Monthly Archives: June 2006

A Reflection

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Quite a few years ago now, a pen-pal of mine created the first personal weblog I ever saw. It was at the late “EditThisPage.com”, and he called it “The View from Dry Creek”. It was a logical name, being as he and his family were living adjacent to a creek with that name. I signed up for one as well, just to try it out; and not having any better idea and given that I live in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains I decided to call mine “The View from the Foothills”. I didn’t post very much there, and a year or so went by before I started blogging in earnest here at wjduquette.com. When I did, I decided to keep the name.

When I chose the name, it was with the notion that I’d be sharing my views on various matters. Recently, though, it’s taken on a different meaning–the images I’ve posted today and sporadically over the past six months are mostly, and quite literally, views from the foothills. Fancy that.

A Long Walk

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This morning I grabbed the cell phone (a recent acquisition) and headed out the door. The goal was to take a much longer walk than I usually would do, partially to impress Jane and partially to found out just how far I can walk in a morning before I run out of gas. As it happens I lasted for two hours of brisking walking (with frequent photo stops) and made it about five-and-a-half miles. And indeed, I saw a great many things on my walk.

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I don’t recall ever before having seen a fire hydrant painted quite this passionate a color.

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These have been popping up around town; perhaps they’ll last longer than the stencils they are replacing. Have to wonder how much just one of these cost the city to make, though.

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In 1934 there were heavy rains in L.A. for days on end. Folks in my town who worried about floods coming down from the mountains gathered for safety in the American Legion Hall, where volunteers supplied them with food and blankets. And then one of a number of flashfloods came roaring down the hill, and a mass of water, mud, and rocks swept the American Legion Hall completely away. Over thirty locals died, along with an unknown number of folks who’d been squatting in the canyons above town. This is a monument to the folks who died; it’s just where the American Legion Hall was. And running underneath it is one of the flood control channels built by the Corps of Engineers to prevent it from happening again. The location isn’t coincidental…..

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I ended my walk at point where a bridge crosses the Verdugo Wash, into which the channel shown above empties; the bridge was marked with this plaque.

An Old Captivity, by Nevil Shute

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It’s difficult to know what to say about this book without saying too much. Ian was especially eager that I read it; he said it usually throws people for a loop, and he was curious to see what I thought of it. He also said that it was something of an experiment that hadn’t quite come off, but that he still liked it.

Now that I’ve read it, I have to go along with all of that. I liked it; it doesn’t quite work; the climax is rather a surprise; and it was worth my time anyway.

The main action takes place prior to World War II, and concerns a former RAF pilot who is hired, on the strength of his post-service flying experience in Canada, to fly an Oxford archaeologist and his daughter to Greenland. There the pilot will conduct an aerial photographic survey of the site, while the archaeologist will work on the ground. We follow the pilot as he prepares for the expedition (a quite dangerous one in those days) and then the expedition itself. There’s lots of the usual Shute storytelling detail, and a number of good characters; and as I say it all works out rather surprisingly.

I don’t want to say any more just now, because I like to keep the main page a spoiler-free zone; but if you’ve read the book we can discuss the details in the comments.

The Five Best Mystery Novels?

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Kudos to Jane for finding this. Mystery writer P.D. James has a piece in the Wall Street Journal in which she lists the (in her view) five best mystery novels. I’ve only read two of them, Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, both of which are certainly very good. I suspect that the others (two from the 1940’s and one from just a few years ago) are equally worth looking into.

Photography and the Old West, by Karen Current

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This is one of the books I got on my used book binge last weekend. It’s an overview of (gasp) photography in and of the Old West, from the early days of photography up through 1915 or so. More accurately, it’s a survey of the prominent photographers of the Old West during that period. For each, the author presents a biographical sketch, describing the photographer’s life and their contributions to photography; this is followed by a handful of their photographs.

I picked this up with great anticipation, and unfortunately I was somewhat disappointed. The biographical sketches are good, certainly, and I presume the photos were well chosen from those that are available. But I was hoping for more photos from each photographer, and I would have liked a little more information about each specific photo.

On the whole, though, it’s an interesting book, and I’m glad I bought it. Some of the photographers were masters of their craft, and their photos remain classics; I especially liked C.E. Watkins’ photos of San Francisco. Others, alas, were not. The author dismisses Dr. William A. Bell, for example, as marginally competent, and the included images prove the point thoroughly–here, at least, I’m satisfied with a small selection of photos. And then there’s Camillus Fly–an unlucky gent who was foolish enough to open a photography studio in Tombstone, Arizona, one of the roughest towns in the Old West, and who somehow failed to take pictures of shoot-out at the OK Corral…even though the OK Corral was next door to his studio, the shoot-out took place at 2:30 in the afternoon, and Fly is known to have been one of the on-lookers. On the other hand, he took the only photos known to exist of Geronimo the Apache–the force that caught Geronimo happened to leave from Tombstone, and Fly was lucky enough (for once) to be asked to come along.

All in all, not a bad book if you can find it.