So, I have barely posted so far in 2026. Being interim chair of my department at Milwaukee School of Engineering has been TIME CONSUMING, to say the least. June 30 is my last day as chair; our regular chair returns on July 1 from her stint as interim VP of Academics. (YAY!!!!!)
But even though I haven’t posted, I have still been taking photos here and there when something captures my attention, usually not sharing them anywhere but sometimes posting to Facebook, which is quick and easy. In fact, at a reception for grant awardees late yesterday afternoon, one of my colleagues mentioned that he likes the photos I post there. Which is no doubt why last night, while driving home through Miller Valley (quite literally a valley, where Miller Beer is produced), I was primed to grab this picture.
Although I had immediately noticed the bright line of orange sunlight streaking along the roofline, I probably just would have continued my drive home, thinking about the things I had to do in the morning. Except, Chuck’s comments from the reception still loomed large. Because what a nice surprise—what an incredible lift, actually!—for someone to have noticed my photos, liked them, and then gone out of their way to tell me. After that gift, how could I not pull over and capture the image I’d seen!
Luckily, it was pretty late, so there was no rush hour traffic and no one to be irritated by me pulling over to the side and then backing up down the street (a rather illogical phrasing, there, backing “up” “down” 🙂 ) until I was roughly back in the same spot as where the image had first caught my eye. There I employed my fancy photography technique of picking up my phone from the console, opening the camera app, and snapping the picture. Looked in my side and rearview mirrors to make sure no one was coming, then pulled back into the traffic lane. Done 🙂
(Aside, lol: “Seeing” the picture is the hard part; after that, documenting the image in a way that presents its best “framed” aspect is relatively straightforward once I understand what I’m after; and I rarely edit beyond cropping.)
Sadly, such an easy capture was not the situation with my current “White Whale,” a lost photo opportunity that presented itself several weeks ago.
Not even “lost,” really. “Squandered” more accurately describes my split-second decision to forego a literally “golden” opportunity to get a really beautiful photo—a choice I greatly regret now, of course.
It was a Sunday afternoon, when the sun was setting with exactly this same intensely saturated shade of orange as last night, and at just about the same low angle in the sky, when I was driving east on Highland Boulevard past Harley-Davidson’s factory—located just up the hill and across the street from Miller Brewing, as a matter of fact.
OMG, that lost photo opportunity was GORGEOUS!
The Harley-Davidson Motor Company’s Juneau Avenue facility has several buildings on a campus that has added tourist-type amenities recently, like a park/amphitheatre type garden area, for example. The building I’m talking about is one of the farthest west, an older structure that looks like every traditional, early-to-mid-20th-century factory you’ve ever seen in photographs and movies. Dark red brick building, three or four stories tall, lots of windows all around.
On that late Sunday afternoon, the windows on that west-facing brick wall were a brilliant, intensely rich, deep copper-gold array that glowed with reflection of that setting sun. And because the eastern sky was getting dark already, there was a nice contrast that way between the waning day’s vibrant orange and the approaching night’s dark blue/gray. And then, to cap it all off beautifully, just above those amazing windows sat the Harley-Davidson rooftop water tower.
I thought about stopping. But I had somewhere I had to be. So I told myself I’d try to be there another day to get a photo then, under similar lighting conditions. However, just like the speaker in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (“Oh, I kept the first for another day! / Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.”), that may never happen.
Because guess what? Perfect conditions don’t come around very often.
Last night the conditions were perfect, which they hadn’t been since that Sunday afternoon weeks ago. After I took the photo down in Miller Valley, I could have whipped around the corner at the western end and up the hill, circling back over to Highland Boulevard to see about the Harley-Davidson photo.
But I didn’t. Once again, I let my opportunity take a back seat to expediency. It was already pretty late, and I’d already put in 12+ hours at work, and I’d already taken the time to get one photo on the way home from work. I just wanted to get HOME!
School will be ending soon, though. I’ll have the entire summer to try for the Harley-Davidson photo again. Maybe the stars (or, rather, the setting sun) will align with my driving schedule again.
Or maybe not.
As you can see in this Google Maps “Street View” from May 2025, summer won’t be a good time to capture sunset reflecting off of the windows of this building. I’ll have to wait until next year to have leafless trees and the sun at the correct angle.
Sigh. This is what happens when you reject a gift from the Muse. Twice.
Maybe it was enough that I had the chance to notice and recognize that “photo” in my mind as the image it (potentially) was. I can pull that memory out and experience it as vividly today as it appeared to me on that particular late March or early April evening.
But then again, it would be so much nicer if I could share it with you 🙂
Maybe my next opportunity will work out. Third time’s the charm, as they say. If I let go of it yet again, then either it was never meant to be or it was but I didn’t deserve it.
Katherine Wikoff 