Remember Catt Black (also known as Catness)? This animal had a couple of unusual behaviors. One was that she liked to ride on my shoulder, like a monkey. Another was that she preferred to ride in the passenger seat of my VW bus.
See: Related Posts
You met some of my Apache project staff earlier. Here (in spite of promises to avoid photos of personalities of no conceivable interest to our viewers) are some more, pictured in the spring on the steps of our temporary Tribal base of operations. From left to right, with their known origins: the engineer/free thinker (Santa Barbara, CA); the pianist/accountant (Tucson, AZ); the pool shark/Special Forces/investigator (LA); the psychologist (Washington, DC); the historian/sociologist/financial auditor (Boston, if I recall); the guitarist/auditor (Eugene, OR).
Not pictured: the mathematician, the computer guys, the contract Apache interviewers/translators, the contract economists & anthropologist and maybe some others I forgot.
And the engineer and his family again — an exception to the bachelorhood of all other full-time, onsite staffers (who were all LA office personnel, except for the psychologist) …
See: Related Posts
The White Mountain Apache Reservation was large. I remembered that it had at least a million acres, but upon doing some research to pin things down, I find that it comprises 2,627 square miles, or 1.6 million acres. I think it was occupied by about 10,000 Tribal members when I was there, spread over six or eight or ten little communities.
The scenery was magnificent. Rivers, creeks, canyons, high desert, alpine forest and many lakes, ranging from about two to nine-hundred acres. Hawley Lake at 8,000 feet elevation and 300 acres was one of the nearby ones I visited frequently; Sunrise Lake, 9300 feet and 900 acres, was harder to reach and near the Sunrise Ski Resort, a development project in progress. The White River I saw daily, but there were other rivers throughout. Mount Baldy (11,000+ feet?) was the highest point on the Reservation and I think was the location of the headwaters of the Salt and Little Colorado Rivers, but I would have to do some real research to speak authoritatively now on this.
I was told that the Reservation provided some of the best fishing in the entire Southwest U.S. and, indeed, in season, the tiny town of Pinetop was overrun with anglers whose trucks and trailers choked the few streets and quickly filled up the few motels. No fishing for me; it was all sightseeing, hiking and photography.
See: Related Posts
Port Costa is a tiny, quaint outpost near San Francisco. Before he moved there and started raising a family, Dave was a gov’t colleague in L.A.; was one of two (not counting myself) obsessed Bob Dylan devotees in our office; owned and was restoring a rare late 20s Chrysler; liked to discuss poetry, Sartre, Camus and existentialism over a beer or two; had an unrivaled deadpan sense of humor; always flew under the radar; and, as a charter member of the fan club, received a Christmas card every year from the Texas parents of the deceased Buddy Holly.
SIDEBAR: I know that I had resolved not to conflate personal memories of humans (at least those not known in common with my readers/viewers) with my display of previously-undiscovered photographs unless their presence in an image had visual merit on its own — but a handful of individuals in the past were so eccentric or remarkable to me that their inclusion starts to cross that line. This regrettable tendency — which I will attempt to curtail in the future — probably owes something to Joseph Mitchell, whose book (now being read aloud to Kim by myself), “Up In The Old Hotel”, serves up accounts of eccentrics and oddities that he encountered in the saloons and streets and elsewhere in New York City during the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
Somewhere along the line I took over the care of Catt Black (aka Catness), a feline originally owned by a local Pinetop friend who had to leave our mountain community. Here, in my cabin, Catt Black jumps between me and the camera as the shutter inadvertently fires. This animal returned with me to Los Angeles (despite my efforts to find an alternative home) and ultimately ended up with my L.A. friends Roy and Dana.
See: Related Posts
Random images for a random afternoon’s walk …
Albuquerque — even before Breaking Bad and Walter White — was an interesting place and made for a relatively easy weekend trip from the Reservation. I visited several times, once for a national conference on Indian issues, once to attend the then-fledgling international hot air balloon festival and often just to play and photograph. I just came upon a few photos, but couldn’t seem to locate many of the balloon event. Then I realized that I must have photographed those activities in color, as befitting the nature of the festival. And my color work — while representing images perhaps in the few thousands, as compared to the tens of thousands of my work in black & white — is almost wholly disorganized into poorly marked boxes and shelves. And I even found a batch of old slides loosely collected in a plastic grocery bag.
Anyway, here is the first of what should become a considerable series of New Mexico photographs made during the Arizona Apache era.
See: Related Posts
I’m pretty sure there are some Facebook users out there, so I will pass on this advice from some of my ex-colleagues:
fwiw …
Windy advisory, today and tomorrow. Took Sir Charles out for as long as we could bear it …
