Well, here we go again. I'll try not to write about death or being beaten as a child. My favorite subjects, it seems.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. - Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Though, I believe I may have left out the true-story telling portion. There is so much to tell, and as CS has pointed out, I can not safely hide behind anonymity. I have the alternate curse of identity.
The pic above was a long open-shutter capture, taken while camping over the summer. We went many places, 3000 miles of driving, out to the deserts around Moab and back - Grand Canyon, Sequoia, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce, Zion. We stopped twice in Henderson to visit with friends and enjoy air-conditioning and a swimming pool.
We did a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon and hiked down into it for a couple hours, turning around at just the right point, when our water supply was at its halfway level. The boy thanked me afterwards for convincing him to turn around when we did. He had miscalculated the difficulty of hiking uphill. He desperately wanted to report to others that he had hiked all the way down, but it was out of the question.
We also hiked the Narrows at Zion for several hours. This was a highlight of the trip for both of us. They had only just opened the slot canyon up for visitors a couple days before we arrived. The snowfall had been so great over the winter that the rapids were too strong to allow hikers. The last thirty minutes or so of the hike the only other human we saw was an unlicensed repeller who had come down the canyon wall and was trying to get his backpack to descend also, but he had no luck with it. It was still suspended there about a hundred feet up when we returned, but he was gone. Perhaps he tried to recover it from the topside.
Tioga Pass, which we had planned to take back home across the Sierras, was still closed from the heavy snow drifts. We skipped Yosemite, as it was July 4th weekend and was apparently too crowded to be pleasant. Instead, we drove home and surprised mom. She had never been away from the boy for two weeks before. You know how moms get.
I will be in NYC for about 3 weeks, beginning October 20th. I will be cat-sitting for a friend. A new neighborhood - Fort Greene - for me to discover. I know the Alamo and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but that's about it. I've been to the park a few times, though I might be confusing it for Prospect Park. I may rent a bike while I am there. A real bike, not those Citi Bike monstrosities. Though, I suppose, in a pinch they might be useful, perhaps as a comedic getaway vehicle.
I hope that Autumn is the actual season by the time I am there. You can never predict very much any more, and no true-story teller would keep that from you.
The city is sinking. Well, the island of Manhattan is, I've read. It is the curse of the natives who once lived there. A hundred years passed between its first European visitors and its first settlement, four hundred more have lapsed since then. You can really tell when you look at the skyline. It reaches so high into the sky you might not notice that it's sinking.
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