About
Hello and welcome to my website. It contains a little of this and a little of that, which is a recurring pattern in my life. I’ve worn many hats.
So let’s begin at the beginning. I started out as an infant, born in Roswell, New Mexico, where my father was stationed at Walker Air Force Base. Dad was a military cartographer. From there we moved, and we moved a lot — Nebraska, Minnesota, Texas, New York, Virginia. I went to four different elementary schools, two intermediate schools, and two high schools. After high school graduation, when my peers were heading off to college, I got a job as a truck driver hauling textiles up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Then I drifted around for a while, lost and aimless, until one day while hitchhiking through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia I landed in Harrisonburg. I stayed for almost twenty years.
During this time I intermittently attended James Madison as it transitioned from a college to a university. Meanwhile, I took on a variety of jobs: day laborer in a railroad freight yard, night clerk at a Holliday Inn, cab driver, liquor store clerk, substitute teacher, waiter, bartender, and manager of a rock-n-roll club where I shared a bottle of Crown Royal with Stevie Ray Vaughn before he got famous. Bonny Raitt, Son Seals, Albert Collins, and The Fabulous Thunderbirds also graced our backdoor stage. I lived in an old, run-down neighborhood hidden along an overgrown alley that split the town. These dwellings — owned by a little old lady who barely charged rent — were wonderfully dilapidated, with hardly a surviving right angle, and the residents were appropriately off-center. There was a beat-up piano on my front porch and our gang of misfits had fabulous parties with all the musicians, oddballs, intellects, and artsy types in town, such as they were. We held poetry readings in bars and went skinny-dipping in the wooded streams west of town. I could have stayed forever in my little Bohemian empire, but an aspiring/avaricious developer bought the hovels, and my Heaven-on-Earth fell to gentrification. I wrote a roman à clef about that whole scene, my first major literary endeavor. It remains unpublished, but I did manage to sneak a copy deep into the walls of my sacred house as it was being defiled.
So what to do? Well, I did as many before me had done — I headed Out West. Along the banks of the Rio Grande I found a nice little adobe hut south of the town of Socorro. There I enrolled at the New Mexico School of Mines and I eventually wrangled a Master’s Degree in Geology. While in school I waited tables at an old silver-era hotel, and I learned digital cartography in the map room of the New Mexico Geological Survey. The photo to the left is at the entrance to a Mexican silver mine, one of many great adventures in this part of the world. My thesis was a field reconnaissance of the Gila Wilderness, a truly spectacular expanse of high-country in the middle of nowhere. Much of the Gila is designated as Primitive Area, no vehicles allowed, and I spent many days hiking in complete isolation (other than two encounters with mountain lions.) After school, I worked for the National Park Service as a geologist at El Morro National Monument up on the Continental Divide. There I designed a project for preserving the thousands of historical and prehistorical inscriptions on the cliff face. This is really, really old graffiti. I was also privileged to live in an awesome park and wear the ranger uniform with the coolest hat of all.
As that project was ending, my dad’s health began to decline. I was unemployed, and I was yearning for autumn leaves and hard-shell crabs, so I came Back East. After living at my parents’ house for a few weeks I realized I was probably going to kill my dad before heart disease got him, so at the invite of an old friend I moseyed down to Charlottesville and took a part-time job teaching geology at Piedmont Community College. I also became an adjunct faculty at the University of Virginia, where I taught Virginia-oriented travel classes of my own devising, focusing on geology, ecology, history, and architecture, and how they are all interrelated. Big fun, but little pay. So, to make ends meet, I also waited tables on the downtown mall. Not so much fun. I really don’t care for rich people barking at me.
Then, in a downright piece of serendipity, while sitting in a coffee shop (I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life) I ran into that aforementioned old friend who spearheaded a company involved in historical preservation. He was looking for a cartographer with an eye for landscapes. Well, well, well… and it surely didn’t hurt that I had a background with the National Park Service. I worked with Rob for several years doing on-site investigations aimed at developing Cultural Landscape Reports for National Parks such as Cape Lookout, Wind Cave, the Badlands, and the Grand Canyon, as well as National Battlefields such as Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg. I made many maps, like my dad, and some of my cartography was presented to Congress to support the formation of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District. It’s an understatement to say that this was an incredible gig.
Unfortunately, Rob eventually sold his company and it was “downsized” by the new management. I ended up as a clerk behind a counter in a convenience store. Bored to tears, I caught on as a carpenter with a company doing high-end remodels, ironically named Hazard and Associates. Somehow I managed to keep all of my phalanges, but three years of manual labor made me realize that I was not a kid anymore.
Throughout all of these perambulations I’ve maintained an abiding interest in writing, and to a lesser degree photography, so that is what this website is all about. Words and pictures.
Let's talk about pitures first. My whole life I’ve seen images, everywhere. Years ago I shot film, and I would perpetrate all sorts of tricks in the darkroom, but I just can’t get next to Photoshop and other digital enhancements. Too easy. My digital photos are largely unprocessed and rarely cropped. What you see is what I saw. No fancy cameras.
Then, to my great fortune, I landed a job with the Virginia State Geological Survey, where I worked for ten years, making geological maps while spearheading some fascinating research projects. Here are three:
(Note the north arrow on the Civil War maps. I feel pretty clever about that.)
There are several photo essays on this website.
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Humans, of course, make the most fascinating subjects, and I have included impromptu portraits of total strangers at Jazz Fest in New Orleans.
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I am also a big fan of architecture— in a fragmented way — and I have included a series on the edges of buildings. And doors, which innately convey a sense of mystery.
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There is also a gallery that focuses on light, which controls the context of how we perceive the world. This is my version of still-life paintings.
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There are also pictures of aircraft. After growing up on Air Force bases I’ve always had a soft spot for warbirds.
I’ve been actively writing since I was a sophomore in high school, when I penned, quite appropriately, a bunch of sophomoric poetry. Since then, I’ve been all over the spectrum and this website currently/or will eventually include:
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Excerpts of three novels I’ve written (Human Beings, Four Stories, and Flame & Steel)
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Sections from three nonfiction book proposals (Field Guide to American Aircraft Museums, My Geochemistry Dream, and Baseball by the Numbers)
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Excerpts from memoirs (Notes from New Mexico, The Summer of Love, Hitch-hikers)
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Radio scripts (Interviews Through the Time Machine)
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Diatribe/Opinion Pieces (Too Many Rats in the Cage)
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Flash fiction (My First Wife, Joe Thomas Fights Back)
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Poems (these will be added on a regular basis)
None of this stuff is published. I am completely inept at that aspect of writing, and I suspect much of what I’ve done will never see the light of day. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “So it goes.”
So this is my website. What you’ll find here simply represents one person’s point-of-view concerning life’s rich pageant — often amazing, frequently overwhelming, and ultimately unfathomable. Photo credit: Julie Gronlund.