Day 269 of 365

Lower west riverside

At the western end of 15th Street, where the road ends at the West Side Highway along the Hudson River.

Day 175 of 365

Cloud break in black and white

A view from the High Line looking west over the end of 14th St., the Hudson and New Jersey.

Day 174 of 365

Sun shines on Hoboken

One of the nice things about all the rain we had in June was that if the storm passed through quickly enough, we were treated to these kinds of views.

"Early morning Hudson River," New Jersey, November 2004

Morning on the river

The sunrise image I really wanted to use was the multiple-image panoramic shot that this photo is just one part of a larger canvas. But that pano won't show up quite as well in the blog.

Ah, whatever ...

"New Jersey sunset," Sept. 11, 2006

New Jersey sunset, 9/11/06

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty.

-- final lines of On The Road by Jack Kerouac

New York City sunrise, Edgewater, NJ, November 2004

Week two of my conscientious effort to participate more regularly in the Photo Friday projects. I tend to think of the spectacles of nature as divine intervention of a sort. In college at Notre Dame, my roommate Bryan and I chose to skip the all-campus welcome-back mass our junior year to rent a canoe and paddle a few miles on the St. Joseph River. You'd be surprised at how pastoral the Michiana area can be if all you know of it is Grape Road, downtown South Bend and the campus (though the latter certainly is more scenic and peaceful than, say, campuses I've visited in Boston and Austin). The majesty of a sunrise or sunset, to me, is more of a display of the divine nature of this world than a factory-made reproduction of Christ on the cross or Mary and the baby in a nativity scene.

Besides, my archives contain few -- if any -- images of those last two icons. So sunrise it is.