[Views of Cincinnati] Left Behind at the Landing

I had been planning to shoot from the river overlook off Madison Ave. at night, but figured I'd walk down that way anyways. A touristy spot, it had the usual nice weather crowd of onlookers out there while an employee of the nearby hotel enjoyed his cigarette. I walked around for a bit, thinking of shots for the future of the project while trying to avoid the goose shit on the ground. I had been here plenty of times, but never noticed the path on the left where I would find the rusted mooring cable that frames the above photograph.







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Walking further along the flood wall, I saw a man in the distance carrying some things down to the river bank. Other than him, there wasn't a soul around. There was a set of decrepit stairs leading down to the river's edge, the handrails warped from years of flooding. Paul Brown Stadium sat in the distance.

The ground was littered with trash and debris that had washed up on the shore. Nothing really struck me as I kept my camera slung over my shoulder. The remains of what had once been the floating entertainment complex known as "The Covington Landing," were quite eerie. Assuming that the infrastructure I was standing on was in fact left over from that "floating mall" era. Looking back up the stairs, the flood wall of Covington looked like some sort of castle defense, with the Marriott hotel being the castle. Very "Fiddler's Greenish," if you catch my drift.

At the top of the stairs was something I had missed before, I didn't really look too close at it on the way down. The rusted steel cables were wrapped around the structure as if they had been reeled up waiting years for some boat to come back and dock. How long had they been there? I guess they were left behind when the Landing was towed away. I dropped to the ground and tried to line up a shot of the Cincinnati Skyline through an opening in the cables. A bunch of shooting and awkward body positioning later - I figured I'd have at least one shot I'd be happy with. I did.

Looking back as I write this and thinking about those mooring cables, which still sit at the riverbank only a few miles away, I started to think about leaving things behind. Just as those cables were left there, we as humans inherently leave parts of ourselves everywhere. Whether it's your hair on the barber's floor, business cards, loose change, graffiti, cigarette butts or more important things. When you move from one place to the next, whether it be from room to room or from house to house, you're constantly leaving part of you or your property behind. In the end, you leave behind possessions and supposedly a legacy. I could delve into some "inspirational" banter about how leaving behind a good legacy to be remembered by is key to a fruitful life, but I see enough of that bullshit in fortune cookies and on Twitter. There's not really a conclusion to this string of thought, it is what it is, thought. One day, maybe after I'm gone and if the internet still keeps this page alive, someone might read this. Like the Mooring Cables, maybe it'll mean something new to someone else.