All posts filed under: main feature

Memories of the Odd Fellows tract from Ron Sutherland. Photos by the Ghost of Odd Fellows

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Ron Sutherland, chief scientist with the Wildlands Network who led the successful activist efforts to save the 79,000-acre Hoffmann Forest in 2015, recalls what the Odd Fellows tract looked like in the ’80s, when he was a Boy Scout roaming through the woods and playing capture the flag. I asked Dr. Sutherland what he remembered, and his memories came out uninterrupted and still very clear from more than 30 years ago. Here are his comments. The photos are by the anonymous “Ghost of Odd Fellows.” The full portfolios of the photos can be seen here and here. It was the place to go in camp for our Boy Scout troop. We didn’t need to do much. We could just go out there on pretty short notice and go out and camp. It was kind of a home away from home for the Boy Scouts. It took all of ten minutes to get there. We didn’t feel like we were in a small, tightly regulated state park. It felt like it was the woods that belonged …

Photo gallery: The coronavirus crisis through the eyes of a photographer

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Terror. Exhaustion. Bewilderment. Disappointment. Sadness. Anger. Despair? Hope? What are the emotions that we have experienced during the past month as the coronavirus crisis spread around the world? All of these and too many others. As the world began shutting down in March, photographer Bernard Thomas went into the world with his camera. Using his decades of experience and memories of Durham as staff photographer at The Herald-Sun, Thomas took photos of his day-to-day impressions of Durham as the crisis unfolded. The result is a powerful collection of images of sadness and desolation. And yes, there is hope. To view individual images on separate screens, click on the thumbnails below.    

American Dream

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The conventional wisdom used to be that there was a “First World” and a “Third World,” a “New World” and an “Old World.” Your home culture was also supposed to be thought of as what you leave behind. Perhaps decadent, perhaps repressive, but always undesirable in some way and that was supposed to be the emphasis. It was what you needed to grow away from. Your home culture was considered to be in the past. Certain countries, certain places also were considered to be backward, to lag behind. But in recent years, this attitude changed. People have begun to realize that we have been in the same time all along, and there was no “First World” or “Third World.” This is true when you think about. While the more modern, technologically advanced countries provided better infrastructure, the “Third World” and the “Old World” countries still had those ancient things, old ways, that provided the balance to sterility, over-emphasis on progress, over-reliance on technology. For me, personally, the American Dream is no longer the aspirational, prosperity-based …