a brief foray

click 'er for bigger

Back to the purely descriptive view. Once again, the lab is having troubles with the E6 machine, so I'm "reduced" to showing the pea shooter output.

We don't have landscapes like this around here, so this view results from a quick journey to the capital of the Confederacy. It's not far from here, and I find these places far more interesting than the restored portions of town. But then I realized, driving past the train station, that its neighborhood - amidst a thicket of massive concrete columns that support I95 and I64 with an incessant roar of traffic 75 feet above - is a completely transformed landscape. Entire city blocks have been closed off to the sky, and the station itself is crowded in by the interstate span that crosses the James River, passing only several feet from the front elevation of this Rennaisance Revival building from 1901. On the ground, the city has tried to make the best of a horrible situation, with a maze of pathways through a darkened "park" that never quiets. Was this an additional, intentional insult, 100 years after the end of the Civil War? No wonder we're still fighting here in Virginia.