You don’t know what this is until you see it and it’s gonna get you. Just let your eye be drawn to dead lower center in the shadows, in between the bands of sunlight. I didn’t see it until I opened the image on my iMac. It’s Old Mike Peak at 13,113 feet! Solid rock and ice!It was freezing when I took this telephoto shot at seven thousand feet. How cold must it be up there? In the freaking wind? If you were up there now, you’d probably be dead. Someone would find your blackened frozen fingers poking through the snow in May and steal your phone.
Great place for a softball game!
Sitting here last night in front of the old Ashley wood stove while New Mexico decided whether to rain or snow, I was remembering a long time ago when I was determined to get away from Austin, Texas. Oh hell, it was 1975, just shoot me. The reasons were many but had to do with following my heart. Austin may have been just one-tenth the size it is today, but it was way too hot and crowded for me and God said, move to Maine! Can you believe it? I wanted to get back to Nature, or have more of it. In search of something different, I’d been reading the Maine Times—had to send away to buy a copy—and found a caretaker’s position at a farm in northern Aroostook County for the winter. They actually wanted me. There were chickens and moose and probably wolves. All of this was communicated by letters. Typewritten, handwritten words on paper. The things you didn’t know about a faraway place, just pictures in your mind. They told me that the farm was isolated and that there would be a lot of snow and also eagles.
Somewhere along the way I gave up on Aroostook County, probably too goddamn scared. I still went to Maine, though. My sole means of hypothetical support, never mind the two degrees, was making welded metal insects. I think everybody needs to read that line again. Not that I had ever made more than twenty dollars from the craft, but this thing was my ticket, oh yeah. I had some beautiful sculptures. A giant moth almost two feet across. A glorious mosquito! A grasshopper. A bat. (The only mammal, as I recall.) After a series of utterly disastrous art shows up and down the coast where no one hardly even came, exhibitors freezing in the mist and two old ladies glaring at my bugs—sailboats or lobsters might have worked—I headed south for Maryland, where my grandmother’s house would be available for a time while she was up in Maine. Maine, Maine, Maine. Or rather, Maryland. Oh my.
Now there was a life. (How many have I had already?) The Eastern Shore was a post-hippie paradise. You could rent a big old farmhouse on a river or the bay for next to nothing. It was a stupendous opportunity and time. I fell in love, got married, we bought a house, had dozens of friends and innumerable adventures, and twenty-five years went by in a blur. But what do you know, even though we were living a mile and a half from the Chesapeake Bay on two and a half acres of grass and trees, I wanted to get back to Nature! We had flying squirrels in the basement and blacksnakes in the eaves, not to mention water, water everywhere, but Nature was the thing and I would have it. It was also oh so warm and humid out there on those gorgeous country lanes, with honeysuckle and corn stink in the summer evening air. Moving to seven thousand feet and freezing to death for fifteen years was perfect, then—and is there ever Nature. The same basic stuff as everywhere, but stunning, brutal, and eviscerating. Like living inside a giant gong and everything makes it ring.
Part of me wants to do it all again now. It always has to do with deciding that wherever I am just isn’t good enough and that I might get trapped. I can’t imagine that Taos is the last place I’ll ever live, but then I don’t imagine dying. If I could, it would happen in my dugout canoe while I was reef fishing in the Seychelles. I’d be very old and tan and wrinkled, drifting in a lagoon or pulled up on a clean white beach. The sun would be so fine and huge and warm and I’d just sit there feeling better every second and the light would fill my vision until everything was blinding bright and calm, and somewhere in another world the breeze would slowly push a dugout out to sea.
I see what you did there, boy. Have another bite.
Around here, winter starts up high, then works its way down
I took this telephoto shot of Taos Mountain at around 3:00 p.m. Wednesday afternoon using my Pentax K-x with 55-300mm lens on the automatic setting. As I am a lazy ignoramus on the subject, it’s never occurred to me to use a filter, which may be one reason the long shots tend to end up washed out (see below).
