Magical Places and Marvelous Creatures

Sometimes a postcard message is as much inspired by the image on the postcard as a message to another person. I sent this postcard and message below some time in April of 2009 from my home in Fairbanks, Alaska, to Suyhou City, P.R. China. Jinlin was the user name (no longer used) of a postcarder acquaintance met through Postcrossing, an online international postcard exchange project. At 150 words, this was a relatively long message for the reverse half-side of this 4 by 6 inch postcard. A typical postcard message In English runs less than 100 words. I had to use my fountain pen with a fine nib to squeeze all the words in. I consider my message to Jinlin an ekphrasis -- a fancy Greek word that means art inspired by art, typically poems (in this case a prose-poem) based on a work of visual art.  

Sandhill Crane in flight. Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge,

Fairbanks, Alaska. Photo by Ted Swem. Alaska Bird Observatory:

 www.alaskabird.org.

To Jinlin in Suzhou,
Suyhou City must be incredible. How lucky for us who live in magical places. I imagine floating the canals, wandering the expansive gardens, strolling past the new museum, pondering how much blood and sweat civilization requires to flower. I hope you enjoy this Sandhill Crane postcard. After the long, bleak and bitter cold days of winter, our heads tilt and ears open as flowers for the sun hungry for spring light. These magnificent birds, with their sweeping wing span and prehistoric call --- more a guttural crank ---, ride on lofty winds, some, all the way from Mexico. They give us pause to ponder what is elemental, what is winged, what is astonishing, what is simultaneously primitive and modern yet natural and supernatural in every creature.
I pray many blessings for you and your young son, Kris

Hawaiian postcard cornucopia

Our good friends, the Gebauer family just returned from Kauai bearing gifts. The last trip they brought me a wonderful t-shirt imprinted with the Postcard Cafe, a well-know vegetarian eatery on the island. This time I was the grateful recipient of a wooden postcard picturing a surfer just rising onto his board on a giant wave and a beautiful packet of postcards (left).The packet contains some wonderful classic-style Hawaiian tourist postcards.

The packet reads, "Designed in Hawaii and Printed with "Ecologically Sound Inks on 100% Chlorine Free Paper from Sustainable Forests." That's a grammarian's nightmare of capital letters but I'm sure it covers all the politically correct bases so as not to offend the Eco-tourist constituency. These earth friendly cards are available from Islandartstore.com. 

The Hawaiian islands trade in on the abundance of tourists that visit the islands each year. Americans from the mainland (a odd term when you think of this global village) make up 80% of the tourist traffic. Hawaii, the 50th state admitted to the U.S., is a slice of  paradise with miles of pristine beaches, active volcanoes and tropical rain forests.
As if their postcards and pictures on Facebook were not enough, each time our good friends return from the islands their enthusiasm seems not only boundless but infectious. We are now officially planning a trip to the islands in the near future. Aloha.

Chugging into the future

For the last postcard of 2011, I chose (no surprise) a train. To me there is nothing more symbolic of moving into the future than a train chugging along, especially trains powered by a steam locomotive.

This postcard came from friends and neighbors who just returned from the lower 48 (U.S.) states. I collect train postcards and they seem to find the best cards for me.

This card is post dated 1928 and shows the Royal Gorge, Colorado. The gorge's rock walls are some 2,500 feet and not nearly as wide, so the effect of being in the gorge is a little claustrophobic to some.

Traveling the gorge by train is fairly high on my bucket list.

Yippie, share the serendipidy

After six out of seven days of record lows (-35 to -41), the air warmed to -18 today. I thought this post card expressed my elation. It felt nice to walk outside again. Instead of the smoggy smell of city air under a high pressure inversion, walking outside today you could smell clean winter air again. It reminded me to of winters in my home state of Michigan which seem tame and mild compared to the  brutal cold and dark of Interior Alaska.

The postcard above advertises the Share Experience Photo Contest sponsored by the National Park Foundation. For you shutter bugs who want to enter the contest follow this link. Photographers are to submit their favorite view from the nation's public lands.

Cold to the Bone

We're in a cold snap here. The weather turned cold the past week and there isn't any end in sight yet. On Wednesday, November 16, records fell: 54 below zero Fahrenheit at Manly Hot Springs, 41 below in Fairbanks International Airport.

This post card is my favorite local cold weather image. There are lots of these hearty souls walking the streets of Fairbanks this time of year dressed up like spaceman. This particular individuals face mask sort of looks like a blue pig snout or maybe a Yetti. It's a great picture illustrative of the ice fog and extremes of dress Fairbankians use to keep warm.

