Apartment buildings in Berlin

Orange-roofed apartment blocks zigzagging around a neighborhood in Berlin.

Communist watertower outside Berlin

From a trip to Germany a couple of years ago: I loved this water tower that passed beside the window of my train. Its old funky communist design made me think more than usual of tripods from the War of the Worlds.

Cleanup barge, Iowa River, Iowa City

The last signs of the construction project, now that the old bridge has been totally demolished, is this barge on cleanup duty.

Salvaged lamps, Iowa River, Iowa City

Lamp globes that used to stand above the sides of the old bridge, lying tumbled together awaiting removal on the grass by the approach to the old bridge.

Crumbled bridge end, Iowa River, Iowa City

Closeup of one of the crumbled ends of the partially demolished bridge.

Demolition barge, Iowa River, Iowa City

Like the construction, the demolition was almost all carried out not from land but floating on a barge in the middle of the river.

Parallel crossings, Iowa River, Iowa City

Parallel crossings: a view to the new bridge between suspended shards of the old, still clinging to the cables once embedded in its span.

Half-demolished bridge, Iowa River, Iowa City

Demolition proceeded with remarkable swiftness, starting with a smash right through the center of the old bridge. Notice the semicircular white boom in the water downstream of the destruction site, collecting detritus to prevent it from being swept downstream.

First crossing of the new bridge, Iowa River, Iowa City

At last, the new bridge was open, and all that remained was to dispose of the old.

Deprecated bridge path, Iowa River, Iowa City

Finally the day came when the fences switched which side of the path they blocked, routing one from the old and well-worn path on the left to the clean fresh concrete on the right.

Buiding up the sides, Iowa River, Iowa City

Shining steel railings sprouted from the sides, curving inward like ribs on some technological beast.

Bridge deck complete, Iowa River, Iowa City

Soon the walking deck of the bridge was completed, needing only to have the railings and light attached for the bridge to be entirely finished..

Laying concrete, Iowa River, Iowa City

Since no truck could be backed onto the bridge to drop the concrete in place, workers instead towed a crane-lifted bucked back and forth, drizzling concrete where it needed to go as if squeezed from an enormous pastry bag.

Laying concrete, Iowa River, Iowa City

Two more weeks, and they were laying concrete on the walkway, beginning to form the final structure of the bridge.

Mud and gravel on a developing bridge approach, Iowa River, Iowa City

At the same time, the approaches to bridge began to develop on land as well, as we apparently moved away from the purely aquatic stages of construction.

Growing bridge superstructure, Iowa River, Iowa City

Once the steel beams of the span were in place to form the core structure of the bridge, the layer above them where people will actually walk began to grow.

Bridge spans linked, Iowa River, Iowa City

After so long working on the foundations with apparently little to show, the main frame of the crossing went up remarkably fast: within a week of the first beam appearing, the full span was linked together.

The first beams jut out, Iowa River, Iowa City

After four months working mostly underwater and right at the water's surface, the first steel beams reached out across the river.

Working in coffer dams, Iowa River, Iowa City

Back and forth with a tug through the icebergs, the bridge construction barge set up coffer dams to make dry spaces in the river, then lay down steel and concrete to make two pilings.

Bridge construction barge, Iowa River, Iowa City

Over the past nine months, I watched a new pedestrian bridge being constructed over the Iowa River and the old one being torn down. Here is how it began, late last year, with a construction barge appearing between the banks, carrying a crane and beginning to work on the underwater foundations of the bridge.

Hess tanks, Charlotte, NC

Oil or gas tanks near the airport, the roofs of the two in the middle showing one of the remarkable things about such structures.  Notice that their lides are much lower than the others? Often, tanks like these do not actually have a fixed roof per se, but a floating disk that rides up and down atop their contents. You can thus tell how full such tanks are by the depth to which the "roof" has sunk.

Empty settling ponds, Charlotte, NC

An empty pair of settling ponds at a wastewater treatment plant near Charlotte, North Carolina. Notice the symmetric ramps leading down into the ponds on either side, presumably to let trucks down in to deal with what may have remained on the bottom when they were emptied.

Muddy ponds, Charlotte, NC

Ponds completely churned with a deep orangey-red mud on the edge of Charlotte. This pond is clearly artificial, and from the segmentation and the small white monitoring stations on its edge, I am guessing that it has something to do with waste disposal or remediation. Regardless of purpose, I like the clear solid shape it forms and the way its rocky margin makes an outline.

Median snake, Charlotte, NC

I like the way these curving bushes form a sort of segmented snake in the median strip of this highway near the Charlotte airport.

Spring blooms, Charlotte, NC

A closer view of a line of blooming white trees, all in a row each to grace its own assigned house.

Spring blooms, Charlotte, NC

The trees throughout this subdivision have all turned to soft white puffballs of bloom as the flower exuberantly in the spring.

Haloed peninsula, Charlotte, NC

Peninsula surrounded by a halo of light from the reflecting sun, otherwise muted as it is currently centered directly on the island. Along the edge, ciliary docks protrude in silhouette.

