Eye and hand came first. Years before I acquired a camera — and decades before I became a digital girl — I had already begun to draw. My first sketches were crude representations of horses, cows, and cowboys. I drew the cows and horses from life, but my knowledge of cowboys came only from television. As time passed and my interest in TV westerns waned, I started to look for other models, drawing the hands and faces of any classmate I could persuade to pose. I even sketched the road‑killed animals I encountered on my walks, smuggling some of the fresher specimens into my bedroom so I could make detailed anatomical drawings. And while my efforts didn’t bear comparison with Vesalius or Leonardo or even Beatrix Potter, the unfortunate subjects made much better sitters than my classmates. The dead animals didn’t fidget, for one thing, and they never asked for a share of my lunchtime candy bar. My mother was not amused by her eldest daughter’s amateur necropsies, however. When she discovered my bedroom studio‑cum‑mortuary, she insisted I move it to the unheated back porch without delay. I did.

Later, when I entered high school, everything changed. I came under the spell of film, and years passed before I again put pen or pencil to paper for any purpose but writing. This long photographic idyll came to an abrupt end, however. I lost my camera, my lenses, and all of my slides (save only a couple of rolls of film at the lab) in a Christmas Eve fire, along with nearly everything else I owned. I recovered my bike and a scorched Sierra Club cup, but that was all. What savings I had were quickly exhausted in replacing my clothes. There was nothing left over for a new camera. So I was back where I’d started. Reluctantly, I picked up a pencil again. It was hard going. Or at least it was until I discovered watercolor painting. The local library contained an unexpected treasure: a collection of facsimile editions of early explorers’ published journals, illustrated with engravings made from sketches and watercolors done in the field, many of them exhibiting surpassing detail and delicacy. I was captivated. I no longer saw pencil, pen, and paint as second‑best alternatives to film. They became tools for discovery.

Happily, the time arrived when I could replace the Nikon SLR I’d lost in the fire, and its successor — an Olympus OM‑1n with three wonderfully sharp Zuiko lenses — proved every bit as good. Still, my rapture was somewhat modified. Despite having an excellent camera, I now found photography both costly and frustrating. More often than not, the slides that came back from the lab failed to capture the scene lodged in my mind’s eye. I’d been spoiled by the freedom and control I enjoyed while drawing and painting. The result was predictable. Though I used a camera regularly in my work as a geologist and archaeologist, pen and paint were now my tools of choice outside of working hours. The coming of age of digital technology muddied the waters somewhat, of course, simultaneously reducing the cost of taking photos and freeing me from my dependence on anonymous technicians in distant labs. And make no mistake, this was welcome news, indeed. Unlike many photographers, I shed few tears at the prospect of the end of the Age of Film. In embracing the new technology I figured I’d finally realized photography’s full potential. But did I then abandon paint and pen forever? I did not. Even now, eye and hand come first.… Read more…

 
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There’s no doubt that In the Same Boat and Tamia Nelson’s Outside readers are a mighty talented bunch. When, nearly six years ago, I wrote an article on storing boats at home, I imagined I’d exhausted the topic, but reader David Birren quickly proved me wrong. By sharing his ideas for inside and outside storage, he prompted me to write a second article. And then… I’ll bet you can see where this is going, can’t you? Other readers wrote in with their suggestions, and a third article soon followed. In fact, every time I published a column on boat storage, I thought that it would surely be the last. Yet each column elicited a wealth of new ideas from readers, every one of them as imaginative as it was novel. It goes without saying that I’d hate to pick the best. In fact, I doubt that there’s any such thing. Each reader’s solution to the storage problem reflects his unique circumstances. That means it’s the best — for him. Consider the example of Stephen Parker of Burnet, Texas. At first glance, his strategy for storing boats may seem a bit Rube Goldberg (UK paddlers read “Heath Robinson”). Don’t be fooled, though. It’s eminently practical as well as wonderfully ingenious. But why don’t I just let Stephen tell the story in his own words?

The whole thing started with my wife saying, “Why don’t you stick that thing up in the attic or something to get it out of the way?”

A eureka moment, obviously. And the result? The kayak attic was born. Stephen takes up the tale again:

Here is my solution for storing my kayak. I call it my “Kayak Attic.” My house is all steel frame so I decided to make use of some wasted space in the garage. I used a lot of scrap pieces for bracing my kayak attic, so it looks sort of thrown together, but it was a good way to recycle the odd offcuts from other projects and avoid throwing them in the scrap pile. Sorry that the pictures look a little cluttered. That’s just the way my garage is! At least I can still get my truck inside.

I use a simple 2:1 pulley system for hoisting the boats, and I have a large cleat screwed into the wall for a tie‑off. I painted the inside of the kayak attic sky blue to keep wasps and spiders from building nests. (An old wive’s tale, perhaps, but it is working so far.) One picture is of the project in its early stages. Another is of one of my boats in the open uncompleted frame, then there’s one of a boat partway lifted into place, and then there’s a photo of the boat all the way up so you can see that it barely shows below ceiling level. The last photo is an end view looking up into the kayak attic which also shows a nifty way to store fishing poles where they are safe but still handy. It works great for paddles, too.

It’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention. If that’s true — and I think it is — then ingenuity is arguably the father, and the handiwork of both parents is evident in Stephen’s clever solution to his boat storage problem. So let’s take a closer look at how to build a kayak attic (it could work for bikes, too!)… Read more…

 
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