I had set the alarm clock early enough so that I could get up with plenty of time to get to Joe's without having to stress about any possible traffic tie-ups. Unfortunately the alarm clock in this place has a volume control. I didn't know that when I had set it before turning in or I would've cranked it up as loud as it would go. I woke up a half an hour before the workshop was due to start! Recall that it takes about a half an hour to get from the motel to Joe's. Luckily I had taken care of most of the packing before turning in for the evening so it was just a matter of getting dressed and getting on the road. I grabbed my stuff and took off. Unfortunately it was chilly out for the van so I was stuck without the use of overdrive until such time that the engine had come up temperature. That took about ten miles with the A/C running full blast. As soon as the transmission dropped in to overdrive I took off like a bat out of hell. Unfortunately there's a little town called Port Jervis which is right on the Pennsylvania/New York border. The speed limit is between 20 and 30 MPH. I had been averaging 75 MPH on the mountain roads between Wurtsboro and Port Jervis where the speed limit is at most 55 MPH. I made the run in about 15 minutes. :) Joe thought I was a "crazy son of a bitch" for driving all the way up to Pennsylvania for a workshop. I said that I thought it would be worth it. I met JoAnne Kalish and Ace (their dog). The studio was pretty cool. They had some of their work hanging on the walls, a line of computers on one wall and photographic equipment along the other wall. The first part of the workshop was some slideshows of the work they have done in the past. Some of it was stuff that had only been seen in public once. There were a total of four students. One has been to most of Joe's workshops and has had some of his worked used in advertising. One of the slideshows was of work they had done for a hotel down in Miami. After the slideshows we broke for pizza. While eating we figured on stopping by a friend of Joe and JoAnne's. His name is Ricky Boscarino. They said that he had been working on modifying his house so that it was themed after Coney Island. Since there were six of us total and the van seats seven we decided to take my van. I made Joe promise not to make fun of it. When I pulled up to the driveway (I parked down the street next to a park) he said that it completed the mental image he has of me. He said something to the effect that he figured that I had an Arlo Guthrie way of life. All I needed was a beard and long hair. I showed him one of my IDs from work and he said that it fit.
We didn't know if Ricky would be home, but we decided that we'd try going there first. After going there we were going to go see a lama farm down the road. If there was time after that we were supposed to go see a waterfall that wasn't too far away. Driving down the mountain roads was fun. I didn't really touch the gas; I just coasted down the road and put on the brakes when things started getting above 40ish. The posted speed limit was between 15 and 20 MPH. When we arrived at Ricky's the gate was open...he was home. Apparently the past few times that Joe and JoAnne went to stop by he wasn't home. They were right in that he had a unique house. It was kind of like Dr. Seuss meets Edward Scissorhands. I don't mean that in a bad way either. It was Dr. Seussish, but more of a grown up theme. I don't necessarily mean adult themed, but it wasn't like a Disney theme that little kids would understand. We found Ricky out back working with a plasma cutter. He was cutting out some hinges for some large doors. As he ran the cutter I started taking photos of some of the things that I saw around me. He had a pile of traffic light lenses (green and red). On the side of one of the buildings was a sign that said "Luna Parc". On the side of the building where he was drawing power for his air compressor was the bumper off of an old car along with some long saws. Behind me was a fence around another building. The fence was made of crutches. After he had completed the cut he was working on he took us on a tour of the house.
The first part of the house he took us to was still under construction. It had a huge set of wooden doors. They were held in place with massive hinges that made a really distinctive creaking sound when they moved. There were a few other things in the room that caught my attention. One of them was the stained glass work. They were stained glass windows that he made himself. There was the head of what looked like a water buffalo mounted on the wall across the room from the doors. Along one of the walls was a set of flywheels and large gears. From this large room we went up a pair of stair cases to get up to the next level. These stairs were made of a single run of square tube with risers that were made of metal stock that was about nine inches deep, about 14 inches wide and about 3/8" thick. There were no handrails. What made it interesting was that while going up these steps we found that there was nothing between us and the basement. :) You could actually fall farther than the ground floor. To top all of this off was the fact that at least two people were afraid of heights. I was not one of those people. I did hesitate making the first step. I made sure to hop a little on the first step to see just how much it moved before continuing. It didn't flex enough to alarm me so I continued up to the higher levels. There were sections that Ricky had started decorating. There were little statues of elephants and robots. I saw a couple of odd masks and some lamps. There was a flat spot on the roof that is outside of Ricky's bedroom. It looked like that would eventually be a patio that would overlook the front yard. Some of the sections of wall on the exterior of the house were covered in copper sheets that he had rapidly aged using chemicals. They had a green look like the Statue of Liberty. He also used the same technique on steel to make it turn to a bright orange. After looking around on the upper levels we went back downstairs to the kitchen and bathroom. The kitchen kicked ass. He had taken the walls and covered them in rows of corks. The molding around the door to the outside was covered in combination locks and the door itself was covered in bottle caps. The ceiling was crammed with old style cooking utensils. The shelves were full of the things that you'd expect to find on the walls at an antique place or like a Cracker Barrel restaurant.
