Running low on Sykes I explored another box of his slides, one I’d not searched before.  Inside were a few slides grouped by subjects and captioned – minimally.   For these subjects we have already seen slides “without words” in Our Daily Sykes.   There was a grouping for “Snake River,” another with many close-ups of flowers and a third of sunsets, of which the above was one.  It is that rare photograph of a sunset that breaks the commonplace of the sinking sun sensations with a very satisfying composition and what editors and ad-agents like to call “human interest” too.  But where is it?  Again, Horace does not tell us.  However, after “reading” the horizon I remembered it from a Washington State real photo postcard we used in our book “Washington Then and Now.”  With the help of Google Earth I think I figured out within a few feet from where Horace took this sunset sometime in the 1940s.  However, I’m not telling.  Rather I’ll include a good clue below – another display of the same horizon and in full daylight.  So where is it?  (Click TWICE to Enlarge)

[Click to Enlarge]   This may be our fourth or fifth visit with Horace Sykes to the top of Steptoe Butte.  The view is to the south and, I believe, a little to the east too.  Sykes’ decision to include a horizon of the hill as well as the quilt of Palouse wheat fields below it is typical of his often displayed urge to when shooting something far off to also include something nearby.  And here the lift of that upstanding cloud plays parallel to the rise in the butte’s horizon.   All is right with the world and heaven above.

[Click to Enlarge] Completed in 1922 the “Yellowstone Trail” bridge between Pasco and Kennewick was the first of four cantilever trusses to be erected across the Columbia River during the 1920s.   The ferry it replaced could not handle more than six cars a trip, a paucity that kept the twin cities distant. (There was no Richland as yet to make it the Tri-Cities.)  A public subscription drive subsidized the construction, and on the day of its dedication people were as likely to break into song as to breath.  The bridge became a symbol of that rarity in Washington, a statewide cooperation.  The Seattle Times called the subscription effort the “greatest community undertaking in the history of the Northwest.”  Soon about 200 motorists a day were paying the steep,  for the times, 75-cent toll.  Here I have fallen into quoting myself.  This bridge’s story and many others across the state can be read for free by you on this blog in the issuing here of the book “Building Washington” that Genevieve McCoy and I wrote in the late 1980s.   Go to the front page books button and find the cover of the book upper left.  Click and wait about five minutes for the big book to download.  If you are looking for this bridge you’ll find it on pages 112 and 113.  “Building Washington” is well illustrated.

Most likely this is another of Horace Sykes looks into the Palouse with the Blue Mountains of southeast Washington or those of Idaho on the horizon.  Some strange light is working here.  A bolt of sunlight has streaked those distant hills, and not the mountains above them.  Or perhaps only a band of snow has dropped onto these hills.  We may expect that of rain – but of snow?  (Click to Enlarge)

Included in the Sykes collection are a number of slides of paintings.  Most were photographed from the originals. This one may be a copy of a copy.  If I have read the signature correctly, the artist was Alice C. Holland, and the date  1949.  I had no luck finding her on the net but I did only the most basic of searches, which is by now often enough.  The painting shows considerable skill.  I also searched for portraits of Franz Schubert but did not find this one.  Still it seems like this likeness was adapted from one of the most oft reproduce portraits of Schubert.   Busts for many admired composers were often purchased for setting on the family’s piano.  I have one of Bach on mine.  I  am pleased with Horace that he would care so for this composer who although he died young was still prolific and the most lyric of the romantics.  Both his songs and sonatas will reward a lifetime of listening, and his symphonies are at once inventive and restrained.  Some of his arranging for brass has riffs that sounded like jazz – sort of.   We may now imagine Horace Sykes listening to Schubert serenades in his sun room with his orchids

Long ago while behaving like a student at the Claremont Graduate School east of Los angeles, but not yet out of the smog, I lived with four other students in a modern shack in the type of subdivision that was known then in L.A. as a Slurb: a combination of slum and suburb.  The homes were new, poorly built and very much alike.  I got a job from the slurblord to clean up homes that had been abandoned or foreclosed on. I was paid $75 a home, which was a happy sum in 1964.

