Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
A wet image for today as we’re getting much-needed rain in the desert, a look back while looking down from the overlook on the Horsetail Falls Trail in the Columbia River Gorge. This location certainly triggered my fear of heights so it was a crawl out, quick picture, crawl back, start breathing again. I was never in any danger, just my brain thought I was.
📷: Sony A6500 | Sony-Zeiss 55mm f/1.8
🗓️: May 7, 2017
As someone who loved even the ubiquitous rain in Portland, rain in the desert is quite special to me. When I woke to rain last month I waited for it to slow then hurried into the backyard for some macro shots of one of our saguaros. I had to work fast, the spines dry quickly and lose the wonderful colors, a couple have already dried here. The water drops on the skin evaporate quickly and gravity is constantly tugging at the drops dripping from the spines. One day I’ll play around with a watering can to get just the right droplets on my favorite areole, perhaps a fun project for a day when my mobility is limited, but that’s not what I wanted here. I didn’t want a picture of water drops on a saguaro, I wanted a picture of the rain.
📷: Nikon Z 7II | Nikon 105mm macro
🗓️: November 18, 2023
Another reason to mourn the end of our preposterous summers is it marks the end of swimming season for someone who doesn’t like to be cold. I’m not sure what the water temperature is right now since the string on the thermometer broke but I did just take this picture of the pool so …
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 wayThe ocean is the river’s goal
A need to leave the water knows
We’re closer now than light years to goI 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.
From July during a summer rain with no lightning or thunder. This photoshoot was the straw that broke the camel’s back and made me start looking for a camera with focus bracketing, though it took me another 5 months to pull the trigger.
One of my favorite places in the Columbia River Gorge was a cliff next to the trail where water trickles down over a thick carpet of moss all along the rock face. I loved to stand close, let the water mist onto my face as I defocused my eyes, and gaze into the endless sea of green. It was hypnotic, even disorienting, but I wanted to imprint in my memory not just the look but the feel of such an intense and lush green in an area already awash in it.
This damp wall of moss though was taken here in the desert on New Year’s Eve. It is a wall only in miniature, a close-up of a small section of the shady side of a granite rock. It had rained earlier and while the trails had dried the moss was still a vibrant green with a few water drops clinging to its surface. Not a wall to overwhelm the senses but to puzzle the mind. I thought I was leaving moss behind when we left the wet Northwest for the arid Southwest, and yet …
Last year after getting some confidence identifying the more common birds and mammals and reptiles of the Sonoran Desert, I decided to start learning the desert plants. I spent an evening reading up on the trees (there aren’t a bunch, this shouldn’t have been hard) but the next morning I couldn’t remember anything I had read the night before. I was a little frustrated with myself but heard a pleading voice that there had been too much that was new and to focus on the things I had to learn, not the things I wanted to learn.
As a creature of habit I knew Arizona would provide beneficial opportunities to experience something different but also that there was so much different both at work and at home that it might be overwhelming (the pandemic hasn’t helped). So I heeded that voice and put aside the guide books and stuck to familiar nearby parks rather than venturing further afield, trying out trails new to me when I felt up to a little challenge.
This summer has brought a mild awakening in being willing to learn new things, spurred on partially by the giant cactus out front that exploded in blooms after the summer monsoons and brought in a host of small creatures to feed on its bounty, and the butterflies that similarly burst into view at the same time either in our yard or on my beloved trails.
Insects have been tricky to learn but I believe this little lovely is a leaf-footed bug of the species Narnia femorata but take that with a grain of salt, I’m not a biologist much less an entomologist, and this is all new to me besides. While they apparently prefer prickly pear (the neighbors have a glorious patch) a group of them have been hanging out on this big cactus in our front yard, feeding either on the buds and blossoms like here on a rainy summer evening, or on the fruit that grew after the pollinators got to work.
I was photographing two of my favorite subjects last weekend, saguaros and the rain, when my macro lens breathed its last (or so I thought), the manual focus ring barely turning. This is my favorite set of saguaro spines, I wanted to capture water droplets pooling on them while I had the chance as no lightning accompanied the rain. The soft white cushion from which the spine cluster emerges is known as the areole, a distinguishing feature of a cactus (compare these to the thorns of the the ocotillo in the previous post which grow directly out of the stem). A few larger spines shoot out from the center while smaller spines radiate out in all directions. Bit of a shame that English botanist Adrian Hardy Haworth’s proposed term in 1830 for the areole, spinarium, never caught on.
As I held the lens in the following days, thinking back to how many things I had photographed with it over the years, there was some comfort in knowing it died doing what it loved, or more precisely what I love. After it sat idle on my coffee table for a few days I picked it up again, idly turning the focus ring and was surprised to see the lens focus in response. I don’t know if some rain had inadvertently gotten in and caused a mechanical glitch or if a cat hair had worked its way past the lens casing but in any case, the situation resolved itself and the lens has sprung back to life.
Thursday night a monsoon storm brought thunder and lightning and buckets of rain in a short period of time, while I prefer the Oregon rains that spread out a year’s worth of rainfall over hundreds of days rather than a few hours, I can’t complain as the desert desperately needs the water. Less intense thunderstorms arrived on Friday, since I was off work I was able to grab my macro lens to photograph a scene I had envisioned for a while but hadn’t been able to capture, large water drops collecting on the leaves of an ocotillo. The thunderstorms diminished as the weekend progressed but showers continued on and off through Sunday, giving me several days of joy out in the rain photographing plants around the yard.
The fun ended Sunday evening when the focusing unit of my Canon macro lens at long last gave up the ghost, I hoped it was a momentary glitch but sadly that does not appear to be the case. It was a few months shy of 22 years old as I bought it in November 1999 for $580, what fun we’ve had over the years! I have no idea what I’ll do for a replacement, modern lenses have a number of features I’d like that my old lens didn’t, but it’s the cameras that give me pause. Sony doesn’t have focus bracketing in their cameras but it would be so useful for the things I shoot I might add another system just to get it, but we’ll see.
A couple of lifetimes ago, almost 16 years to the day, the sun begins to rise above the Atlantic in South Carolina. If memory serves this was the last time I saw the sun rise over the ocean, a short while later I realized how easily alligators were seen in the freshwater marsh so while I returned to the park a few other times before sunrise, naturally I never made it past the marsh. I visited the ocean in the Pacific Northwest during our many years there but something would have gone very wrong for me to see the sun rise above it.
We may be landlocked here in Arizona but we did get some water the past week, starting with a thunderstorm one night after work. I sat on the back porch listening to the rain pounding down in the dark, breathing in the unique smell of the desert in the rain. Another day a short shower barely wet the ground but yesterday the skies darkened during an afternoon swim so I got out in plenty of time before a thunderstorm blew through, thankfully courtesy of the weekend this one I was home during the day to watch. Trixie was not amused but I stayed out until it grew dark, the odds are against me being able to see the rain so I try to soak it in when I can.
Boolie 