“Tickets, Please”

We’ve flown into Manchester Airport on our last two trips to England because it’s convenient to the places we’re headed to. Perhaps laid back isn’t the proper description for the atmosphere there, although that may be true when it’s compared to the legendary chaos at Heathrow (I don’t know about that, and have no intentions of finding out). My favorite aspect of the airport is its proximity to the train station—I can shake off the mental numbness I’ve accumulated on the flight in minutes and be on a train, on the ground, looking ahead to my destination. 

This time, after passing through Customs and getting our bearings, we had an hour’s wait until the train to Ulverston departed—a good excuse for a latté inside the station and then a bit of skulking, paparazzi-style, with the NEX5n. As far as I could tell, none of the principal subjects were aware of me—I’m sure I seemed nothing more than another bored tourist, if they noticed me at all. I’m equally certain that had I aimed my full-sized DSLR at them I would have been very obvious, an intruder in their daily routine. That’s one reason I left the Canon at home.

And then suddenly I heard “Tickets’ please” and we swayed off towards Leeds through the tattooed brick backside of Manchester, where red and white are the graffiti artists’ preferred paints. It was much the same in the smaller villages we passed through, and I felt a bit sad that the old buildings—factories, most impressively, dwarfing entire blocks with their dark blood-red bulks—had come to such anonymous, pitiful ends, scribbled on by youths with (likely) no sense of history, or decorum. And not a single unbroken window.

The weather, wrapped in a gray winter overcoat, spit at us the entire way to Ulverston, but the train was quiet and we shut out any thoughts of rain on the Cumbria Way, where we’d be walking in two days. At the Ulverston station a young woman called a taxi for us and a short drive through town led us to our first B&B, Candlewyck.

Puzzled

Dreaming In Oz

Surrounded protectively by her luggage, hands wrapped reassuringly around a mobile phone, a young woman sleeps soundly amidst the hustle inside the Manchester Airport train station. We can only guess where she’s come from, or her destination—her story is safe, anonymous. I would have passed without taking a picture except for those shoes. While they’re not an iconic shade of Technicolor® red, and (as far as we know) possess no magical powers, perhaps she’s dreaming, as Dorothy once did, that there’s indeed no place like home. 

Connections

Waiting for the morning train, Manchester, England.

Evening & Morning On The River Wharfe

We’ve been planning for the Cumbria Way for several months, and now the walk is eight days away and it is still difficult to comprehend. Familiar routines crowd around as I sit typing up this post, but the cats are fed, birds, too, and a table of gear awaits a final packing, and all else is simply mental. Anticipation. Checklists. A touch of…dread? Can we walk that far in a day? How deep is the deep end of life’s pool, really?

I expect the Cumbria Way will surprise and please us with its personality, but I’ll miss one element of the English landscape absent there and that is its rivers. There will be spacious views from the fells but no meandering channels flowing through fresh woods, no murmuring conversations to make long miles easier. The Dales Way spoiled us in that way, especially along the wonderful River Wharfe.

Pigeons Lose A Roost

I was wandering through central Montana in 2009 when I photographed this huge grain elevator, and then yesterday evening I saw a recent photo of the building showing it half-demolished, taken down carefully but surely, leaving a flock of pigeons to find a new roost and punching another empty hole in the landscape of rural America.

“The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects—making it possible…to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” —Susan Sontag

Greeting The Day

In Zion we had held our breath. In Monument Valley, we exhaled.

Straight Up

Traveling northeast on Interstate 15, retracing the route I’d taken two weeks before with Ulrich, dèja vú as strong as black coffee, Kathy and I angled towards Hurricane, Utah, and instead of turning right at the edge of town we went left, up the hill, to Springdale and Zion National Park, and everything I’d done earlier in the trip melted away.

Sunset teased us when we arrived, with bunches of dark clouds arranged behind the massive rocks overlooking Springdale. A flicker of color, and then it was gone. Sunrise the following day was equally brief, and thoroughly dominated by clouds. But as I’d learned on prior visits to Zion, the sky isn’t as integral to landscape photographs there as it is in other locations, like Monument Valley. The reason is simple—the views are vertical—towering rock walls, with the picturesque Virgin River winding through the canyon below, are the Main Subject. Clouds are merely whipped cream on the top.

I feel cramped photographically when I’m there—even wide angle lenses don’t alleviate that. I’ve hiked to viewpoints above the canyon and…well, stunning is the word but not for me. Not for the photos I want to take. Sounds picky, I know, but I just don’t care for the ant-like shuttle busses crawling way down there on the road. Or the road, for that matter (hypocritical, since I’m driving). This leaves me searching for flat ground, down by the ever-present river. (The aforementioned shuttles, by the way, are the only way you can access the canyon during most of the year, unless you’re staying at Zion Lodge.)

Kathy and I shuttled to the end of the line and worked our way back to Zion Lodge, where we had lunch. We watched several hikers in cold-water gear head up The Narrows; stopped to huddle under the overhang at the Weeping Rock; and finally followed a trail to Emerald Pools, each of these short walks giving up something a bit different than the others, yet all tying together in a decidedly Zion-type way. At the lodge we were chased from an outside terrace as we sat down to eat by quick-moving gusts of wind and rain, and finished standing inside with a dozen other visitors as the storm pelted the windows. Sunshine reappeared as suddenly as the rains departed—time to catch a shuttle to the main parking lot and move on to Kanab.

Zig-zagging up the highway to the northeastern edge of Zion, I stopped whenever I could to take in the vistas, sandstone accented by fir, maple, and pine trees. I was sorry to be hurrying by, but elated to see the wonderful light developing across the Checkerboard Mesa. This is a gentler, rounded landscape compared to the canyon. Rocks, small plants and trees coexist across the mesa in limitless eye-catching combinations, a visual balance of nature.

As we left the park behind rain hung from black storm clouds along the horizon, while faint rainbows tinged the sky. As often happens, the highway didn’t go in the right direction—there would be no dramatic display to cap off the day. Fortunately for us, Zion had already stolen the show.