Madrid Obligatorio

In December, our transatlantic flight to New York turning back near Greenland, spending hours in the air with an unknown mechanical error for returning us to the Madrid-Barajas Airport. After an all-too-brief but restless night in a mediocre Spanish hotel, we were back at the airport early the next morning for a second (and ultimately successful) attempt at an Atlantic crossing. Several hundred people waited to board. I looked out at the horizon; the landscape was strange, alien, surreal, but ultimately a lot more welcoming than the cold dark of the North Atlantic. The image will stay with me.

Madrid Obligatorio

Atlantic Track Corrosion

Atlantic weather ages every part of Martha’s Vineyard, but the combination of textures and colors of age (rusted iron, grayed cedar, turned leaves) really captures a broad spectrum of possibility. The somewhat “impossible” geometry of the image places them in juxtaposition.

Atlantic Track Corrosion

Connecticut’s Marine Layer

This is a sight I haven’t seen since I lived in the Bay Area: a layer of low-lying clouds caused by a temperature inversion that look remarkably like the marine layer. Though I know the origins aren’t the same in the Central Valley of Connecticut, that mix of perfectly clear sky and rolling clouds brought me back in time and made rising at dawn worth it.

Connecticut's Marine Layer

Dutch Paradise Boating

This bucolic Dutch morning puts me most in mind of Iain M. Banks’s science fiction utopias. That may sound “out of pocket,” but allow me to explain: His far-future settings often feature people who are choosing intentionally charming but low-tech lives doing what they enjoy in beautiful settings. These boaters traveling down the Vechte feel part of the same vein. Though they live in one of the most advanced countries on Earth, they can still choose relatively simple experiences and ways of living.

Dutch Paradise Boating