The AK Steel company’s Ashland Works plant includes a pig iron blast furnace and oxygen furnace. It stands on the banks of the Ohio River in the small industry town. As you drive by the industrial facility on Highway 23, one cannot help but stop and be amazed by the facility’s purely utilitarian function and form. (Click on the photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
I have been fortunate to see how many people work around the world. I have seen flower pickers running at breakneck speed in the pre-dawn hours to their jobs in greenhouses around Kenya’s Lake Naivasha. I have met Mexican migrant farm workers in central Washington state, who pick all of the apples, cherries, and other fruits and vegetables we eat around the country. I have met the men who do the hard labor building roads and buildings in Vietnam. And there are so many more. The work I have seen humbles me in its physical intensity and also brute reality. But people have to work, to make better lives for themselves and their families. So, today, on Labor Day, a moment to honor those who have to use their bodies to eek out a living, where ever they call home.
Click on the photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.
I visited the Oaks Amusement Park this weekend, in southeast Portland, along the Willamette River. This 110-year-old facility is a classic, old-style small amusement park, not a corporate-themed fantasy land that milks consumers for all they got. It is among the oldest in the country. Old-school amusement parks are part of an older, carnival world that dates back to the Midways and Pikes of the 1893 and 1904 World’s Fairs in Chicago and St. Louis. In fact, Oaks Park is part of that tradition, opening as part of the 1905 Portland World’s Fair.
There is something utterly low-brow about businesses like these. No one who attends the opera would be found anywhere near here. The rides are not forcing us to buy Disney products or watch a Universal Pictures film. Most are just about flinging our bodies in different directions, so we can momentarily feel a sense of safely packaged fear and excitement, with a slight twinge of panic these old contraptions might break down and fling us to oblivion.
What I saw at Oaks Park also was about the most diverse crowed I have seen in one place in Portland since arriving. Parents and their kids, and also grandparents, were letting it rip, laughing, and having a good time. The carnie atmosphere prevailed on the main strip, complete with gun-skills galleries, basketball tosses, junk food, and stuffed toys. I thought about the people who worked here and what they thought about their daily grind, and the people who spend their hard-earned money just to escape from life for an hour or two without going broke.
Surprisingly, amusement parks are almost always portrayed as sinister places in film, from West World to Jurassic Park, to even older films like the noir classic Third Man with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. This American Life did a pretty good episode on amusement parks also. It is worth a listen too. So amid that joy, and it was joy, you always feel that sense of trepidation, like maybe, just maybe, the rides might not work. And maybe, that is why people keep coming back, year after year.
Following the hottest July ever in human recorded history on planet earth, the American west is having the greatest outbreak of wildfires since the great fires of 1910, which ravaged Montana, Idaho, and Washington state.
Fires are burning widely across my home state of Oregon, Washington, California, British Columbia, and Alaska. Three firefighters were killed on Aug. 19, fighting a blaze in the Methow Valley near Twisp–an area hammered by wildfires in 2014. There is major change taking place. This will involve how we plan for fire, build in fire zones, speculate for fast profits in pretty Western scenery (if you can afford that game), and consider what is safe.
Maybe the lessons will be forgotten. People, particularly wealthy people, will still want to live near the mountains and wild places where fires naturally occur, but with global warming patterns due to climate change, the ecosystem will be transformed more and more by big burns. We as a country cannot afford to purely protect all of the property here, particularly when the sacrifice is lost firefighters’ lives. Will it one day be left just to burn?
I took this picture about a week after fires ravaged the town of Pateros, in central Washington, again at the center of Washington’s complex of fires.
(Click on the picture to see a larger photograph on a separate picture page.)
In the completely overlooked and unknown north St. Louis County community of Berkeley, Missouri, lies an overgrown, forgotten, and largely abandoned cemetery. Washington Park Cemetery was founded in the 1920s as a burial place for the St. Louis area’s black residents. It lies just off Natural Bridge Road, about 1.5 miles from Lambert International Airport.
Today, few if anyone knows about this place. It has been the subject of news stories throughout the years, mainly involving land use controversies that led to cemetery land and graves being removed to make way for an interstate and more recently in 1993 for the MetroLink light rail, which connects the urban center with the airport. Literally thousands of former bodies were removed to make way for major public infrastructure.
