2900 miles. Summer, short. Driving, long.

August already...in Arizona, back-to-school doesn't wait until after the dog days of summer. Last Thursday the teens returned, so I'm back in the classroom, hoping the air-conditioning won't malfunction, as it has every August since I began teaching in Tucson...106 degrees outside is no joke.

I try not to inflict a what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation-assignment on my students, but I do feel compelled, here, to post my own summary: a good chunk of June was spent moving (two households) and traveling, and although it was definitely not vacation, Seneca's oft-quoted "travel and change of place impart new vigor" comes to mind...

The vigorous route, then: 2900 miles...

After my wife and I moved into a new home at the beginning of June, I immediately flew to Georgia to help my mother pack up for her own move; she lives down the road from us in Tucson now. At the last minute, arrangements to ship her car fell through. (Beware the shady conglomerate of car-shippers based out of southern Florida.) Result: I ended up driving her car out west--a cross-continent road trip through The South and Texas, with a several-day detour to visit friends in central Florida...So, from Augusta, via Atlanta, down to the Orlando area, then through Mobile, New Orleans, on to San Antonio through El Paso, ending up, almost three thousand miles later, back in Tucson.

====================

A South Carolina sunrise,

from the Georgia side of the Savannah River...

On my visits to Georgia over the years, especially since I've lived in the desert, I've come to love morning runs along the Savannah River, on the Augusta Canal trail. Languid mornings, fog lifting over backwater reflections...

...19th-century brick, railroad bridges...

Maybe it sounds shallow--I mean, people are most important, and I still have friends in Georgia--but now that I no longer have family members who live there, which will make any future visits much less frequent--one of the things I'll miss most is that trail. Water, tunnels of greenery curtained with Spanish moss, humid solitude, history...

Neither of my parents is from Georgia, but that's where we ended up living when my father retired from the military when I was a kid. Nice enough, but I never did really feel 'at home.' As polite as people can be--and part of me does miss the social lubrication of 'yessirs' and 'thank you ma'ams'--I never could completely get away from "you ain't from around here, boy, are ya." So, I came back out west for grad school, moving to Seattle, and after spending a year each in France and Nicaragua, I've been in Arizona for eight years now...

Georgia's second city does have its international side, which pre-dates "The New South" of the late 20th century.

Chinese script on an antebellum building...huh?

(I went to high school just a few blocks from here.)

Go back up to that canal--dug in the mid-19th century by African slave and Irish-immigrant labor, then enlarged in the 1870's by Chinese workers; those laborers, from either further afield weren't limited to building the railroads out West... In the Reconstruction South, Augusta became home to one of the oldest Chinese communities east of the Mississippi...

And at the Saturday morning Farmers' market down by the river--

--you can now get arepas colombianas: 

Grits and fried green tomatoes still rule, 

but this small southern city has evolving tastes...

Also just a few blocks from where I went to high school, a relic of 18th-century farm life--the home of a signer of the Declaration of Independence:

Meadow Garden dates to the 1790's and was originally the home of George Walton, a young member of the Georgia delegation to the Continental Congress of 1776.

I'd never been, so I visited this landmark during what will probably turn out to be my last trip to Georgia for a good while. The vibrant interior, furnished with period pieces, struck me. 

This blue: historically accurate. 

Who knew that 18th-century decorators favored such a bold shade?

During the Federalist Era, almost every home had a portrait of George Washington...

...and here, he presides on a wall of...yep, peaches. 

Georgia has been taking that fruit seriously for a long time...

What's better on a summer day than a drippingly fragrant peach?

(Note, too, how "y'all" is spelled here...correctly.

"Ya'll" makes my skin crawl.)

After driving my mother to Atlanta, where she got on the plane to Arizona, I headed down to central Florida to see old friends. With days of hotels and highway driving looming before me, their home was truly an oasis.

Kitchen-wall words with pedigree...

Ahh, subtropical mornings:

...with BIG birds!

These neighborhood sand hill cranes let me get so close...Alarmingly tall...

Hearing their cries, it felt like I was running through the wilderness instead of a suburban neighborhood...

Downtown Orlando's Lake Eola Park:

Away from the theme parks, Orlando is a birdwatcher's dream, tree-filled and never far from water...

...and street-art. This wall truly caught my eye, as I drove by it on the day that the tv/radio/print/socialnetwork news was saturated with the details of the Charleston church shooting.

Head, and heart, hurt.

Oh, The South...

"Tortured past" and "complicated legacy" are the clichéd perennial fallback phrases that almost everyone uses when talking about The South's history of slavery and segregation. Really, though, is there anywhere on the planet that can escape those epithets? (I'm reminded of this quote from great Western writer Wallace Stegner: "No one who has studied Western History can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.") Prejudice-fueled-injustice--its flavor may vary, but its presence marks all corners of human geography... 

