This is Narada Falls, a waterfall in Mount Rainier National Park. It’s a double waterfall, whose first cascade falls twenty feet and passes under the road to Paradise.  The second starts on the other side of the road and plunges 168 feet to the point photographed in this image. The fall of water is long enough to pull apart the the stream’s flow so its middle is cloud and mist rather than a pillar of falling drops.

I took this photo September 11, 2024. The significance of the date was not lost on me. Nor was my location in the middle of one of America’s great national parks and my good fortune to be a witness God’s magnificence handiwork.  Despite the park’s beauty, it was also not lost on me it was built by volcanic fury and cataclysmic destruction.

Drawing on one of your photographs, tell us about a body of  water you are familiar with. Has it offered you a new perspective on place?

In late August 1985 we moved from Calgary to Creighton, Saskatchewan, a “suburb” of Flin Flon, Manitoba…

Spences Bridge is the bridge which makes up the title of Wendy Wickwire’s fabulous book about James Teit, and his life long advocacy and study of British Columbia indigenous peoples.

What is home to me?

A discussion about the meanings of Home can easily fall into cliche, sentimentality, and sophistry; at least in the remembering both the fond memories and avoiding confrontations about more the more painful ones of a past Home. So yes, “Home is where the heart is”.  Yet this begs a question: “Where is the metaphorical location, the geographical place of one’s heart when someone calls some place Home?”

I was reminded frequently that motorcycles are too dangerous and to never take a ride on one.  Later my parents soften, they said I could ride, but only after turning 18 and have decided on self-banishment by moving out on my own.

But almost always, constantly actually, I was lectured about girls, to resist the temptations of my male desire, to fear fast girl corruption, ‘sins of the flesh’, for its purpose is to lead one astray, and any temptation of fast girl sin must be stifled for my own good. Banishment from family and probable perpetual poverty in this life, and hell in the next, awaited me if I ever knocked up a fast girl.

All these people are dead.