the evenings of summer
hickory bay, florida - may 31, 2005

the storms of morning gave way to the fragile calm of evening on this last day in may. while it is true that i spend nearly all my time on the water in my faithful kayak, i also own a sweet little carolina skiff. its outboard has been a critical care inpatient at various outboard hospitals since october, so the skiff has been floating, neglected and alone. in dire need of fresh air tonight, i rounded up the oars, threw off the mooring lines and began rowing.

despite their locomotive similarities, rowing is very different than paddling. first, you face the stern and the view over the wake (small as it is) is completely dissimiliar in perspective. i smiled widely at the last light of day that fell so sweetly over the retreating glimpses of my canal floating away behind me. in a scene saturated with glassy reflections and those gigantic clouds that hang like meringue over the everglades in the summer, rich glowing light bounced off homes so familiar i could paint each one in my sleep. the objects may remain the same, but light renders them unique each day.

a thought worms its way into my awareness: perhaps photography - art - is largely about being fearless - unafraid to *feel*. technical expertise will bring you precision, good light offers you a chance, mentors will teach you what works for them, but i suspect that images that come out singing might have voices born of fearless and honest expression. anger in afternoon storms, heartbreak in light falling on water, deep gasps of desire as great-winged birds lift off, the mystery of a human glance or the wild joy of love-tinged possibility when the day dawns ... these are the paints, the pigments, the dyes, the colors pulled through our emotional lenses. opening up could very well mean much more than a simple f/stop.

and so i row - facing backward - feeling my way through to the end of the fading day and month by the braille of all that surrounds me. what does it mean to me? what might it mean to you?

this light - this very scene - reminds me of everything that ties my heart so fully to this place. storms rumble over swamps. long, elegant birds fly past with soft swooshing noises to their night-roosts in the mangroves. the seabreeze strokes my hair with tender understanding. florida wouldn't know how to be boring if it tried. even when traffic and growth runs amok, this soft air  - so palpably full of humidity that light seems to reflect off each water molecule - is the stuff of primordial magic. if you let it in, it binds to your very hemoglobin, perfusing every cell in your being.

the outboard may come home one day, but i don't think i'll retire these oars any time soon.

"some photographers take reality...and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation."
    -- Ansel Adams

paddling home as sunset rips the sky
barefoot beach, florida - memorial day - may 30, 2005

"There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas."
  -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

the seasons have changed. in a week's time, the windows have closed, the humidity has descended and the winds have begun to push up from the caribbean. moist winds. heavy air. weather books describe this push of warm, wet air into an air mass of much lower moisture as "the humid tongue".

tonight, at sunset, thunderheads streamed along the tongue just offshore. sea salt clung to skin in viscous rivulets. contrast edges between water and sky disappeared into a curtain of bruised blue-grey. the last warriors of a holiday beach day, these three boys paddled hard toward shore in their small inflatable raft as the sun fell through a small gash in the darkened sky. color flared and tore at the angry clouds. a breath or two later, it was gone.

making memories. big and small ... adventures had by all.

and now, hours later, lightning flashes nature's high beams and the sky groans. storms are coming.  summer arrives on noisy hooves.

backlit orange canna lily petals
bonita shores, florida - may 29, 2005

"i know i can not paint a flower, i can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint colour i can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time."
   -- Georgia O'Keeffe

recently, a good friend generously loaned me his 90mm/2.8 macro lens to take for a test drive. on this morning, i wandered my gardens just after sunrise in search of willing models. near the black shadows of tall white ginger that grows along the walkway up to the back patio, my eye discovered this orange canna lily, intensely backlit by the low morning sun. i knelt behind the lily for a time, in tight proximity, watching the light play through the colored petals that so much reminded me of stained glass. i thought about light and color and visual perceptions and *up close*. what i can see as the whole - the flower, the sky, the sun, the shadows - with my eyes becomes translated into shape and light by my imagination. reality becomes perception. a captured moment of effervescent light is bent into a richly saturated apparition in my brain, and emerges, destined to become my experiential gift.

steam plumes from sulfur vents
sulphur works, lassen volcanic national park, california - may 21, 2005

at just 106,000 acres, lassen volcanic national park is not a huge park, but it could easily be one of the most fascinating of our national parks in its rich history and geology.

