Another Column Review

I confess that I am a visual kinda guy. I have written of how I have enjoyed the sounds of train horns in the dark and bird song in the trees, and of the scent of a carpet of lupine in the mountain meadow well above timberline that reeked of Welches grape juice as I walked through. But the sense that brings me the greatest pleasure has always been my vision.

I have stepped out of the trailer and wandered aimlessly about a coastal campground in the mist of dawn, steaming coffee in hand and wool sweater snug around my neck, as the dogs scurried about sniffing and peeing and doing dog stuff, and I could smell the ocean and hear the surf crashing past the dunes, and I enjoyed the music of the white crowned sparrows in the trees. But then the fog swirled around the hills to the east, rapidly turning pink to red before the sun surmounted the ridge, and I quietly stared, not wanting to miss a moment, and that was the best part of the morning. That time it was the color that captured me.

Another time it was a black and gray world shortly following the sunset, on a hillside somewhere near Point Reyes, and there were no other colors to be enjoyed as the fog filtered through the large conifers, lichens hanging down from the branches to make the tree silhouettes more intriguing, if not a bit sinister. No sound followed the great horned owl as it sailed past, no doubt intent on a dinner of rodent or rabbit. I could not hear the bats, but they were easy to spot against the dim bright of the sky. The rocks in the trail weren't to be seen at all, but merely sensed by sole and toe as I walked slowly and silently, alone in the gloaming.

Much earlier, on another weekend on the coast, the camera was brand new and I hoped to do great things with it, capturing instants in time when the correct elements lined up so exquisitely that even my humble eyes would see the magic and my index finger could press a button, and I would own it forever. I was still too silly then to realize that I could not own any time forever. So I went off through the dunes, up the narrow path of smooth sand and mouse tracks, between the lupine and ice plant to that last gasp of land where it met the sea, and where you could see where the sea met the sky and then went away. And there I waited for the sun to go around the planet yet again, and finally leave for the day. As before, the sun tried to set the sea on fire, and the sky filled with conflagration, and the little clumps of seeds on the ends of the waving grass centered in the camera’s viewfinder with the unbearable red of the sun and the rest of the red behind them, and they became black silhouette and the photo was born and it was perfect. And I cannot find where I put it away to keep safe.

Visual candy.

I have two carousels of Kodacrome slides sitting in boxes next to the projector in a cabinet in a house. Captured within is a tiny fraction of the visual candy that hiking for twenty days will present to those willing to do the time above tree line, along the John Muir Trail in the highest and best parts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I guess you could say that I have preserved that wonder forever. For me, forever will last as long as my mind can recall. The slides will last for a while, and a while longer when I finally convert them to pixels and plant them on some silicon somewhere. Someday someone may look at them and they will still be pretty, and they may even mean something, but they will never mean the same to someone as they mean to me. Such is the experience that is life.