Absent, Not Forgotten

Some folks do spring cleaning;  I do winter culling.  And have been doing a lot of it, including in my foto library.  Considering the library as a whole, it’s constantly in flux . . . stuff out; better stuff-I hope–in.  Many quotes say this;  my favorite version is “you cannot step into the same river twice.”

Same is true of a harbor; what vessels inhabited it when I first paid attention are no longer here, at least not in the same way.  Take Odin, about which I’ve heard a lot of chatter this week.  Great name.  Perfect candidate for an award for eccentricity, but I smiled every time I saw Odin.   I never saw the closest vessel to her in DNA, the ill-fated Red Wing.  You can tell this is the older Odin because the house rests on a hydraulic ram.

 Here her house has front legs.

Here’s Odin, house down, bunkering a Princess vessel.

Dean Reinauer has also left the sixth boro; she traveled out on the back of Blue Marlin last summer.  Where she is today, I’m SURE she’ll see no snowfall like this, taken a few years back over by Howland Hook.

Ditto Great Gull . . . down in Venezuela . . . no snow.  I recall fondly how excited I was when I first saw Great Gull, turns out built by the same folks who built barges for Europe as part of the Marshall Plan.

And the ORANGE June K.  I know she’s still around as Sarah Ann.  But that original color was almost institutional, almost spring time.

And then there’s Rosemary McAllister, now working on lease down south without her last name and with an all-white stack.    Her christening was a seminal bowsprite/tugster collaboration.

She worked in the harbor for too short a spell, from my POV, before migrating to Houston, but what do I know about the economics.

Scott C is now Weddell Sea.  Dorothy Elizabeth (star  . . . well, an extra . . .  of Carlito’s Way) has now been scrapped.

Finally, there’s Kristin . . . , once with a telescoping house like Odin, now scrapped.

I have others, but it’s amazing how much changes in five years of  observing the harbor.  All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

Given my vintage, the sound that personifies change for me is this song by Jefferson Airplane.