The five of us liked our little shack because the rent was cheap split between us, and our dinner conversations were vigorous.  We were all graduate students on the exercise machines of seminars and our meals together.  Our home was up against a open concrete box drain that was there to carry any flood that Mt. Baldy might send out of its hills onto Claremont and Montclaire, its neighbor across the tracks and our “community.”  It is fitting that the names of the two towns share the same letters but in a different order.  Claremont was one of L.A.’s oldest suburbs with a grown landscape and large old homes, some of them Victorian.  Montclaire was nearly new and made with no apparent or felt soul.

My room had a door to the side lawn nestled beside the canal that was guarded by a sturdy wire fence, which was hardly noticed.  Lying on bed and looking west into the smog of Los angeles the sun set very much like Horace Sykes’ sun above, except that my setting sun was also seen through a screen of Eucalyptus trees on the far side of the canal.  That combination was most serene and sponsored both day dreams and meditation.  It was the sun of Tao during those sunsets, and the filter of smog was so effective that you could continue to look directly into the sun without harm.  Depending on its layering the smog made its mark on the sun, and I sometimes squinted at it and imagined the globe resolving itself the balance of  the yin and yang that was once best known as the Northern Pacific Railroad symbol.

I remember rain in that canal only once, our first week  in L.A..  It rained seven inches in seven days, and set some record.

My first hunch was that this was photographed from Guys Peak, that cross between a pyramid and a pile of sugar (during the winter) that rises abruptly over Snoqualmie Pass.   But now I figure this view looks  south and a little east from the southern slopes of Denny Mountain (and the then still future Alpental ski runs and lifts) over the Pass to Lake Keechelus.

This is another of Horace Sykes looks into the city and the waterfront during his and others pre-vehicular access to the viaduct in the spring of 1953.  This one looks east on Yesler Way.

We return with Horace to the Grant Tetons to make a by now didactic point.  This naturalist photographer could not leave it like we saw it with Our Daily Sykes #290 (printed again just below) with nothing growing in the foreground but also felt a pull no doubt to this beach flora and used it, like we have shown many times through now 296 of Sykes subjects, in a foreground given to those smaller – or small by comparison – growing things that were his other enduring interest or devotion.  It is still morning in the Tetons but the mountains are not reflecting now on Jackson Lake.   Hold on! It is silly if predictable that I gave a narrative to these two recordings, that I put the first one shown here first for Horace too.  He might have just as well taken the top photo first and then chased the mountain reflections in the lake.

We will pause now for Horace Sykes orchids.  Besides his talents for picturesque landscape Sykes loved the orchid and gave a lot of attention to growing, exhibiting and photographing them.  We imagine that when he was off on his trips for adjusting insurance claims and  shutter speeds that  some part of him missed his happy times at home with his family and his orchids.

I confess to a small worry that this may be out of place; that is that it may not be a Sykes, although it is pulled from his collection.  First, the photo is of a Seattle landmark, the Seattle Art Museum in Volunteer Park.  Seattle subjects are rare for Sykes.  But he did love art and so may have cherished its hometown temple.  The slide is also dated August 17, 1943.  Captioning for Sykes is rare, and dating almost never.  Still the slide does show Syke’s sensitivity for framing his subject, and it even has its small singular oddity, which Sykes often finds in small plants and rocks.  Here it is the orange trash container.  Certainly Sykes did not pose it, but I think he would have liked it, whether he recorded it or not.  It is that trash can that “makes” the picture.  Everything springs to it and from it.  Now try not to give it your attention.

“A Pond Reflection.”  This will be as close as we may come to a pun on “Upon Reflection.”  And it certainly is meditative. (Click TWICE to reflect.)  This may be part of the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake and no pond.

The sun-lighted cut through the rolling mid-ground, the delicate and distance thread of blue mountains, and great curving gravel road in the foreground are all  painterly matches for the surreal Kodacolor of this Sykes landscape.

Here it occurs to me – again – how a digital camera might have freed Horace Sykes to shoot whatever he wanted to record and many times over if he was so inclined.   With such freedom he might have “mapped” this farm with shots left and right as well.    As it stands or lingers in this picturesque setting, some days protected from strong winds by the screen of tall poplars, Horace again – and again – gives us few clues.