Old House in the Storm

Old House in the Storm. This is where I was and what I was running from this afternoon.

My walk as a mini-cliffhanger

I ran into Scott at Wegman's, my 7th of 8 stops on today's errand route and we had quite a chat and decided to walk if he got done with his haircut at about the same time I got some with Wegman's and the egg farm.

When I came out of Weggies, it had rained and it was steaming off the parking lot and HOT--felt like a sauna! Weggies took longer than I hoped (and I didn't even get everything I needed) and Scott had already called and gone on his way back to Jordan when I got home, so I put away my groceries and went out to walk by myself. They were threatening thunderstorms so instead of going to 3 Rivers, I thought I'd park at Palmer (closer) and walk down the road. As I was about to turn off the car radio, it started making that wretched buzzing sound that indicates a warning--I knew what it would be and listened carefully--severe thunderstorms damaging winds headed my way at 20 miles and hour and currently over Seneca Falls. Warning, all people take cover indoors or in a vehicle if necessary--do not stay outside.

I calculated the time available and figured I could make it.

I took all my camera gear and a waterproof gear bag--but it was a small one, not big enough for all the gear. Big enough for Eeyore and one lens, maybe. I had the new flash, too, because the black clouds were making it much darker than usual. And Ollie and all the batteries and other gear. I was going to take a tripod because of the darkness due to the black clouds, but it was so windy it seemed pointless.

I walked and watched the lightning snake across the sky closer and closer, walked up over two (small) hills where there was nothing but corn, so I felt pretty exposed--the corn's not knee high yet. Of course, I wanted to walk 45 minutes, but when I'd walked 21, the thunder was so close I turned around and headed back. I walked fast, and as the storm approached, I walked faster and faster. Pretty soon I was jogging. As I ran as fast as I could back to the car, the storm hit. I dove into the car just as it really cut loose, pelting the car with rain like standing under a waterfall almost--and the wind, which had been getting stronger and stronger, shook the little car, threatening to uproot it.

I only got hit by the first sprinkles and splotches of rain. My gear was safe--and I was very relieved when I saw the downpour that the gear at least was inside the car. YAY! Good timing. Phew.

On the way back, I was wishing I could photograph the rain in the headlights and battering and misting off the roads.

"An adventure every time!" Scott Carter

"Every Day's a Holiday," FJ

"I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination" John Keats

Mail Slot, Phoenix 

Carp at the dam in Phoenix 

Pink Peony in Phoenix Churchyard. Photo (all photos) by Mary Stebbins. 

In the Zone? I must have been "in the zone" as I wandered through the deserted streets of Phoenix NY. This abandoned storefront seemed evocative, spoke to me of love and loss. 

wild rose in light rain, phoenix 

Musk Mallow

Musk Mallow, Phoenix, NY.

Dam at Phoenix 

Flowering Raspeberry at Silk Creek 6/9/05 

Geese, squirrel, Pine Cone, Radisson

Geese, uncooperative squirrel, pine cone at Radisson June 8

Reflections, Hidden Lake

Reflections, Hidden Lake, Radisson, June 8, 2005

I cropped adjusted this picture further in Photoshop and used it as an illustration for today's illustration for Full Tilt Retreat.

Hidden Lake, Radisson

Hidden Lake, Radisson, June 8, 2005.

Radisson

4:32 PM, out walking at Radisson. (The Trail here is clearly visible!) I came here because it is nearby and I am feeling pressed for time, and because the weather man was threatening thunderstorms and it looked like it, so I didn't want to be bushwhacking etc, and it’s way too hot (in the 90s) to wear protective bug gear.

I did not walk at all yesterday s I theoretically should walk twice today but in this heat and with my feeling of time pressure, I'm not sure I will. I wanted to walk once in the AM and once in the PM but I didn't get AM walk in.

I am carrying a ton of photography gear but haven't taken any pictures yet. I did stop to look at Dames Rocket but didn't shoot it.

A runner just went by and waved, a man about my age, now there's a brave soul, running in this heat.

How ephemeral and cerebral writing and photography are, especially on-line. It’s out in cyberspace and not real. That goes for what I am writing into the Psion. These files have a way of disappearing. They're as fleeting as thoughts and dreams. I think I’m making something, but I'm not.

The canopy has become summer-thick and dark, almost overnight in the heat. I need a tripod to take pictures in the woods. Or the new strobe. It’s not suitable for every use, though. Good sometimes for flowers but rarely for scenics.

As I fantasize of travel and Photoshop plug-ins and fancier photo gear, I think: I ought to “live simply so that others might simply live.” Rather than using any available fund to continuously enrich my life, I could help people who have nothing.

