Even though I am past my formative year...

Thousands of years of human exploits ought to be recorded around here, but the roads that native Americans pioneered, or earlier, the 'highways' employed by whoever it was that thought traveling across a cold land-bridge from Russia was a great idea, have either been reclaimed by the ocean or been paved over by opportunistic Europeans. Prominent in this image is the Fechheimer & White building (approximately 131 years old). The smaller building just to the left is the Hallock-McMillan building, thought to be Portland's oldest existing commercial building (maybe 159 years old). The oldest buildings in Portland are barely one-hundred and fifty years old A small architectural accouterment at the North end of reservoir #1 on Mt. Tabor. There is no Acropolis on Mt. Tabor weathering the millennia - no birthplace of Portlandian democracy - instead, crumbling concrete reservoirs are poised to become ruins at the tender age of one-hundred and twenty-t...