A few more park photos, this time from Portland's "Marigold HydroPark" [map]. A "HydroPark" (the trendy BiCapitalization is theirs, not mine) is a chunk of land around a city water facility, open to the public as a park. They started doing this a couple of years ago to great, ok, moderate fanfare, around the same time they reopened Reservoir 3 to the public. I was a little curious about this, but none of the HydroParks were close enough for an idle excursion. Then I stumbled across one while on my way back from Marshall Park.
Well, "stumbled across" isn't quite accurate. I saw the big water tower, figured there just might be a park attached, and went to check it out. And sure enough, chance favored the prepared mind for once. Anyway, I took a few photos, and here they are.
It's not that I think water tanks are terribly fascinating, but there were some interesting shapes and angles and such going on, and there's not all that much else there to take pics of. It's a small parcel, sloping grassy lawn, some trees and shrubs, and a gigantic million gallon water tank. The city calls it "Marigold Tank", which incidentally would be a great name for a band.
I realize these things are perfectly safe and all that, but when you count the zeros on the sign and realize you're standing under up to a million gallons of water, you can't help but take a couple of steps back and look nervously upward. Then you go "ok, so that's what a million gallons looks like. Cool." Well, that was my reaction. Your mileage may vary.
Incidentally, the company that build the thing is still around. Here's their corporate history page, with lots of photos, although this particular tank doesn't get a mention.
Ok, I snuck a flower photo in on you there, so sorry. But they were right there, bright yellow and everything. I couldn't help it.
The tank is kind of interesting in B+W; the shapes and shadows are more interesting without all those distracting colors, etc.:
Oh, and I had to try a few infrared pics while I was there. Most didn't turn out that great, but you can at least tell where you are in this one:
Here are a few pics of, and from, the Astoria Column out in (you guessed it) Astoria. Some were taken on my mini-roadtrip last month, and others are from the only other time I've been there, wayyy back in February 1979.
Regarding the 1979 pics, the originals actually look better than what you see here. The scanner I used on these is about a decade old. It doesn't do an overly professional job of figuring out colors, and its dynamic range is pretty limited, so if you have a photo with light parts and dark parts, you can get one or the other to come out somewhat decently. But not both. And it puts ugly vertical bands on everything it scans. And square objects come out a tad on the rectangular side, like photo #2 above. On the other hand, the scanner was free, and Ubuntu's default install includes a driver for it. So that's something, I guess.
The first couple of photos in the slideshow are more or less the same view of downtown Astoria, taken 28 years apart. The two roughly squarish photos were taken with a 126 camera, which you basically can't even find film for anymore. I'm not 100% sure whether I took those or not, since my own camera was a little 110 just like this one.
Here are a few of the column itself.
In my defense, photographically speaking, the camera wasn't shaking in these shots. It was me that was shaking. Oh, and the stairs were shaking, too. I didn't remember the stairs being that scary in 1979.
Several kids ran past me on the stairs going both directions. Who knows, maybe they'll come back 30 years from now and they'll wonder if it was always that scary. Or they'll just float up to the top with their antigravity boots, sneering at all the poor chumps of decades past who had to worry about stuff like "stairs" and "exercise".
So anyway, here's the very top of the column, taken from the balcony.
A few grain ships on the Columbia. Ships tend to park in Astoria temporarily on their way to Portland. I don't know if it's due to the tide, or they're waiting in line for a river pilot, or the Astoria visitor's bureau pays them to create some nautical ambience, or what it is, exactly.
Just across the parking lot from the column, and steps from the gift shop, is this odd memorial to a local Indian chief who befriended Lewis & Clark while they were here, 200-odd years ago.
The memorial only dates to 1961, and was put together by people claiming to be descendants of the aforementioned chief. Which is a nice touch, certainly, although I don't know how you'd ever be able to prove a claim like that. If you're running a cash-strapped city parks department, and someone comes along wanting to give you something for free, most likely you don't ask a lot of tough questions. They could say grandpa was the Shah of Atlantis, for all you care, so long as their checks clear. But hey, I'm always a cynic, in case you hadn't noticed.
