Catherwood's

"the crusades"

Back in the day, when people took photographs using film, there was this thing called a "double exposure" -- exposing the same frame of film twice, to create an unusual or otherwise unobtainable effect. (Now that most people are shooting with digital cameras, and can in any event digitally edit scanned versions of film images to combine them with other images in any way they like, the in-camera double exposure is going the way of the dodo.) I remembered that the other day when I ran across this double exposure I did back in the '80s. 

One exposure was the end profile of the old Milwaukee Exposition Convention Center and Arena, with the steeples of St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the background.  It was a scene I saw frequently, when I would park on top of the ramp on 4th and Wells before going over to the State Office Building for work.  This scene, which would be my view to the north when I was up there, always made me think of Christianity and Islam.  The steeples, of course, were unambiguously Christian -- but why Islam? It was because the building was always known and referred to around Milwaukee as MECCA. 

One month, as sometimes happens, the crescent moon was very closely aligned with the evening star (the planet Venus), creating the classic moon-and-star symbol of Islam. I captured it that evening, making notes for myself as to where it appeared in the frame, and the next time I got down to Milwaukee I cocked my shutter without advancing the film, and lined it up as best I could with the steeples-and-MECCA scene.  This image was the result.  To me, at least, it evoked the idea of Christian crusaders, marching over the curve of the earth, bearing down on the holy places of Islam.

I find it impossible to look at this image now as I did when I created it. The idea it evokes has taken on associations which could not have been imagined -- or at least, were not imagined -- 2 decades past.

Orfordville bluegrass jam

This past Sunday I finally got back down the bluegrass jam in Orfordville.  I hadn't been for a couple of months -- the damn winter weather (fog, blizzard, whatever) had kept me grounded.

It's organized and run by Fritz Jaggi, on the first Sunday each month, in the American Legion Hall down in Orfordville, a little town at the bottom of Wisconsin, near Beloit.   

There's  usually a couple of dozen musicians, and also a good crowd of listeners and dancers. Food is served out in the hall in front, where the stage and the dance floor are, and there's always a good crowd in the back, too, at the bar.

I dragged along my National and my mandola and spent most of my time picking and singing (and drinking) with the crowd in the back. Late in the afternoon I got called out to play with a pickup group on the main stage.

We had a good ensemble, with a good bass player holding us down, and we did okay. I sang a number, and counted myself successful in remembering two verses worth of lyrics (my mind usually goes blank when I get up in front of a crowd).

more photos here...

Cloud City facing disaster?

Although Leadville, Colorado, the "Cloud City", lies high in the Rockies surrounded by snowy peaks, it's still a pretty dry place.  But just east of town -- in fact,  not far from the spot where I took this photo -- there is over a billion gallons of water, lying pooled  under the surface. 

As explained in this recent Denver Post story, though, that's not good news.  The water is acidic, polluted with poisonous heavy metals including cadmium,  zinc and manganese.  It's also backed up, almost 200 feet above the level of the town, and many experts think it is an imminent threat to burst through, inundating parts of the town and disastrously poisoning the headwaters of the Arkansas River.

How did this happen? During the mid-19th Century mining boom in Leadville, when it was one of the biggest and richest cities in Colorado, the foothills east of town were riddled with mine shafts and drifts.  The mines were eventually played out, and what was left was devastation on a grand scale.  Above ground, there were piles of tailings, dragged up from far below, from which leached a  variety of poisonous heavy metals.  Underground, there was a honeycomb of empty mine works -- which filled with groundwater and runoff from the prodigious snow pack that covers the mountains every winter.

During World War II, a brief effort was made to resume production in some of the mines, and to make this workable a tunnel was started, sloping downward to the north and an outlet along the East Fork of the Arkansas River, to drain water from the working mines.  The resumption of mining didn't pan out, but in the 1950's the tunnel -- known as the Leadville Mine Drainage Tunnel (LMDT) -- was adapted to provide permanent drainage that was needed for the water which continued to pool in and around the old mine workings on Fryer Hill,  Carbonate Hill, and other areas of the Leadville Mining District close to town.   

The tunnel was not sophisticated.  It was not lined, but was simply dug through the glacial till and braced with wooden timbers.  By 2001 it had become apparent that collapses inside the lower end of the tunnel had largely blocked the flow of water out it.  But water kept seeping into it, and has now filled the tunnel, backing up to close to 200 feet above the outlet. Ominously, new seeps and springs have been appearing in the slopes and gulches below the areas where the mine water has pooled -- and this year's near-record snow pack, already at 160% of average, hasn't begun to melt.

The tunnel is owned and operated by the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation.  It is pooh-poohing the risk. However, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the "superfund" site program (Leadville's mining district is such a site), is worried that "an uncontrolled, potentially-catastrophic release of water to the Arkansas River from (the tunnel) is likely at some point".

I'll be following this story, hoping that I don't end up reading about just such a catastrophe actually occurring.

[Google News results for 'Leadville Mine Drainage Tunnel']