long before the california gold rush of the mid-1800s, tens of thousands of native americans, in four tribes, lived around lassen, subsisting on fish, game, roots, and acorn meal. In yana oral history mount lassen was waganupa, the center of the world, whose snows melted and created canyons, caves, and ridges. some heroes and gods are said to have transformed themselves into the ancestors of men, bears, and other living things. but some local indians believe that two of the supernatural beings still live, like lemurians, deep inside the mountain.

somewhere around 1840, a danish immigrant gold miner named peter lassen had been given a large tract of land east of the sacramento river by the mexican government. somehow or the other, lassen discovered a way over the mountains that came to be called "lassen's cutoff" and set himself up in the business guiding settlers.

but lassen was a man who could mistake lassen pealaska, his key landmark, for mt. shasta, which is higher and further to the west. he would get lost in the wilderness, leaving his exasperated charges trailing behind and supplies running perilously low. legend has it that one of his parties got so fed up they forced lassen at gunpoint to climb to the top of lassen peak (roughly 11,000 feet in elevation) and figure out where in creation they were. lassen was murdered in 1859 while on an expedition in black rock desert.

lassen peak's real moment of glory came on may 30, 1914, when it erupted, sending a cloud of gas and ash seven miles into the stratosphere. the nation watched fascinated, much as it did 65 years later when mt. st. helens erupted in 1980. this eruption began a 7-year cycle of sporadic volcanic outbursts in this area.

the reawakening of this volcano, which began as a vent on a larger extinct volcano known as tehama, profoundly altered the surrounding landscape. lassen's eruption eventually blasted out a crater that is a thousand feet wide. when the eruption climaxed nearly a year after it began, rock fragments and pumice spiraled 30,000 feet (9,150 meters) high. a pyroclastic flow - an avalanche of hot ash, pumice, rock, snow, and gas - thundered down lost creek, northwest of the summit, turning into a mudflow, flooding the valley, and destroying houses near the town of old station.

the area was made a national park in 1916 because of its significance as an active volcanic landscape. the park is a compact laboratory of volcanic phenomena and associated thermal features - except true geysers. it is part of a vast geographic unit - a great lava plateau with isolated volcanic peaks - that also encompasses lava beds national monument, california, and crater lake national park, oregon.

volcanic activity is still the central interest of this park. lassen's geothermal areas – sulphur works, bumpass hell, little hot springs valley, boiling springs lake, devils kitchen, and terminal geyser - display bubbling mud pots, steaming fumaroles, and boiling water. sulphur works' hydrothermal area is the most accessible hot springs area in the park and is a fascinating display of steam vents, sulfur steams, and mud pots. it is thought to be part of the central vent system of ancient mount tehama.

in these steaming, active areas, slippery clay and thin crusty coverings could lead to a dunking in 195 degree F (76 degrees C) water and mud. most water in the thermal areas of the park contains sulphurous or sulphuric acid - the odor is mainly that of hydrogen sulphide. much of the white clay is tinted yellow, tan, or pink by minerals, chiefly iron oxides.

taking a walk up a hill with a dear friend at sunset
upper bidwell park, chico, california - may 19, 2005

"wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. the sun shines not on us but in us. the rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. the trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love."
   -- John Muir

lupines and scotch broom
sierra nevada mountains, california - may 21, 2005

"The happy beings who belong to the plant kingdom of Florida dwell together in gorgeous heaps and twistings and tangles, but California plants rise side by side with scarce a prickle or tendril of attachment, looking skyward and proper, like good people at church."
  -- John Muir

sandhill cranes - may 17, 2005

"cranes are the stuff of magic, whose voices penetrate the atmosphere of the world's wilderness areas, from arctic tundra to the south american veld, and whose footprints have been left on the wetlands of the world for the past 60 million years or more."
   -- Paul Johnsgard, Crane Music: A Natural History of American Cranes

sandhill cranes are indeed magical. one need only listen to any of the dozen or so distinctive calls in their vocal repertoire to feel that magic, as i did after dark last night. earlier, in the sweet light of near-sunset, i followed a mated pair across soft, rolling hills of green for a time until my eye took my camera elsewhere, chasing light in the opposite direction. coming back outside onto those same small hills after dark, i stood, enchanted by a sudden explosion of lyrical, throaty trills and trumpets, echoing loudly off the soft undulations of grass. it was haunting and surreal and like nothing i'd ever really heard before. there in the darkness, i instantly lost my heart, and like many times before, i yearned to grow wings.