I remember the first Thanksgiving my wife and I spent in Healy, Alaska. We woke up and the temp was pegged at 49 below and the propane wouldn't flow. We ended up taking the turkey we were supposed to cook to our friends house to cook it there. They kept their propane tank propped up against the house and wrapped in a thermal blanket. The heat coming off the house was enough to keep the propane liquid and flowing. I know this is a perverse wish but I kind of wish that it would have been 50 below that year just so I can say some day, "I remember the day it was 50 below on Thanksgiving morning..." I guess I'll have to settle for saying, "I remember the day it was 49 below in the 49th state."

Landing a Big One

My high school friend, Rick, has a great sense of humor and wrote on the back of this old Curt Teich linen postcard, "Here's a photo of me catching a big salmon last week. He put up a mighty fight too!"

His fish story did catch the vernacular of the 20Th-century postcard greeting. How many folks back home were bamboozled or humored by stories of whoppers caught and eaten in obscurity on vacation in the back woods.? I would guess more than a few.

Though the old Curt Teich postcards were not of the great quality of color cards printed in Germany and France in the first half of the 20th-century, they do have a rich watercolor tone all their own. Looking at the image, I can feel the vast quietude of the water, timeless atmosphere and the euphoric mood that is a part of the fishing experience on large lakes. Someday I'll tell Rick about the summer when I was ten and landed the giant Sturgeon that bit our boat's oar in half.

Speaking of Fish: or what one fish said to another

This somewhat macabre image comes from Vickie in Taiwan, a Postcrosser. She translates a Chinese proverb but a lot got lost in the translation. It is something about the two fish talking to each other on the line. One asks why the other is still laughing and the other replies because I'm lucky to still see the sky and not hang in the market. I searched the Internet but couldn't come up with any matches, so if any of you have a clue how this works please let me know.

The image is reminiscent of many fish caches in Alaska this time of year. Fish are hung and dried and smoked in the open air and the odor of smoked fish is everywhere, especially along the coastlines and river villages. Its a strong scent but after you've lived here a few years you come to expect and enjoy its pungent odor which signifies fall has arrived.

Alaska, the big one

A question for your elementary school-age kids. Which U.S. state has the largest land area? This postcard answers the question.

Alaska is so big you can put Texas, California, Montana within its borders and still have plenty of room for Idaho. Now that's big.

Compared to the world's countries, Alaska ranks 15th in size, just a little smaller than Lybia and nearly 27,000 square miles larger than Iran.

A few other facts, Alaska has the most coastline of any state and half the world's glaciers.

Kicking Up Some Dust

This scenic card came from Helga, a Postcrosser, from Germany . I liked it a lot. Just thinking of driving a VW on a desert road and kicking up some dust has a lot of appeal to an ex-Legends car racer.

Tugging The Heart Strings

A service station that changed my thermostat in November sent this card to remind me that it was time for my next service. My car's windshield would not defog at 30 below Fahrenheit so I resorted to driving dressed in full winter gear and the window down to keep my breath from condensing on the windows. The station didn't ask but I usually change my own oil and do my own lube job. Still, I appreciate the lovely picture and recall that I was secure in my parents car and slept many miles in a similar position even before the era of seatbelts, let alone car seats for children.

Scandolous Kiss

Was it the polite kiss or that the man had lost his hat that made this image so scandalous? Than again, maybe it was all that wild vegetation and the woman's exposed ankle that told the real story. This neatly bordered postcard was published in 1910 by Bamforth and Company of Hanfirth, England, and New York.

For a more than a century, Bamforth's produced scads of postcards. They were best known for saucy seaside cartoon cards and also silent films, according to About Postcard blogger, Linda Kelly. You can still buy Bamforth's saucy postcards from Bamforth and Company, both wholesale and retail. They hold the license for Bamforth's postcard reproductions. The undivided back of this particular postcard shows the distinctive "B" of the Bamforth's original logo.

I consider this card a find. Where I found it was a mystery until I posted it and Diane Glass, Artstanding Stranger, reminded me she sent it in April just before I left on vacation. When I returned from vacation it was back to work for the busy summer season. For the remainder of the summer my personal effects were disheveled. I'm not a neat nix to begin with so the card got shuffled from desk to desk all summer until a few weeks ago. Compounding this is that right now I have a new medical aliment and taking some powerful drugs to combat it. This makes writing, which I love, and even thinking laborious. For the past week I've had enough pain to knock down a moose. To combat my distractedness I've begun to note the backs of my postcards with dates and contributors when I receive them. This is no doubt normal behavior for serious collectors but for me it was never necessary, since my postcard sources were few. Now this old dog has to learn a few new routines to keep his bone yard straight. Thank you Diane for the save. It is not my intention to create mysteries but to celebrate them.

When I wrote this post in a mind numbing fog, I looked for the easy explanation for how it came into my collection. Because this card is an original, not a reproduction, I assumed it came into my collection the way many did, through the past efforts of my now deceased grandmother. She snagged many a postcard, including some very old and rare ones, out of the hand of many unsuspecting relatives or friends. She would curtly say, "It's for my grandson's collection!" as if to say, I had a divine right to it.