[ Lost in the Landscape ]

last Newport post: cameras/semi-mysterious tower

Walk­ing around town when I get breaks between meet­ings I’ve dragged along one of two cam­eras. One is a trusty roll film cam­era that I’ve been using for years, and the other is this embar­rass­ment of a dig­i­tal cam­era, the first dig­i­tal cam­era I bought John when dig­i­tal cam­eras were just com­ing out. I haven’t gone shop­ping to Toys R’ Us lately but I’d guess that it has the same megapixel capac­ity as a My Lit­tle Pony dig­i­tal cam­era today, if they make such a thing. At least it’s not pink. Maybe I should say that it has 1,300 kilopixels–certianly lots more impres­sive than 1.3 megapix­els. And on top of the low res­o­lu­tion it eats bat­ter­ies like crazy. Seri­ously I thought it had died and gone to dig­i­tal cam­era pur­ga­tory until I dropped into the gift shop down­stairs and fed the cam­era five bucks in bat­ter­ies. Might have been a good excuse to finally get myself a real dig­i­tal camera.

Since most of the pic­tures I took were with the film cam­era I’ll have to forgo the imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion and wait to see the pic­tures until I get them devel­oped. But here’s one of the ran­dom dig­i­tal shots of a struc­ture located just above the down­town tourist dis­trict. Though it’s called many things, it appears on the map I have as the Old Stone Mill, though it’s doubt­ful that it was ever attached to any oper­a­tion like a mill. In fact, it’s appar­ently a bit of a mys­tery what it is exactly, and a bit of a mys­tery who built it. Appar­ently car­bon dat­ing of the mor­tar dates it to var­i­ous dates, some as late as the late sev­en­teenth cen­tury, some to the early 1400s.

Call me a skep­tic, but just like peo­ple who claim their hotel is haunted, what mys­tery there might be well could be overblown and might have noth­ing to do with real­ity, though it’d cer­tianly be good for busi­ness. There are a lots of web pages where it’s dis­cussed: wikipedia of course; Curt F. Waidmann’s nicely researched The New­port Tower: a Medieval Ruin in Amer­ica; the Red­wood Library and Athenaeum’s page on it; and the more scandal-/mystery-driven page on Unex­plainedEarth. If any of those pages have any author­ity, Wikipedia points to the Red­wood Library’s pages, and I might go with that eval­u­a­tion: The library is located just across the street.

February 23 2008 | Categories: photography • rambles | Tags: cameras • Newport R.I. • Newport Tower • oddities • Old Stone Mill | 1 Comment »

the mojave phonebooth: part 1, weird at first sight

I first ran across what later came to be known as the Mojave Phone Booth in Jan­u­ary of 1993 or 4. I’d been camp­ing that week­end in what was soon to become Mojave National Pre­serve, and one day was explor­ing some of the fea­tures on the north end of the park-to-be. There the park butts up against I-15 and the thriv­ing tourist waysta­tion of Baker, Cal­i­for­nia, touted on signs through­out town as “Gate­way to Death Val­ley.” Baker is home to what’s claimed as the “world’s largest ther­mome­ter,” 134 feet tall–a foot for every degree that made up the hottest tem­per­a­ture ever recorded at Bad­wa­ter in Death Val­ley. Baker is also known for the Mad Greek Restau­rant, a busy and basi­cally okay eatery that serves up Greek –Mexican-American cui­sine in por­tions that you might expect in a town that owes its suc­cess if not exis­tence to trav­el­ers head­ing for that shin­ing shrine of excess, Las Vegas, which at one point in my life was my all-time least favorite swath of soul­less human des­o­la­tion on earth. But enough Vegas-bashing and back to the Preserve…

The most dra­matic fea­tures on the land are a chain of mul­ti­col­ored vol­canic cin­der cones. I think of them as single-use vol­ca­noes: Unlike their big broth­ers that build to some size over long eras, cin­der cones mark a short period of erup­tions that builds them to a few hun­dred feet high. And then the erup­tions stop, the route to the magma below closes up, and when the ground’s finally ready to erupt again, a new crack opens up, away from the first cin­der cone, cre­at­ing another, sep­a­rate cone.

