Solstice (almost)

From a cold night in December... and now a new year. Bundled up in the studio, as if for a Torino winter, pigeons taking refuge under the eves, a thin layer of ice all across Lake Garda... The town of Riva tucked away at the far end, with her winding narrow streets, snow on all the ledges, and looming just behind, the crags of the Dolomiti...

A single swimming float--from the summer--also with a layer of white...

Pripyat

Reading Martin Cruz Smith--Wolves Eat Dogs--his Chernobyl requiem. Arkady finds himself exiled in the Zone, dosimeter at hand, dodging radiation scarecrows. The 26th of April, 1986--an idiot's experiment gone awry--Reactor Number 4 drops drastically in power, the fuel rods freeze in place, hydrogen gas builds to immense pressure, then explodes, blowing the top off the reactor, taking the core up with it. The call to Moscow--denials that anything is wrong--and word comes back, take some iodine, stay indoors for a day or two... But the May Day celebrations go on as scheduled--children of Kiev on parade--a workers' holiday... Breeze blowing down from the north, thyroid damage immediate, other symptoms take longer...weeks, months, years--a lifetime of regret. Could it have been another way? A black village. Samogon, wormwood...

Angels Camp

Mining country--along old Highway 49. The goldrush towns--Murphy, Volcano, Mokelumne Hill, brick buildings of imported stature, a Boston cornice, Concord arch--sluices and shutes, all still visible along the higher roads, hillsides giving way to slag, now overgrown, buried, waiting to be reclaimed. The color purple--royalty in ancient times, and beyond--maybe the most artificial of tones, never quite red, never quite blue, but fitting, somehow, as a repository of planted hope. Let it grow over, refurbish, return to earth...