Monday Morning Mix
It is a Monday morning with more than one twist to it today, July 7th. 2025.
While we still reel from the tragedy of floods in Kerr County, and word of more devastation in Travis county, an anniversary of my own intersects this day, and this one is in the form of an even and round number this year.
It is hard to avoid jumping to conclusions about the flooding that killed the folks along the Guadalupe River, but while recovery and rescue are going on, maybe take a look back at my article over the weekend and what it tells us about how we may be able to help from wherever we are –
I sincerely hope that there are organized efforts from organizations like our local fly fishing clubs who are part of the Federation of Fly Fishers and those clubs who are not – to plug into the post disaster cleanup and assistance efforts there.
I myself have vivid and fond memories of a couple of summer weeks spent in Hunt, Texas, on a piece of private property – visiting my DNA Dad – when I was probably ten or eleven-years-old. This place was on the river, and was magical. A swimming hole with water so clear I was afraid to open my eyes and see all the fish around me. Wagon tracks fossilized in the shallow mud where wagons stopped and moved on after taking on water – less than a hundred years earlier. Abundant artifacts from the Native Americans, buckets of arrowheads sitting around, and ghostly stories about chambers in the sides of hills where the gathered ashes of their dead were placed … deep mounds of ashes they said. That part of Texas fires the imagination of a young soul, and I am sure that is why it is such a youth camp destination in this huge State.
Seems Like Yesterday
Today is the anniversary, of a life changing cancer diagnosis for me. Ten years ago, on this day, we were bound for Cocoa, and had stopped for a few days with family in Gulf Shores for a beach layover. My SO and I were already tightly wound because the doctor who had taken the sample from my neck, the needle biopsy of a swollen lymph node, was equivocal then and there in the office – it was cancer. But we held onto hope waiting for the call from the lab to deny what she had seen. That didn’t happen. It was confirmed, and so I had cancer in my head somewhere for sure. But where was not part of the diagnosis that day. My ears began to ring, and senses went into overdrive. Time gained intensity that day.
At Cocoa was a skiff waiting for me, one I had worked for and on to design and bring to life with the help of a small boat maker (no longer making skiffs – A&L Fiberglass) I had found online. While the family and myself began to reel from the new future laid before me, I was faced with the obvious: Did it make any sense to go all the way to Southern Florida to get a new skiff now? There was no way of knowing if it was terminal brain cancer, or what, or where.
Rather through rationalizing, or stupidity, I said I needed it now, more than ever, to be something to look forward to. Little did I know, the financial devastation that would be wrought on me a few months later by my last large corporate photography client – a very good one for more than twenty years* – unceremoniously dumped me with no warning whatsoever. That is another story for another place and time. That little skiff became one of the FEW things to look forward to.
With the great gifts bestowed on the medical staff, a real army of doctors as I think back about it, I made it. The cancer period was something that had longer and greater effect on me than I realized or admitted. Maybe I will talk more about that someday, but that is not my kind of thing. I will put it simply for now. My doctor said, “I have a very high percentage cure rate for the (type of) cancer I had, 97-percent.” Or … I “would be dead in six months.” I really liked those odds. With those odds, my answer was obvious, “I’ll go for the full burn.” Little did I know just how the “full burn” really works.
The silver lining to all this dramatic reading? I have been able to encourage many parents of adolescents to get the HPV vaccine! That is my best blessing and I have reaped the reward of knowing, while I am still alive, that these eventual MEN will be able to deflect the silver bullet virus that caught me, and put me down for a long count.
Of course I always take the time to thank my family for taking care of me, getting me through, and keeping me focused on the moment and that it was going to pass and leave only a memory – as bad as it still is. Thanks to my friends who showed up. And to those who abandoned me – to my actual face – I never held it against you. Really, I was never contagious! To my family who rushed to plop their kids down with the sick guy, I am still here. How about another picture sometime?
On Photography
As some of you have taken the time to know and otherwise been forced to know from visiting this site, I have had a long and mixed photographic career – lots of highs and more lows. The fire of creativity and career never went out, but it has smoldered since my cancer debacle and the heartlessness of the unprofessional actions by Denton’s *TWU (that last big corporate photography client) putting me out to not-so-green pasture, a desert actually, at the same time I was fighting this disease.
But I never quit, and I never quit thinking about photography and now videography and other means of visual creativity. My website, www.shannondrawe.com has been repeatedly crushed by poor hosting and the open invitation they leave for hackers to come in and destroy that site on a regular basis. As of this writing, it is completely lame, and this is where I pull out the SIG and put a bullet in that site’s ear. It is time to change the formula for my business Shannon Drawe Photography and I will be moving to a radical YouTube based formula starting this month at f.8BeThere on YouTube. Translating my still photography into video is a tricky proposition, but it is time to do something different. Please take a look at f.8BeThere on YouTube, and if you feel so inclined, LIKE and SUBSCRIBE to that Channel. It doesn’t cost anything and it helps ME a lot. You will find a seasoned photographic portfolio that touches a lot of bases – some I bet you never knew I had! You will also find new product reviews and photographic tips and tricks that are known and some unknown insider stories from the photojournalism days (coming very soon), like the day I met and photographed the legendary Alfred Eisenstaedt in San Diego, California.
Because of the popularity of this website, I will be mixing in my photography more often now. And while I will still struggle to keep it “relatable” to our fly fishing journeys … I can stray sometimes, and will stray sometimes because? well, because I can!
