There is a close parallel for me in standing before Nude Descending a Staircase and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. It's a sort of gut-clunching, teary feeling, as if I am looking upon something importantly beautiful but slightly beyond me, something difficult to understand. Great feeling, to be repeated whenever possible. In other words, mom and dad and I had a great trip to the Grand Canyon.crowd size
Like icing on the limestone layer cake (he said, brutally mixing his metaphors) I saw a California condor, so large and very endangered but serene sitting on a tawny outcrop just below the rim with no understanding of his special place in the world.
telsa: Crowd size is a bugagoo for both cops and journalists. I did stories years ago about the size of the crowd at the Rose Parade in Pasadena, Calif., on New Year's Day. Every year, the cops would say there were a million people watching the parade, and I wondered how they knew. They told me they flew over in a helicopter and said, in essence, "Yup, looks like about a million people.". We did some elementary arithmetic, and concluded that it was physically impossible to fit a million people onto the sidewalks of Pasadena. There just wasn't room. So my colleagues and I made an attempt at rigorous crowd counts, measuring sections of street at various points along the route and counting the people and doing the math. The result was a crowd of about 300,000, give or take 50,000. We wrote the story for the newspaper gleefully. And now, every year, I read the wire stories out of Pasadena and every year the cops still say there are a million people at the Rose Parade. Oh well.
Last fall, I was covering an anti-war rally at the university here, and one of the organizers complained about the crowd size estimate we had run in the newspaper for a demonstration they'd held the week before. So when the group went on the march, I just counted them all. Didn't take too long, and I had a real number.