“Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.”
― Energy and Equity
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
― Siddhartha
I have written about it, here, many times before – All my live I have always wanted to live on a creek lot. For the last decade or so I do, sort of… it is more of a ditch lot – the creek is tamed into a straight line in the middle of the block, exactly between property lines. No natural watercourse flows in a straight line.
It is tamed in terms of location and direction… but not in terms of flow. Usually a quiet narrow strip of water barely moving, when it rains the water rises and becomes violent.
The last storm (not the big one, a couple days later) I took some photos from the Yale Street Bridge right when the rain ended and again, the next morning.
Huffhines Creek, From the Yale Street Bridge, upstream, under normal conditions.
Huffhines Creek, From the Yale Street Bridge, upstream, after a rain.
Huffhines Creek, From the Yale Street Bridge, downstream, under normal conditions.
Huffhines Creek, From the Yale Street Bridge, downstream, after a rain.
The crazy thing how fast this transformation occurs. Despite the buffering of the flood control ponds upstream during a thunder-boomer the water will come down in a wall and the creek will rise in seconds. When it ends the water drops almost as fast, leaving only a line of detritus as a reminder of the violence that was there minutes before.
These are by no means photographs taken under extreme conditions. That little bit of water visible in the before photos will almost completely dry up in July and August, evaporated under the deadly Dallas Texas summer sun and inevitable drought. This was only an ordinary spring thunderstorm, I’ve seen the water significantly higher (over the bike trail, for instance). I simply can’t get a photograph of that because of darkness and/or fear.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Anna Karenina
Huffhines Creek, Richardson, Texas
There is always someone like the duckling in the lower left corner. In unknown danger, not in with the group, crossing upstream, almost alone. Is it you? Really? Are you sure?
“Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn”
― The Dream Songs
Hall Arts Plaza, Dallas, Texas
I have never completely recovered from the time when I realized that the cotton in the aspirin bottle was not necessary and you did not have to replace it after you extracted your tablet – a belief that, as a child, I structured my entire world around.
“All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love – seemingly the most natural of acts.”
― Divisadero
Nic Noblique, Wounded, Anita Harris Phelps Park, Dallas, Texas
The second of three Nic Noblique sculptures in a little pocket park amidst the construction of luxury high-rise apartment towers in Uptown, Dallas.
Nic Noblique, Cherry Bomb, Anita Harris Phelps Park, Dallas, Texas
“When the mushrooms took hold she sensed some of the gods calling to her from inside her own chest and followed their urging outside into the yard and up the sunny slope into the trees. She felt all gooey, gooey with the slobbered love of various gods gathered within, and smiling full-time went about the woods looking to collect butterflies and pet them until they gave milk, or maybe roll in the dirt until she felt China through her skin.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone
Huffhines Creek in back of my house, Richardson, Texas
There is no better weather… no better day than the one after a violent storm. The sun is so bring, the air so fresh – scrubbed clean by the violence. You never know what’s going to peek out and enjoy the calm.
