Mists of Morton

30 January 2014

By K. A. Erickson

All rights reserved

Low-lying clouds drift up from the valley. They cover up hillside clearcuts, obscure plumes from the mills and plywood factories; the desolation of stumps, farmlands, shuttered businesses along Main. Cars with disability placards on the dash line the street.

Folk songs play over the speakers at a coffeehouse and deli as I sketch the facade of the theatre across the street. Now playing, Walk With Dinosaurs. In the back room of a coffeehouse are shelves of books, a lending library for a town without a physical one. Someday, they say. Today, take your pick, romance novels, overprints, or perhaps a murder mystery by someone you've never heard of.

After finishing my coffee I drive to another part of town. There a murder of crows rifles through the garbage in the back of a 4 X 4 pickup truck parked outside the Morton Market. Caw, caw, caw, caw! The crows broadcast their findings. They are unconcerned about human intervention as they peruse the contents in the cold rain.

Inside the store seniors shuffle down the aisles filling their basket with sundries. A few stoop to pick up a copy of The East County Journal on a lower shelf. Seventy-five cents for eight to twelve pages plus advertisements. The current issue highlights high school sports teams, the Mossyrock Vikings and Morton-White Pass Timberwolves, an upcoming play, and the Morton town council approving money for summer tourism. “Thanks for shopping with us today ...”

Noon arrives. The coffeehouse has only soup and sandwiches. A faded neon sign attached to a building alongside US Highway 12 blinks “EAT”. “EAT” has a selection of burgers, fries, ice cream shakes, the soup of the day. “Do you want your onions, cooked or raw?” a worker behind the counter asks.

“EAT” sits next to a gas station where a hunched elderly man in the grocery ten minutes ago is now filling up after going inside to purchase a lottery ticket. A car pulls up and a built 30-year-old who would in the past have worked in the timber industry hops out and runs inside the gas-station-food-mart to get a box of chicken wings. The way he's dressed, he likely works at a customer-service job.

As customers in the dining area of “EAT” wait for their orders to arrive I overhear a conversation one table away. It is about kids and getting services out in this area. One has to drive to places in either direction. Her ex-boyfriend is in prison for hitting people with a 2x4. A string of bad relationships, it seems. She is thankful for the fatherly figure sitting across from her for agreeing to meet. It has been awhile. She has a lot to say but only one hour for lunch before going back to work.

Two high-schoolers have stolen off campus to get lunch at the food mart. The woman at the table recognizes one of them, her boy. With him is a girl with a dress that shows leg … lots of leg.. A silver-haired woman inside “EAT” remarks, “That's too much leg for a day like today.”

The skies brighten. The rain lets up. Through pockets of blue sky sunlight illuminates a town of grey.

Showers I have known

By Keith Erickson

They say you save water by taking a shower as opposed to a bath. But they probably haven't met me. I used to and sometimes still do take long showers, the warm water washing across my body removing grime and making me “clean” once again.

I thought if I could stay in a shower long enough my problems, worries, and fear would flow down the drain with the dirt and soap suds. Every part of my body that I hate would dissolve away. That scar from the time an annoying fellow student grew impatient and slammed the drawer above in the library card catalog onto my hand. Ouch. It's still there long after the card catalogs have been retired and auctioned off to collectors or used for firewood. Scars and this other thing I never really cared for. Gone, replaced by perfect skin, what should have been there in the first place. Exiting the shower I feel better, look fresher, but still have the same issues as before.

The worst thing that could happen in a shower other than Norman Bates appearing is to be pelted by a sudden burst of frigid water. The hot water tank is now empty. Or perhaps someone in the dorm bathroom is flushing the toilet again, hungover from a night of partying, cheap women and cheaper booze.

I had the hot water run out at a campground once. The worst part of that would be I still stubbornly held out in the shower for the hot water to return to get my quarters worth. They had a quarter for 8 minutes of hot water. Then it was reduced to seven minutes, then six minutes, five, four. At that juncture they decided they could not reduce time anymore so they upped the price to 50 cents for six minutes. More quarters in the slot box made them a target for vandals to break into. Quarters were replaced with tokens and you had to track down a camp host or even less likely a park ranger to obtain. Three tokens for a dollar. Two tokens could be used for x minutes. The extra token usually became a donation to the state or county running the park. I'd find a few when cleaning out the campgrounds those two summers I was employed.

Another bad thing that can happen after taking a nice warm shower is to either put back on the soggy, wet, cold clothing you had on before or go outside into the immediate inclement weather and get drenched. I have forgotten about the line backing up at our place. In that case you had to stop your shower and rush outside to a line opening, unscrew the cap, then plunge vigorously so it would hopefully all go away. You were likely naked at that point, standing in the cold and rainy weather, while plunging. It's not a scene you want to remember or have the neighbors that may peer over the fence remember.

