open road diaries

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we are standing with standing rock. it could be a long winter. please consider donating needed supplies. list here.

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new york city : old macy's warehouse in queens

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highway 12, washington (jennifer timmer trail)

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“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”  

― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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national parks : acadia, maine

(suzanne timmer)

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national parks : yellowstone

(jennifer timmer trail)

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new york city night

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Sunday Drives : Dennings Point

A large brickworks was situated on Dennings Point from 1885 to 1939 when the clay ran out and the site was abandoned. Durisol, a manufacturer of composite wood and concrete construction panels, bought the buildings in 1948 and added a few new structures using their own materials - these additions were awesome mid-century design. When Durisol moved on, Noesting Pin Ticket Company, a paperclip manufacturer, used the buildings until 1980.

The structures are now part of Hudson Highlands State Park system. There's a trail around the point that follows the Hudson River and loops back along a little cove. It's a nice drive and stroll on a Sunday.

Top photo: Samuel Gottscho, 1950

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Sunday Drives : Chuang Yen Monastery, Carmel, New York

This past sunday we headed east on Route 301 from the Taconic and came upon Chuang Yen Monastery, a Buddhist temple on 225 acres in Putnam County, New York. The largest indoor statue of Buddha in the United States sits in Great Buddha Hall.

Most of the temple buildings are built in the architectural style of China’s Tang Dynasty. The grounds are beautiful and peaceful. After visiting Great Buddha Hall, we strolled around the lake and over a series of bridges, then took the walkway uphill to The Thousand Lotus Memorial Terrace, where you can light incense, sit and meditate.

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To My Old Brown Earth

To my old brown earth And to my old blue sky I'll now give these last few molecules of "I." And you who sing, And you who stand nearby, I do charge you not to cry. Guard well our human chain, Watch well you keep it strong, As long as sun will shine. And this our home, Keep pure and sweet and green, For now I'm yours  And you are also mine.

— Pete Seeger, 1958

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There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.

Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

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O Canada

There’s both a sense of anticipation and a sense of sadness as I travel to the southern Georgian Bay area of Ontario, a place I lived and love and wanted to make my home. Now its time to make peace with those dreams and our father’s aging as the end of the End of the Rainbow nears after more than 3 and ½ decades of being the most beautiful farm in the Beaver Valley.

  The farm is for sale. The farm we worked on and invested in and wanted to make into a place where generations of family gathered to walk through the orchards at blossom time, swim in the river, camp at the pond. There is just one thing; the farm is, in the end, our father’s lifeline into the future. He sits at the kitchen table and talks about all his work through the years and then we are silent.

  In the Spring I’ll help pack up, and perhaps I’ll come again other times after that to kayak the Bruce Peninsula, to swim in the Bay, to bike and hike the trails, to see friends. But I will be driving down into the valley as a traveler, past a century house that has been my home, past a farm bounded by river with the most glorious view of the Blue Mountains from the porch and I won’t be turning into the driveway to kiss my pops hello, to hug my stepmother, to stay awhile. And so I’m here to begin the last phase of goodbye.

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nebraska, 2013 (jennifer timmer trail)

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"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route."

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

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Portland

Out of Utah into Idaho on to Oregon, from flat land into gorges and valleys, through heavy rain in the dark and wet with the Columbia River beside us, we rode into the lights of Portland.

And we were in the land of bungalows and local food and hipster vintage, of downtown museums and galleries and repurposed industrial spaces along the river. Things I loved immediately: bike riders, leg warmers, salted caramel ice cream, front porches. The smiles and welcome from the woman at the market, the sales associates at Fred Meyer who gave me 10% off a 50% off sale and a final 15% off my purchase, the guy we bought the desk from, the ice cream servers at Salt & Straw (ok, so we were there a lot). So much movement and energy each weekday morning and afternoon with parents walking their children to and home from a southeast neighborhood school like its’ a laid back small town. The city is friendly. I wanted to unpack and stay a bit and buy a pair of leg warmers.

Portland moved me – at a dinner party with a group of accomplished photographers and friends sharing ideas about life, next steps, curiosity; seeing my sister’s [potentially ex] husband, watching how much my niece loves him, feeling my heart break and understanding this is simply my perspective; reuniting with the cousin I haven’t seen since we were girls and learning that her father would love to see my father, two brothers out of touch for decades who knows why; meeting a thoughtful, funny young writer/photographer making a home for himself while making plans for his upcoming body of work; playing a rousing game of Apples to Apples after eating homemade potato leek soup. And then it’s time to go.

Jen is making this awesome city her home. Missing my traveling companions as soon as I hug them goodbye, shaking the devil of regret off my back and embracing the now, I head out to Canada.

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bear valley off I-40, colorado (jennifer timmer trail)

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Taking it all in

It didn’t take long for the stress and exhaustion of packing and leaving to wear off and then it was all about freedom, exploration, the road ahead. We had a super quick drive from Ann Arbor, our meetup, to Portland, our destination - crossing Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and a small part of Wyoming on mega-road I-80, then dropping down into Colorado and Utah from Cheyenne to visit with family and friends.

Although we spent a lot of time in the car each day, we were just looking around taking it all in, stopping for photo ops along the way. Jen says US 40 from Steamboat to Salt Lake may now be her favorite road ever. I’m thinking I want to get out on more roads. 

From Michigan to Oregon, our route was breathtaking and desolate – the stubble of harvested fields disappearing into the horizon, rolling hills and high desert mesas, tumbleweed and ragged brush, rock, mountains, rivers – thousands of miles punctuated with rest stops, farms, granaries, small towns and cities, pockmarked with oil refineries and cement factories and dams and poverty and abandonment.

What a ride.