Somebody dumped they baits:
I like how our attempts to conceal graffiti turn into a "paint on concrete" crazy quilt:
Two items, caught in the cracks, within a few feet of each other:
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Some Recent Remainderings
Somebody dumped they baits:
I like how our attempts to conceal graffiti turn into a "paint on concrete" crazy quilt:
Two items, caught in the cracks, within a few feet of each other:
Wishing for a Net
Boy-oh-boy, man-oh-man, one afternoon about a week ago I was wishing I had Miss Eudora’s “Wide Net” to toss out across the Chattahoochee. But I wouldn’t have been seining for a human – no, no – though I guess I might not have been surprised to have netted one – rather, my purpose would have been to scoop up the hundreds and hundreds of plastic bottles that were rushing past, carried along the channel by the afternoon’s swift current.
What would I have done with all those bottles had I come into possession of a net and been able to get it across the Chattahoochee? Well, that question did occur to me – so after a while I abandoned my net fantasy. But I didn’t abandon my curiosity about where all those bottles came from. It was several days after the second flood, after the water had returned to near normal level, so I wondered if maybe these bottles had been lodged somewhere for a while and then, that day, in some post-flood cleanup upriver, dislodged. All I know is that there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and that they floated by for a long time. I’m not sure exactly how long they floated by, but they were already there when I arrived, and they were still floating by when I left about an hour later. There were some dead tree limbs, too, but not much else that I could discern.
Here are some photos:
Most were out in the channel, but this one came close.
What would I have done with all those bottles had I come into possession of a net and been able to get it across the Chattahoochee? Well, that question did occur to me – so after a while I abandoned my net fantasy. But I didn’t abandon my curiosity about where all those bottles came from. It was several days after the second flood, after the water had returned to near normal level, so I wondered if maybe these bottles had been lodged somewhere for a while and then, that day, in some post-flood cleanup upriver, dislodged. All I know is that there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and that they floated by for a long time. I’m not sure exactly how long they floated by, but they were already there when I arrived, and they were still floating by when I left about an hour later. There were some dead tree limbs, too, but not much else that I could discern.
Here are some photos:
Most were out in the channel, but this one came close.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Filaments of My Imagination -- A Gossamer Afternoon
Late Sunday afternoon, fresh home from a two-hour walk on the Riverwalk, I was moving about in our kitchen, when, just as I stepped from the pantry to the stove, passing the kitchen window that looks out onto the Riverbank, something caught my eye. It was just a glimmer, but it caught me. Over there on the River, in the late afternoon light– a long, vertical strand of something -- something about a yard in length, a single luminescent strand floating north to south about forty feet above the surface of the River, no anchoring object that I could see at the top, and nothing at the bottom. Just a strand, floating.
For a second I thought I’d imagined this thing, this filament, and then I saw another. And another, and another. Then we had a virtual parade of the long, single strands, floating in the air, highlighted by the late afternoon just-right autumn sun, traveling from north of us to who knows where south of us. Some of them were longer than a yard. Occasionally one would reverse its north-to-south path for a second or two, but ultimately all of them headed south. I summoned Fred to the kitchen, in part to help me convince myself that what I was seeing was real. At first, he was not convinced. Within about a minute, though, Fred spotted one himself, so then for several more minutes Fred and I stood at the kitchen window and swapped announcements -- “There’s one! There’s one right above the leafless tree.” “There’s another one right above the gazebo.” And “I just saw one pass the damaged light pole.” After a while, armed with the binoculars, we moved to the front porch. More and more and more of the threads floated through the air above the Chattahoochee.
When the light reached a certain angle, I noticed that there were many, many of the strands lying stretched out on the park lawn directly across the street from our porch, between us and the River. I remarked that they created a “gossamer grid.” Later I retracted my statement when I realized that they did not in fact form a grid pattern, as they went in only one direction – north-south. There were no east-west filaments there on the grass.
The whole time we were watching the things, in the back of my mind I was remembering a poem – not really remembering the poem itself, but thinking that I remembered such floating vertical filaments having been referenced in a poem I’d once read.