This makes me worry about the place of art in a world where people are DYING of starvation, malnutrition, war, disease act.

Meanwhile, I am walking through the woods and hear the barred owl babies and the musical calls of other birds. I stop for a minute and look up into the tops of tall trees and listen to the birdcalls. It is cooler in here, in the deep shade. Not cool, but cooler.

I walk past a single dragonfly wing on the ground and consider picking it up. I imagine the possible uses of a dragonfly wing. Pictures. Becoming a fairy, perhaps. I walk past and leave it.

I’m getting bitten, that's what I get for being out here so skimpily clad.

I grab a few shots of an uncooperative squirrel.

The pool is full of happy children playing and splashing. Earlier, I had thought of going to Silk Creek, but I was busy with errands and banking and watering the plants etc. I can't spend a whole hour just driving in order to go play and cool off when I have so much catching up to do. Never mind packing to move, cleaning to sell, talking to the lawyer etc.

I stop to take some shots of some frolicking young squirrels but I am not close enough to get good pix. Meanwhile, a dog with a deep scary voice starts barking behind me and gives me a real scare. Luckily, he’s inside a fence.

I take a few shots of a pinecone and study pools of water in water lilies but refrain from taking them. I am thinking of that poem by Gary Snyder, which I can remember the feeling of, but not the words. The moon over the valley, the granite ledge, it’s too much. A single leaf, a pinecone. At the edge of the woods, the breath of a cougar. That's totally not it, but the point he was making is that we can't take it all in. Better to concentrate on a single leaf.

Here it is:

Piute Creek

One granite ridge

A tree, would be enough

Or even a rock, a small creek,

A bark shred in a pool.

Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted

Tough trees crammed

In thin stone fractures

A huge moon on it all, is too much.

The mind wanders. A million

Summers, night air still and the rocks

Warm. Sky over endless mountains.

All the junk that goes with being human

Drops away, hard rock wavers

Even the heavy present seems to fail

This bubble of a heart.

Words and books

Like a small creek off a high ledge

Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind

Has no meaning but that

Which sees is truly seen.

No one loves rock, yet we are here.

Night chills. A flick

In the moonlight

Slips into Juniper shadow:

Back there unseen

Cold proud eyes

Of Cougar or Coyote

Watch me rise and go.

                    Gary Snyder

Boy did I ever butcher that trying to remember, but it’s been years since I read it. Meanwhile I look up at the pond and the trail around it just as a girl on a bike sweeps into a turn from coming toward the lake to flying around it. She swoops toward and past me, and something shifts. I have a moment of Flash, as Emily of New Moon would call it. I feel awake and aware and tuned in, alive. And the sun beats down on me, and I see myself from the eyes of the girl, a funny fat old woman writing on something that looks a little like a Game Boy. But I barely enter her consciousness, not nearly that much. I am a small part of the whole tapestry of scene for her. The old person in the alley of the photograph. Not the one in the foreground, but the one way down in back that struggles up the hill and echoes the lined face in the foreground.

Or I’m in this Piazza in the sun with geraniums and potted cedars, just one part of the background.

Meanwhile, birds chatter and frogs croak and they don’t care a wink that they are just part of the scene. A boy in white shirt fishing pulls a tiny fish from the pond and flips it around. He is just a small part of my scenery as I am of his.

There is something "eternal" about this summer-like day, though nothing is eternal, of course. It's summery and hot, but it isn’t summer yet, according to the calendar. And yet, it's a quintessential summer day. If there could be a rubber stamp summer day, this would be it, but of course, every day is different in subtle and larger ways.

I left my good sandals in Detroit and am wearing a pair of old beat up Kmart sandals that won't stay fastened and that I almost threw out. Glad I didn't though, I need them today.

A lone little black boy rides up and does a wheelie. Then he does another bike trick. He is very aware of me, and keeps looking to see if I'm watching him. Then he is gone and I'm alone again. A while later, a boy about 14 rides by and actually speaks to me, confirming my existence. I am seen.

A turtle sticks its head out between some water lilies, and seeing me, ducks back under. Seen again, this time simply as possible predator. We each have our own view of the world.

Two girls ride up, talking about strawberry ice cream, and then, floating through the heat comes the sound of the ice cream truck.

Most of the time, I don't even flinch.

The woods smell like hot cedar. Here, it is cooler, but still smells like hot cedar, though there is no cedar in sight.

