light as a feather
29.8.04
Visit home
Home is still where the parents (and the grandparents) are. The visit home may have been short, but it felt so good.
¶ 5:51 PM
¶ 5:51 PM
Balthazar in Arizona
A good kid vacation. Balthazar logged around 70 hiking miles over three weeks. He did many hikes in this vast desert playground studded with improbable rock formations striated many shades of red and ochre with names like Chimney Rock and Cathedral Rock that tower a thousand feet high. He did vertical hikes, flat loops, and hikes up stream beds in his water shoes, stopping to swim in deep eddies along the way. He saw lizards by the hundreds, snakes, giant yellow butterflies, and a spider whose abdomen was swaddled in what looked like crimson velour. In the streams he saw trout and fresh water crayfish. Balthazar can hike forever if you can keep his mind off it. He usually accomplishes this himself by asking us millions of questions about when we were kids, or by pretending that the three of us are riders in the Tour de France and we're jockeying for position. He plays a rider and the race announcer simultaneously.
¶ 4:59 PM 0 comments
¶ 4:59 PM 0 comments
27.8.04
Textures
Looking at things closely. The desert is a place where there's not much to see in the middle distance; it gets monotonous. The real action is in the very far away, and in the very close. Being in the desert got me to look again.
¶ 9:35 AM 0 comments
¶ 9:35 AM 0 comments
22.8.04
Out West
The West is about vastness and solitude, about shifting light and silence. A place where dimensions play tricks on you. I remember a road we drove in Colorado last year, reputed to be the longest, flattest stretch of straight road in the country. Heading home to our Bed Breakfast, we could see the town it was in, see it like it was only two miles away, post office on the left, gas station sign on the right, half an hour before we actually got there. We drove and drove but it just never seemed to get any closer. It was like chasing after the moon. Then in July when I was in the Alps, I watched an airplane take off from a mountaintop airfield and head straight for the mountain just across the valley. When it did not veer I waited for it to crash into the mountain; it got smaller and smaller until it simply disappeared against the vast backdrop. I find myself growing more and more drawn to these sorts of huge, solitary places.
¶ 11:25 PM 0 comments
¶ 11:25 PM 0 comments
