In honor of Memorial Day, here are some photos of flags draped on houses or barns throughout New England. I love how the character and charm of their surroundings transfer to the fabric or paint of the flags.
The Berkshire region, Massachusetts.
The Berkshire region, Massachusetts.
Central Maine.
I want these flags.
Here are some more links,
A Walk Outside (Picasa),
Memorial Day (Picasa),
Millard Wardwell (Picasa),
First Day of Summer (Picasa).
The man is not an IRS tax collector or a faceless oil executive, but a fun squandering third grade teacher or an overbearing parent. As a little squirt, the pedantic teachers and volunteer parents at my local elementary school squandered my fun, telling me to wash my hands, wear safety goggles and not to wrestle with other boys during touch football. In their soulless eyes, scraped knees, bumped elbows and fat lips are gateways to barbarianism.
In order to provide wood for the perpetually burning fire on the shore Grand Pond, we walked to the nearby woods to participated in some "forest thinning" in the hopes protecting the great Maine woods against potential forest fires and under cooked marshmallows.
With Tucker's hatchet we attacked cherry saplings like Paul Bunyan, reclaiming our manhood one chip at a time.
Sometimes the hatchet got over zealous and bit off more than it could chew, latching onto a log like a burr into a wool sock. A jarring swing and a well placed hand liberated the hatchet, and Tucker was back in action.
By wearing a Barbour International motorcycle jacket, a Filson Mackinaw hunting jacket, a pair of Red Wings work boots, or other pieces of clothing associated with a potential dangerous, yet pure activity, you are sticking your nose up to the shoulder pad laden third-grade teacher that put you in time out for running down the hallways or jumping out of the swing at recess. Here's to you Mrs. Johnson, "We will use hand chopped wood to cook our wieners, not some safe burning, mongoloid hybrid of wood pulp and fossil fuels!"
Here are some more links,
Chopping wood (Picasa),
Paul Bunyan Disney,
Flamz Errol Morris (High Life).
After finishing my last test and turning in my final essay, I joined nine friends to make the twenty mile drive due west to Tucker's cabin on Great Pond in the Belgrade Lakes region of Central Maine. We brought nothing but the essentials: ten sleeping bags, four beer balls and two cases of beer, ten pounds of hamburger meat and two pounds of flank steak, three fishing poles, two dozen night crawlers, two avocados, five packs of Bubbilicious Bubble Gum and one pack of original Redman.
For three days we terrorized the cold waters of Great Pond in search of elusive brown trout and male bonding. We woke up early and fell asleep late.
Regardless of how often I organize my tackle box, it inevitably looks like this. I guess tackle box entropy is an essential part of fishing and a necessary hurdle standing between a fishing pole and a golden fried trout.
Four of these Beer Balls lubricated the cold the water of Great Pond and sleeping on the hard floor of Tucker's uninsulated cabin.
We relied on manpower to negotiate the glacial lake, not this fine piece of American outdoors equipment.
LL Bean Old Town Canoe like my Grandpa has. Old Milwaukee Beer like my dad drank at the University of Wisconsin. Night Crawlers like I used on the banks of the Columbia River as a little boy.
Issue 12 of the H(Y)R Collective is now up. A couple weeks ago I met with Jon Patrick from the Selvedge Yard and chatted with John Fiske and Lee Norwood from Rugby about their personal sense of style and influences while we had lunch and some cookies. JP wrote up our discussion and I took photos for a Focus article in Issue 12 of H(Y)R Collective.
Please head over to the site and check it out. We are really happy with how it turned out. Make sure to look for Lee's comments about the style blogging space. He has some interesting conclusions.
We are already hard at work on our next Focus article about LL Bean bringing back the Norwegian Sweater. Look for it to come out in a month or so.
Here are some more links,
Issue 12 H(Y)R Collective,
Jon Patrick from the Selvedge Yard (ART).
I left my job in New York in the summer of 2011 and moved into a camper. Since then, I have driven 100,000 miles around the west, surfing and camping. During the summer of 2014, I set up a home base in the Columbia River Gorge. These are some of my stories and photos.
