Ed Book's Journal - Returned last night from a good workshop experience

08:21 pm April 15th, 2006

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			Ed Book's Journal - Returned last night from a good workshop experience photographs and words

edbook


	Returned last night from a good workshop experience
	This past week, I attended an Eddie Soloway workshop on Whidbey Island. It was a good experience for me with an excellent and insightful instructor and sharing and talented fellow students. I highly recommend Eddie's book One Thousand Moons with photographs that I can best describe as inspiring. (you know I make good recommendations) I returned home from Whidbey Island via the Keystone-Port Townsend ferry across Admiralty Inlet and then south on the Olympic Peninsula and across the Hood Canal floating bridge to my home here on the Kitsap Peninsula. Because of holiday traffic, I had to wait about three hours in the queue while three sailings whittled at the waiting line of cars, trucks, and motorhomes. I worked on my laptop, read, and dozed while I waited in the rain. This time of year, there is only one ferry on the run and I imagine that the weather caused it to fall a couple hours behind schedule in it's expected half hour crossing. I could have returned home from the other end of the state in the time it took to travel the sixty-some miles. Here's a photo I made a couple days ago looking out across the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward the Pacific of the USS Stennis. I think it's home ported in Everett but it could have been in the shipyard in Bremerton about a dozen miles from here. (I try to avoid Bremerton and the shipyard in particular so probably wouldn't have noticed if it had been there.) (many years ago, I served on one of these aircraft carriers as a nuclear reactor operator and crossed the Pacific a couple times as well as all over the South China Sea, Tonkin Gulf and Gulf of Cambodia.) USS Stennis in the Strait of Juan de Fuca ©2006 Ed Book Peace Tags: nautical, ocean, sky, sunset, whidbey island

19 comments or COMMENT HERE


	Comments

From: ilenebook	Date: April 16th, 2006 03:24 am (UTC)		(Link)

Awwww so nice.
ILYM

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	From: cathouse_blues	Date: April 16th, 2006 04:08 am (UTC)		(Link)

I hope you don't mind, but I've added you to my reading list. I stumbled across your photograph of the Stennis while poking around my friends of friends list, and of course I just had to see what other wonderful images you had. They are all, of course, wonderful, but I do still love this image of her. My (now ex-) husband had been a rider on the Stennis as a DIRSUPPer out of Misawa back in the day.

I very much look forward to the arrival of your beautiful photographs coming up on my reading list; thank you.

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	From: airscale	Date: April 16th, 2006 04:14 am (UTC)		(Link)

Beautiful... love the texture of the water.

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	From: thoughtsbykat	Date: April 16th, 2006 05:06 am (UTC)		(Link)

Lovely! I love the everything about it.

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	From: mummm	Date: April 16th, 2006 07:15 am (UTC)		(Link)

I love the sparkling colors on the water as the sun is setting. Even on our *pond* (Lake Michigan) it is so spectacular. There is one point, right as it sets, at which it just *moves my spirit to another place*!

BTW, I really love seeing all of your photographs but my favorite, so far, was the mountain one that I think you took at your home. It just is so *unearthly* beautiful!

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	From: cranialstrain	Date: April 16th, 2006 07:53 am (UTC)		(Link)

The texture of the water is quite fascinating, thanks for sharing :)

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	From: trinapink	Date: April 16th, 2006 03:31 pm (UTC)		(Link)

You were a nuke?! I knew I liked you. :-)

My husband served on fast attack subs as a nuclear reactor operator. He has rather fond memories of it. He used to say, "I always wanted to live in the West and in the future." Working on the sub was living in the future to him.

I'm loving your photos. As always.

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	From: edbook	Date: April 16th, 2006 05:44 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I was a forestry and recreation & parks major in college and joined the Navy because I was drafted for VN and wouldn't be able to shoot anyone. I wasn't a sub volunteer but had to serve aboard one anyway. Because of claustraphobia after a year transferred to the Enterprise (aircraft carrier) I disliked the military, hated the Navy, and absolutely hated the submarine. The switch to the carrier was a welcome relief after the boat but I still didn't like being away from my family even though we communicated via tapes and letters daily.

Time has a way of fading unpleasant details and what I remember about those times is my close friends.

After the Navy, I worked in electronics but was recruited to work in nuclear engineering again and spent a lot of time again aboard ships--but only for a few hours a day instead of all the time. I even worked on scrapping the boat I was on the commissioning crew for many years earlier. I found many of the notes I put on the back sides of labels on some panels. Ask you husband what he wrote on the back of the scram switch label plate. I still have some of those label plates. I didn't really like working in that field at all and when I didn't have to work in that j-o-b any more to support my family, I ran away to my avocation and changed it to vocation--- shouldda done that many years earlier.

