Slice of Life: Scale

I live by gigantic.

Not flowers, but Grand Coulee Dam. It is gigantic [click the link for the stats!]. It’s on a scale that our eyes can’t fathom even standing in front of it.

At the right on the water is a pumphouse– it’s five stories tall. My mom, when she came to visit, would see their lights from our house. Every day she’d go for a walk down the next block to find that building, which of course wasn’t there. It is much larger than she could imagine.

Take another look: those are cars in the parking lot in the lower orange oval — now in the top orange oval is another parking lot with cars so tiny you can’t see them! The main part of the dam following that orange line at the top is almost one mile! Depending on the level of the water, the drop from the top to the stream is 401 feet.

It’s gigantic, and perfect for the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge scake!

Grand Coulee Dam provides power, flood control, and irrigation

• “generating more than 21 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year”
• “That’s enough power to supply 2.3 million households with electricity for one year.”
• “The Columbia Basin Project serves about 671,000 acres in east central Washington”

The towers are like massive trees, standing in place, spreading electric arms of power for us.

I also just happened to visit Olympia this week — and saw our capitol building peeking above the trees and a beautiful park, showing the scale of a community’s caring for its citizens.

In this beautiful sunset scene of Capitol Lake, see the freeway line on the right side. It seems so small in this pleasant view, yet with six lanes of cars, the freeway is stifling and stressful.

And in this serene view is an immense cedar/pine tree that recently was twisted in our new scale of storms — the wind wrenching the old tree, splitting its trunk.

In the same early morning, the sky lightens and the nightlights still shine.

Try it in black and white:

Back at home, I found the wind had whipped around the autumn leaves, creating pillows for the hidden fairy.

You can see the patio swing behind waiting for one last swing.

And finally, because the world is huge and we are all unique, I think this is important to remember in our smallness: