For 120 years, the Taylor family has been farming oysters in Puget Sound. We picked up a sack full of oysters, mussels, and clams from
their store in Bow this weekend.
A drive down a rural gravel driveway through the trees; emerge within feet of a railroad track with a BNSF freight hauler on it; wait
as the train passes to unblock the parking lot while fumbling with the cell phone to figure out what DO NOT HUMP
stenciled
on the side of a parked locomotive means¹
— if one wants a quintessential Northwest experience, getting shellfish within yards of the water where they were harvested is
a good choice. I was wandering around their buildings and had to get a photo of this Pepsi machine. One wonders when it last dispensed a beverage for the 50¢
indicated. It appears as if it has been there since shortly after the glaciers retreated.
I have long been fascinated by bits of machinery left to rot where they stand. The intentional does nothing for me when the raw material surrounds us and can be interpreted, unprocessed, by the observer. What does it mean that we build, exchange time and energy for, happily use, and then abandon these things without cleaning up after ourselves? I am sure an economist could explain how the opportunity cost of tidying up one piece at a time makes not doing so perfectly rational, but as less than perfectly rational actors, I wonder if that would be a sufficient explanation.
This phone in San Francisco’s Chinatown is one of the outstanding examples I have encountered when I was fortunate enough to have a camera on hand. It can be instantly recognized as a phone, but has long since stopped functioning as one, yet there it is. It has achieved a certain sublimity as its decay is ineluctable but thus far insufficient to render it unidentifiable, despite the ravages of its environment and the predations of those who have defaced it, and one can imagine its eventual transmogrification into the simply grotesque, but it is not yet so. It is in its place, and by virtue of its quotidian presence, seems correct, almost reassuring. I am particularly fond of the evidence that the shi (獅) has failed to successfully guard it, leading to speculation about that whole mythology, and feel that the cigarette butt makes a fine punctuation to the composition of the photograph.
Here in the Evergreen State, we point to our snow‐capped mountains and sparkling waters and declaim how beautiful it all is. The citizens of Seattle are proud of their record as recyclers of waste. Yet there is crap everywhere, some of it really beyond the reach of my fondness for these artifacts of the modern epoch because it is obviously just trash, but where it fits snugly into my embrace of products of industry gone to seed, I find no shortage of it in our emerald corner of the world. The Pepsi machine out back at Taylor Shellfish is one good example.