Peace

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	From: edbook	Date: April 16th, 2006 05:46 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	ps

because he'll probably ask, I was an RO aboard the Silversides SSN679

what boats did he serve on?

Peace

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	From: trinapink	Date: April 17th, 2006 05:01 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: ps

Only one. Baton Rouge 689. Also an RO.

He promised himself on the second day of boot camp that he would not re-enlist, and although he was pigeon-holed in the captain's stateroom by a one-star admiral who mocked him for his dream of going to college, he left anyway. Went to work at Palo Verde in Phoenix and retired from there. Now (post MBA) he's back in power-generation, but at the management level.

After I brought up the submarine today, he told a rather shocking story about some tools and bricks of hashish in Rotterdam (didn't involve him actually...thank goodness!). I'd never heard that one before!

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	From: edbook	Date: April 17th, 2006 05:14 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: ps

689 a different class and much improved over the class I was on... I had some friends that went to work at Palo Verde--what a place to put a reactor plant.

Because you brought it up, several old friends came to mind today. I have lost contact with all of them, being the moving population that we've become except that I've lived here since '73 when I left the service. I guess I resented the fact that a stupid war changed my life in a way that I wouldn't have chosen and then life presented options that couldn't be refused without putting my family through additional hardships added to that Navy time.

I'm glad that my children didn't have to go that route and were free to pursue their own way in life.

Peace

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	From: trinapink	Date: April 17th, 2006 01:48 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: ps

"I guess I resented the fact that a stupid war changed my life in a way that I wouldn't have chosen and then life presented options that couldn't be refused without putting my family through additional hardships added to that Navy time."

Fair enough! I worry that the stupid war we're currently in might derail my son's life in a similar way, or worse (he just turned 18). :-(

I'm glad that your children have your example of pursuing your spiritual calling, even if you did have to set aside for far too long. I don't know that I ever saw an adult following a dream like that until I was 30-something. Perhaps if I had, I would have had the courage to do what I knew I needed instead of the "smart" thing.

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	From: americancheesy	Date: April 18th, 2006 07:40 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: ps

I was always curious about what rate you were. ET was not what I would have guessed right off the bat, but now that I think about it, ET makes the most sense.

On a different topic, similar subject:
I am not re-enlisting.

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	From: edbook	Date: April 18th, 2006 08:02 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: ps

you didn't think RO because I don't seem like the type that doesn't like to get dirty? or because I seem to do things? ;)

Peace

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	From: trinapink	Date: April 17th, 2006 04:53 am (UTC)		(Link)

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up bad memories.

My husband joined specifically to be on the subs. He's always been infatuated by the power of nuclear reactors, so he's been very happy staying more or less in the field (he's currently management at a coal plant). His fondest memories (that I remember, anyway) were the days when they'd clean the ship, gorge on shrimp, turn down the O2 and sleep like a babies in a crib. Of course, it helps that he's only 5'4", so he fit in the bunk.

He says he never dared take off the scram switch label plate, but he used to write irritating things about his LPO, just to annoy him, on the back of the pressurizer label plate.

I hear you about finally quitting your job to make your avocation your vocation. I knew in high school that I wanted to write fiction, but my father convinced me to do the "smart" thing, and major in journalism. Now I'm 45 and just now trying to sell my first novel. I've never been happier.

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	From: shatterpath	Date: April 16th, 2006 03:41 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Beautiful work you have here, Ed. A internet friend sent me your way, for which I must thank her again! You capture the Pacific Northwest in all of its magical glory. Particularly my favored madronas. Thank you so much for these.

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	From: bonjour__amour	Date: April 16th, 2006 03:59 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I really want to be on that water.

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	From: ricmerry	Date: April 16th, 2006 07:59 pm (UTC)		(Link)

OK, tell me. What was the single most important thing you got out of Eddie's workshop?
(I have the whole summer to get the rest from you)
;)

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	From: edbook	Date: April 16th, 2006 09:24 pm (UTC)		(Link)

it was covered when I had to run out to my van to get something... ;)

it might take the whole summer to dig it out of me...

actually, I picked up a lot of little lessons about opening oneself to using other senses to get a feel of a place... I normally will go somewhere and be there a few days to get that feel and start making images that I like. He had some exercises to bring them sooner. I will share them but in a different way than he did and incorporate them with my own exercises for other things... in my book...

Peace

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