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Oysters, Alabama Style

 

 

When I was a kid, my dad, a traveling salesman, came home on the weekends. He drove all over the South, mostly small towns far from cities, from North Carolina to Florida and all the way to Mississippi.

Whenever he went through the Florida Panhandle and the Gulf Coast of Alabama he sometimes brought home oysters. Tired with roadburn, he’d pull into the driveway on a Friday evening and open the trunk of his old Mercedes diesel to reveal a bushel of Apalachicola oysters in a big burlap sack. We’d stand in the driveway in the twilight and eat them right out of the trunk.

Then we’d haul them around back in a wheelbarrow and invite all the neighbors over. Steam some on the grill under the same wet burlap, eat more raw. Oyster stew. Fried oysters. Oysters for days.

A great article in

The Bitter Southerner

 

“He beat the guy with a baseball bat, set him up in a rocking chair, and then shot him,” Brent says. “You might not want to get that graphic. You could just say it didn’t end well.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Datura Inoxia

Datura Inoxia time lapse

 direct Youtube link

 

One night, about 30 years ago, I was walking down a sidewalk in an old neighborhood in Richmond, on the way home from a social engagement. It was very late, the streets were empty. I was tired and pleasantly overstimulated – much scintillating conversation, coupled with subtle inebriants consumed on a visit with some very creative friends.

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Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.

On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe.

A film by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh

alexgorosh.com
wylieoverstreet.com

Copyright 2015

 

When my daughters were young we spent a lot of time looking at the sky. Comets, meteor showers, constellations, satellites, planets. On camping trips, especially; but sometimes we juat went out into the country to find dark places so we could see better.

Laying in the dew-wet grass, or bundled in winter coats on the still-warm hood of the car, we’d listen to the whippoorwills, the crickets and katydids, the owls, and distant trains, and look up into the big dark and empty that seems so full when the sky is clear.

In elementary school they made models for science projects, and posters. We used flashlights for the sun, and basketballs and baseballs for planets, and we tried to get our heads around the scale of things.

We are not alone, it seems. These guys did that, too, and tried to make it real on a much bigger scale. It’s beautiful on many levels.

via Colossal

 

 

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Urbanna ~ Atherston Hall

Atherston Hall B&B in Urbanna, Virginia 

 

 

 

 

 

Urbanna really is like Scottsville on the Rappahannock, even more than we imagined.

The old town of Urbanna is only a couple of blocks long in any direction. Resting on the bluff above the harbor, it’s easy to walk the whole thing in a few minutes. Several stately buildings pre-date the Revolutionary War: the old Custom House, a former Scottish general store, the original courthouse converted to a church in the 1850’s. Side streets are narrow and shaded by big trees.

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Urbanna, Virginia

 Sailing into Urbanna Creek

 

Every year for our anniversary, T and I try to go somewhere new. We don’t need to go far – west is the mountains, east is the Bay. We can arrive within a few miles of a place we’ve been before and have it feel completely different. This year – just upriver from Deltaville, and Gwynn’s Island, within sight of the creek that leads to Irvington, and beyond that Windmill Point, all places we’ve been before – Urbanna gets the nod.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bridges

Curt looking for The Hole in the Wall

 

This is going to be fun.

It is true that I should have left 15 minutes ago. Yes, it’s still dark, and the mountains to the west are a deep cold blue like waves crashing on a beach of stars; but the horizon in the east is glowing embers. Fifteen minutes is easy to make up. Normally not a problem when driving 2 1/2 hours east, to the Chesapeake.

But crews have been replacing two of the old steel truss bridges on the River Road along the James. In the semi-dark I sit at temporary stop lights blinking on deserted roads, deep in the woods – no work crews around, no other cars, just me sitting in the dark, alone, listening to the car idle and the katydids and the tree frogs and the fish jumping in the Hardware River below, dutifully waiting tor some imaginary line of cars to pass so the light will turn green and let me safely pass. Is that a police cruiser in the weeds on the other side? A ticket would make me really late. I have to do it all again at the Rivanna. I love these old bridges, and will miss them when they’re gone. I miss the one they took down a few years ago on the road north from town. A double insult to be delayed by their funeral.

 

deadrises at Gwynn’s Island

 

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Tangier Island Mirrored

Two images, taken eleven years apart

 

As we walked the island I kept having flashbacks to previous trips – things half remembered, familiar in some way. It wasn’t until I got back, though, and started going through the photos, that I realized I had photographed many of the same views taken before – some of them almost exactly – but eleven years apart. We even walked a similar clockwise route around the island.

Makes me wonder, if I could find photos from that first trip back in the 1970’s, how similar those old photos would be. How little has changed. The same boats, hauled up in the marsh, still decomposing decades later.