I retraced my steps. 

I do that a lot, not just because sometimes the memory fails and I don't know I've been down a path before, but there is comfort and value in the things I know. So I choose to visit again those things I love. I'm then often rewarded with epiphanies.

And it's never the same. I was listening this morning to Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She was interviewing Merce Cunningham, an American avant-garde choreographer. Merce passed away on July 26 at age 90. The interview was originally broadcast in 1985. 

The conversation was fascinating. At one point he observed that it was okay to sit quietly and observe two Coke bottles. He said they may look similar, but in fact they couldn't possibly be the same as they didn't occupy one space. The light passing through and reflecting off of each was worthy of contemplation, for the beauty revealed and the inspiration delivered.

It's the same with my journeys, short and long. None of us can ever step in the same stream twice—ever. From one microsecond to the next, it will never again be what it was. Each step along the way, each thing I look at, each thought I have is fundamentally different from those things that have gone before. 

Don't get me wrong, I love visiting new things. But I also love coming to an understanding—however limited and imprecise—of something I'd seen or some place I'd visited before. And I am a contemplative, slow photographer.

But—I dug in my heels at repeating something this past weekend. I had to take my youngest, the third of three, to his orientation at Texas Tech in Lubbock. The campus is beautiful, the people are extraordinarily nice. It's true that Lubbock is the home of Buddy Holly and for that fact alone, the city gets a pass on being so profoundly unremarkable—so unworthy of going there for its own sake. It's not a pretty place.

My son and I were separated—we each had our own orientations to attend. This will be our third child in college—in fact, next month we will have three in college at the same time.

(I don't know what my bride was thinking when she orchestrated our Irish triplets. Having three kids in less than three years has some advantages—you get through phases very quickly. But there are some downsides: diapers, sibling birth order issues enhanced and financial concerns. In all honesty, I just did what I was told. Even though I was a happy participant, there are complicated reasons why there were three and why they were delivered rapid-fire.)  

The upshot is that with the others already in college and my having done all this before—I didn't have to sit through an hour and a half seminar on how to pay for my child's education online. I've done this before. I know how to do this kind of stuff. I was restless and didn't want to revisit all this stuff again. I endured the first day, but then I bolted.

So the next day, instead of attending a morning of information designed for parents new to the college experience and fidget through stuff I'd been through before, I played hooky—300 miles of hooky. It took some time to get where I wanted to be. I revisited State Road 207 as it entered Palo Duro Canyon and continued the loop over to just west of Amarillo, to the Cadillac Ranch.

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I hope you notice the Open Salon addition to the Cadillac in the image at the top of this post. It won't be there long, this will be your only chance. You may have to see it in a larger size than what is afforded here on the blog. An image 485 pixels wide sometimes doesn't reveal everything you need to see. You can view a larger version of it here.

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Cadillac Ranch is a collaborative art project. I posted a blog a long while ago (in OS time) that documents my first trip there. On that blog is some copy from the Wikipedia article about the place so I won't repeat that info here. But suffice it to say, that it is an art installation that is continually changing and evolving. Everyone is welcome to participate. From soon after the ten Caddies were installed, people were drawn in to add their own artistic DNA—pebbles tossed in a stream that is ever changing and never again the same. It is still worth the journey: to view, to think, to participate.

Amarillo is growing. In what used to be a vast and vacant farmland and pasture, the city is encroaching. It won't be long before the surrounding area is built up. In fact, this is the second location for the Cadillac Ranch—it was moved about three miles westward in 1997. From the entry gate on the service road of Interstate 40 leading into the site the image above is the tenth of ten from the left as your looking south at the installation. 

My first visit there was in 2007. No. 10 looked like this then:

You see my point. Well, part of it—we are witnesses and participants to the ever-evolving. 

But before I post some more images of my most recent trip I want to make a larger statement. 

I think the Cadillac Ranch is a lot like Open Salon.

Both are very much in the moment. Both represent a veneer of time. And in both we paint our comments onto another's canvas. The slice of time is infinitely small.

And once we post something odds are it will have a life of it's own for some time then it will quietly slip beneath the waves, rarely to be seen again. There are exceptions, as we can see in the Most Read feed. This is my 108th post on Open Salon. I'm not prolific, I've just been here a while. But my own experience is repeated for many here, that once a post has run it's course, it is rarely visited again. 

This isn't a bad thing, it is after all a metaphor of our times—of how we use and consume information from our chosen media. I love the journey. I love Open Salon. I love sharing. I love giving. I love you.

Thanks for visiting. Thanks for stepping in this stream with me.

Here's the rest of the Cadillac Ranch, but only from the few moments I was there:

No. 10

No. 9

No. 9

No. 8

No. 7

No. 6

No. 6

No. 5

No. 4

Some of what's written: "Life is a journey, don't piss off the other passengers" and "Drive it like it's rented."

No. 4

No. 3

No. 2

No. 1

No. 1

1 to 10—left to right

for a larger version of this last one, see here.

Oh, one other thing that's kind of cool. The last image is what's called an HDR rendition. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, or something like that, and it's a post process rendition where three different images of the same shot are combined. The three shots are taken at different exposure compensations and from a tripod to minimize movement and the results usually present a greater depth in all parts of the image. I don't normally do HDR, but I thought I'd give it a try. However, there was a funny thing that happened in this rendition. 

The third car in from the left, No. 3, shows a guy standing there, but he got melded into the car like Hans Solo frozen in carbonite. The combining can't account for a person's movement. Here's a crop enlargement of that guy:

I have some additional images (if you can believe it) of the Cadillac Ranch on a gallery site I maintain. You can visit that here.

all images copyright © 2009 by barry b. doyle • all rights reserved

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