boolie

Find the River

Me, my thoughts are flower strewn
Ocean storm, bayberry moon
I have got to leave to find my way
Watch the road and memorize
This life that passed before my eyes
And nothing is going my way

The ocean is the river’s goal
A need to leave the water knows
We’re closer now than light years to go

I have got to find the river
Bergamot and vetiver
Run through my head and fall away
Leave the road and memorize
This life that passed before my eyes
And nothing is going my way

Excerpt from R.E.M.’s “Find the River”

My leave of absence has been planned for a long time with only the timing uncertain. During that time my mind kept returning to one of my favorite songs by my favorite band, thinking of how I needed to step away from the hectic pace of normal life and let my mind be quiet and reflective for a while. The image that formed in my head was always this one, taken fifteen years ago of a shallow stream in the Hoh Rain Forest. If I was condemned to only visit one park for the rest of my life, it would be Olympic National Park. Whether I’ll ever get back is a mystery these clouded eyes can’t foresee, but if not I’m grateful for each of my visits to that wonderland.

A Lucky Break

I’ll be posting more frequently the next few months and I feel I ought to explain why.

Last year after we adopted Bear I was caught off guard by how intensely homesick I suddenly felt for Portland (this is Ellie and I playing in the snow in our backyard a decade ago). It’s not that I hadn’t missed Oregon before — you can’t love a place as much as I loved the Northwest and not miss it when you leave — rather I missed it in the same way I’d miss the desert if I could snap my fingers and give us our old lives back. But I’ve never had a problem mourning the beautiful things I’ve lost as long as it doesn’t keep me from loving the beautiful things I have and have gained. And if you’ve followed me long you know how much I love the Sonoran Desert.

Something else was going on.

A big part of it was I had been having trouble sleeping, leaving me physically and mentally exhausted. Bear was more of a challenge to integrate into our lives than Ellie had been. Sam died around the same time, not that any of their death’s have been easy but I always knew his would be hard. There was pandemic fatigue, the school shooting in Uvalde, the stress of a car commute after so many years taking the train, an especially challenging project. To top it off I got sick twice and had to miss a week of work each time, burning off a huge chunk of my time off, time I usually spend letting my mind spin down. And even though I try to live in the moment and am keenly aware of how good my life is and how many people are genuinely suffering each day of their lives, I still reached a point where I couldn’t keep going and needed to find a way to retire.

Thankfully my boss offered an option to take a leave of absence instead and I took him up on it. Tomorrow I start my four month break and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to step away and recharge. I may not get to play with Bear in the snow as I did Ellie, but he is about to start going on a lot more desert hikes. Looking forward to doing more photography and editing old pictures, my backlog goes back many years (including this one!).

The Powder Room

One of my favorite sights of spring in the Sonoran Desert is when the birds have faces completely pancaked with saguaro pollen. When I finally got around to getting my first Nikon so I could do more macro photography I wanted to get a close-up of these large flowers, the desert’s powder rooms. However each saguaro blossom only lasts for about a day and I needed to find one on a day off when I was up early and with no wind and with a saguaro with an arm that bent towards the ground and was right next to the trail and which wasn’t covered in bees. It proved to be a tall order but on Memorial Day I was up before sunrise and found an obliging giant.

Due to some mix of the early hour and lack of practice and a general tendency to forget to setup the camera properly when I get excited, I left the shutter speed far too low and even with almost no breeze ended up with a little motion blur. Plus I should have stopped down one more stop so there would be less blur in the focus stack due to the large separation between stigma and stamens.

Nevertheless these shots will bring a smile to my face for years to come. As I wrote in my hiking journal while lamenting my mistake but hoping the pictures would come out: “It was great fun regardless”. The breeze soon picked up so I went home and got Bear and came back for a hike out to see the saguaro I call Witch Hazel, my first time seeing her in bloom.

Just a lovely day all around.

Bear the Spotter

I had four days off for the Labor Day weekend and not coincidentally Bear and I went on four hikes in the desert. After rain Thursday night on Friday I waited for a gap where the trails would have dried out but before the next rain showers hit. Temperatures had plummeted so I took Bear up to the overlook on Brown’s Mountain, as I didn’t let him do it all summer as I won’t let him do big elevation changes in the heat.

On the way down he paused for a while, I thought it was the expansive view as he does enjoy the view from up high. After giving him a moment I encouraged him onward as I wanted to beat the rain if we could. As we descended further he came to a standstill and it took me a moment but I eventually saw what he saw (or smelled): a gray fox peeking out through the desert scrub! A new species for both of us!

It was more Boo-sized than Bear-sized so I was glad it wasn’t scared of him (or me) and we were able to watch it for a while as it sauntered across the hill side, occasionally looking back at us before continuing on. What a glorious tail! When it finally disappeared into the hills we continued on down the mountain and arrived at the car as the first raindrops fell.