Charlotte, NC cove

Sometimes the sun is positioned just right to turn a lake into a gleaming mirror, highlighting its shape and the texture of the water, as with this cove near Charlotte. On the right, a powerboat leaves a feathered trail of wake.

Horse farm, Charlotte, NC

Coming down at the other end of that flight, a horse farm on the edge of Charlotte, North Carolina. The oval shape is an arena for training, and from the barn radiate thin lines of fencing dividing the field into triangular segments. A few scattered black dots in those segments are horses out to pasture.

Casco Bay islands, Maine

Another shot of Casco Bay islands, many limned in the white of breaking surf.

Casco Bay islands, Maine

The islands of Casco Bay spread out below us, part of the vast spray of coastal bits and bobs that makes Maine one of the most island-infested of all the states, despite its relatively short coastline.

Cousins Island Power Plant, Maine

Jutting out into Casco Bay, the Cousin's Island power plant is a remarkable eyesore for an area otherwise so typically concerned about both appearance and environmental impact.

Downtown & Back Bay, Portland, ME

Downtown Portland is the big buildings at the lower part of the image, lining Congress Street. My father's old law office was in on of the brick buildings just above the plus-shaped roof of the Civic Center, and my wife and I got our marriage license beneath the green roof and pointy clock-tower of city hall. Above, houses and a lovely walking trail wrap around the Back Bay, partially full in this picture at about half-tide.

Waynflete School, Portland, ME

And this is Waynflete School, where I went from 5th grade through graduating High School. It spreads through a couple of blocks of converted old brick houses, now much expanded from what they were when I was a kid. The yellow building on the left is the Lower School, connecting over to the arts building to its right. Middle School is mostly in the buildings above, the High School mostly in the big red building on the extreme right. There are years of memories packed into this picture for me, and it was a delight to be able to catch it from the air.

Western Prom, Portland, ME

Portland, Maine is a city on a hill, sweeping a long bar of higher ground capped by two steep hillside parks, the Eastern and Western Proms (short for promenade). Here we see the tree-covered flank of the Western Prom, the more sleepy and less used of the two.

Wooden world, Portland, ME

This wooden world hangs in one of the lobby space of the hotel at the Portland airport, where the airline stuck me to await my second day of flight delays. I found it understatedly elegant, loving the way the grain of the wood interacts visually with the shape of the continents.

Creekside path, Portland, ME

On the other side of the road by the jetport, a path continues on into the woods beside the Stroudwater, promising a long and quiet riverside walk. Alas, however, I didn't go very far that day due to the amount of ice making things rather slippery.

Old dam, Portland, ME

Following a disastrous day of incremental airplane maintenance delays and ultimate cancellation attempting to depart Portland, Maine this March, I found myself out for a walk by the airport hotel, discovering this beautiful old dam on the Stroudwater River, its reservoir gleaming in the gathering sunset beneath a sheet of lingering ice.

Bridge on Silver Comet Trail, Atlanta

The Silver Comet Trail is a beautiful long rail-to-trail conversion out in the Western suburbs of Atlanta. This striking bridge crosses a major highway between two deep corridors of leafy green.

Beautifully architected building in San Francisco

From a trip to San Francisco a couple of years ago: I love the chunky square extruded windows of this building.

Fencing at O'Hare

Sunset through a barbed wire fence at the edge of Chicago O'Hare Airport.

Streaking lake off Chicago

Brown streaks running out into Lake Michigan from the Chicago shore, looking to me like silt kicked up from some aspect of the spring thaw or recent rains.

Bare grass loop, Northern Illinois

Someday, there will be a full subdivision here, but for now this area somewhere Northwest of Chicago is mostly just a bare loop of roadway in the grass.

Oxbow overload, Northern Illinois

This is one of the most squiggly rivers that I have ever seen, both meandering strongly in its course and with a remarkable number of cast of oxbow lakes and traces of former oxbows all around it.

Red-line fields, Northern Illinois

Another different sort of agricultural mystery is here: thin red lines in right angles along these fields near their roads. My guess is that these are some sort of wrapped and aging product, like one sees with hay bales, though I would doubt that these are hay bales since those are typically dispersed more evenly across a field.

Banded fields, Northern Illinois

This set of banded fields wraps around the farmstead at its center, rising around it if I am correctly interpreting the marks on this terrain.

Banded fields, Northern Illinois

Another set of banded wavy fields, light and dark in mysterious stripes of cultivation choices.

Banded fields, Northern Illinois

I don't know just what's going on with these fields in Northern Illinois to give them these distinctly different bands of color, but I like the wavy forms they make.

Mississippi ski area, South of Dubuque, Iowa

Ski areas in the Midwest are a bit... smaller than one finds elsewhere in the country. Chestnut Mountain Resort, here, is right beside the Mississippi near Dubuque, Iowa. Not so much a mountain as the side of a river valley, it's still apparently nearly twice as tall as the little Lost Valley ski resort we sometimes went to when I was a child in Maine.

Feathered snowscape, Northern Iowa

Feathery structures in the slopes of land around these fields in Northern Iowa.