Long ago on the Olympic

It has been far too long since I thought about photos. I have aspirations of designing a website, of getting my current work into public fora, and of pursuing a little bit more commissioned work (headshots, family photos, etc. [hire me!]). So, it's pretty much just the beginning of another year.

I'm 10 months in arrears on updates here. That takes me back to a splendid march day on the Olympic peninsula. Bad Starbucks coffee. Delightful coffee stand espresso. The Hoh rain forest, where crisp water rushes past vibrant green ferns, and trees are eternally shrouded.

The Hoh rain forest, where Melanie smiles in the rain.

Not so far away, one can find beaches, such as those at La Push. Time is short; if any time on the beach is wanted, it is imperative that one run there, in order to not let the light die before arriving at the inevitable log-jam that forms the mouth of the mile or so of trail separating the road from the Pacific.

La Push: with seastacks.

La Push: where waterfalls spill into the ocean.

La Push: and then we went home.

there was more snow on the way down.

Melanie was pretty jazzed about life on top of mount teneriffe. we were chilly. the views were presumably inferior to the views on days when one could see more than eight or ten feet. we weren't interested in going down the way we came.

we went to seattle (seattle! o land of coffee and drizzle, microbreweries and lush forest) in march. we did the things that one does. we waited at the airport for trains, which were barred by fate and the whims of undisclosed mechanical tomfoolery from coming to us. we gazed on mount rainier from the train stop, since this was going to be our one shot to do so. we ate dinner at converted funeral parlors. we strolled on the coast of puget sound. we went to discovery park, where Melanie sat in an illegal tree (she called the bluff, and the bluff decided to stay).



discovery park! small waves throw multifarious photons off of bedraggled branches.



there is a lighthouse, and Melanie will not look in its direction.



but Megan will make sure that Melanie looks where she is supposed to.



WE INTERRUPT REGULAR PROGRAMMING IN ORDER TO INSPECT MELANIE'S LOOKERS. LOOKS LIKE THE LOOKERS LOOK LOVELY.



the sky clears enough for sunset colors, and i look for a balanced patch of trees. these have been things that we do around town.



but sometimes we also rent cute little fiats (non-arbitrary law will eventually find its way back into our lives) and drive toward the cascades. at their feet we find mount si and mount teneriffe.



the waterfall (is it teneriffe falls? is it kamikaze falls? it is too hard when things have two names.) was the deciding factor--we decided to casually stroll up mount teneriffe.



i had no tripod and one very war-weary nikon d90. i did what i could. it's nice to have a d7100 back.



the falls fell from high above, so we went to see what is high above.



and we found a delightful ridge (the southwest one), which wound a winsome way above the lush valleys. sometimes it was broad and leisurely. other times narrow, with drops to each side.



"i'm kind of surprised that we haven't even seen any snow yet," i said. the soil was soft, dark, and damp. it was still pretty early in the year.

then the snow appeared. there was essentially a line of it. below the line, we had seen no snow. above the line, we would be in snow for several hours.

we came to a band of steep rock, home to cascading plants. i picked a route through the band. twenty five or thirty feet up, sinking my hands into the snow to try to get some small amount of purchase from something underneath, i realized that i probably hadn't chosen very well.

shortly later we found ourselves on the summit in near-zero visibility. we chose to go down by way of an allegedly easier route, and looked forward to being out of the snow in 30 or 45 minutes. the north-facing valley, though, trapped snow much longer than the southwest-facing ridge, and we were in deep snow for most of the trip down. 

from here

over two years ago i strolled down the main road east of the nyangea mountains. it was easy to stay oriented with respect to absolute directions, as there were mountains to the west and plains to the east. it was just like being home back in boulder.

the book i was reading at the time was v by Pynchon. i didn't get it.

february 1, 2014 was the height of burning season. the plant matter left behind after the last season's harvest had been left standing starkly in the fields, but it was time to prepare the ground for the next round of crops. fields were ignited, and what nutrients from the stalks weren't carried off in smoke settled back into the ground as ash. waves of life fled the indiscriminate devastation.

a few weeks before, i had gone for a jog along the main road to kaabong. there was a small pillar of smoke in the distance, but i didn't pay much attention to it. by the time i reached it, the fire had raged to the very edge of the road. all of the plant life was pretty small and the main road was large, so i wasn't particularly concerned about it, and intended to run alongside the blaze. 

as i drew near to the fire, the wave struck. at first it was just a grasshopper or two. then, the six or nine inches of air above the ground became completely saturated with small wildlife fleeing the conflagration. for a hundred yards my legs were bombarded, and then i was clear of the fire.

the local population makes extensive use of this side effect of burning. they encircle the perimeter of the fire and capture fleeing rats. the rats are then roasted and eaten--a low-cost, low-effort meat source in an economy with very restricted access to meat.

there are endless things to say about the cultural practice of burning. i've said a number of them above. i'm sure that there have traditionally been descriptions of wind directions, smoke types, and scents. i'm sure that there are unique linguistic reflections of culturally located concepts about the fleeing creatures.

