Some of that slammin' wine we drank up, this bottle courtesy of the Sedgehammer. On Sarah's July b-day.

During our Napa honeymoon week, we had so much vino that it took me at least two weeks afterward to break the habit of swirling everything (water, soda, coffee, milk) around in its glass to aerate it. It was a delicious and incredible experience. I'll have pictures and words to share about this for the rest of my life.

In particular though, that week provided roughly ten more chapters in the big book about why we have the single best collection of friends in the entire world. I'm not sure there's a word for the kind of time we had in California, and so much of the unique experience is thanks to the people we had around us. 'Joy' is good, but it's a little too vague. 'Indulgence' is a favorite of mine, but it implies a kind of submission and gluttony that, while most definitely present during the week, were not the focus. 'Ecstasy' sounds too dirty. 'Celebration' is getting close, for no other reason than it binds the experience tightly to so many other great events shared with these folks and others from the past.

To put it another way, there's a Napa poem in me somewhere that I'll work on for years and never get quite right.

Crossing into the Terminal Range, Canadian Rockies. August 9.

Notions like shift and change are redefined here. Driving through the mountains, temperatures regularly swung 50 degrees over the course of a few hours. Daily and weekly rhythms, during and since the trip, have seemed both essential and completely inconsequential. We've alternated between large crowds and complete isolation so often that it's hard to say which feels more familiar.

More than anything, these new measures of change have prompted resignation, and quick acceptance. We build and consult new gauges. We haven't abandoned thermometers and calendars; rather, they're bigger. And a different color maybe.

Wanted to get into this yesterday but didn't really have a chance...

From wildlife refuges to Friday night football, there's a whole lot in Fairbanks that's familiar to someone who grew up in the rural Plains. There are parties out in the woods. There's a generous helping of lumber yards. Everyone knows what kind of bacon to buy at the store.

Howevah.

Remarkably, the seclusion we experience here leads to some pretty stark differences from similar-sized rural cities like Rapid City, South Dakota or Grand Island, Nebraska. There are things like expressways and industrial parks. Falafel is easy to find. The Saturday morning farmers' market is likely the best we've visited outside of San Francisco.

It's a bit of a surprise, but juxtaposed with a rural confidence and pragmatism are diverse and abundant resources.

Doubtless these characteristics will be even more greatly appreciated in another 8 or 12 weeks, when good sense and Thinsulate are not luxuries, but requirements.

"It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop."
--Auguste Rodin, 1878

Rebroadcast this week, the "Time" episode of Radiolab* covers the event that prompted the Rodin quote above, the Leland Stanford/Eadward Muybridge experiment that leapt camera technology and techniques forward and prompted the accelerated development of motion pictures in the late 19th century.

The thing is, though Rodin can be excused for defending his craft against new and threatening competition from photographic images, there's little in my mind to distinguish theoretically the striving realism of Rodin's sculpture from the selective and crafted photographs produced by early, complexly constructed camera equipment.

A hundred and thirty years later though, I've got a picture machine that fits in the pocket of my dungarees and also rings the switchboard operator and also plays my phonograph records. Admittedly, consumer technology has removed much of the artistry and craft from our visual production, and this is almost definitely something to lament. Qualitative change, it seems, can happen gradually.

But: if I had to assemble a stable tripod and step under a big black hood thing, or if I had to purchase and replace emulsion film after every 24 shots, this laptop certainly wouldn't contain more than 2000 images from the last three months alone.

Costs! Benefits!

So! While not every photo you'll see here belongs in a gallery, just about everything worth posting will reveal and illustrate some "real" and "reliable" experiences now etched on my mind. And that's something.

Above is a herd of bison, some as big as the car we're driving, leisurely crossing a busy British Columbian section of the Alaska Highway, which stretches the roughly 1500-mile distance from Fort Nelson, BC to Fairbanks, AK.




*Listen to the episode, from Radiolab's first season, here. Then listen to the 35-odd other episodes they've produced since 2005. It is time well spent on learning.

Hi all.

We're here, in Alaska. And I'm here, on the Web.

The Web is a crazy spot, obvs. Now, and here, you'll likely see me construct an amalgam of a personality that in some major ways is likely to be more reliable and genuine than any I've had before.

In other ways, it will be "built" and "considered" and artificial... because I hope for an unpredictable and dynamic and unfamiliarly merged audience. But more, because of how I imagine interaction taking place here, hopefully between me and others. More likely, between me and the virtual space.

A blog is smaller than Facebook and Twitter, tools whose limits seem harder and harder to locate. Advantages of owned spaces are their real and imagined and intentional and unintentional limits, all of which can prompt some important things like imagination and creativity.

So here's hoping those are things that happen here.

Thanks for visiting. Comments are open. Come back tomorrow.