I was just thinking about that BetterPhoto.com thing. While it is gratifying to have people notice you and I am never overly eager to get negative feedback, most of the feedback is in truth insipid and unhelpful. Finding the right variety of support and helpful feedback is difficult. Doug often manages it. My own feedback at BP is no better than the others because I am following their lead, afraid to make waves, afraid to make enemies.

I'm in a bad place with Discovery at Little Hog Island. I'm a little "bored" with it because, mainly, I don't know where I am going. It is hard to work on something massive in such little sound bites. As often occurs in such big projects, I am losing sight of the overall plan in the minutia of details. It's a terrifying prospect to put your work out for people to see when it's in an early stage as this is, but even more upsetting is the fear that no one cares (or seems to care) and no one seems to be looking anyway.

I never did the maps, I never had time, so if I do them now, I'd have to post them by scanning them on my scanner at home in B’ville which means I'd have to find and install the software because it never was installed in Blue, Dead was the server for the scanner, which is crap compared to Keith’s.

Thought chains are funny things. I was thinking of myself at that imaginary piazza and wishing I could go there (“live simply so that others can simply live”—stop dreaming of travel all the time!), and I think I deserve to go there when in fact I've done nothing to deserve that or anything else and I think of my father and how he did finally travel to Italy and elsewhere and then I think how he was old first and then I think of his dying in pain, how he said, "No one should have to suffer like this."

And we all have to die and each step my falling apart sandals take brings me closer to my own death.

Meanwhile, the repeating silly song of the ice-cream truck has found me again, like a taunt.

Today, the ponds are all full of samaras and junk. They are pretty to the eye but not the camera. Voices drift across the water and the soft clunking of canoe paddles against aluminum.

A family of ducks with tiny ducklings takes off from shore paddling madly to escape me. I can't get my camera ready fast enough to capture them.

I get Ollie out to take a picture, but it seems to be dead as a doornail. Nothing I can do wakes it. I replace the battery and after messing around some more, finally get it to work. I wanted to take perfect reflection in the pond and while I was fooling around, three ducks flew in formation through the picture, but I missed it. I missed an earlier shot earlier because I was messing with Eeyore.

"Some days a diamond, some days a stone, some days the hard time, won't leave you alone." My times are not hard relative to other people's, people with real problems, and I need to always remember that and teach Graham about being a privileged white boy in a privileged white boy world.

I think Susan may have neglected that oh-so-important aspect of his education as a human being.

What does it mean to be a privileged white-boy in a privileged-white boy world? It means being responsible for your choices and understanding how your choices affect the less privileged. In the world today, it is less and less possible to pick yourself up by the bootstraps.

When I finally get the camera going there are no ducks flying through the picture and the light has changed, but I take it anyway.

Across the pond, a man comes out on his deck and growls, loudly and meanly. “Grrrrowl. Grrrrowl, get out of here.” He claps his hands. I can't see who he’s yelling at, ducks? Or what. Not me, because I’m across the pond and behind a screen of trees.

A man walks by with a dog. I speak to him, but he just scowls at me. A woman is watering her lawn. In the pond, the bullfrogs are jug-a-rumming in their bass voices. Spores interrupt the interrupted ferns.

I need to think about my Hog Island entry for the day. It occurred to me to have a piece about the Hogs of Hog Island from Rheta's folder. The Hogs would of course eat the tern’s eggs. Before they eat them all there has to be some demise to the hogs. Poaching would be good.

I think I am on Part 37

I think to sit for a moment and jot some notes, but the geese think I'm going to feed them and swim toward me. I take a few quick shots and leave.

I have nothing to feed them.

Discovery on Little Hog Island, Part 37, June 8, 2005 (I wrote my day's entry here, but I am deleting it, moving it to Full Tilt Retreat. If you want to see it, click here).

Give a man a fish and you've fed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you've fed him for a lifetime. But, where are there enough fish to feed all the starving people when we're killing all the fish with poisons? And where are there enough oceans, lakes, ponds and streams in the desert?

Isn't Graham's life as valuable as that starving child's and vice versa? Graham is first in my life, though, he's my rose, my fox (a la Le Petite Prince). We need to have room in our hearts and pocketbooks for both our loved ones and those others.

When I get home, it's cooled off a little outside but now the bugs are out! In my yard a zillion bugs. Irises that used to belong to my Mom, huge and opulent, smaller blue ones, and little yellow irises. All the poppies are nearly gone. The lawn needs mowing and the little trees are popping everywhere. Batchelor buttons are flowering and the hollyhocks are up and getting big.

The poison ivy is going mad. Well, the walk is over and I cannot prolong it any longer, wish as I may. The mosquitoes are encouraging me to do what I must and return to work.

Starry False Solomon's Seal at the Pinery, 5/29/05