The Machinery of Night

Foto Friday: Phaestos

Oh, no time, no time. So have some old thing I already have scanned.

Mt. Ida from Phaestos, Crete, June 1990

At the time, of course, I was annoyed that I'd managed to catch the guy on the motorcycle. Now I think it adds valuable local color.

This is from a Kodachrome slide. The mountains have a watery look you sometimes see in old slides, but this one isn't really very old. So I don't know how I got that.

No, I'm not sure which one is Mt. Ida.

I remember looking at the Cretan mountains and thinking, "Civilization has been here so long that there is nowhere, nowhere in these hills where people have not walked." It was a claustrophobic feeling. Where I grew up, in the Ozarks, you could pretend that wasn't true. You could pretend that you were the first to explore this ground, even if just one tiny patch. Or, at least, you could tell yourself that no one had been here since the days of the Indians. That is, until you were snagged by a rusting string of barbed wire, or a plastic six-pack ring.

Labels: Foto Friday, Greece