The longest I went without showering was a week at camp. I suppose I could have in theory used the showers. But after having your possessions stolen by so called trustworthy fellow scouts, I just lived with the sweat and dust. Even then someone swiped my filthy and rank socks. When I was employed at the same camp it was no different. Now it was some other “trustworthy” employee running off with your stuff. What became of those individuals that stole from me? One became a cop and still steals from people he arrests. Nothing changed except now he does it “legally.” Damn bastard. I got 24 hours off from camp each week after the campers went home and before a new group arrived. I would use that time to shower in the safety of my parent's house. Then I'd have to drive all the way back.

Capturing the Dark Sky

By Bob Lane

When I was a boy, there was only one street lamp on Tennyson Terrace, a block away at the intersection with Transit Road.  Few homes used porch lights when they weren't expecting company.  And in this near-dark, the Milky Way hovered so close over my head that I knew that when I grew up, I would be able to touch it.  Now, like most Americans, because of light pollution, I can't even see it.

Gregg M. Erickson can see it.  He travels hundreds of miles, and sometimes climbs ten thousand feet, to see it.  And when he does, he touches it.  With his camera.

The Milky Way over the Glow of Salt Lake City

Dark Sky West,  an exhibit of his full-sky photographs of the Milky Way, is showing at the Gig Harbor campus of Tacoma Community College, at least through February.   Nine are on display in the school lobby.  Others will be rotated throughout the showing.

Erickson is a son of former Tacoma News Tribune reporter Jim Erickson. He teaches business computer sciences at Cal Poly is San Luis Obispo, California.  Two and a half years ago, he was a well-paid, corporate consultant, traveling the western states.  In his gallery brochure, Erickson said he had grown weary of airline travel. He elected to drive from Los Angeles to Denver.  Stopping at Blue Mesa Reservoir in Colorado, he was overcome by the sight of the brilliant night sky.  The experience changed him.  He quit his job and began traveling through the western states, photographing the stars "in all the dark places of the American West" with a digital camera, "where you can actually see the Milky Way."  

"There is a lot of light pollution going on," he said.  For instance the lights of Las Vegas are visible on the horizon from 150 miles in all directions.  In his striking photograph of the Mobius Arch, he said, "you can actually see the lights of L.A., from about 200 and some-odd miles away." He found that completely "pure" skies are rare:  "There a few places in Nevada, where you can get completely away, where there are really pure skies."

Many of his images show the Andromeda galaxy prominently, even though the light has traveled for one million years to reach his camera.  He said his photos "are presented as truthfully as possible.  Colors and brightness are a result of an exposure lasting several minutes."

Once his images were downloaded into his computer, Erickson digitally "stitched" them together, creating a seamless, full-circle view of the heavens.

Because of the wrap-around effect of Erickson's wide photographs, the straight-line Milky Way is portrayed as brilliant arcs.  The effect is stunning.  The scenes vary from the table-flat landscape of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to a candle-lit Mobius Arch in California.  

Besides those photographs on display in Gig Harbor, Erickson has more he is preparing for a show in California.  Some may be seen on a website at DarkSkyWest.com.  "That's my dedicated website for the images.  There are over a hundred images."  His two years of photographic adventures are chronicled on his personal website, NWicon.com.

Jim Erickson, center, listens to son Greg

Erickson estimates he has some 125,000 images in his computer files.  He talked about how he captures them during a computer hookup recently from the Cal-Poly campus.  

Erickson cites one cold night "on the summit of South Sister, which is this absolutely brilliant Cascades volcano outside of Bend, Oregon.  And you have to get up and out of the tent at 1 in the morning, and you're freezing.  And your fingers are frozen, and you're fumbling with a camera, and you're setting up the tripod at 11,000 feet.  And you're freezing, you know, and it would be so easy, you know, to just roll over and say, forget it, I'll just do it later, I'll do it some other time.  It's about forcing yourself to go through with it and do the job."

"There's a good story behind just about every image,"  Erickson said.  He's considering compiling a book about his Milky Way pilgrimages.  

Each one of the photographs in the gallery is comprised of 15 or 20 digital images "stitched" together--a computer blending of the edges of each scene to make one continuous image.  "About a minute and 40 seconds is the exposure that I use for each one of these images."  He uses an ISO of some 1200 to 1600--compared to an ISO of about 100 for point-and-shoot cameras.  Still, he constantly battles to balance a rapid shutter speed with a highly sensitive ISO exposure rating.  That he has been successful is evident in the delicate shadings of his night skies, with almost undetectable movement of the stars.


