I’ve just completed a big processing job, and the last thing I wanted to do today was stare into a monitor. I couldn’t make myself go to work, so I went for a walk instead.
I ended up at Green Lake, somewhat serendipitously (my usual mode—I never know what I’m going to do until I do it. The other day, Robin was with me on an errand. We had several choices of route. We discussed the best way to get there, and yet, at an intersection, I went another way. "It’s a wonder you ever committed to marry me,"she said, exasperated again.)
The birds were different than during my typical winter walks. Lots of swallows, six different species, I counted. When I’m looking at birds in public, I feel like I have the key to a different, more exotic reality than the civilians around me. No one else noticed the Yellow Warbler singing from the top of a tree, or the Warbling Vireo singing from the depths of another willow. Someone else ought to have noticed the Osprey, 200 feet up, make a spiraling dive into the lake, grab a foot long fish, and then struggle to contain it as it flew off to the East. But the two men walking by me never looked up.
I felt something similar as I photographed around the lakeshore on my walk, this view into an unseen reality. Why this spot, and not another? What captivated me about this arrangement of dense brush? Sometimes it is birdsong that draws me, and then a photograph that keeps me. There’s one dense area on the south shore of the lake, that always creeps me out a bit when I wander there, and then I get confirmation of my creeped-outness by the condom wrappers littering the ground. Another brushy spot on the northwest side, where the water is almost always calm, has a completely different feel for me, nonetheless, on a bench was a pair of woman’s high heeled shoes, a red brassiere and a flowered top. How did she get home, I wondered? Shoeless and topless?
"What are you taking pictures of?" the barista at the coffee cart asked. "Oh, stuff,"I said. "Landscapes, I guess."
"oh, stuff" I find myself responding that way a lot. It's hard to explain to someone in one sentence (because thats as long as they'll pay attention) how I'm feeling and what I see at that second. Love reading the site every day.
Posted by: Jared Guess | June 08, 2007 at 03:57 PM