Today is World Water Day, an event intended to draw attention to serious problems but for me evokes nostalgia. That’s what happens when a childhood is spent immersed in a Central Florida lake back when the water was clear and clean. Some days my brothers and I would swim so long that I imagined gills forming below our ears. We and our friends also spent much time in other waters, too: springs and swamps and ocean surf. With little effort, I can still feel the sensations, still smell the smells, of living in a world of tropical waters.
These photos from The Big Picture tell a larger story about world’s water. They’re worth lingering over. My humble offering below (click to enlarge) from a family vacation on the Oregon Coast last summer, makes me want to drift away on the next outgoing tide.
One of my favorite web sites is proof once again that simple ideas can produce breathtaking results. The Big Picture, a seven-month-old photo-journalistic blog of the Boston Globe, demonstrates how so-called old media can do a much better job via new media. Too bad that truth has taken so long to sink in. (I worked on the print side of newspapers for many years before moving to the online side in the heady, pioneering days of the 1990s.)
Two recent features, each with more than two dozen stunning photographs, are stark reminders that the United States is waging two wars in distant lands. The pictures make real what for most of us are distant abstractions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These collections of well-composed single images pack more wallop than any video. They create a lingering truth, a truth not easily blinked away.
