It is raining like to wash the house away.
In other news, a good man and a good friend just let me know that he is engaged!
smudges and smears
I seem to be drawing again.
Mucky Pup
The dog park was like a swamp today! I headed up with the pooch around 2 pm, when the sun peeked out for two seconds, but by the time I got there, it had started to sprinkle again.
The Macon
Back in 2002, I started running posts here focused on lighter-than-air aviation. Originally, I had intended to run a post a day on the topic for a week, so I called it Blimp Week.
The topic overfilled the week, and while I haven’t been posting tons on the topic of late, every now and then something comes into my email that merits a new post.
When I started posting on the topic, I tracked down illustrator Kent Leech, who (with his father) created a magnificent cutaway illustration of the US Navy dirigible the USS Macon for the National Geographic Society. The image can be purchased within the National Geographic volume Inside Out, as the frontispiece. I had looked and looked for the picture online but simply had no luck.
Mr. Leech kindly responded to my questions about the image, but was not able to come up with a link to the drawing either. Years later, in May 2010, he followed up with a link to the drawing, hosted on his own site. Instead of embedding the image here, I’ll just pass that link along, and urge you to go check it out. He has some other interesting drawings on the site, too, such as the Turtle, the MG-TC (attention Eric!) and a vacuum tube.
Here’s some of what he had to say about the image creation process for the Macon illo back in 2002:
My father and I did that illustration back in late 1991. It took appx 6 weeks from start to finish.
I am afraid I have no posters of our illustration, and at present there is no image available on-line.
It was great project to work on! We went to moss landing and saw the parts they caught in the fishing nets (small chunks of the structure). Mark Holms was the art director at Nat Geo at the time. He was able to find old photos of the Macon (in a dumpster!!) that helped us do the illo. We even built a model to photograph (for the perspective). It is pretty crude, but it did the job.
Right after I hit post on this, I found a promo site for a National Geographic documentary on the Macon, which includes a very simple, but kind of amusing, in-browser interactive Sparrowhawk skyhook landing sim!
Further poking about revealed the raison d’etre for the documentary: in 2005 and 2006, the Macon’s resting place, 1500 feet down within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, was exhaustively surveyed and documented by an archeological team. On February 11, 2010, the 75th anniversary of the wreck, the site was added to the National Register.
Above is an image found on the NOAA press release site. It shows the wing of one of the Sparrowhawks lost when the ship went down; the planes were in place inside the dirigible when she went down.
Gusher
Such rain today! Coming back to the house at about eleven, I looked northwest from the top deck of the high I-5 bridge, up and over to the Ballard fishing port. Just past the two bridges that mark Fremont, the rain faded the city and boats to foggy gray. Looking up, above my fellow motorists, I could see that the clouds were moving briskly from southwest to northeast. It seemed likely that the rain would hit the freeway before I wheeled into the drive.
And so it was. Unloading the car, I was soaked though. I thought it unlikely that the dog would get his walk. Amazingly, around 3, the sun emerged, and the sodden ground steamed. A quick look at wunderground.com made it clear the area itself was clear for at least an hour or two, and so we headed off to the cemetery. Memorial Day weekend is like the Christmas of cemeteries, I think. All last week the grounds crew were working absolutely as long as they could, trimming and cutting and raking and who-knows-what. Today, two days after the holiday, the graves are bedecked with botted plants ad cut flowers, American flags twitching and snapping in the breeze.
I’ll walk the dog in the graveyard about three times a week, mostly on days I do not have an errand that takes me more than a mile from the house, and I am coming to know the place fairly well. Nearly every time I take Rocket over, though, something else strikes my eye. There’s a man who, two years ago, parked his worn pickup in the same place every day at 4pm, carted a chair to a grave, and read until the light failed. He would toss breadcrumbs to the birds. Over the past couple of years, his truck became a late-model sedan, and his visits came earlier in the day, and now they are less predictable. I haven’t ever walked over to his spot and made the acquaintance of his bereaver.
There’s the marker dedicated to the memory of the ‘father’ of baseball in the Pacific Northwest, the row of inexpensive, cast-concrete markers commemorating a score of infants both born and decedent in 1919 and 1920, presumably taken to the bosom of Old Man Influenza. There’s the grave of a Marine who lost his life in 200-something at 18, always adorned with some keepsake, sometimes things like an inkjet-printed all-access pass. I’m guessing he held fast; the all-access placard’s colors run freely in our sodden spring.
Today, for no particular reason, I noticed one of the many graves which had been visited and adorned with flowers. The person memorialized was born in 1958 and passed on in 2002. Without consciously doing the math, I realized that the remains of that person had belonged to someone who lived just as long as I have now, today. It was a peculiar feeling.
There’s no promised relief from our wintry spring – just yesterday I saw a satellite image depicting solid cloud cover stretching along the jet stream from Japan to the Pacific Northwest. The Pineapple Express is going to persist, it seems. I delayed planting my garden this year. As it happens, I planted a kitten before I planted my crops. This weekend, seven days after we buried her, I noticed the first upshoots in my raised beds. The soil’s plenty warm, and plenty moist, and the day lasts nearly 15 hours already. There’ll be a fine crop, I’m sure.