When the sun began to set, the filaments became no longer visible, and Fred and I left the front porch, re-entered the house, and set about individual late-afternoon activities – Fred in his studio and I in the kitchen. After a while Fred called me to his computer. Apparently he’d been intrigued by my use of the phrase “gossamer grid,” its having inspired him to look up the derivation of the word “gossamer.” That search had led him first to this very nice explanation by Martha Barnett of Public Radio’s A Way With Words
And then it led him to the very poem that had pulling at the back of my brain since I’d seen that very first, most elusive filament float by – Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” Here’s the poem:
It was then that I remembered that "The Noiseless Patient Spider" had been one of many poems that my classmates and I had memorized and recited in our high school English class, back in the mid-1960s, in a little town in central Georgia, about 30 miles east of the Chattahoochee.
In memory of my high school English teacher – Mrs. Pearl S. Garrett.
For a second I thought I’d imagined this thing, this filament, and then I saw another. And another, and another. Then we had a virtual parade of the long, single strands, floating in the air, highlighted by the late afternoon just-right autumn sun, traveling from north of us to who knows where south of us. Some of them were longer than a yard. Occasionally one would reverse its north-to-south path for a second or two, but ultimately all of them headed south. I summoned Fred to the kitchen, in part to help me convince myself that what I was seeing was real. At first, he was not convinced. Within about a minute, though, Fred spotted one himself, so then for several more minutes Fred and I stood at the kitchen window and swapped announcements -- “There’s one! There’s one right above the leafless tree.” “There’s another one right above the gazebo.” And “I just saw one pass the damaged light pole.” After a while, armed with the binoculars, we moved to the front porch. More and more and more of the threads floated through the air above the Chattahoochee.
When the light reached a certain angle, I noticed that there were many, many of the strands lying stretched out on the park lawn directly across the street from our porch, between us and the River. I remarked that they created a “gossamer grid.” Later I retracted my statement when I realized that they did not in fact form a grid pattern, as they went in only one direction – north-south. There were no east-west filaments there on the grass.
The whole time we were watching the things, in the back of my mind I was remembering a poem – not really remembering the poem itself, but thinking that I remembered such floating vertical filaments having been referenced in a poem I’d once read.
When the sun began to set, the filaments became no longer visible, and Fred and I left the front porch, re-entered the house, and set about individual late-afternoon activities – Fred in his studio and I in the kitchen. After a while Fred called me to his computer. Apparently he’d been intrigued by my use of the phrase “gossamer grid,” its having inspired him to look up the derivation of the word “gossamer.” That search had led him first to this very nice explanation by Martha Barnett of Public Radio’s A Way With Words
And then it led him to the very poem that had pulling at the back of my brain since I’d seen that very first, most elusive filament float by – Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” Here’s the poem:
A Noiseless Patient Spider
by: Walt Whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them.
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
It was then that I remembered that "The Noiseless Patient Spider" had been one of many poems that my classmates and I had memorized and recited in our high school English class, back in the mid-1960s, in a little town in central Georgia, about 30 miles east of the Chattahoochee.
In memory of my high school English teacher – Mrs. Pearl S. Garrett.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Rotary Park Funk
Rotary Park has GOT to be the very funkiest part of the whole Riverwalk. From cat grottoes to a solar clock to a bad pro-life sculpture to Bulldog Bait and Tackle with its offer of both bait and barbeque -- yep, Rotary Park wins the award for Funkiness on the Riverwalk. And don’t forget that the Homicide Memorial ain’t far away. Neither is the Civil War Naval Museum, which oft is occupied by “Civil War re-enactors.” (Talk ABOUT weird …)
Fred and I spent some time in Rotary Park just yesterday – yes, admittedly probably augmenting the weirdness that was there already – and here’s some of what we saw:
The first cat grotto we spied was off in the bushes to the left, just past the south end of Rotary Park. First I saw a cat. He crossed my path (Yes, he was black.) and seemed to be headin' somewhere. I watched him and he led me to this weirdness ...
Then, at another spot, a whole 'nother cat grotto.
And off in the bushes behind that one, a whole AVENUE of cat grottoes ...
When we first saw this thing coming up next, we didn't WHAT in the world it was.
It's hard to get a good photo of it, with its marble tiles laid into the ground. The tiles that you see in a double vertical line are embellished with the first day of each month (for example, "November 1") and a pair of what looked to me like a child's or baby's footprints. The other set of tiles, the ones across the top, were the more difficult ones to photograph, because of their placement in an arc above the double-vertical tiles, and they're more worn. Some are even broken. We did manage to figure out, though, that each of them features an hour (7:00, 8:00, 9:00 ...). That's when Fred figured out that the thing is a solar clock, the idea being that one can stand on, say, "November 1" (Coincidentally, we were there on, guess what? November 1!), and your shadow will point to the time of day. Fred demonstrates:
Lo and behold, it worked! Fred's shadow pointed to 2:00, and indeed the time was just about two o'clock!
