Camera Data

Camera Model: Canon 10D

Lens: Canon EF 200 mm f/2.8L with 1.4 extender

Shutter Speed: 1/100 sec

Aperture: f/13

ISO Speed Rating: 100

Days of Future Passed (July, 2005)

Oregon, my Oregon, where’ve you been so long?

My recent summer sojourn sucked me out of my Puget Sound home port into the heart of Oregon like a well posted rip-tide. The distant shores of the Willamette Valley and the past loomed large on the horizon.

My first port-of-call was Eugene where I met up with a few good friends from High School. Although it had been 35 years since I’d seen many of them, it was as if it only had been a few minutes since we’d last talked. The past became the present and we drank a toast to the future. Good friends for sure!

The following morning, I dropped the hook in the well charted waters of Corvallis where I attended Oregon State University. The past was everywhere. Lecture halls, final exams, a bit of misspent youth, a well spent deferment out of Viet Nam, and memories of an on-going search for my future washed over my bow, wave after wave.

I suppose it’s good to look closely at the past from time to time. But when I looked into the questioning eyes of this young child, again, it was the future I wanted to see. Is there still time to do something, anything, to make the future better, more secure for our children?

What can I do? There must be something, there's still time.

But now, if I could say just one thing to her, I’d steal a line from Bruce Cockburn and Jimmy Buffet and tell her to keep her eye on the horizon because “Tomorrow may come, it usually does”.