   

So, having spent the largest chunk of my growing-up down South, I can't help but note the lingering aftertaste of the American brand of chattel slavery south of the Mason-Dixon Line whenever I see the region's historical architecture. So much of it is lovely, aesthetically...but I've never been comfortable with those who insist on using the adjective 'genteel' when describing the Antebellum 'way of life.' This summer, with the Charleston shooting and the resulting Confederate-flag discussions, the 'heritage-not-hate' slogans were heard again...

...and although this building (below) is not directly linked to that politically-controversial issue...

...it does epitomize for me, the unpleasant undertones of a historically complete understanding of The South's "heritage." This structure in Augusta, Georgia (again, just up the street and around the corner from where I went to high school) is the old First Baptist Church--the site, where in 1845, a regional convention of Baptists decided to formally separate themselves from the national denomination in order to become "Southern Baptists." Why? Slavery. More and more of their coreligionists up north were becoming increasingly vocal Abolitionists, so it was time for a break. The genesis of the Southern Baptist Convention was their pro-slavery stance; truly, black and white. 

Lovely building. Heritage, indeed. 

Millions of Americans today owe their religious affiliation to what took place here. And yet...

How many truly understand the origin? 

This should not be read as a rant against any one denomination in particular--but history is history.

It wasn't until 1995 that the Southern Baptist Convention formally 'repented' of its pro-slavery position.

Driving up from Orlando to finally head out west, I took a detour off I-10 up in Florida's panhandle. I'd never seen the Gulf Coast, and I was curious about the so-called 'Redneck Riviera.' 

It was a Saturday; it felt like half of the population within a half-day's drive of the Gulf of Mexico was all here. Stuck in traffic, this vacant lot caught my eye:

Some juxtaposition, eh?

Powdery white beaches and turquoise waters. Check.

By evening, along the Alabama coastal wetlands around Mobile Bay.

Mobile.

It had never been on my radar as a destination. I decided to spend the night here--a childhood friend, whom I'd not seen in many years, moved here a while ago, so it was good to see him and his family...And, oh, the seafood...(Try The Oyster House on the causeway.)

The next morning I drove through downtown--home to the tallest skyscrapers on the Gulf Coast and also old Fort Condé--the original French military fortifications on Mobile Bay. Mobile would be French, then Spanish and British before finally becoming American in 1813.

By late morning, I was in New Orleans. Time for beignets and café au lait at the Café du Monde.

Obscene amounts of powdered sugar.

There are some things you just have to do.

Along with the Louisiana air itself, the copious white powder and the throngs of sweaty tourists make everything sticky...truly atmospheric...and gloriously so. And the wait staff--visual confirmation of New Orleans' legacy as an outpost of the French Empire and an immigrant draw--largely Vietnamese...

I was wondering if this corner of Jackson Square had become one of those tourists-have-replaced-the-locals landmarks. While waiting in line for the restroom (yes, have to queue up for the toilet), a guy next to me asked me, "so, are ya from here?" I asked him the same question, to which he replied: "Oh yeah I come here all the time, and especially when friends from out of town visit." Okay, then!

Such a celebrated city--a city I'd not yet visited--but I only had a few hours here...enough of a first-hand taste, though, to ensure that I will return.

While French is no longer the language-of-the-street in the French Quarter, 

you have to love how local sports fan have adopted Frenchy spelling: "GEAUX Saints!"

(I know, I know, 

I'm a French-teacher-who-works-in-the-U.S.,

but I'd never yet visited La Nouvelle Orléans?

Hey, I was gonna get around to it eventually,

it was on my list...

and it still is.)

With limited time, after just several hours in The Crescent City, 

I kept heading west, this time away from I-10,

driving along the Mississippi River, through Vacherie.

Banana trees everywhere,

next to tin-roofed wooden structures.

Felt like I was back in Central America.

Truly sub-tropical down in those parishes...

In the bookstore of the old Laura Plantation on this River Road, I had a conversation with one of the docents--a young man who speaks fluent local French--le bon français acadien. He learned it spending summers with his grandparents and great-grandparents who spoke no English. Finding fluent Louisiana francophones is becoming more difficult, as the younger people increasingly turn to mainstream English...

Et voilà: "Oak Alley."

A Southern Plantation home par excellence, and the French is entirely intentional. This was originally named "Bon Séjour," founded by the Aimé and Roman families in the 1830's. The sugar aristocracy along the lower Mississippi River was mostly French-speaking Créole society who preferred that their daughters not marry les Américains. A magnificent setting--centuries-old oaks, the mighty Mississippi, and pillared Greek Revival Majesty...all built with slave labor.

