The balmy air at the North Rim was speaking to me. I should have been listening. Late September in these rarefied parts is normally brisk, sometimes even cold. On this day of our arrival we were comfortable in short sleeves. If it were warm here, the inner furnace of the canyon would be even hotter than normal. But the Nankoweap Trail was already playing with my head. I'd heard and read so much about its steepness, ruggedness, and dizzying heights I didn't even bother to think of its exposure to heat and sun. But in the end it's the heat that always matters in Grand Canyon. Always.
I'm getting sick of picture-perfect pictures. Slickness is not a virtue. When I was an undergrad and studying photography, I had perfection and rigid rules rammed down my throat. It was like being a goose whose liver was being fattened for foie gras. There we all sat, young and impressionable artists, while they stuffed this and that down our gullets. It pretty much ruined me for photography for about twenty years. I'm just now recovering.
A sneaky, little heat wave is sinking its tendrils into our neighborhood. These nasty things barely announce themselves. The change starts off with an imperceptible shift in the breeze. The branches of our weeping birches go this way instead of that. Or they swirl around indecisively until they decide that the ocean air is no longer welcome. Like a songbird being stalked by a raptor, suddenly I look around, head darting from side to side. "Shit!" I hate heat waves. Give me a drippy, rainy, foggy, gloomy day anytime. I look at anyone who says they love the heat with bemusement. I just don't understand it.
I love photography but walking around with a camera is hardly a comfortable thing. It's starting to cause a tingling feeling in my upper shoulder. The damned shoulder strap, made of some puny, little, sponge pad digs into the nook that forms the junction between neck and shoulder. I think its starting to create a permanent ridge.
Short and nasty. A heatwave hit us here in Northern California last week. The summer had been the coldest I can remember. It was fog for weeks, maybe months. After awhile the days blur together into a diffuse mass of whiteness. Then, in a moment, everything got hot. Very hot. A few days later, just as quickly as it came, it was over. The fog whipped in and the whiteness once again prevailed.
The world is at its best when it is nestling itself into the night's sleep. Second to that are the first stirrings of morning, before the crush of humanity has a chance to break the spell. A summer morning in San Francisco is particularly satisfying. Come July a thick, fog blanket shrouds the city in its daybreak which makes San Francisco the most silent of summer cities. This is especially true when one is away from the main arteries that feed the caffeine-starved commuters into downtown. A walk along the side streets and into the parks we find the morning vignettes that define the foggy, San Francisco dawn.
In summer, by the time little kids and golden labs arrive at Muir Beach I'm normally long gone. Kids and dogs scare away the birds and I prefer squawking birds to screeching kids. Sometimes, however, we find ourselves at our favorite places at unexpected times. And here I was at Muir Beach at peak hour.
Once, when I was ten, I lit a sparkler right in the middle of our living room. This, of course, was a mistake, something a pubescent boy is predisposed to make. It caused quite a stir as the acrid, metallic smoke filled the small room. While I only pulled this stunt but once, mostly because of all the yelling, I can still smell sparkler smoke as I write this. That—and the sulfur smell of real fireworks—always reminds me of July 4th. Smells evoke memories like nothing else.
There is, along my daily walk, a valve wheel that controls the ebbs and flows of the bay into a small, flood-control pond. Sometimes the wheel is up, sometimes turned down. I've never actually seen the man or men who perform this task. I simply notice the position of the wheel each and every time I pass it. Yesterday, the wheel was down, way down. I immediately wondered why. That position is rare for this particular contraption.
I think this is it. Lensbaby and I are over. I tend to embrace projects with an obsessive enthusiasm, kind of like shooting a Roman candle into the sky. *Pfffffffft!* My projects soar into the sky with great intention. The loftiness is palpable. So too is gravity and the crash is inevitable. The better projects tend to live to see another day and another burst of optimism. The lesser ones land with the smell of burnt sulfur. I'm not sure what to make of this one.
