A last look at Fremont (for now). The Solstice parade is a marvelously vibrant institution. There's that odd contradiction though, all that noise blowing out the bell of a tuba, but it is still an institution. Someone or something organizes it, says who can and can't be in it. Yet every Solstice it shows us this wild, apparently joyous face.

I took this photograph in the same place as the tuba photograph, there under the Aurora bridge. The bridge is very high at that point, a good hundred feet or more. On one occasion, some years ago, someone attacked a bus driver and the bus went off the bridge, crashing into the top of an apartment building, miraculously only the driver and the attacker were killed, though 33 people were injured. That particular spot, where I took the photographs, is a favorite for suicide jumpers. You might argue that gaiety has its price I suppose.