Here at the Mojave Pre­serve there are piles of them–some of them pris­tine in their per­fect pyra­mi­dal geom­e­try, oth­ers reshaped by min­ing operations–and they guard the west­ern edge of Cima Dome. Just a few miles south of the world’s largest ther­mome­ter, Cima Dome hosts the world’s dens­est pop­u­la­tion of joshua trees, and that’s what you notice first. But the fea­ture is called a dome and not a for­est, and as remark­able as the j-trees are, grow­ing denser and green as you get far­ther out on the dome, it’s the geol­ogy and not biol­ogy that makes this place so amazing.

On a topo map you can eas­ily make out the uni­form con­cen­tric rings of the dome as it rises over 1500 feet from the lower points around it. In real life it’s a lot more sub­tle. You look at the ground as it rises, grad­u­ally, per­fectly, and you get a torqued sen­sa­tion that some­thing is hap­pen­ing, but you’re not quite sure what. You stare and it looks like you see the cur­va­ture of the earth, though instead of fly­ing high over it, you’re stand­ing right on it. Space seems to dis­tort as what you expect to be flat bulges up. Queasi­ness sets in. Wel­come to Cima Dome.

The place has this amaz­ing power and force that the touted 1960s and 1970s earth­works can’t begin to approach. In terms of spa­tial power, as inter­est­ing as they are, Robert Smithson’s Spi­ral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s var­i­ous con­struc­tions, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater can’t hold a can­dle to it. Sorry guys!

So there I was, jeep­ing through the j-trees and the spa­tial queasi­ness, when I encounter a fence, a cat­tle guard, a power line and a pow­er­line road cross­ing the jeep track. And next to the road, next to one of the power poles is a phone booth. A phone booth? A dozen miles from any­thing? A freak­ing phone booth? But out in the desert you see a lot of…unusual…things. And I stuck the phone booth as another entry in my brain’s cat­a­loging of desert sights and sight­ings. Lit­tle did I know what I’d just seen.

[ go to part 2, i told you it was weird ]

January 06 2008 | Categories: places • rambles | Tags: baker california • cima dome • cinder cones • desert towns • joshua trees • las vegas • mojave national preserve • mojave phone booth • mojave phonebooth • oddities | 1 Comment »

the kindness of strangers

I love big, splashy plants as much as the next per­son, but there’s a plant that I’ve got a spe­cial attach­ment to that’s nei­ther big nor splashy.

The green rose, Rosa chi­nen­sis virid­i­flora, lives up to its name. When the “flow­ers” open, what’s inside the pro­tec­tive sepals is cer­tainly green. But there are no rose petals in sight. The blos­som just keeps on open­ing, reveal­ing more and more sepals, all of them green in color, some­times tinged with a red­dish cin­na­mon color. Inside a typ­i­cal rose, once the sepals unfurl and the petals open, you finally get to the pis­tils and sta­mens, the repro­duc­tive parts that enable sex­ual repro­duc­tion and per­pet­u­a­tion of the species. But this plant lacks them too, just like it lacks petals. If this plant were to turn up in nature, it’d go extinct once the sin­gle plant passed on.

Its his­tory is a lit­tle fuzzy, though it was for sure intro­duced to the rose-growing world in 1856 by Bem­bridge and Har­ri­son in Eng­land. In The his­tory of the rose by Roy E. Shep­perd, the author notes that the plant has been in cul­ti­va­tion since 1743, which for a plant with no hopes of repro­duc­tion by seeds is quite a feat. Through the years, peo­ple have found some­thing about this plant inter­est­ing enough to start cut­tings or make grafts onto root­stock or whole­sale dig up the plant and take it along with them when they move.

I was a rose geek in my early teen years, grow­ing and exhibit­ing roses around the Los Ange­les area. At one point I had some­thing over a hun­dred roses, includ­ing this one. I moved down to San Diego, and by the later 1980s finally had a house with room for plants. My par­ents were mov­ing out of the home­stead, and for some rea­son I felt the need to res­cue this one rose from an uncer­tain future. Of all the roses, I dug up this one and moved only this one. Read­ing through some of the posts on this rose at davesgarden.com–includ­ing some­one who moved her great grandmother’s plant–I’m not the only with an attach­ment to it.

And some­how, through the kind­ness of strangers smit­ten with this won­der­fully weird plant, the green rose has stayed in cul­ti­va­tion for some­thing like 264 years.

December 10 2007 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: green rose • oddities | 3 Comments »