Fred laughed at me because when we were trying to figure out what the thing was, I had mused, "Does it have anything to do with dead babies?" Now, if y'all look at all my photos here, you'll figure out why I thought that. Yes, you will. Reason: We had just passed the Homicide Memorial (coming up later in this post) and the "Dead Baby Sculpture" pictured here:
The towel was a "remaindering." I didn't touch it.
Here's the label for that sculpture:
Once, several years ago, I got myself entangled in a controversy concerning this very building, Bulldog Bait and Tackle. The deal was this: Somebody in a position of power in Columbus Consolidated Government got the bright idea that Bulldog Bait and Tackle needed to be gentrified -- "cleaned up," as it were, in fact, torn down and re-built to "coordinate" with the nearby Civil War Naval Museum, which is all brick and spiffy. Well, this didn't set well with me. It didn't set well with other thinking folks, either. I mean, who in the world ever heard of a gentrified, cleaned up, spiffy BAIT SHOP, for god's sake? You might begin at this point to wonder, Well, what did Bulldog Bait and Tackle in fact look like at this time? Answer: It looked like a bait and tackle shop SHOULD look; it looked like a dump. It was comprised mainly of a piece of a trailer/mobile home or two, and it had all sorts of appendages, and it had a worm dispensing machine on the front porch, and it had a BIG bulldog painted on the street side of the main structure. Bulldog Bait and Tackle was a thing of beauty. And Mayor Bobby Peters and several others there in the courthouse failed to recognize this beauty and wanted to destroy this prime example of vernacular architecture, this gem of local culture. So we went toe to toe, me 'n them folks downtown. I still have, somewhere, copies of that correspondence. Others got involved in the fray, too. Right about now you might be wondering, Did Cathy not realize that in the larger context -- in consideration of the vast myriad of challenges and issues that we Columbusites, that we humans on this earth face -- on a daily basis -- feeding the hungry and achieving world peace to name two -- Did Cathy not realize that preserving Bulldog Bait and Tackle probably didn't measure up as an issue one should put a whole lot of energy and time into? Answer: Yes, I guess I did. But at a certain point in time the cause just overtook me, and I couldn't stop myself. And besides, Bobby Peters and his unfunny, wannabe smartass self got on my last nerve. So I stuck with it. We eventually compromised, Bobby and I. The city agreed not to build a brick shithouse -- uh, that would be bait shop -- but rather to build it out of wood, with a porch, something that sort of better faked "vernacular" than a brick monolith would. So that's what we have now -- Columbus Consolidated Government's fake vernacular version of a bait shop. However, I am proud to point out that the good ol' folks at Bulldog have, over the few years that the "revised version" has been in place, done all they can to return the place to its former beauty, to funk the place back up, as it were, so to speak. So yeah! Y'all go, BULLDOG! Long live Bulldog Bait and Tackle!
Above: An indication that Columbus is now safe from invading Yankee forces.
The Homicide Memorial is not funny. Erected by the parents of a young woman who was a number of years ago the victim of a homicide here in Columbus, the memorial is comprised of bricks into which have been etched the names of that young woman as well as other Columbus homicide victims. The dates of the homicides are there, too. As I look at the bricks, I can remember many of the stories and the names, but some of them are complete mysteries to me. The whole thing is sobering. Fred keeps wondering if any of the victims' families, who surely must have paid to have their loved ones' names put there, get any solace from coming here and sitting on the benches to look at the Homicide Memorial. I hope so. I failed to get a photo of the benches -- will do that next time I'm there.
I think I'll finish up today's post with a shot of a maybe "not so weird" scene at Rotary Park:
Fred and I spent some time in Rotary Park just yesterday – yes, admittedly probably augmenting the weirdness that was there already – and here’s some of what we saw:
The first cat grotto we spied was off in the bushes to the left, just past the south end of Rotary Park. First I saw a cat. He crossed my path (Yes, he was black.) and seemed to be headin' somewhere. I watched him and he led me to this weirdness ...
Then, at another spot, a whole 'nother cat grotto.
And off in the bushes behind that one, a whole AVENUE of cat grottoes ...
When we first saw this thing coming up next, we didn't WHAT in the world it was.