In his computer "darkroom," he uses "Hugin," an open-source image-stitching program to create his finished photographs, preferring it to the more popular Photoshop.

Erickson believes his full-sky images would not have been possible if he had to rely on "film" cameras.  Digital has surpassed film in image quality in perhaps the last four years, he said.  "There are some camera backs that can produce a hundred-million pixels."  (Point-and-shoots use perhaps a few million pixels, points of light, to create an image.)  He believes "the Nikon D90 in 2009 was the first digital camera to offer better resolution than Kodak 35mm. Kodachrome."

Erickson uses "very ordinary cameras" in his nighttime work but combines them with high-quality lenses, some adapted from old film cameras.  Currently, his workhorse is a Nikon D7000, "a very basic camera, obsolete by today's standards."  He said fine work "is really less about the camera and more about the location and the technique.  Somebody with $1,000 or $800 can easily get a camera that can do some of this stuff." 

Erickson shoots with "a very special wide-angle, 14mm. lens; it has a 2.8 aperture.  Very fast, very wide-angle."    He shoots vertically in multiple exposures, tilting the camera from the horizon to straight up, to capture the Milky Way. 

Erickson said his photographic quest is not for fame or riches:  "I really wanted to just establish a dialogue, and to show what is happening in the American West.  And to get people to appreciate the night sky.  It really is something that humans have been able to observe basically since the eye evolved.  

"For about 500 million years, we have had this connection to the night sky.  And we're losing our connection with it; there are a number of people who have never seen the Milky Way with their own eyes.  I think a part of my work is to get people to appreciate how great it really is, and to see this great sky, and to know that we are a part of this greater system of planets and stars, and to know how wonderful it really is."  

Alexander Hamilton and the Effects Of Internal Radiation Upon the Cosmos Prior To Meeting Stephen Hawking

By James Erickson

If memory was Salvador Dali

And M.C. Escher a clock,

Would you know what time it was

Or would you have to upgrade.

A Tacoma press club, really?

Wide-eyed John called the other day, ebullient as always about his brain flash of the moment.  What did I think about starting a Tacoma Press Club? he challenged.  About the same as I did when I proposed that 40 years ago, I replied:  A good idea, going nowhere.

This is different, he burbled.  He'd already lined up another newsman, editor of one of those counter litterers that fill up the space between casino ads with rewritten handouts.
That makes one of you, I noted.  John himself was not eligible for a "press" club because his ego-boosters were filed on a website.  Electrons aren't newspapers, I pointed out.  They are not published on a press. (I don't care who they let into the White House Press Club.)

Back in The Day, when Honan's still featured at least one Honan behind the bar, I had tickled the idea of a part-time press club, to meet on some regular schedule at Honan's.  That was the meeting ground of the Tacoma News Tribune old-timers and political ol' boys, before they turned off the lights downtown and crawled up the hill to Brown's Star Grille.  I thought we could decorate the walls of the corner room with celebrity black-and-whites.  These would be a drawing card for women's clubs and Jaycee meetings.  Toss in a few framed classic front pages, such as Harry Truman hoisting that "Dewey Wins!" (was it the Chicago Tribune?) or WWII ending, some such.  And Honan could name drinks after famed columnists--The Magoo Martini, the Pyle-Driver.

Went nowhere.  The old-timers couldn't stomach the idea of sharing a table with a radio man, much less the marcelled talking heads.  And those radio guys didn't even know where the hell Honan's was. (Where DO they drink?  Or, DO they drink?)

John wasn't the first to dredge this doomed plan out of my ink-stained past.  It came to mind in December, when a couple of us old Tacoma News Tribune staffers--where did THAT come from?--daily reporters shared yarns in that new coffeehouse on Opera Alley.   The Bakers have long been gone from 7th and St. Helens.  Ownership of the building and use of the old newsroom and offices has changed more times than American Idol changes judges.  I don't know who's upstairs--I'm not familiar with downtown so much since the buses quit running after dark--but if you slide down the hill and into the alley, you'll find that the old press room and mail room have been remodeled into a cafe. 

It's the familiar sand-blasted-brick-and-raw-joists of any urban-renewalled project.  The lighting is creative and moody.  There are plenty of tables and the staff is pleasant. ( I'm not doing a review--I can't even remember the name of the place--but I met the owner--can't remember his name, either.) I suggested that if he dedicated a wall to the old Trib, we might find enough artifacts to fill it.  He didn't laugh at the idea (which is more than I can say for the Honan's)

I have a couple of old Underwood upright typewriters  in the basement that I could contribute--no wires, no batteries.  I found a pica pole in my ruler barrel.  And I have editor Paul Anderson's copy shears someplace.  

How about a framed photo of me interviewing Esther Williams?  That ought to bring in the crowds!