Jānis Indāns
Pāvilosta
You know what’s wonderful? This. This is wonderful.
It’s wonderful because this could be almost anywhere. Anywhere with a temperate climate. Anywhere people build with wood. Anywhere that has cellular reception.
It’s completely wonderful that, even though you can’t see it in the photo, there’s a river nearby. A short river, to be sure — only six kilometers — but deep. And not just a river, but the River Saka; a tidal river that empties into a sea. Not just any sea, but the Baltic Sea.
It’s absolutely wonderful that this could be almost anywhere. A suburb of a large Japanese city. The outskirts of an industrial town in the American Midwest. A neighborhood in some small German hamlet. In fact, it’s a small fishing village in Latvia. You’ve probably never heard of it, but people have been living in this area since the Stone Age — five, six, maybe seven thousand years. Maybe more.
You’re sitting in your own particular somewhere, looking at the shadows that fall on a fence in the small fishing village of Pāvilosta in Latvia, where people have been living for thousands of years. You could, if you were ambitious, look up the village on Google Maps. You could, if you wanted to, use the Street View feature and virtually wander through the village and try to locate this particular somewhere.
Could anything be more wonderful?
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
