Trinity River Bank, Fort Worth, Texas
(click to enlarge)
On the Levee
Category Archives: Photography
And Shipping is Always Free
(click to enlarge)
After church the three ladies liked to buy sack lunches from a truck and a bottle of Chianti from the shabby old liquor store on the way down to the river. They would sit on the bank by the rapids with their lunch and catch up on the weekly gossip.
There used to be old men fishing down there. The fishermen would sometimes whistle or shout at the ladies, which they, correctly, took as a complement. Now, though, the levels of polychlorinated biphenyls in the fish have been determined to be unsafe and the fishermen have been run off by the police. Sometimes the women miss the fishermen a little – but they also enjoy the quiet.
The ladies have a little pool going. Every week each kicks in a ten dollar bill and the first one to spot a body floating down the river wins the pot.
“There's one!” the lady in the middle shouts.
“That doesn't count, that's a swimmer.”
“It's a body isn't it?”
“But the bet is on a corpse, and you know it.”
“OK.” She sounds disappointed.
“There's one!” the lady furthest upstream calls out.
The middle one is not happy. She gives the object a close look. “Wait, I don't think it's a body, I think it's an inflatable woman.”
She pulls her Sig Sauer P229 out of her purse and lets off a round. She is an expert shot. The inflatable pops and shrivels up into the churning water. The ladies hear giggling from a copse of willow trees upstream. The ladies have been pranked.
“Those kids! At it again. Where did they get that thing?” They shout at the kids. “Where did you get that thing?!”
A reedy voice, hard to hear over the roar of the rapids, comes giggling back from the willows. “Dealdash Dot Com.”
“Children now-a-days. What is this world coming to?” the lady in the center complains. The other two nod in agreement. She pulls a little kit out of her purse, screws the handle on the end of the aluminum rod, and begins to swab out the barrel of her handgun.
“Cleanliness is next to Godliness. That's what my mother taught me.”
The other two nod in agreement again, but don't move their gaze from the water. They want to win the pot.
Steel, Rivets, and Concrete
(click to enlarge)
What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven! Rivets. To get on with the work—to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast—cases—piled up—burst—split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that station-yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death. You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping down—and there wasn’t one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with.
—-Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Seventh Street Bridge
She’s driving home Sunday morning, with the
heat turned up, the windows rolled down
to the edge.
And yesterday, snowed for the first time.
Now no one’s on the Willis Avenue Bridge.Used to be a hard merge.
—-Willis Avenue Bridge, David Berkeley
On our bike ride in Fort Worth last weekend, we made the point of riding across the new Seventh Street Bridge. It was pretty cool.
Seventh Street Bridge
Fort Worth, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Seventh Street Bridge
Fort Worth, Texas
(click to enlarge)
One really cool thing about the bridge is the bike lane.
Traffic
I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.
We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being…, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.
—-J.G. Ballard, Narration for Crash! (1971), a short film by Harley Cokeliss
(click to enlarge)
“In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside – there were the same ruthlessness and agression concealed within a set of polite conventions.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
Bridge
(click to enlarge)
Gate
(click to enlarge)
Delta
“The industries were there because of the river. They had come for its navigational convenience and its fresh water. They would not, and could not, linger beside a tidal creek. For nature to take its course was simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana. Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state.”
—- John McPhee, The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya
(click to enlarge)
The structure was obviously undermined, but how much so, and where? What was solid, what was not? What was directly below the gates and the roadway? With a diamond drill, in a central position, they bored the first of many holes in the structure. When they had penetrated to basal levels, they lowered a television camera into the hole. They saw fish.
—-John McPhee, The Control of Nature
Deere
(click to enlarge)
Well, I’m working on the new railroad
With mud up to my knees
I’m digging for big John Henry
And he’s so hard to please
And I’ve been all around this worldHang me oh hang me and I’ll be dead and gone
It’s not the hanging that I mind it’s laying in the grave so long
And I’ve been all around this worldWell, the new railroad is ready, boys
And the cars are on the track
And if our women leave us
Money’ll bring ’em back
And I’ve been all around this world—- Working on the New Railroad (trad)
Kite
“A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won’t give up,
or the wind die down.A kite is the last poem you’ve written
so you give it to the wind,
but you don’t let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.”
― Leonard Cohen, The Spice Box of Earth
Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”
― Anaïs Nin
Bill Chance