My neighbors around the corner have furnished their kin with a miniature harley davidson to ride around (and around, and around) the hood. A little chainsaw on wheels piloted by America’s future obese. The nieghbor behind me spends all day every day working on his lawn and garden blaring old timey music through outdoor speakers, starting at 7am. The young rednecks across the street have a little dog that starts barking at 5:30am in unison with the rooster. I’m at the end of my rope and my grip is loosening. Sometimes I think it’s a blessing and a curse to appreciate peace and quiet. I supose you get what you pay for, my little trailer was cheap and I’m not a slave to my mortage, just to my intolerance of domestic noise.
I wrote the above paragraph last night. When I went to bed I started into Wallace Stegner’s “The Sound of Mountain Water”. I’d like to quote his first chapter after the introduction. It’s a bit long winded for a blog, but bare with me, it’s only 2 pages in the paperback.
“I discovered mountain rivers late, for I was a prairie child, and knew only flatland and dryland until we toured the Yellowstone country in 1920, loaded with all the camp beds, auto tents, grub-boxes, and auxiliary water and gas cans that 1920 thought necessary. Our road between Great Falls, Montana, and Salt Lake City was the rutted track that is now Highway 89. Beside a marvelous torrent, one of the first I ever saw, we camped several days. That was Henry’s Fork of the Snake.
I didn’t know that it rose on the west side of Targhee Pass and flowed barely a hundred miles, through two Idaho counties, before joining the Snake near Rexburg; or that in 1810 Andrew Henry built on its bank near modern St. Anthony the first American post west of the continental divide. The divide itself meant nothing to me. My imagination was not stretched by the wonder of the parted waters, the Yellowstone rising only a few miles eastward to flow out toward the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Gulf, while this bright pounding stream was starting through its thousand miles of canyons to the Columbia and the Pacific.
All I knew was that it was pure delight to be where the land lifted in peaks and plunged in canyons, and to sniff air thin, spray-cooled, full of pine and spruce smills, and to be so close-seeming to the improbable indigo sky. I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me. When the sun dropped over the rim the shadows chilled sharply; evening lingered until foam on water was ghostly and luminous in the near-dark. Alders caught in the current sawed like things alive, and the noise was louder. It was rare and comforting to waken late and hear the undiminished shouting of the water in the night. And at sunup it was still there, powerful and incessant, with the slant sun tangled in its rainbow spray, the grass blue with wetness, and the air heady as ether and scented with campfire smoke.
By such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired and old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: it is purity absolute. Watch its racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal. And listen again to its sound: get far enough away so that the noise of falling tons of water does not stun the ears, and hear how much is going on underneath- a whole symphony of smaller sounds, hiss and splash and gurgle, the small talk of side channels, the whisper of blown and scattered spray gathering itself and beginning to flow again, secret and irresistible, among the wet rocks.”
After reading that I laid the book down and listened. A dog down the street was barking at such a pace that I couldn’t understand how it was able to breath. Behind that was the dull roaring of the truck traffic that runs through Moab day and night. It was still hot inside the trailer, and it smelled like musty carpet and sweat. And that was when I finally reached the end of the rope, slipping through my rappel device so to speak. I got out of my comfortable bed, got dressed and drove up to the Sand Flats area above town. Of course I would have preferred to sleep next to a river but I didn’t want to drive to far. This time of the year all the tourists are Euro’s who don’t camp (or tip!), so the campsites are empty and no one is around up there. It was quite. The kind of quite that makes you notice the ringing in your ears at first. The kind of quite that puts you in touch with your soul, the sound of truth. Shortly after falling asleep, as if on cue, I was rudely awakened by a coyote barking rather loudly about 30 feet away. Moments later the desert was alive with what must have been 20-30 coyotes yelping and howling for miles and miles. I couldn’t help but smile at the irony of it.
Waking up this morning to silence, the smell of junipers, and a beatiful sunrise, I confirmed what I had decided last night. It’s time for a change. How that change is to take shape I’m still unsure of at the moment.
I’ve spent the last two weeks flailing in the heat and spending way too much time alone. I’ve also been spending too much time indoors not exercising, a result of the heat and a forced break from sitting on a bike seat which I’d rather not elaborate upon. In that time I happened upon a photography blog that really drove home the importance of photoshop: http://www.chromasia.com/iblog/ . This guy was taking what were for me average images and making them interesting, adding a whole second layer of creativity. I downloaded his tutorials and have spent the last week going over them. Below is an image which isn’t anything too spectacular, but I’m happy with it because I think it shows what can be done with an otherwise difficult and average scene. It’s an hdr photo, a combination of four different exposures of the same scene. The final hdr was an over saturated weird looking scene, but after multiple layers of b+w, dodging and burning, and toning it finally became interesting. To me anyway. It’s all subjective.
Here’s what one of the raw images out of the camera looks like.