The bathroom was also quite a sight. The walls and floor were covered in crushed tile and set like a giant mosaic. There was a bathtub that was up on a rise (three steps up from the floor). The tops of the steps and the lines along the steps were covered in stones like you'd find in the mountains. The windows were stained glass windows. In one corner of the bathroom was a stone fountain. There was an old fashioned urinal (the type that goes down to floor level). He installed an old fashioned telephone next to the toilet. When else would someone call? ;) The middle of the room has a circle of smooth river stones in a circle. Above that circle is a lit dome in the ceiling. Up in the dome was a shower head. The drain was hidden under the stones. Several of us were having problems getting a decent photograph of the dome with its built-in lighting. I decided that instead of holding the camera I'd just set it over the drain. That kept things more or less aligned properly and I didn't have to worry about camera shake. The amazing part of it was that Joe had been there a year before and the room wasn't a bathroom at all. It was a wired technical presentation room.
After photographing the inside of the house I went out and prowled the grounds. I paid special attention to the details. There was a small stand off of the beaten path with little statues of elephants. They were "dressed" like you'd find statues of elephants in India. It seemed Ricky was in to a little of everything. I found unfinished projects all over the place. It seems like he works a lot like I do. I have enough projects at any given time so that if I got sick of one I could walk away and work on another one for a while. Beside the house was a table and stools. I looked at the stools at first and just dismissed them. Then Joe came and sat down on one of them. Basically what Ricky did was he took a bucket and filled it with concrete. He then took a large coil spring from an automobile and sank that in to the concrete. When the concrete set he sank the other end of the spring in to the slab that the table was set. The stools were literally springy. :) I thought that was cool. At one point I socialized with JoAnne for a while. We hung out around the outhouse outside of the kitchen. :) I noticed a little figurine of a monkey sitting on a bench holding a woman's dress shoe. I went out front and played with custom white balance. The subject I used was a structure made of blue glass bottles. Hidden off in the bushes was a big pile of blue glass bottles and a shopping cart filled with more of the same. There were little dragon fly sculptures hidden in the bushes as I got farther away from the front of the house. As we were getting ready to leave I happened to glance down at the ground and I noticed the stepping stones leading up to the front door. He had changed them to look like waffles with butter and syrup.
We had spent a great deal of time at Ricky's house. On the way out we asked how he found time to do all of this. He said that he doesn't watch TV. I didn't happen to see a TV anywhere around there. It's a wonder just how much time is blown watching TV. Anywho as we were pulling away from Ricky's we figured that the lamas were already in for the day and that there wouldn't be much to see. Instead we headed to Raymondskill Falls. When we arrived we found a woman sitting out near the water. It looked like she was either meditating and/or praying. I made sure to keep a respectful distance. I climbed along the rock walls around the water to photograph other sections of the falls. Supposedly if it had been earlier in the summer the place where we were standing would be under several feet of fast moving water. There was so much to see here. Again I seemed to have an eye for detail. I photographed some pond skaters. That was actually kind of a difficult shot to get. The light in the area was actually fairly low. I found images in lots of the things I saw. There was a fallen log that had been eroded to where it looked like a crocodile. There were a couple of parts of trees that looked like faces. There was a rocky outcrop that we all swore we could see different animals in it. Some of us saw dinosaurs. Some of us saw goats. A couple could see how we could pull and eagle out of it. This was a good place to do time exposure shooting. If the settings were set just right the water would look like ground fog flowing between the rocks. Like at Ricky's we stuck around the falls for a couple of hours. The drive back to Joe and JoAnne's was far more conservative. Most of it was uphill so the van didn't get to coast through the turns. As we rounded a corner heading back some deer started to cross the road. I stopped dead in the middle of the road and pulled out the camera and started shooting. The light was still low so I had to be extra careful to hold still. I was starting to get the shakes which didn't help much. I tried to brace against the door of the van but the vibrations of the engine made the shakes worse. I did get a couple of decent shots. There was one that I got that Joe said was "a money shot". The doe was illuminated with rim light. I wasn't standing that far away from it either...less than 30 feet. I'd even say that it was less than 20 feet in reality. I was standing literally in the middle of the road and it wasn't that far off of the road in the trees. After the group of deer wandered deeper into the woods we resumed for the studio. On returning to the studio we sat out on the back deck where we had lunch. We had wine, cheese, crackers, and talked and pet the dog (Ace). A few of us stuck around pretty late in to the evening. I think we finally broke around 2300. I said my goodbyes to Joe and JoAnne and thanked them for their hospitality. Joe said that he still thought I was out of my mind. They both asked me to call them when I got home so that they knew I made it home okay. The ride back to the motel was uneventful.
