Rust and Fire

Here and here were earlier Feeney posts.  This devolution is as painful to watch as a crime.  Or is it?  Can it be a prompt to memory, a trigger for younger folk to ask its history of those who remember?  Wasted scrap?  An eyesore?  A reminder that ours was not the first generation working  and living here?  What do you think?  Meanwhile watch the regress.

Summer 2009 bore rust and graffitti but

a measure of charring as seen in January 2010 as seen from the bank and

from the KVK, and

each time I pass I expect to see no trace.  Here,  here, and  here are more Feeney images.  Vessel will not make its 120th anniversary … in 2012.

I imagine that different people see it differently.  Since I never saw this boat in any better condition, it doesn’t pain me as much as it would someone who did.  Instead, I feel a shifting mix of regret and healthy curiosity.  As Rebecca Solnit says, “ruins stand as reminders.  Memory is always incomplete … but the ruins themselves … are our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time.  To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory;  a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories.”  I guess that’s why sea bart comments as he does, and why I enjoy wandering in both junkyards and museums:  they have a lot in common.  Against my wall is both a new paddle and a piece of an old broken one;  although they both started life as paddles, each has a different function now, but I benefit from both, just differently.

Last foto by Allen Baker;  others, Will Van Dorp.