The honesty of Oak Alley's depiction and exhibits of slave life impressed me. (It wasn't too long ago that visitors to many plantations still encountered phrases such as 'and this is where the servants lived'...)

Inside a slave's shack.

An example of an iron 'collar' with bells,

and below that, "children's transport shackles."

Table and map showing the percentage of the regional population that was actually made up of slaves...

...and a listing of some of the names of the French-speaking African slaves--

no last names, no African names--

a memorial, of sorts, to those

who made plantation life possible here during the 

Antebellum decades of "The Peculiar Institution." 

From Créole life along the Mississippi to the Cajun world along the Bayou Teche:

I stopped in Breaux Bridge ("Pont Breaux" here) to stretch my legs in the Crawfish Capital of the world. The helpful lady in the regional information office, proud of her local heritage, told me that, as I continued heading west, there were two things I had to do: eat boudin and handle baby 'gators.

So I did.

At Billy's, in Lafayette Parish. 

The town of Scott is, officialy, "The Boudin Capital of the World." In much of the French-speaking world, 'boudin' can refer to a blood-sausage, but in Louisiana, it's blessedly safe for non-vampires. Pork, rice, spice...all nicely encased. I tasted it in all its glory: boudin roll, (yep, fried in an egg-roll wrapper) plain boudin, and boudin balls (crunchy!), washed down with Dr. Pepper in a glass bottle. Mangez, buvez, as they say...

As for handling baby alligators,

it may be touristy,

but it's just off I-10 in Jennings--

you can't not get off the highway to handle these guys.

They are so docile...and so (surprisingly) soft.

The boudin kept me going all the way through Houston at rush-hour until I finally arrived in San Antonio.

The Alamo. 

Riverwalk.

A pedestrian oasis after driving all day...

The next morning, I got up early--desperately needing a morning run after the previous day of porcine-feasting in Cajun Country. The streets in the King William district, lined with 19th-century mansions, and the paths along the San Antonio River, make for a perfect urban loop of greenery and architecture.

 

(The city even puts out a handy brochure with maps for downtown run/walk routes.)

Heading west--the Texas Hill Country: big sky, wildflowers...

...and, of course, barbecue.

At last, just one more night in a hotel before sleeping in my own bed again in Tucson--spent the night in El Paso, and drove up a bare mountainside for this view the next morning--looking over the city into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico:

Back in the desert again. 

Borderlands.

(Another place where history's 'mixed legacy'

has led to a complicated present.)

An unlikely spot, perhaps, but this hillside motel just north of downtown is home to one of the best roadside breakfasts I have ever had. Think Waffle House...or Alice's Diner--but Spanish-speaking.

Next time I'm passing through west Texas, this hole-in-the-wall will be a destination. Driving west from the lands of grits and biscuits-and-gravy, this taste of hashbrowns and huevos con frijoles made me feel like I was 'back home'--a culinary welcome-back to the Southwest...¡Gracias, Lucy!

Before the final four and a half hours of driving to Tucson, I walked around downtown El Paso a bit.

streetscape in the Segundo Barrio district,

the blocks surrounding the border crossing.
Color and lively shopping...and good eats...

And, for the last meal on the road--lunch just a few hours before arriving in Tucson,
in Mesilla, New Mexico, a plate of red- and green-chile smothered enchiladas in La Posta De Mesilla, an adobe compound that was once a stop on the Butterfield Stagecoach Line in the 19th century, when this tiny town served as the territorial capital for New Mexico and Arizona...

Taste of place.

The place that's become home.

The Desert Southwest.

Road trip, safely ended.

The soundtrack to summer in Tucson is the song of cicadas--hidden in the mesquite and palo verde trees...you will occasionally spot one resting in the morning hours on a stucco wall:

And when the heat in the lowlands gets to be too much, all you have to do is go up.

A quick 45-minute drive from my house takes me to the highest peaks and trails in the Santa Catalina Mountains, where, at 9000', it's 30 degrees cooler than the desert 6500' below...

...green cool peaks, granite crags, sky island meadows...

...and we try to hold on to summer...

mountaintops, long days, wildflowers...

"...the dominance of the eye..."

A few years ago, I came across A Book of Migrations by Rebecca Solnit.

