It is the last gasp of summer. How odd. How short. And my eye is kinda twitchin’. We are once again, or maybe for the first real time, empty nesters; M went off to college this morning. Right after he fixed the popped out passenger window in his new ancient Civic for the third time. Okay, his apartment is only ten minutes away, but it’s also in another entire universe. I hope he milks the next two years for all they’re worth.
I’m going to miss him, but then, the two months he just spent with us, my M time was basically after ten at night, which I am too old to do for more than one night in a row. The house is pretty empty.
We had another couple of huge monsoon uproars last week. I was running around, closing windows when I managed to kick the daylights out of one of M’s still not unpacked suitcases. I now have two toes taped together. Directly next, I went downstairs to open the mail and slit my finger open on an envelope. Good times. Good times.
I am in no shape to write. Brain’s too cluttered. And the images of the trip? Like an idiot, I was shooting something – what? what? – that required a nice 1600 ISO, which means that everything looks like it was shot through a plastic safety fence; you could drive a truck between the pixels. WHY is there grain in digital photos? I used to understand film. But you can’t understand magic—it’s like against some natural law.
So here are shots of the trip out. M shot them all cause I was driving. Ten hours with that boy go by like two; we had a grand time and made it though about 1/100th of his play list. Half of these shots, he took with his phone. I’d see this crashing vista coming up and start yelling, “Shoot it! Shoot it!” But by the time he got the camera to behave, all the angles had changed, and what we got didn’t come close to what we’d seen.
I won’t post everything, because there are hundreds of shots—I don’t usually shoot the actually journey this way, but traveling the south west is like taking a journey across another planet – alien and stark, smashingly beautiful, amazing as the day goes on and the light changes.
For what it’s worth:
Me. On the journey.
My traveling companion.
Early morning in the canyons.
I love slanting light. Sharp edges and dramatic shadows. At 65 miles per hour. Or more. Probably more.
Through the dirty windshield. These huge outcroppings of geology, with their colorful and rugged striations (original horizontality edited by wind, rain and weight) are sometimes breathtaking.
I always imagine the frightening forces that push these ridges up from the earth, breaking free of the stuff under your feet to thrust themselves up in knife edges against the sky. I wonder if it happened all at once – ground shaking and things crashing – or a tiny bit over a very long time?
Me, again. Driving.
My companion again, having fun.
And this odd thing – just an obelisk, standing there for how long? Like carving a captive ring out of wood, nature carves this standing thing and it lasts for decades? Hundreds of years? (What does it mean? – that was for you, Mar) Until it crashes down on your car one day apropos of nothing. Wow, that would be a trip-breaker.
And then there’s this stuff. We’re moving into the sandstone part of the desert. Talk about weird and beautiful sculptures. But I’ll show you more of them on the way home.
Okay. That’s part one. Sorry for the lousy resolution. And the dirty windows. Hey – at least we remembered to get gas before we left. More to come –
20 Responses to ~o:>Go, dog. Go!