I almost always do at least a little image manipulation in Photoshop. (Right now that would be Photoshop CC 2014.) My goal in this process is to make up for any limitations of the lens and sensor and end up with something real. It’s easy to go overboard, of course. Often that’s excusable in the name of art. But most of the time, I just want the image on my computer screen to be as accurate as possible, even if I have to imagine what “accurate” is. What you see above still isn’t quite right, just the best I can do at the moment, and certainly better than this:
That’s the original image as I downloaded it from my camera. No, I’m not shooting these in RAW format, although it’s probably way past time for me to get a clue.
Only took the one shot here, no need to stick around
This photo taken early in the morning on February 25, 2001 in San Cristobal, New Mexico, was the basis for the cover of the first ebook version of Buffalo Lights, the amazing story of jumping headfirst off a cliff. No, wait, it’s about our moving to New Mexico! (Haha, just kidding, it hasn’t killed us yet.) By now you’re also thinking, dammit John, that ain’t no buffalo. No, but it’s a bull with all his parts outside the front door after a snowstorm at eight thousand feet. I’d run outside naked from the back door with my slippers on, all jacked up to get a shot of what I thought was a goddamn bear.
The summer before, my wife had seen one in the front yard. I knew this because she yelled, “There’s a bear! and slammed the heavy wooden door shut. When I jumped up with my camera, she threw herself against the door with outstretched arms and shouted, “NO!” I would have argued, but the pose was so melodramatic, like in a silent movie, and partly charmed me. I was also pissed, but figured there would be another bear, and damned if she would stop me. There wasn’t, as it turned out. But on the morning of the 25th, her very birthday if the truth be known, my wife was in the tiny room she used for an office and a closet and saw the weirdest thing: something completely covered a window from outside! I leaped out of bed to investigate. It was dark reddish-brown. It looked like fur. And it was moving…
“It’s a bear!” I hissed, and went straight for the door!
Oops, something on my feet. Oops, my camera. Oops, my bathrobe—no, that’s in the bathroom, no time! I opened the door—yow it was cold—ran around the house in the opposite direction I’d seen the fur slide, and came face to face with this fellow here. The rest is history, I guess, and you can read about it in the book: Chapter 21, “Bull o’ the Blizzard.” Seriously.
That was quite a place to live, up there in the valley. The history of what we called the “adobe cottage” was as strange and dark as any of it around here. Back in the ’70s, a crazy hippie lady and her local boyfriend built the house. She sold it later, of course, along with the meadow and a creek that ran through it, and moved on but then came back. Almost thirty years later, she and some ungodly loser were living there again, renting from the owner at the time, as we were in a bigger place next door. She was determined to get her old home back by some kind of voodoo and used to sit in the middle of the meadow, meditating on it. It was the spookiest goddamn thing.
We moved back in when those two left or got evicted, after the landlady burned sage and beat a drum to chase away the devil vibes. (We’d lived there when we first arrived, before them. At least I think we did. The sequence of the moving back and forth eludes me now, and please don’t make me think about it.) There was a resident rat so big, he scared the cat. I used to sit at my computer with a rifle in my lap. He dragged a whole geranium plant under the bed one night before my very eyes! That’s in the book as well.
We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. As far as plans and hearts and money go, remember that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the Black Knight ends up with first one arm, then another, and finally both legs cut off and blood spurting all over the place but still attempts to fight? That’s kind of what it was like. I don’t think we ever recovered, exactly, but you open up in other ways. Anyway, the night is young. The night is always young. At least it better be.
This ought to be a screenplay. Can I get a witness? [tap-tap] Is this thing on?
Why not buy now before you know you need one?
The silly thing is, I can’t tell anyone yet. But it’s slowly emerging. The image came together in front of me one night back in July. The buffalo skull portion started as a digital tracing of a photo on a card my wife’s mother sent us before we moved out here from Maryland. The “goddamn buffalo” thing I already had. It just came to me once. I even registered the domain, which points right here for now. So. I think I know what it is, I just don’t know how it is. But it’s alive!
In related news, I have at least two new ebooks in the pipeline. If I were any kind of man at all, I’d finish my rock and roll science fiction novel, too. But maybe I am not a man. Maybe I am Buffalo. Maybe it’s time to make some thunder on the plain.
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