i don't really have any data about burning practices. from here--erie, colorado, over two years after the fact, with a comfortable bed, endless food options, and delicious beverages--i feel a little bit dismayed. from here, it's easy to see how i could have done a better job.

but i'm trying to evade that narrative. i'm trying to show a little bit of grace to myself. i asked about burning in multiple ways. at some point, if the one remaining semi-speaker of the language simply doesn't remember how to talk about these things, there's not much that i could do that would help him remember. maybe i could have. but it does no good to dwell on that for too long.

my grandmother grew up speaking swiss german as her first language in indiana. at the beginning of her elementary school education, she almost completely shifted to using only english. she is a couple of decades older than Komol, the last nyang'i semi-speaker, but her personal linguistic story echoes his considerably. he, too, grew up speaking nyang'i as his first language. he, too, almost completely abandoned it somewhere between the age of six and ten--in his case, for karimojong. it seems like he might have spoken it a little bit longer and used it a little bit more after shifting to the dominant local language. he's had a shorter interval since abandoning the language for attrition to set in. but in essence, what i am trying to do with nyang'i is comparable to if my grandmother was the only person on earth who remembered anything about the german language, and i decided to try to describe german on the basis of what she remembers. even if she remembered reasonably considerable vocabulary (he remembers somewhere between 600-1200 words, depending on what you count), and even if she could string some words into short sentences, or even short stories, it would perhaps be a little bit overly optimistic to hope to document a traditional hefeweizen recipe in german from her memory.

from here, it's easy to feel frustrated with the things i didn't succeed in doing as i strolled beneath kakwanga and podolac. but i also need to remind myself of what i did and didn't do while there--and to keep in perspective what i ever could have hoped to do.

two nights and one day

"well, so i got a new rice cooker..."

the beginning of this story was not what Melanie and i expected. we tossed sideways glances at each other. or at least we tossed sideways glances at each other as much as we could in the dark.

"...and the instructions are, like, really precise. like, exactly a cup of rice, you know? and, i mean, i don't have measuring cups."

it was about 10pm. it wasn't exactly blizzard conditions, but it had been snowing on and off for several hours.

"so anyways, i don't have a car, and who wants to drive in this anyways, so i walked over to sprouts, but they didn't really have any measuring cups. and when the weather's like this, i'm not gonna ride my bike, you know? so i jogged over to target and bought some measuring cups."

we were on top of mount sanitas.

"and i was about to head up, but i thought 'what could i do that would be really silly or ridiculous?' and i was like 'i could get a cup of snow from the top of mount sanitas!'"

he had jogged up four or five minutes before. he was wearing shorts.

"so yeah, anyways, here i am."

he had told us that he moved to boulder four years ago. i asked him what brought him here. it turns out that what happened is that he bought a new rice cooker.

"uh... alright, i'm gonna go make my rice now."

he had finished packing snow into his measuring cup. he turned and ran back down the mountain.

when it isn't snowing, it tends to be rather beautiful. we've had weather in the sixties pretty regularly lately. a few weeks ago it was nice enough that Melanie, Summer, and i scrambled up the second flatiron. i got a different sort of topout photo (above), and had nice morning backlighting on the way down (below).



not too long later, a good round of snow hit. Melanie and i took the occasion to hike up sanitas to take some snowstorm night photos from the top. i had a vision of clouds coming and going during the course of an 8-10 minute exposure. i also set up a self-portrait that didn't work even a little bit, but which i posted on my blog anyways.



it was here that we met the man with the new rice cooker. obviously i didn't ask for his name, or take  a photo of him to post on my blog, "humans of mount sanitas." at least one of my photos worked out pretty much exactly as i had envisioned--the left half of the frame is blurred and obscured by falling snow/low clouds, while city lights shine through on the right. but i didn't like the rest of the composition very much, and didn't provide any supplemental light to the rock in front. so i don't like it nearly as much as the photo that is at the top of this post.

last monday i twisted my ankle while bouldering. it was slowly recovering, so obviously the only choice was to go on a night hike in breathtakingly strong wind on saturday night. Melanie and i hiked up the anemone trail. as we got close to the top, a mostly dead tree creaked and swayed. i stepped over the final rise and felt like i was being lifted off of my feet. i ducked back behind some rocks and said "well. this is good enough for me!"

just as we started down, i noticed how nicely two dead trees complemented the landscape--a tall and straight one (the creaky tree!) to balance the flatlands out to the east, and a short twisted one to tuck underneath green mountain. i set up a tripod and took a series of shots that captured the swaying softness of the tall tree with some bursts from my headlamp to illuminate the short tree. if i'm going to be doing this thing very often, i'm going to need to get a filter for my headlamp, as it's hard to balance the lighting in post-processing when all of the foreground light is smurf blue.

lighting parties

for new years eve, a number of my friends got a nice dinner together, played games, and then had a sleepover. it was fun. cards were shuffled. fires were burned. breakfasts were cooked. Tim Novak told me about german directors while Kristin looked out of the window.

a few days later, the last light of dusk hit a lamp in my living room. it also got thrown around in weird ways by mason jars in my kitchen.





Ben pontificated. Emily wasn't sure. Jon was basically amused.