I was running with my tripod, and my impressions of the bridge photo taking session are mostly of different kinds of light. The workmen’s lot was bare dirt. There were some inexplicable mounds of concrete, and a train track on one side. Behind the lot, the sun was setting over downtown, glinting off every surface, reflecting and re-reflecting off the glass city. The farther the sun dropped, the more golden the shining light. The shadows cast by the buildings were deep, however, and cold; the last stray bits of winter collected there, and every blade of grass was cold.
At the edge of the parking lot, a mound that could have passed for a low hill rose steeply and precisely. I didn’t recognize it as a levee. You can live in Dallas for years and never realize that it was built around a powerful river that floods and needs to be held back. The hill/levee was choked with brambles and clinging thorns: a mournful lot of these. Up the hill I went, ignoring the thorns, slipping on the scree, until I could look over the edge, across and down a field that was unnaturally green, past a strange platform surrounded by a fence with ‘KEEP OUT’ on it. I had a good vantage point. I could see lots of police cars. And a few helicopters. And the odd bird, strikingly silent and agile in the company of helicopters, and nearly blending in to the sky.
trinity river blues 