A Vignette

A quick snap from the spring of an owl atop a boulder with wildflowers blooming in the desert below. I was busy and didn’t look closely at the picture until much later, when I realized an owlet was also looking out. And it was months after that as I finally edited the picture I realized an antelope squirrel was running down the rock on the right. I took other pictures as we circled around the loop, some with compositions I like better or with softer light, but I love this little slice of life. This section of the desert has few saguaros and the wildlife is dominated by small mammals and those that eat them.

You won’t see Bear in the picture but I do, not only was he standing beside me but I only found this trail because of him, as it is the easiest to access from our house and a great place to hike with him when I’m short on time. So for me this picture is as much about a slice of my life as theirs.

The Bird & The Bee

Diffuse light from the rising sun falls on a white-winged dove and a bee and the very tops of the saguaro flowers, but not yet on the ripening fruit or the saguaro below. One of a seemingly infinite set of pictures as I play with light arriving or departing the desert, taken on a rare pre-sunrise hike without Bear a couple of months ago.

The Summer Boo

The window in my office has been a favorite Boo spot this summer, though he’s curled up beside me at the moment.

The Mostly Missed Monsoons

The summer is monsoon season in the desert only the monsoons have gone missing. Our tiny tortie Trixie hasn’t missed them, she’s terrified of thunder but so far has only gone into hiding briefly when a storm brought a lot of wind but little rain. The desert is desperate for a good drenching so here’s hoping they arrive soon. Trixie loves to sink into a sea of softness and she’s the main occupant of Bear’s new dog bed.

Patterns in the Shadows

In January while walking Bear we passed some large granite boulders and my pattern recognition self thought he saw an owl deep in the shadows of one of the boulders. The rest of my selves thought he was being ridiculous given the distance and while I had seen owls in the area, mostly what I see are protuberances in the rocks that at a distance look like owls. He was so insistent there was an owl there I took a picture and zoomed in just so I could prove him wrong and we could continue on our way.

Except to my delight and chagrin there was an owl there. If the owl seems blindingly obvious in the first picture I took it two months later on a rare occasion when I brought my super-telephoto into the desert and happened to find it in the same spot, with the high magnification and exposure for the shadows the hidden subject is easily revealed. The second picture was taken on the day in question and is still a moderate telephoto shot, zoomed in several times compared to these naked aging eyes, but even so you get a feel for what I was seeing on the day. The owl is in the shadows of the boulder on the right, with some rocks-not-owls on the boulder on the left.

It was a nice find and helped me understand more about the owl and how it manages the brighter parts of the day. The zoomed-in shot is a nice reminder that while I think of the boulders as being solid monoliths they are rather beaten up from so many years of wind and weather, and not so homogeneous to boot.

So I cut that same self some slack weeks later when he thought at first glance he saw a bullfrog in the middle of the desert. In this case all it took was a second glance for the frog to turn into the greens and yellows of the paddle of a dying prickly pear. Though I saw many bullfrogs in my years in the Northwest it was a particular bullfrog that triggered the recognition, a giant fellow sitting undaunted beside a trail in Portland, when I later looked at my notes I realized that sighting was 18 years ago. So if I’m still alive in 18 years I suppose no matter where I am on this great blue ball I’ll be seeing owls in shadows that aren’t really there, except maybe they are.

Layers Upon Layers

This picture of Bear at the end of a winter afternoon hike has several layers of meaning to me. When we first adopted him he was overweight and slightly limped even on shorter walks in the neighborhood, and his manners precluded taking him into areas with lots of people and dogs. It took months getting him physically and mentally ready for long walks before I was willing to try him on less-visited trails far from trailheads. Take to the trails he did, while he enjoys his neighborhood walks he has a special love for the desert and when we’re about to head out he practically knocks me over as he scampers to the back of the garage and waits beside my hatchback.

As his progress continued I started taking him to more and more populated trails, culminating in this our first visit to my favorite place, the Brown’s Ranch trailhead. We took my favorite hike, finishing up at Sunset Vista with the sun sinking low in the sky, stopping for a snack break and some pictures before dropping down the hill to the car. I was growing confident we had a lot of desert hikes in our future, as he did well even with the off-leash dogs we encountered.

I snuck Brown’s Mountain into the background as I love to do, as this landmark more than any other was the anchor that helped me find my bearings when we moved here and it felt like we were in a never-ending whirlwind, with this part of the preserve my refuge in stormy seas. The looming mountain would add an extra layer of meaning to the picture a week later when for the first time I took him up its flank to the overlook, watching him enraptured as it slowly dawned on me he had never been up that high before.

It’s now far too hot for any evening hikes and we haven’t been into the desert for weeks since I haven’t been able to get up early enough to beat the heat. Long swims will have to do until I can manage an early rise, but even then I’ll avoid trails with elevation gain until cooler weather arrives in the fall.