This passage from that remarkable book has stuck with me:

     "Perhaps people travel for pleasure because the visual is much more memorable than the tangible, the seen than the felt.  At the time, traveling may be nothing more than a series of discomforts in magnificent settings:  running for the train to paradise in a heat wave, carrying an ever heavier pack in alpine splendor, seeing sublime ruins with stomach trouble. Yet it is the field of images and not the body of sensations that lingers.  My mother once remarked that if women remembered what childbirth felt like, no one would have more than one child.  And so I, third child of a third child, owe my existence to forgetting and my taste for travels to the dominance of the eye..."

...the field of images...

   ...the dominance of the eye...

Maybe that's why I haven't felt as much of a need in recent months to come back to this blog. In high school and as an undergrad, I entertained the notion that I was a wordsmith...In grad school, writing about writing grew tiresome, and then when I spent a year abroad living in Paris, I occasionally dreamed about getting a 'real camera' and documenting more of the images that were informing my sense-of-myself-within-geography instead of translating the images into words. (I did spend large amounts of time writing to the woman who would later marry me, though, conflating sense-of-place and sense-of-me in both par-avion letters and scrolluminous e-mails...)

This blog began as an outgrowth of group e-mails sent to friends during the year that my wife and I lived in Nicaragua. Within a year of moving back to Seattle, we realized that we wanted to leave behind the leaden sky winters of the Pacific Northwest, and so we moved down here to Tucson. (Eight years now?!) To share our impressions of the Sonoran Desert with our friends and family 'back home' and 'back East', I kept posting a few times a month for a few years...

...and then smart-phones happened.

   ...and then Instagram.

Yes, the tyranny of the square-format and the ubiquity of over-sharing are inescapable facets of the tool/beast which has become our portal, via our thumbs, to ever expanding grids of curated lives. So be it. Or rather, to be more modernly tautological: it is what it is.

Within the constraints of captions and hashtags, then, my need to write and share images has been finding a more immediate outlet here:

Images from past trips, snapshots from trail-runs, minutiae conveying a sense-of-place...

Hmm...this blog then--becoming more of a forum for occasional musings and ranting/raving/reflecting...
a self-published monthly? semi-monthly...?
desination running-guides? 
road-trip travelogues? 
"listicles?"

Looks like it.

Thanks, readers, for keeping up... 

Here are a couple of those 'listicles' I've recently had published, by the way,

for Arizona Tourism and the Matador Network: 

       - 20 Things You Didn't Know About Arizona 

       - 8 Incredible Natural Areas in Arizona You've Probably Never Heard of

"Black and White" for this Monday's #travelpics...and the Sonoran Desert's "Second Spring"

Another summer has come and gone...

Tomorrow is the first official day of Autumn...AND it's Monday. 

Keep your wanderlust alive, though, by signing on for the weekly #travelpics chat on twitter, hosted by Kathryn Cooper a.k.a. @AntiTourist and her co-hosts @sihpromatum, @TheTravelCamel, @VibrantIreland, and @travellingmolly... Check in at 3 p.m. ET/ noon on the West Coast.

This week's theme will be "black and white" in travel photography...

...which got me thinking back to when I first began thinking about taking black-and-white photos. It was during the year I lived in Paris; all I had, in those pre-digital-camera days, on my grad-school budget was a point-and-shoot...The Monoprix supermarket around the corner from where I lived had a kiosk where I would drop off my rolls of film, hoping for scenes to turn out. Few cities are as photographically documented as Paris, but even so, I was anxious to get a few shots that would be "MINE" and not just some postcard.

One winter morning, then, from the roof of the Printemps department store: 

During that winter, I spent a week-and-a-half down in Barcelona,

thinking about my father who had died only a year-and-a-half before.

he'd spent quite a bit of time in Spain before he met my mother;

 I ended up chasing his ghost around the city.

This wall in the Barri Gòtic got me thinking about all that gets embedded in a place,

all that gets embedded in us as we travel...

Another wall, several years later, far from Spain--

one of the finest examples of Inca stonework:

the twelve-angled stone in Cuzco, Perú.

No metal tools, no mortar.

Centuries of earthquakes haven't toppled this wall;

the masonry is so well-fitted that even today,

not even a sheet of paper will fit between the stones.

When shape and texture alone are what you want to capture in an image,

color becomes a distraction.

Moving to Arizona seven years ago, we couldn't get enough of the iconic saguaros. I've since calmed down a bit, taking fewer cactus pics, but here's one of my favorites from our first hike in Saguaro National Park.

The botany here invites zooming in--this agave almost becomes a study in abstract repetition:

Back to France and architecture--

last summer my wife and I finally made it to the Château de Chenonceau.

It's one of the most photographed sights in Europe, with its arches over the River Cher. Don't make the mistake of passing it by, thinking that it would just be better to avoid the crowds by going to some other castle. Come here mid-week, in the late afternoon, when the big tour-bus-groups begin to leave. You'll have the Renaissance galleries and gardens almost to yourself if you stay until closing time.

