It’s still summer!  Like my last Photo of the Month, we’re talking about summer again.  Since it’s August, I notice on the weekends, actually even during the week, I see more parents rushing around to do things that they promised they would do with their children at the beginning of the summer and kids moping around because they have to go back to school at the end of this month.

To me, summer is not officially over until I can no longer go fishing.  When I catch a fish and the fish is warmer in the water than I am standing on the bank, summer’s over.  And for any of you who suggest I might try ice fishing: no way.

One thing’s for sure, this is going to go down as the summer when we had the earthquake.  Everybody has a story, so here is mine.  Many of you know my studio is on the 3rd (top) floor, and in here something is always being blown around by a fan or something, so I didn’t really pay attention when a pencil rolled off of the desk, I thought it was just a heavy UPS truck going by.  But then I noticed my computer monitor was shaking, and all of my rolls of seamless background paper were rolling back and forth, and my storage cabinets were shaking.  My mind went from “I wonder what is going on?” to “I have to get out of here.” 

So I grabbed my car keys and ran down the stairs.  It was over by the time I got to the offices on the second floor, and we all stopped to try to figure out what had happened.  I learned that the safest place to be in a building during an earthquake is to stand in a doorway.  From my days in the Navy I knew what to do for a radiation burn from a nuclear reactor, but... well, you learn something new every day. 

After this was over, watching the news go crazy all up and down the East Coast, I started thinking about people on the West Coast who deal with this every day and don’t even get out of their Starbucks line. 

The best story I heard about it was from my Mother.  She said she was sitting on the porch and she realized she was moving and she wasn’t the one doing it!  After sharing my story with her, I told her, “Ma, look, you’ve lived long enough to see a black president and go through an earthquake on the East Coast!”  She thought that was funny.

In closing I’ll say: Summer’s not over, enjoy the warm weather even if they have already put out Halloween candy in some of the department stores.  Talk to you next month!

-Kevin S. Nash

Photo Details:

Photo of the 2011 Iron Hill Brewery’s Twilight Criterium in West Chester, PA.