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The Steel Corner
25 January 2022
The narrowest street in the neighborhood hugs the steep side of Edgehill Mountain with just one sidewalk on the lower side where only the top floor of three-story houses can be seen.
The Steel Corner. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 42mm (84mm equivalent), f9, 1/320 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
And yet it breaks off into two at one end right where this steel corner appears. The roadway at the bottom of the picture goes uphill to the north and the one at the top continues downhill to the west.
We usually stick to the sidewalk avoiding the two-way traffic, which is confusing enough for the drivers. The car going uphill has always had the right of way (which only makes sense) but that principle is often lost on drivers these days.
And with SUVs and cars and pickups parked halfway on the single sidewalk there often isn't a place to pull over. So we try to stay out of the way.
It seems as if everything has run over it.
But when we were shooting the house being demolished, we started wandering uphill at this corner even though there was no sidewalk.
There is a big mirror so cars can see what's around the bend but that wasn't going to be much help to us. We hugged the mountain on the inside or the railing on the outside, trying to stay out of the way for the minute or so it takes to walk around that bend.
Our little detour gave us the chance one late afternoon to more closely examine this steel corner where the two roads diverge.
It's remarkably finished, we think. The steel bent at a sharp angle, the concrete poured to its level, a single weed, the asphalt flowed to its edges.
It's also battered. It seems as if everything has run over it. And a few things have even left their engraving on the steel.
In the late afternoon light, it struck us as particularly handsome, so we snapped a photo.
We're not sure why we like it as much as we do. And you're under no obligation, of course.
Maybe it's nothing more than that with so much disfunction in the world at large and our communities in particular, it's delightful to find something just doing the job it was designed to do.
It holds the corner where the road diverges. Has for years. Will continue. Storms, tsunamis, quakes, fires, student drivers, ambulances. Won't matter.
Not many things you can say that about.