(and, incidentally, all the rest of these are iPhone-photos)

Still in France, to the Southwest, now,

in the Tower of the Château de Montaigne...

...the residence of the famed Renaissance man Michel de Montaigne, who, in some ways, can be considered Europe's first 'modern' writer, inventor of the essay and a 'blogger' before his time. During the year I lived in France as a grad-student, I'd never had the chance to make my way down to this part of France; it was a delight to wander around the vineyard-covered landscape.

Montaigne (1533-1592) spent the last years of his life in the circular tower of his family's château, converting its different levels into his chapel, library, study, and bedroom. He wrote all of his "Essais" here, in semi-retirement after years of public service and traveling. While my visit was not exactly a 'literary pilgrimmage,' being in this tower, in the rooms where so many thoughts were carefully crafted so long ago--it was sobering.

Thinking about the ability of photography to capture a moment and render it timeless, this passage from Montaigne comes to mind:

     "The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life."

Back to the Southwest US,

a streetscape in Santa Fe:

Again, a wall...shape, texture, and shadow at play...black-and-white is the way to go...

A scene from earlier this summer--an oasis on the outskirts of Tucson drying out:

No shortage of water here,

flowing in the Jeonju River in S. Korea this past June:

...and from Jeonju up to Seoul, 
for this view of Zaha Hadid's recently completed Dongdaemun Design Plaza:

...and some of the not-so-spiral stairs inside:

For some more architecture-and-people,
this scene from the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris:

Talking intently on his cell-phone, on a sunny lunch-break, after a long grey spring--the ups and downs of living and working in the French capital...

And some outdoor cooking, in front of the XVIIIth-c. Mission San Xavier del Bac, just outside of Tucson:

And finally, to the Grand Canyon State's namesake landscape:

Last November, I spent a couple of days here; I hadn't been in a few years, and I also had a little bit of fact-finding to do for a project I was working on. In the past, the timing hadn't worked out to see sunset or sunrise over the vast chasm, so I made sure to include time for that on this trip. As I arrived at dawn and made my way to the edge of the South Rim, I saw that the canyon was filled with a sea of fog--I didn't learn until later that it was a rare inversion, a climatic phenomenon that only occurs once a decade or so in the Grand Canyon--definitely a privileged moment! I meant to take some photos of the sunrise and the morning light spilling into the gorges below, but instead, the play of light and fog ended up stealing the show.

I took this particular photo just a few minutes after arriving. While the sunrise a half-hour later was indeed spectacular, this shot ended up being one of my favorites. This particular tree-topped outcropping, disappearing into the roiling mist reminded me of Chinese scroll paintings and landscapes I had hiked in while in the mountains of Korea, so I decided to take a vertical shot, including just enough of the dawn sky for color, but focusing on the rocky profile and trees disappearing into the fog, masking the canyon-floor a mile below. I'm sure there must have been some visitors who were disappointed because they couldn't see into the canyon on this particular morning, but for me, watching the waves of fog in the quiet cold--it's one of the most spectacular landscape-moments I've ever seen...

   ...and in this morning's Sunday newspaper, I woke up to this:

This photo won first place in the Arizona Daily Star/Western National Parks Association photo contest; definitely a nice way to wake up to a weekend morning!

===============

By mid-September, most years, the monsoon begins to dry out here in southern Arizona. The rains have been good in Tucson this year; what locals call 'the Second Spring' is well under way. Wildflowers are blooming again, taking advantage of the moisture and the break from the 100+ degree days. Here are a few scenes from my run along the trail to Bear Canyon this morning...

As I ran into Bear Canyon, this guy-on-horseback was sauntering out...

Lush and well-watered, the canyons right now...

Along the trails, in the flowing washes, some of the wildflowers I saw this morning:

clockwise, from top left:

ivyleaf morning-glory, Coulter's hibiscus (aka 'desert rosemallow),

allionia incarnata (aka 'trailing windmills')

and desert thorn-apple datura

(This website, incidentally, 

is one of the best resources for identifying desert plants and blooms.)

An evening scene, from last week:

(blooming next to the prickly pear: 'psilostrophe cooperi,' aka 'paperflower')

Technically, there are three distinct 'summers' in the Sonoran desert.

The first hot, dry summer--May-June,

   then the rainy monsoon--July through mid-September,

      and finally, the post-monsoon summer, which lasts through most of October.

This 'Second Spring' is just the briefly blossoming tail-end of the monsoon...

We'll enjoy it while it lasts.