If I had time, I do a photo booklet on each trip. The week I just spent on the east coast was particularly rich. But there are other pressing matters to attend to (running a publishing business, fixing a blown-out well, catching up on homestead maintenance), so the best I can do right now at this throw out some random photographs. I’m also going to try to recap the week soon. Such fun!
I’ve always had backpacks for airplane travel, eschewing suitcases and wheeled bags. I figured it was a good workout to have the weight on my shoulders, and I always walked up the stairs instead of using escalators, and never took the moving walkways. BUT on my last trip, I had so much weight, it wore me out. This time I got an Osprey rolling pack (with day pack, wheels, and shoulder straps), a new Da Kine day pack, and cut down on clothing as much as I could. Much improved.
Even though I have a (11″) MacAir laptop, a bunch of camera gear, couple of books, and on this trip, a digital projector, the weight is on wheels — such a relief. Well, duh.
Airports are stressful enough as it is. I’ll get my workouts in other ways. The strap is for a fairly aerodynamic camera bag, in which I have my new Olympus OM5-D10 with 3 lenses — gonna carry it in my city explorations here. The vest is a Columbia Omni-Shade — lightweight, bunch of pockets Also, stealth vaping — heh-heh — works in airports.
My cousin Mike and I were a year apart and we hung out together whenever we could as kids. We were the same size and looked a lot alike. He went to college at UC Santa Barbara and threw the javelin on the track team. He always painted, from a young age. After college, he moved to New Orleans, then NYC, where he sold paintings on the street. Next he settled down in Provincetown, working as a waiter to support his art habit.
In Fall, 1965, I hitchhiked across the country, on I guess what you’d call a vision quest. The counterculture was rocking then.
This photo is when we went clamming in P-Town. Mike’s wearing the John-Lennon-style hat I’d bought in NYC.
Mike then went on to build a phantasmagorical sculptural village in Arizona, which he called Eliphante. He told me he was inspired by the work of Bob De Buck and Jerry Thorman in Placitas, New Mexico, which was depicted in our book Shelter. Eliphante is featured in our book Home Work, pages shown here.
Mike passed away 4 years ago. His wife, Leda Livant, has just put up a website of some of Mike’s paintings here. The Eliphante website is here. (Lotta links.)
BTW, when I left P-Town hitchhiking on a Saturday afternoon, I got picked up by some kids from The Rhode Island School of Design. They were going to a Bob Dylan concert that night, well all right! It was one of the first Dylan performances where he did folk music the 1st half, then brought out Robbie Robertson et al for rock ‘n roll. Things were so loose then that I was right up at the stage with my camera and got some memorable black and white shots.
After a month on the road, I came back to San Francisco, quit my job as an insurance broker, and went to work as a carpenter.
I ran across these guys last night. Left to right, Guillem Ramirez and Xerta Puig. They flew from Barcelona to Chicago, rented the Harley, and were finishing up an 18-day vacation. They travelled on Highway 66 and, were on their way into San Francisco, then heading down Highway 1 to L.A., where they’ll drop off the bike and fly back to Spain. He’s a builder and she has a business that sells nativity items.
(When we start up The Shelter Blog in a few weeks, I’ll be putting much of the building stuff on the new blog, and doing more posts like this.)
Saw this yesterday in Pt. Arena. To Tell the truth when I see these caravans of elaborate and custom 3-wheelers (they often stop off in Pt. Reyes Station), I think, why not get a car?
The design here is pretty snappy though. They seem to run from 15-24k$.
The drive to Pt. Arena is about 3 hours. Usually takes me about 4. This time, leaving in the afternoon, instead of (as usual) early morning, it took me 8 hours to get to Louie’s. Did I have fun! I must have stopped, usually to shoot photos, 50 times…I’m thinking of changing the nature of this blog once we get THESHELTERBLOG up and running, maybe tie it in with Instagram, a photo+ caption a day. More like getting you to ride shotgun with me. For example:
Anywhere on this Pacific Coast, there are creek beds, rivers, canyons running perpendicular to the ocean. Water-carved arroyos. As you drive, you can look down and see if there is a trail down to the beach, and there often is. Just before sunset last night, I spotted the trail here. it was like going through a jungle. A pristine white (dirty white color — the best — sand beach, mountains of driftwood.
“The Terrapin is our new model series of trailer campers. Similar to the small trailers of the 1950s and 60s, these campers are a great platform for road trips, car-camping, or to haul to the lake. They offer a little more room than is typically available in the bed of the truck, and can be disconnected to set up base camp. When mounted to a trailer frame, the possibilities for small custom campers are nearly endless…
From top down:
-Elegant steep gable house on 28th Ave near Balboa in SF. How come you never see anything this cool in Dwell Magazine?
-House frame in Vallejo, hip roof, nice little understated dormer. You can learn a lot just studying this nicely-proportioned frame.
-If you remember when skateboards were like this, you are pretty old. In the 40s we used to take apart clamp-on-to-yr.-shoe skates and nail them on a piece of wood. This is in the window at The Purple Skunk Skate on Geary Blvd. in SF.
-Ducati on street in SF. I like seeing the frame, as with the house in Vallejo.
-Bambi Airstream, obviously a new one, Novato
Boy, I love getting out and around, shooting pics.
WELL! In retrospect I think it was sheer exhaustion. Finishing the new book after a speeded-up schedule, too little sleep, too much caffeine, 3 major trips back to back — I don’t do airplanes/airports well at all — and I got to Hawaii — long anticipated, oh boy, warm water — wrote a blog post the first morning there about how rich my life was, and keblam, the next day folded like a limp hot air balloon…Long story short — it’s been about 2 weeks of feeling like shit + severe neck pain and I’m finally on the other side…I recognized a couple of things during this episode: (1) I’m a total wimp about being sick. It’s the end of my world; I don’t suffer feeling bad or low-chi gladly and (2) I haven’t had sufficient empathy for people that are ill or in pain. The neck thing made me realize what people who have say, back pain, are going through. Holy shit! Well, a big fat (800 mg) Ibuprofen cured the neck pain — voila — plus there was a music documentary of George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inauguration — blues, baby! — and a killer version of “Hey Bo Diddley” with Bo and Ronnie Woods that was extraordinary — and I started to move my neck, and sweet Jesus, I feel alive again, and ready to get on with my life. I might even jump on my skateboard this afternoon.
Whenever things break down like this for me, I can count back to at least 6 dumb things I’ve done, in combo. Here there were like 9. Look at the amount of stuff I was carrying — no checked bags — plus I was walking up all the stairs, not using escalators, in airports, to get a workout. Yes, yes…
