forensic evidence points to a cat being involved.

Rigging, in soaring parlance, is the act of assembling the glider. Most gliders are built to be easily taken apart and put on a trailer as many are landed off airport when soaring conditions turn sour. Gliders such as these high performance fiberglass ships are almost always stored ‘in the box’, or disassembled in their enclosed trailers, as the effects of the sun can damage their finish and actually weaken them structurally. Although most flights are done by a solo pilot, it is very much a group sport with everyone pitching in and helping to rig the fleet. Wing runners are needed to help get them up to the flight line, and then help with the launch, and a tow pilot is needed (along with a tug) to get them up in the air. At the end of the day the process is reversed, and the gliders go back in the box.

I made a new pinhole camera. Its digital. I really wish they still made type 55 polaroid though . . . (these guys are trying to resurrect it–one can always dream.)

A welcome respite from the long winter, and the halting spring of the northeast, a nice warm ocean courtesy of Florida’s Vero Beach.

more

flowers

I’m not really sure what to make of this, it looks vaguely pagan. Is it a totem? A native American ritual? Maybe just a way to decorate that big pole in the middle of the yard. I have to wonder what the birds eating nearby think about it.

Hoffman Lodge, Middletown NY.

This place feels like a relic of the past. A once grand building in the middle of a decaying neighborhood.

This is the catholic church on Cottage Street in Middletown, NY. It was named Middletown because it was in the middle of several intersecting rail lines, and thus had a lot of various industries calling it home. (The hack saw blade was invented there.) It was a  working town but with a lot of beautiful houses and lots of not-so-pretty factory buildings which today are in various states of upkeep. And as it turns out, a lot of steeples. It has seen better days for sure.

I used to have a house up there and spent a lot of time driving around getting a sense of the place. It’s laid out on a confusing, curved sort of grid. It turns out it was designed around around the various railways coming through town: The O&W, The New York and Erie, The New York Susquehanna and Western and various other permutations, mergers or failed lines. I never really took any photographs of the town while I lived there – I guess I was always too busy running to the garden center, or over to the airport to go flying.

So I’ve been going back now, revisiting Middletown with a camera. These are part of an ongoing project to look at these spots before they’re gone forever.

I would say it was for more than a year that I kept smelling gas on my street. Sometimes I would see a Con Edison crew in the area and I’d mention it, they’d always say to call the emergency number, which felt pretty dramatic. About an hour or so after a call I’ll see some guy probing around with one of those sniffy things, and they’d never find anything. Of course I kept smelling it. And of course it got worse. Until one of those guys with the sniffy thing declared that we had a substantial gas leak on our hands. And thus began my week long adventure with some of the men of Con Ed. Actually the first contact was with a fairly weasely looking fellow with a white PT Cruiser and no identification. He had a magnetometer and a can of spray paint and I realized he was marking the location of the gas line laid down sometime in 1908. My neighbor on the other hand didn’t realize that, and called the cops.

The next day I heard a backhoe out in front of my house and went out to investigate. As I was talking to the driver a large dump truck about two houses up the street was raising its bed. Out of it came a wave of large 1″ thick steel plates cascading down the street toward me. It looked like a deck of cards someone threw out onto a polished table. As I jumped between the wheels of the backhoe they stopped right where I’d been standing. Backhoe guy found that very amusing.

It took days and many holes to find the pipe. There were lots of bets as to where it might be, and lots of epithets hurled toward weasely markup guy–not to mention lots of joke at his expense about the cops. Once they dug up the pipe they found a fist-sized hole in an ancient elbow joint. So I find myself looking at the innocuous boxes marked ‘gas’ a little differently now.