strong vocal resonance, able to travel well over a mile, is unique among these large wading birds because of their unusual windpipe. in most birds, the trachea passes directly from the throat to the lungs, but in sandhill cranes it is elongated by forming a single loop which fills a cavity in the sternum. it is not surprising that the louder and more harmonic whooping crane has a longer trachea with a double loop.

perhaps the most remarkable call of cranes is the unison call, typically uttered when they begin to pair. unlike their single-noted calls, the unison call is a complex and extended series of calls uttered by a pair of the birds standing in a specific posture and spatial relationship to each other. magically, they call in synchrony. perhaps like their human pair counterparts, though, the calls and postures of the sexes differ: the female begins calling and usually utters two notes for every one given by the male.

amazingly, their vocal magic reaches "across the shell": unborn young produce distinct calls from inside the egg and the adults respond with a purring sound.

cranes perform a very elaborate courtship dance, beginning during spring migration. breeding pairs stay together for life and migratory, mated pairs return to the same nesting location each year occuring at the same time and using the same route and the same rest stops. the ritual of their dance of is one love and energy, consisting of bowing, jumping as high twelve feet in the air and throwing sticks. the dance begins slowly with one bird and then gradually, the tempo increases. the excitement continues to build and, infectiously, spreads to others, including young, unmated birds simply needing to release aggressive energy, until many are dancing at the same time in a ‘tribal fervor’. 

in this way, sandhill cranes are famous throughout time and in myth and lore for their uniquely lavish and kinetic springtime ceremonial dances. for centuries, they have evoked strong emotional responses in people. greek and roman myth tended to portray the dance of cranes as a love of joy and a celebration of life.  the crane was usually considered to be a bird that apollo the sun god used as a herald of spring and *light*.  apollo is  said to have disguised himself as a crane when on visits to the mortal world. in japan, the crane was known as 'the bird of happiness' and was often referred to as 'honourable lord crane'.  chinese ancients believed that cranes were symbols of wisdom - the messengers of legendary sages who were carried on their backs in flight between heavenly worlds. the powerful wings of the crane were said to be able to convey souls to the Western Paradise and to take people to higher levels of spiritual consciousness.

the relationship between cranes and modern people is by no means idyllic, however. species that face growing pressures on their natural habitats have in some cases turned to using cultivated lands for foraging. Under most circumstances there is little conflict with farmers’ interests, but in some areas, and at some times of the year, foraging cranes can cause damage to crops. such damage can be especially severe in the spring when cranes probe for newly planted seeds or pull up and consume seedlings. damage can also occur in the fall when migratory cranes are in large flocks and crops are ripening. in some situations, cranes have been intentionally poisoned or shot.

standing a bit over three feet on tall, spindly dark legs and often mistaken for great blue herons, this species breeds as far north as alaska and the arctic coast of canada in north america, south into the great lakes region and westward across idaho, nevada and oregon. they also breed in the extreme southeastern united states and cuba. the winter range of this species includes parts of california, new mexico, arizona, texas, georgia, florida and northern mexico. sandhill cranes that reach independence are expected to live about seven years. the oldest known sandhill crane lived at least 21.6 years.

sandhills are gray except for white cheeks and a bare reddish forehead. bustle-like feathers further add to a distinctive appearance. it is difficult to tell males apart from females except for for slight variations in size. males are the larger gender, but  not by much. the intensity of red in the bald forehead is present in both genders and varies depending on behavioral stimulation which controls skin capillaries by restricting or relaxing blood flow. thus, a brighter red forehead is associated with stressful stimuli; on the other hand, a less conspicuous forehead signals submission. sandhill cranes frequently preen with vegetation and mud stained with iron oxide. consequently, during most of the year they appear reddish brown rather than gray.

the national geographic web site is host to an amazing collection of images, videos, audio calls and information about cranes, birds that are truly "the stuff of magic".

the monarch arrives - may 13, 2005

"butterflies - flowers that fly and all but sing ."
   -- Robert Frost

"just living is not enough," said the butterfly. "one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."
   -- Hans Christian Anderson

into the black of storm - may 12, 2005

"consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk."
   -- Edward Weston

mother's day - may 8, 2005

"when i photograph, what i'm really doing is seeking answers to things."
   -- Wynn Bullock