It's hard to get a good photo of it, with its marble tiles laid into the ground. The tiles that you see in a double vertical line are embellished with the first day of each month (for example, "November 1") and a pair of what looked to me like a child's or baby's footprints. The other set of tiles, the ones across the top, were the more difficult ones to photograph, because of their placement in an arc above the double-vertical tiles, and they're more worn. Some are even broken. We did manage to figure out, though, that each of them features an hour (7:00, 8:00, 9:00 ...). That's when Fred figured out that the thing is a solar clock, the idea being that one can stand on, say, "November 1" (Coincidentally, we were there on, guess what? November 1!), and your shadow will point to the time of day. Fred demonstrates:
Lo and behold, it worked! Fred's shadow pointed to 2:00, and indeed the time was just about two o'clock!
Fred laughed at me because when we were trying to figure out what the thing was, I had mused, "Does it have anything to do with dead babies?" Now, if y'all look at all my photos here, you'll figure out why I thought that. Yes, you will. Reason: We had just passed the Homicide Memorial (coming up later in this post) and the "Dead Baby Sculpture" pictured here:
The towel was a "remaindering." I didn't touch it.Here's the label for that sculpture:
Once, several years ago, I got myself entangled in a controversy concerning this very building, Bulldog Bait and Tackle. The deal was this: Somebody in a position of power in Columbus Consolidated Government got the bright idea that Bulldog Bait and Tackle needed to be gentrified -- "cleaned up," as it were, in fact, torn down and re-built to "coordinate" with the nearby Civil War Naval Museum, which is all brick and spiffy. Well, this didn't set well with me. It didn't set well with other thinking folks, either. I mean, who in the world ever heard of a gentrified, cleaned up, spiffy BAIT SHOP, for god's sake? You might begin at this point to wonder, Well, what did Bulldog Bait and Tackle in fact look like at this time? Answer: It looked like a bait and tackle shop SHOULD look; it looked like a dump. It was comprised mainly of a piece of a trailer/mobile home or two, and it had all sorts of appendages, and it had a worm dispensing machine on the front porch, and it had a BIG bulldog painted on the street side of the main structure. Bulldog Bait and Tackle was a thing of beauty. And Mayor Bobby Peters and several others there in the courthouse failed to recognize this beauty and wanted to destroy this prime example of vernacular architecture, this gem of local culture. So we went toe to toe, me 'n them folks downtown. I still have, somewhere, copies of that correspondence. Others got involved in the fray, too. Right about now you might be wondering, Did Cathy not realize that in the larger context -- in consideration of the vast myriad of challenges and issues that we Columbusites, that we humans on this earth face -- on a daily basis -- feeding the hungry and achieving world peace to name two -- Did Cathy not realize that preserving Bulldog Bait and Tackle probably didn't measure up as an issue one should put a whole lot of energy and time into? Answer: Yes, I guess I did. But at a certain point in time the cause just overtook me, and I couldn't stop myself. And besides, Bobby Peters and his unfunny, wannabe smartass self got on my last nerve. So I stuck with it. We eventually compromised, Bobby and I. The city agreed not to build a brick shithouse -- uh, that would be bait shop -- but rather to build it out of wood, with a porch, something that sort of better faked "vernacular" than a brick monolith would. So that's what we have now -- Columbus Consolidated Government's fake vernacular version of a bait shop. However, I am proud to point out that the good ol' folks at Bulldog have, over the few years that the "revised version" has been in place, done all they can to return the place to its former beauty, to funk the place back up, as it were, so to speak. So yeah! Y'all go, BULLDOG! Long live Bulldog Bait and Tackle!
Above: An indication that Columbus is now safe from invading Yankee forces.
The Homicide Memorial is not funny. Erected by the parents of a young woman who was a number of years ago the victim of a homicide here in Columbus, the memorial is comprised of bricks into which have been etched the names of that young woman as well as other Columbus homicide victims. The dates of the homicides are there, too. As I look at the bricks, I can remember many of the stories and the names, but some of them are complete mysteries to me. The whole thing is sobering. Fred keeps wondering if any of the victims' families, who surely must have paid to have their loved ones' names put there, get any solace from coming here and sitting on the benches to look at the Homicide Memorial. I hope so. I failed to get a photo of the benches -- will do that next time I'm there.
I think I'll finish up today's post with a shot of a maybe "not so weird" scene at Rotary Park:
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