I knew about this battered resting place ever since I was a kid. I could see the graves literally right next to Interstate 70, and read stories in the 1990s about the light rail and airport expansion disputes. When I stayed in a hotel literally just across from this cemetery in July, I instantly knew what the place was, even though I found no signs. All I found were grave markers, names of African-American residents who were interned and the weeds, trees, and brush that were taking over the place. It reminded me of Jewish cemeteries I found in Poland, now abandoned since the tragedy of the Shoah in the 1940s.
Here are a few shots that I took wandering around on my last night before flying back to Portland. It was hot, humid, and eery. In the distance in one shot is the Renaissance Hotel, a luxury airport accommodation that looms over the cemetery. I doubt a single guest at that place ever wanders in the back to see the history that is now slowly being taken over by the Missouri bush.
(Click on each photograph to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
On days when chaotic people around me seem overwhelming, in that place called life and the real world, I always seek the solace in what I know to be universally true. And that is the goodness in others.
I ignore the emotional tornadoes who suck energy from others, and I bring back memories of people I have met everywhere in the world. Today, on a day when the whirlwind people were a bit too much, I got a jolt of the “rest of humanity” through some friendly old smiles. Here are a few of their faces, taken from my travels in Bali and Java, in Indonesia, in February 2009.
(Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
My explorations of Portland’s historic Lone Fir Cemetery found lots of fascinating headstones. Each represents a life, a full story, a story that intersects with hundreds of other stories. And how do we remember these former residents, who are now but forgotten. Cemeteries remain a good place to contemplate one’s life and what one does with one’s life. Because ultimately we all return to the earth, and our life is but a speck in the passage in time in an infinite universe. (Click on each photograph to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
Everywhere I walk and go it seems, some water or road project is going on, digging up streets, laying new sewer lines, and creating some inconvenience for all of us. Hey folks, that is called the price of living in a modern world. Be thankful you have these things. According to Food and Water Watch, 2.5 billion people, 1 billion of them kids, live without basic sanitation like a sewer system. And if you think your roads are bad, try them overseas, where they create literally lethal situations daily. So, you may just try and chill out if you have to wait. You can even smile at those flaggers. They are your price for a modern, comfortable life. It is worth our investment.
Last night, I discovered a story how Google Street View can be used to tell the story of cities, including the agony of my home city, Detroit. I wish I had discovered this earlier, because it is a great tool to document change, despite the weirdness of Google’s spy cam on all of us, in our neighborhoods. I decided to use the time machine portal to see how the former home of my Michigan relatives fared between 2007 and 2013. So this is a very personal issue for me.
What I found was not surprising, and I had reported on this on an earlier post. What I discovered today was a more rich visual tale of the decay that really is the story of Detroit’s ills over the past six years (2007-’13). I think this kind of storytelling should be used in the face chirpy “Detroit on the rebound” news coverage that some want to promote that seeks to ignore the full story.
About a month ago, I published a blog about my reaction to seeing parts of Detroit that had fallen into disturbing decay, complete with ravaged neighborhoods, arson-torched homes, and the collapse of communities. This sparked a bit of a backlash by a group of current and former Detroit area advocates (all white, like me by the way) who rushed to Detroit’s defense and said negative storytelling ignores the “good people” and “good stories” and tales of the recovery. I then reviewed the data, and think rose-colored perspectives can be naive at best given the indicators of crime, poverty, employment, population health, and more. I do think balance is critical, but you cannot ignore what you see, particularly with tools like Google Street View, and in the work of recent documentary photographers.
This is an American story and an American tragedy, with many villains, many victims, and a still uncertain future. Recovery will take decades. Right now many people are struggling, and many people have just walked away–like my relatives did decades ago. Many in leadership positions in our country would prefer to have our country spend tens of billions to preserve our strategic priorities in foreign lands and willfully ignore a once great city that is, by all definitions, an “African American” community that many in this country care very little about.
I talked about this with an old public health classmate of mine and how young Americans go overseas to address global issues of poverty and development. He wryly commented, maybe some new grads can work on “third world” issues in our country. I think he is right.
This is the final post I am making, for a while at least, on the city of my birth, Detroit. I wanted to capture the industrial area located in Dearborn and southwest Detroit, around the River Rouge and Zug Island. The neighborhood filmed is called Delray. The murals shown in the video are by Diego Rivera, at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. They capture the world-famous Mexican muralist’s impressions of industrial production and Ford’s River Rouge complex, then the world’s largest factory, in the early 1930s.
What Beautiful Light 