InMotion

If you travel regularly as I do in New Orleans on St. Bernard street, between N. Claiborne Ave. and the intersection of N. Rampart and St. Claude Ave., you are bound to encounter what in the Pacific Northwest are referred to as "salmon".  These bike riders are riding in the wrong direction, against the flow of traffic. The fish swim upstream in the fall to spawn, the human "salmon" ride upstream for unclear reasons.   This is dangerous human behavior for several reasons, among them being that it may force another cyclist riding in the other direction to ride too close to a parked car (risking being doored) or to veer into the lane of traffic, risking being hit by a car. I think most likely the salmon riding behavior results from the rider feeling personally safer when they can "see what's coming" since virtually all bike riders in the city eschew the use of rear view mirrors.  This "wrong way biking" is ubiquitous all over New Orleans, and is...

Monoculture in south central Louisiana.  Sugarcane in April In 2017, Irishman Paul Kingsnorth selected some 30 essays that Wendell Berry wrote  between 1968 and 2011.  They were published in book form as The World-Ending Fire.   I received the book as a birthday gift from my son Tyler, along with a long letter from him.  In his letter, he quotes at length a passage from Berry's 2006 novel Andy Katlett: Early Travels.  For Tyler, this was his first reading of  Berry, now 84, who has written 7 previous novels about the fictional small Kentucky town of Port William and its people.  Tyler was stirred by how it "captured themes of growth, change, nostalgia, belonging and purpose": Time is told by death, who doubts it?  But time is always halved- for all we know it is halved- by the blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present.  Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is...