My night was going really well until I got back to the motel. I went to sync my photos from the media vault to my notebook. The media vault for those of you who don't know is a little notebook hard drive with a card reader attached. It copies all of the files from the card and dumps them to the hard drive. After the files have been dumped to the drive I can wipe the cards and continue shooting. I had used it fairly heavily during the day. When I went to sync it to the notebook it came up and said that over half of my photos were gone! I was so pissed. I packed some of the software that I use for disaster recovery, but it's just diagnostic software. It's more to give me an idea of what I'll have to do when I get home to fix a problem than to fix it in the field. I was on vacation; I wasn't about to spend my time screwing around on a computer. I pulled some software off of the Internet to see what could be salvaged. It looked like I could get some of it back. Most of the photos that were gone were from the later part of Ricky's and almost all of the shots from Raymondskill Falls. I was so pissed. I almost threw the photo vault across the room. I decided not to because I figured that in order to do that level of data recovery I'd have to pull the drive and wire it in to a Linux box. If I destroyed the drive I knew for sure that the possibility of getting any of it back would be gone. I ended up having to walk away for a while. I watched some TV before turning in for the evening. Before shutting down I did one more look at the photo vault. This time it said that all of my photos were there! I was so relieved. I'm not sure what had happened exactly. I know that something on my notebook was keeping the directory listing from updating. I made sure to start the sync right then and there before anything changed. :) After the sync completed (took almost two hours) I turned in for the night. I had a long drive ahead of me.
I got on the road around 0830 in the morning. It was kind of a difficult drive home. Again memories of going home after spending time at Grandma and Grandpas kept coming back. It's one of those rituals that deep down I do miss. I took photographs as I drove (probably not the smartest idea). They came out really interesting. Almost all of them were at a slant like I was stomping on the gas while taking them. Towards the end of Virginia I made sure to get some shots of the mountains in the distance. I always liked that section of the trip. At one point I did make an attempt at a photograph that I really wanted. It didn't come out too badly. It was of the odometer on the van; I took a photo of it when it read all sevens. :) I thought it would be a neat conversation piece. I got stuck in Charlotte, NC for two and a half hours because the assholes on the road don't understand construction zones and merging down to only one or two lanes. I ended up stopping at a police station and asking directions. I figured that they could tell me how to get from where I was out to I-485. They wanted to know why I wanted to get there by some other way than I-77. I explained that I-77 was backed up for several miles and I wanted to bypass it. They finally understood and gave me the directions I wanted. I drove straight through to get home. I ended up pulling in to the drive way at 0700. To say I was tired was an understatement. I was starting to have trouble staying awake around Daytona Beach. The drive was no longer sufficiently "interesting" to keep me awake. The drive through Jacksonville was fun. It was construction, but there was nobody on the road to speak of. While driving through I saw one police car, a small road crew, and two tractor-trailers. That was it from the time I entered Jacksonville until I was well out of it again. The one thing I learned about the music I was listening to was that listening to Counting Crows is a bad idea. I like them just fine, but listening to them while driving tends to make me really drowsy.
I left all of my stuff out in the van when I got home. I went up to my room and slept for four hours. When I woke up I unpacked the van and then called Joe and JoAnne around noon to let them know that I had made it home okay. I explained that I decided to wait to call them because I didn't want to run the chance of waking them. They said that it was okay and asked that I stay in touch. All in all it was a good trip that was worth the fuel costs. I'm glad I drove. It made the trip that much more enjoyable.
Posted by Rob at December 31, 2007 09:41 PM