About Me

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Adalbert is a forum for me, to post ephemera, photography, poetry, occasional travel notes, and various spontaneous motions. Cover photo: Parsonage where my great-grandfather spent his early years. Taken near Liegnitz, Silesia, ca. 1870. The "xothique" portion of the web address is a nod to Clark Ashton Smith's fictional continent of Zothique.

Monday, September 11, 2017

Grandfather, Granduncles, January 11, 1951

My grandfather, Fred Clark (fourth from left), and most of his brothers, probably in Ennis, Montana, January 11, 1951. There is a an elegiac sense here, a feeling that the photo could almost have emerged from 1880 rather than the 1950s. The Place of Dead Roads... QuiƩn es?

The saloon might have been Oscar Clark's, mentioned by the late Dr. Losee.

Sunday, September 3, 2017

2017 Eclipse, Madras, Oregon


Images of totality I captured during the total solar eclipse, August 21, 2017, Madras, Oregon. The flash washed me out in the selfie shot, but I like the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" tone overall. The skies might be out of a John Martin painting. In spite of the doomsday forecasts of media and government, matters associated with the event mostly rolled smoothly. The night before the occultation, I missed my shuttle bus and walked at night up into the hills, where I had my camp (of sorts). Crickets shrilled in the sagebrush, beneath the vast rush of the Milky Way.

On my return, I did get stuck in nine hours' worth of traffic, on what would normally have been a two-hour drive. Someone driving past me the other way, going east, taunted me with "there's a hundred-mile traffic jam in front of you!" The slow drive did give me the opportunity to witness some samples of landscape one normally wouldn't have time in; but it was tedious as well.

On the way back, I also stopped for dinner in Warm Springs, Oregon. I hadn't been in that area in general in central Oregon, for a long spell.