Festivities

I know this isn't what I usually post... but I had to share. Check out my BSG snowflake. The outside is cylons, and the inside is the BSG crest. Yup, I'm that much of a dork. Oh, and it took me over an hour to develop.

Texas Architecture

A Farewell to the Lone Star State

Near Oglesby, Texas

Texas, that vast expanse of farm land sliced through by pale four-lane highways, the sides of which sprout fast food joints and chain stores, umber and gray suburbs like a hexagonal growth. Behind the suburbs stretch endless fields scarred by the crossing of county roads, and behind even these, the purple flat-topped lines of mesas.From the highway the land out there seems impossibly large and clearly abandoned. From county roads it reveals itself as a treasure trove of the bizare, abandoned and run down.

Ireland, Texas

Bosque River, Texas

An army of leather-skinned older men in pickup trucks and aging trailers guard the

tops of their hillsides with a shotgun and a dog or two. They change nothing of the land, not the barb wire fences, the scrub wood, corroded truck bodies, or the ancient churches left behind when people moved on. The land changes human artifacts into weather-worn heaps of wood, cinder-block and tin.

Ireland, Texas

The cemeteries of the past go silently feral in their spots of shade. Infant tombstones stretch in rows of cemented over graves from the first pioneers of this land. Broken slabs of granite separated from their cadavers by time are heaped in the corners.

Outside Hamilton, Texas

Ireland Cemetery, Ireland, Texas

Lost towns sweat away silently in the sun, inhabited by a handful of souls still eking their living out of some long-horns and the violent green of early summer. The grandiose gates of ranches reach toward the cloudless sky, the houses set far back from the undriven road, a true privacy that seems abhorrent to most modern men. Here prevails the independence of a life that needs no supplies but a tiller and a truck and a hardware store and a gas pump.

Return to the Robert's Bro.'s

Taken from inside the control room. This is the first shot in years that I thought needed to be monochromatic. The only thing I liked better in color was the Kool-Aid blue gallon of punch. Notice the gloves; someone still works here.

It's incredible to think that this saw-mill is still functioning. As a kid, I could hear the deep thrum of it through the woods a mile away. Family legend has it that the Robert's bro.'s stole our trees for lumber, and since their land meets the back of ours separated by nothing more than the old dry-stone wall, it's probably true. My hermit friend Jack says he once saw them burning a huge stack of tires, the black smoke belching out into the air. Their mill has a feeling of menace about it, and on this freezing-rain day it seemed the most desolate place on earth.

Worcester in the Fall

There is that last gasp of fall before the trees are left barren, a time of rusted berries and birch branches that look like a lemon tree. Worcester knows it is in for another salt stained winter. The stray cats who live in the abandoned lot behind my apartment sneak into the condemned house at night for warmth via a crack in the basement window, appearing and disappearing like shadows on a partly cloudy day. The gang of grizzled men who had become a fixture on their porch during fair weather have moved inside, and I can hear their laughter and their mexican marijuana coughing coming from inside the thin triple-decker walls. I sit on my back porch singing the blues into the sky as it fades from honey yellow to palest blue, and finally, to black.

The Neighborhood

The house across the street from my apt. Worcester pit 101 - never show the pit you're scared. That way when he runs across the street to charge you, he will only play-bite your fore-arm, and you will still have 2 hands to hold a camera with.

Happy Halloween

Forgotten Graveyard, somewhere near Copperas Cove, Tx.

Humble Abodes

Abandoned House, Topsy, Texas
Brand New Satellite Receiver, Lampasas County, Tx.

I realize it has been almost a year since my last post. In the last year, my life has changed dramatically, and I think my eye reflects these changes. I'll be posting more regularly now that I have the time, though who knows if anyone frequents my personal corner of online space.

Winter in the Country

This giant of a tree has stood in the center of the town golf course my entire life. No more. The ice-storm took goliath.
I have been trying to photograph this barn for the last 2 years, but it is in the center of a field of pricker-bushes, and I've never made it close enough. The snow was hard enough for me to walk right out to it this time, though.
The third time this truck has been featured in this blog. The hands were an accident. I sort of think they work, though.
A vanashing view: one of the 2 remaining dairy farms in Ashfield (which used to have close to 50 such farms).
Leaning Cupola, Near Route 112, Ashfield Ma.

The field, vanquished by frost. Ashfield, Ma. holds its breath, knowing that the deep snows that paralyze it for 6 months of the year are coming soon.



Thanksgiving morning walk:

I miss my sister

The tin man used to belong to an oil company somewhere along Route 2. When the place closed down, my neighbor Richard Richardson bought it at scrap metal price, and installed the light-up heart. Richard collects just about anything that can be classified as both junk, and beautiful, and seems to have set his sights on proving the old adage that one man's junk is another man's gold. This place is a great photo destination for anyone interested in decrepit allure.

The USA

Let's face it, America has long suffered problems of low economy. It has been blessed with work ethic and plenty of resources. But one can only go so far on ones hands and pride. Here, the shock of the bank crisis is only a another debt.


The center of Town - Goshen, Ma.

Sometimes life feels like one big balancing act. One of these days, I'm bound to slip. Until then, I'll fly.

Nature takes back the truck

Found on Rt. 2. Probably been there since before I was born.

Haiku

I know a hermit. He's been in my life for a long time now, and suffice it to say, I've learned a lot from him. Jack never saw me as inferior even when I was 8 and he was...timeless as always. For this reason, I've always heeded his advice. I visited him this summer. I told him I considered some photographs to be visual haiku. My haiku is somewhat awkward, but the photographs I quite like.

Robber Brothers

The Robert's brothers are one of the largest landholders in my small town, Ashfield. Land is power, and they have a lot. They also operate a fairly large forestry and wood refining business. I think everyone has a beef with the family from some time in the past. They allegedly harvested several acres of my family's forest a few decades back. This gives them a rather dark history, and the sawmill they own will not make you feel any better about the merits of their business. Ocea has never had a look at this site, the town police look the other way, and the site is far out of the eye of game wardens and the like. My father calls it Mordor. Suffice it to say that I am pulled toward the creepy work-hazard like a moth toward flame. All summer I found myself traveling down the rutted road to the Roberts Brother's sawmill. Padding along silently in the feet of sawdust, turning rusty corners on improvised walkways, I felt a sense of kinship with the place.Was it the reflection of my inner-creep that I was seeing? Was it the danger of the place: shards of glass left in second story windows over work zones? Perhaps it was the accelerated cycle of forest death and birth, symbolized by the mounds of sawdust and the bright green corrugated tin. Or maybe it was just the graphic beauty of the place, a place etched out like a wood-cut. Maybe there was no occult force drawing me back again and again. Maybe it just felt like that.