We have some more big Lilies. I hope you like Lilies, there will be more next week.
This is Marguerite. They are small. My photos are not to scale.
And finally, an update on the vegetable garden. We put up a small fence to act as a trellis because some of the beans want to climb.
We have our share of little creatures running around. This chipmunk and his friends come looking for dropped birdseed. I make sure I “drop” some every morning.
And we have no shortage of hummingbirds. We have to refill the feeders every few days. They are territorial and we often see the equivalent of dogfights among these little ones.
I left Blair Bridge and traveled less than ten minutes to Bump Bridge. While Blaire bridge was on a busy road, the road to the second bridge was much more rural. As I drove, I wondered how it got its name. Was there a rather large bump in it or near it?
Once at the bridge, I could see how it got its name; it’s on Bumps Intervale Road. As I left my car, I could hear either a pack of coyotes howling away or a kennel of dogs howling for their breakfast. All I knew was that it was loud and rather close. I was hoping it was the kennel and not the coyotes. Eventually it died down. Whether it was coyotes or a kennel, they got what they wanted.
This bridge was much shorter than the first one I visited. It was 68 feet long not including the ramps leading to it on either side. It’s a pretty bridge in a nice location. There’s been a covered bridge on this spot on the Beebe River since 1877. This one was last built in 1972 after the previous bridge rotted out. Unlike many rebuilt bridges, Bump Bridge uses wooden timbers for support rather than stone abutments. I prefer the top picture because with all of the trees high up in the background, it looks like it’s way up in the hills.
Occasionally, I’ll meet someone from another country who will say, “You Americans really like your flag. They’re everywhere.” I can’t argue with them. We love our flag. You see them on or outside of public buildings, but that’s to be expected. We also buy them and put them outside our homes and businesses. We wear them on clothes. We put them on our cars and trucks. We put them on just about everything.
My favorite flags are more the home-grown celebrations of our country. I think it’s great when people make their own flag or paint it where you don’t expect it. Some even to put elements of the flag on display in a show of patriotic pride. I think it shows the character of the people who put those things out there for the world to see.
Yes, we really like our flag; no argument here. Happy Independence Day.
Earlier in the week when I was chatting with my friend Anna, the topic of his bridge came up. She thought back to the movie Blair Witch Project and said it sounded spooky. I scoffed at this but perhaps there is something to it. The first covered bridge was built in 1829. It was torched by an arsonist who claimed that god had told him to do it. Then in 2011, a later version of the bridge was heavily damaged by Tropical Storm Irene. The bridge reopened in 2015 and I hoped that I could manage to get through my shoots today without any bad luck myself.
I counted and before beginning my official quest to photograph all 54 of New Hampshire’s historic covered bridges, I had only photographed twelve. And these twelve were the low hanging fruit. I’d taken their pictures when I was on travels for work or other things. Somehow, my boss never seemed to notice when I detoured a bit to shoot a photo of a covered bridge.
With forty-two bridges left, I decided to try to get four in a day. All four are within a half an hour’s drive of one another in the central part of the state between the Lakes Region and the White Mountains. Sunday, I got up and out the door by 4:30 AM to head off to the Blair Bridge in Campton, NH about an hour and a half away. I like the strategy of going to the furthest bridge first and then working backwards so that the drive home seems a bit shorter. Unfortunately, this meant the drive there felt long especially after not driving all that far for three months due to coronavirus.
I arrived there just after 6:00 AM. The bridge sits on a rather calm and shallow section of the Pemigewasset River. The bridge is 292 feet long and 20 feet wide. The odd thing about the bridge is that it’s on a road connecting the highway to a state road. Like most covered bridges, there is only one lane. If a car is coming through the bridge, you have to wait for it to come through before going ahead. It’s a busy road for a covered bridge but it must work for them to continue the tradition of having a covered bridge on this site.
I’ve recently been playing with taking photographs usingan antique magnifying glass and a lensball. It has not been as easy as it looks. I tried taking the shot above with a lensball with no great result. I rather liked this, though.
The shot above is a river in a forest taken through the lensball. I tried a number of shots here. One issue is catching your own reflection. It seems to be a problem if the area behind the ball is darker than where I am standing.
This was taken along some railroad tracks. I got morshiny e of the gravel of the railbed than anything else. One issue was that there are a lot of minerals in the rocks causing bright spots.
The adventure continues….
On Sunday, I stopped in Franklin, NH looking for a covered bridge and spotted this rather large brightly colored fellow in the center of town. He is wearing a mask so as not to contribute to the spread of COVID-19 and holding a test tube in his hand. (I presume it’s a coronavirus test.) I snapped a pic and then walked up behind him. Can you guess what he is made from?
Yes, he’s made of old kayaks. The city is on the Pemigewasset River and is a haven for river rafters and kayakers. It’s good to see such creativity at work.
The Evening Primrose are taking a beating. We put the bird feeder on a tree branch overhead. The squirrels and chipmunks routinely feed from this feeder and will then jump down onto the flowers. Naughty little animals. Tsk, tsk.
Let’s not forget the vegetables. We have them in a few spots but this is the largest. My wife put down a biodegradable landscaping paper to keep the weeds down around the plants and then filled in with mulch around the borders. I took this on Friday and it’s already changed quite a bit.
Cabooses have always been my favorite type of train car. I stumbled on this one yesterday while visiting a historic train depot in Ashland, NH. I get the sense that it is becoming a permenent fixture as part of the depot’s museum. Here are some of the details that I could capture.
This is a challenging year to be a photographer. Okay, it’s a challenging year to be anything. Before March, I finally arrived at a point where I felt some improvement in approaching people and making good images of them. The shoot I did at our town’s local ice fishing contest was among my most popular because of both the subject matter and the people. The last few months, I’ve posted daily but it’s been a steady rotation of still lifes and landscapes with the occasional small animal or bird for variety.
As social distancing rules relaxed in the US, I hoped to be able to get out to some local cities and the coast to try to get some variety in my images. Unfortunately, the news has reported that the coast is jammed with people and that parking restrictions aimed at limiting the number of people have caused problems. At this time, even though our area continues to have a relatively low incidence of COVID-19, other parts of the US that relaxed restrictions are seeing an increased incidence of coronavirus. The safe money says to stay close to home.
For a while, I’ve considered trying to photograph as many of New Hampshire’s fifty-four historic covered bridges as I can. It’s not easy. They are spread fairly far out. To get the four located in the northernmost part of the state along the Canadian border, I have to drive three and a half hours one way to arrive there. But, there’s not a lot else to do this summer. And let’s face it, this is something I can do without encountering throngs of people.
Using websites, I made a list of all the historic covered bridges and their locations. It’s easy to see groupings that go together logically for a single trip in which I could photograph three or four bridges at a time. And certainly, there will be other things to see along the way. The photographs here are of bridges that I had previously visited and made images of in my travels. They are the “low hanging fruit”. So let’s see if I can get all of them, shall we?
In these times we all have to work safely with what’s available to us.
All of the historic bridges that I’ve photographed can be seen on a new page at this site called Historic Covered Bridges of New Hampshire. You can find it here.
